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Gardeners often spend hours pruning their trees and shrubs in order to control size and shape, but pruning can do more than dictate a plant’s stature. Regular selective pruning, or maintenance pruning, is also a way to keep woody plants healthy and productive.
One aim of maintenance pruning is to protect your woody plants from pests and disease, which can gain entry into a plant through dead wood, broken branches, and wounds caused by branches that are rubbing together. By thoughtfully cutting back tips, branches, limbs, and stems, you can also encourage youthful growth that produces abundant flowers and fruits as well as prevent the spread of pests and disease. Knowing where to begin with maintenance pruning can seem overwhelming since there are so many different trees and shrubs to consider. But by following three basic guidelines - knowing what, where, and when to cut - you will be successful in all of your deciduous tree and shrub pruning endeavours.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to cut
When pruning trees and shrubs, always make an angled cut just above and sloping away from a viable bud. Buds are located immediately above the point where a leaf is attached to a branch or, if the plant is dormant and leafless, above the leaf scar (a mark left on a branch where the leaf was once attached).
Be careful not to cut too close to the bud. This will damage the bud, causing it to dry out and die. And don’t cut too far above a bud, either, because the stub that remains will eventually die, rot away, and provide a possible entryway for disease.
Prune dead wood to prevent disease
Inspect your trees and shrubs regularly for dead or broken branches. Wounds from such branches expose irregular surfaces (hence more surface area) that take longer to heal than clean cuts, leaving prime entry points for pests and disease.
Thin crowded stems to encourage new growth
Remove old stems that have declined in flower production and have grown too tall. Prune any candidates back to ground level or to a vigorous shoot near the stem base. This will allow more light into the centre of the plant, triggering new shoots to grow.
Remove suckers at growing points
Suckers are vigorous vertical stems that ruin a tree’s appearance. The best way to remove suckers is to get them while they’re young and during the early part of the growing season. Simply grab them and give a sharp yank sideways, ripping them away at their growing point. If the suckers are too old to yank off, they must be cut off as close to the growing point as possible.
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