Pruning Basics: Woody Plants
Extension Master Gardener and ISA certified arborist, Maraea Harris, explains how to get started with pruning the shrubs in your landscape. The main focus is pruning to maintain healthy trees and shrubs.
Pruning
Summer Pruning for Woody and Herbaceous Plants
Summer provides a second and sometimes much needed time to prune a variety of spring flowering trees and shrubs and to help perennial flowering plants look their best. Summer pruning helps you to improve overall structure and size of your woody plants or boost fruit and flower production in fruit trees and shrubs.
Pruning Trees and Shrubs: Winter – Updated in 2022!
Winter is an excellent time to prune many trees and shrubs. Learn why and how to prune to remove crossing and rubbing branches, suckers, water sprouts, and damaged wood. Discover the best practices for reducing shrub size, trimming hedges, and carefully removing larger limbs. The results will be trees and shrubs with healthier and fuller growth, better flowers and fruit, and a more attractive home landscape.
Plants
These plant and gardening related presentations from the Glencarlyn Library Community Garden offer a range of educational information on gardening and includes a new series on Beautiful Native Plants
Recipes & Crafts
These videos include some of the herb-focused activities usually featured at the Glencarlyn Library Community Garden's annual AutumnFest event.
Best Gardening Practices
These videos from the Glencarlyn Library Community Garden include Gardening Basics, Gardening Tasks and Climate Conscious Gardening.
Wildlife
Information and observations on insects from the coordinators of the Glencarlyn Library Community Garden.
Pruning Resources
MGNV has focused on Pruning in the month of February. Here is a round-up of our pruning resources.
When, Why, and How to Prune Shrubs
Dormancy makes late winter/early spring the best time to prune many shrubs and trees. The gardener can see the shape of the bare plants better, and the cuts are less disruptive than when the plant is growing. When full spring arrives, the plant will put energy into the new shape and desired size.
Assessing and Dealing with Snowstorm Damage on Trees
Though snowfall can transform our landscape in ways beautiful and wondrous, heavy snowfall can also cause astounding harm. Trees and shrubs broken under the weight of snow and ice need to have damaged wood carefully removed.
Pruning Perennials and Shrubs: Summer
Summer is the time to prune trees and shrubs that bloom in the spring and to help perennial flowering plants look their best. Extension Agent Kirsten Conrad walks you through the how, when, and why to prune hedges, multi-stem shrubs, small trees, and large branches. With these best practices, your pruning results will be healthier and fuller growth, better flowers and fruit, and more attractive landscaping.
Managing Cicada Damage to Trees
Worried about cicada damage? Learn more about coping with "flagging" and the right way to prune post cicada damage.
Glencarlyn Library Community Garden Videos
The coordinators of the Glencarlyn Library Community Garden started making short educational videos in the fall of 2020 as an alternative, distanced means of providing some of the educational content and herb-focused activities usually featured at the garden's annual AutumnFest event. They enjoyed the medium so much that they have continued to make plant and gardening related presentations as opportunities have presented themselves.
Q & A – Ask the Extension Agent!
Stumped by something in your garden? Ask the Extension Agent
❧ Frozen Fig Tree
❧ Topping vs Pollarding
❧ Pruning Herbs & Brambles
Healthy Bark, Healthy Tree Part 2: Mechanical and Weather Damage
Mechanical damage is the most preventable of bark injuries because it is often due to impatience, inattention, or ignorance. Careless maintenance practices can damage trees that take decades, not weeks, to grow. While we cannot control the weather, which can cause irreparable bark injury, we can control what plants we purchase and where we choose to locate them—the right plant in the right place increases its chances of surviving weather extremes. Enjoy the amazing photographs in this article on preventing mechanical and weather damage to trees.
Winter Is the Time for Pruning
While the garden is dormant, you have a chance to find and correct landscape issues concerning many varieties of deciduous trees. This is the best time to prune this type of tree.
Garden Myth Busters! Using Bleach to Disinfect Tools
THE MYTH: The best way to disinfect pruning tools is to use a bleach solution.
A common and much-debated garden myth is that a chlorine bleach solution is the best way to disinfect pruning tools. So popular, in fact, that a Google search on the topic comes back with 1.7 million!