Alopez: Pruning #9

March 1st 2017  by Abby Lopez

As we looked upon the garden, the bees flocked to the flowers.  Winter’s scenery of barren trees, muddy tracks and falling leaves fade as the new season begins. Buds are budding, sprouts are sprouting, Spring has sprung. With all this new growth in Spring, it is time to learn to the pruning basics.

Today we learned how to prune and maintain plants.  To do this, we identified what are nodes in of a few plants of JD’s permaculture garden that had overlapped a pathway. What are nodes? Nodes are the points on a stem where the buds, leaves and branching twigs originate. They are the crucial spots on the plant where healing structural support and biological processes take place. We took a closer look at each stem of two types of bushy plants and observed where green leaves sprouted.  We used pruning shears to cut above a node and never through a node as it will kill the healing spot for regrowth.

Why prune? I learned that the benefits of pruning are the following; to prevent mildew growth by providing improved aeration, to clear obstructive pathways and maintaining accessibility, to promote healthy growth by ridding of dead limbs and provide nutritional support of viable ones, to create sturdier and durable structures against  wind resistance and to provide access to sunlight for the lower parts of a plant.

Learning these basic pruning techniques helps us maintain healthy ways to maintain our plants.

 

 

 

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