 Okay, here we go. It's gone on to the second talk, and this is a very timely topic. When is the best time to prune many shrubs? For a lot of different shrubs, the answer is tomorrow is the best time. We're writing the perfect time to do it. But first, we need to listen tonight and learn how to do it. And that's what we're gonna do tonight. And we have Kathy Widerholdt, the project manager of the Northern Hardy Fruits Evaluation Project based out of Carrington, to give us the tips on how to prune shrubs. Kathy, welcome to the forums. Thank you, Tom. Welcome. Hi, everyone. Yeah, we're gonna talk about pruning shrubs. I've kind of included some tree pictures and shrub pictures in here because some things make a better description of the process than others do. So we'll get right into it. We'll give you some reasons for pruning. And I know some people will give you a million reasons why they shouldn't prune. So we're gonna talk about why you should prune. You wanna prune for plant health. You'll improve the strength of your plant. You can control the size and the shape of your plant. And I put on there in the last one, you can prune to produce unusual forms of plants. Well, we don't have any bunny shapes or dog ear kitty shapes out in the orchard. You might have some in your yard, but I'm not gonna talk about the unusual forms of pruning. No topi areas out there. First, we're gonna talk about the wrong way to prune. And I swear I see it every single day. I know it's at our courthouse. I know it's on the street I just drove today. I see stubs. I see stubs left on trees. It's not as important on shrubs because you'll be renewing that shrub pretty often. But on a tree it's unsightly and it can lead to disease in the tree. So the wrong way to cut a branch on a shrub or a tree is to cut that branch right in the middle of no man's land. There's nothing going on there. There's no bud near it. There's no other branch near it. You've just cut it off and you've just left it. It's abandoned. Just look at it. On the left hand side, these are both dogwood, on the left hand side is a fresh cut. You can see that's about three, four, seven inch long is what's left there. And that's like a fresh stub. And on the right hand side is a stub where it was pruned the previous year. And actually that picture is telling you the exact right place that you should have pruned that shrub. Where the red living tissue meets that gray dead branch part where they meet that boundary. That is the exact right place that you should have pruned that. On a tree, there'll be a branch collar. There's kind of a widening of the branch where it meets the trunk of the tree. And you see that on trees. On shrubs, you don't really see a branch collar. But if you just look at that picture on the right, that is the exact right place to do your pruning of your shrubs. So I cannot say this strongly enough. Stubs do not leave stubs. I will just, I dream about them. I actually feel a little tense just talking about them because I see them all the time. And it can lead to just injury to your plant, you know, funguses can move down that dead tissue. Like I said, not so important in a shrub, but in a tree that you wanna live for 50, 70, 100 years, you just wanna have as little damage as possible to that tree. And I actually, I only noticed this this week, although I've used these pictures for a couple years, this orange arrow is pointing to another injury to the plant. If you can see that cut that's a little blurred there on the left hand picture, that cut is too close to that main stem. It's too far in. You've created a big wound that probably won't close very well. So like on a tree, that can be really damaging. So here's some more pictures of wrong pruning. And again, this is leading stubs, but it's on a giant scale. It's on a full-size tree. We don't see this as much as we used to. I know there's one tree in Carrington, and I remember going on vacation when I was a kid, going down to Tennessee, and they have so many ice storms that it breaks trees. You could see these topped trees all over. So I mean, I think the education has come a long way that we know that it's not a good idea. Actually, that left-hand picture, the publication I got it from was called Topping Trees. Care or tree abuse? Is it tree care or is it tree abuse? And really it's tree abuse. On the right-hand side, you can see what happens when you do do that topping, when you cut that branch in no man's land, middle of nowhere. There are little buds that are hiding underneath the bark of trees and some shrubs too, but mainly trees. Those buds are called adventitious buds. They're waiting, just waiting there, waiting for their chance. So when that tree limb gets broken or you have cut it, the plant hormones that were there suppressing those buds is removed, and then those buds just go crazy. It is the party for them. They all grow as much as they can, and you can see how they all kind of come out in one area, and they're small, they're thin, they come out at a bad angle, and they're just not gonna be great. So in this next one, we'll see a really extreme form of this. On the right-hand side, you can see that tree kind of looks like a willow to me because the branches are kind of yellow right there where they're young, but that tree was topped. And look at all those branches. They look like dandelion heads. And just think about if you were to get a heavy snow on that, it would definitely really pile up in those branches. It would break a lot of those new young branches, but it could bring down those limbs of the tree, and it could smash your car, it could crash into your house. They could fall onto a person who might be walking underneath them, so it's really just not a good situation. So don't ever top a tree. On the left-hand side, I wish it was a little bit brighter, but you might have to imagine a little. You can see that that's a pretty substantial limb that was cut off in the center. I mean, it's not topping or that's not the top of the tree, but it was cut improperly. It's a bad cut. That limb has actually got an opening at the top and rot is actually happening. I could see it online, but it said not as good of a picture right here for us. All right, so now we've talked about the wrong way to prune, and let's talk about the right way. This little diagram is a very nice diagram. I love it. It's so clear. It's from Iowa State Extension. On the left-hand side is the exact way that you should always want to prune. It doesn't happen every time, but it's the way you should want to prune. It's a 45-degree angle. You leave a nice amount above the bud, not too much, but not so much that it gets too close to it. The second image that's in there, that's too much of an angle. See how it's so much wider and it's a long area for the plant to try to close. Plus that upper area is getting kind of far away from that bud. The bud, I think I mentioned this, the bud produces hormones that help the plant close a wound, and if you're too far away from the bud, it won't close, and that's how you get the damage. The central image, that's too low of a cut. You've cut very close to that bud, and it will probably dry out and then die, and then the rest of that stem will die down to the next bud. The fourth image, that's where we leave the stub. We've cut too high above the bud, and there's just not enough hormone to reach up and help close that wound. And then the very last one is, that's what a good cut would look like if you have a plant that produces opposite buds. Dogwoods produce opposite buds. I think maple trees do hydrangeas. That's a big thing. You want to make a good cut like that on hydrangeas to get nice amounts of flowering in the future. All right, so this is more toward the tree side. We do have both trees and shrubs, and you probably do too. So on the left is just a little diagram. The dark colored branches on the left side of the left picture, those are the branches that will be removed, and when they're making their cut, they kind of enlarge that there. That's how they're gonna make their cut. They're showing the cut at the branch collar. So trees have branch collars where the branch meets the stem, meets the trunk, and that's where you want to make the cut. So on the right-hand side, our pictures I took a couple of years ago in our orchard, and the green arrow on the top picture is pointing toward the branch collar. And I was thinking of how to describe it. It's like the wrinkly neck of the branch. The branch is nice and smooth, and then you have this wrinkly neck, maybe how a turtle pulls its head into its shell. And you want to make the cut right at the top of where the smooth branch meets the wrinkly neck. And I did make that cut then in the lower picture. If you can imagine, that branch was pointing toward the inside of the tree. The whole branch is going to the right, to the outside of the tree, into the sunlight. That branch was pointing inward to the inner part of the tree where it won't get sunlight in the summer. So I was removing it. It wasn't needed. Here's another image of a tree branch. I was removing that branch. It's about one and an eighth, one and a quarter inches. I used a saw to remove this. The cut is pretty much at the right spot. Maybe I would have come outward, maybe a millimeter, you know, but it's pretty much in the right spot. And it's showing nicely that branch collar against the trunk and then the branch that comes out there that I'll be removing. So there's different kinds of pruning that you wanna do for your, this is more in regard to shrubs. This is different kinds of pruning that you want to do. There's two kinds of renewal pruning. And in this image, we're talking about the drastic method or maybe it's called rejuvenation pruning. You will be cutting the plant all the way back to the ground level. Maybe a couple inches, leave about four to six inches above the ground just enough so that more buds can come out of those remaining stems. This is not a method for everything. It is used very sparingly for almost everything. The only exceptions are plants like barberries and spireas and potentellas. Those are plants that bloom on this year's wood so they'll grow green in the spring and then they have their flowers in the summer. And those plants are renewal pruned every single year. You see it at businesses. They have commercial people that come and then just cut them right off and then they bloom again the next summer. So that's pretty good. It can be used on some old shrubs, like old forcithias, but not every year. So you've got a forcithia that hasn't been pruned in 20 years, you just bought this house and you're like, this thing's a mess. You could cut it off and then watch what regrows and make selections of those branches, but you cannot cut it off every year. It will just take too much energy away from that plant. The roots will start to die down and lose their oomph. So it's just something to be used sparingly for shrubs. All right, and here's another method of renewal pruning. And this is what I do when I prune for fruits and it's what you can do for pruning for flowers too. This is a several year method. Each year you are removing about one fourth to one third of the plant material that's there. Generally it's the largest and oldest branches. I mean, that would probably be a really great idea for flowering shrubs for sure. For fruiting shrubs, sometimes you just wanna have a selection of year classes of the branches that are the canes, whatever you wanna call them that come up out of the ground. You wanna have some brand new ones. You wanna have some middle aged ones and then you wanna have a few older ones. But once they get too old, like generally four years old for pruning plants, those you get out. And then you have these different year classes of the one, two and three year old plants. And you can tell, you know, the first times you prune, you're gonna be very uneasy about it. But if you keep looking at that same plant year to year to year, you get to know your shrub and you'll see that the bark gets corkier, it gets darker, the plant gets older. Certainly those branches branch out. They're not a straight stem anymore. They're very branchy like a tree. So those are the older ones. So that's what we use all the time, works great for fruit and works really good for flowering plants also. So there are also thinning cuts that you make. First, you do the rejuvenation where you remove the cane or the stem right from the ground. And then you go into the thinning cuts. And this opens the plant up to sunlight. And you just wanna get rid of things that are like clogging it up, you know? When I do currents, I try to leave about six inches around or between canes. So each cane then has about three inches. Maybe I'm still too tight, I'm not sure. But you wanna leave some space so that air and sunlight can get in there. And when you make these cuts, you know, remember the first thing I showed you was the rejuvenation, you cut the whole plant off. Well, then the buds that are remaining, they just go crazy. But when you do a thinning cut, when you do it properly, you do get regrowth but you don't get crazy regrowth because you are cutting to another branch or you're cutting to another bud. And so the energy has a place to go. And actually, this is a good time to just take a moment and say that for almost all deciduous plants, the energy in that plant is in the roots of the plant. And when you are pruning, you are actually directing where that energy is gonna go. I mean, think about a fire hose and a giant tank of water. All that water's gotta get through that hose, right? So if you only have one hose, that water's gonna shoot out like crazy. But if you had 20 hoses, the water's gonna come out a little more sedately. And that's how you can think about the energy coming from the roots of a plant and then filling that plant out for the year. So you just wanna remove some of the old stuff and leave some stuff there for a place for that energy to go. So just be a little more moderate on this. You wanna make your cuts more properly kinda like these diagram shows and that diagram is in your handout. And always cut back to a bud or cut back to another branch so it has a place to go. And then the last one I'm gonna talk about is heading back. Heading back is a good way to make your plant shorter. It makes your plant stronger and you can just control the size of it. When you head back, then you are heading back to another side branch. You can see it in the diagram and that's also on your handout. It makes the plant stronger because the branch, the cane, it gets a little thicker every year. And when you cut the top off, that bottom part continues to get thicker but it doesn't have that long whippy end that would blow in the wind or like when it gets fruit, it would drag it down to the ground so you get an arching plant. You'll get a more upright plant this way and it's just gonna just be stronger. All right, and so just to reiterate the heading back, cutting back again to a good bud or a side branch, like I said, some plants have alternate buds in leaves and some plants have opposite buds. Alternate means that a bud grows from one side and then the next bud grows from the opposite side. It's not exactly opposite but just imagine that. A zigzag pattern is how the buds are and when you head back to a bud or a branch, you are in charge of what direction that plant grows next because the way that bud faces is the way that new branch or new growth will come out of that. And then if you have opposite buds, like I said, hydrangea, lilac, maples, when you make a cut on there, right above those two branches or two buds, excuse me, you've had a single stem coming out of there and now you've cut it back where there's two buds and if both of those buds grow, it's gonna get kind of full. You want that for things like hydrangea or dogwood or really thicken it up, you'll get good leaf production, you'll get good flower production. So it's just a same method but different results depending on the kind of plant that you have. So I just have a couple of picture examples here. This is a young red current plant and I kind of drew the buds on top of the buds just so you can see them better. It was a little overexposed. So these are heading cuts that shorten the branch and I'm gonna extend it in the direction I want it to go. On the left is the original stem, just a young stem. It's one year old, it's got a bunch of buds on top and then it's got these other buds on the side and this is the alternate branching pattern where the buds are kind of like every other direction. On the upper right-hand side, I made my pruning cut at a 45 degree angle. I've got a nice length above the bud and that bud is on the left-hand side. So now when that shoot grows, I'm sure that a shoot will grow out of there, not just a leaf, when that shoot grows, it's gonna grow up and to the left-hand side. So hopefully that's the outer side of your plant. You don't want it to grow to the inner side. So if that pointing to the inner side, well, you should make another cut. So go down one picture and I made a second cut and I removed that top part and now that bud is gonna take that plant growing to the right-hand side. Did I say the right-hand side for both? I don't remember, it sounds like it did. Anyway, the top picture, your plant is gonna grow to the left, the lower picture, your plant's gonna grow to the right. So you decide where it has to go. All right, and then this is a young hascat plant that I planted a few years ago and planted it one fall. It was very small and it grew the whole next year and then the next spring I cut it off about three inches tall and from that it grew into this on the left-hand side. I have asked a lot of buds to form from a very young plant and that is the best thing you can do. If you have planted a small shrub, you wanna at some point in a dormant spring very early in its life, probably the next year, cut it off and then you're gonna get all these buds released and then you're gonna get this nice, bushy form. Otherwise, this might have been just like one or two canes with a couple little branches on it but because I cut it off, I got all this growth. So here's what I did. This plant was a little clogged up on the left-hand side and I wanted it to be nice and open again for sunlight and air. And so what I did is I removed these little branches because the little branches are just gonna stay kind of little. They're gonna be shaded by the bigger branches. They're gonna droop downward when they get leaves and flowers and then fruit on them. They're gonna like droop down to the ground and rub on those wood chips, maybe the mice will chew at them or something. So again, so there were these little branches and I just took them out, just unclog that plant. All right, so once I did that, then the plant is still a little thick. You can see there's quite a few branches there. So then I removed a few of the big nice branches but they're just in the way. They're clogging up my vision of where the sun is gonna come in and where the air is gonna come in and how it's gonna grow in the future. So you just take out a few and just make it do your bidding. I love the best thing that Tom Cobb ever says is show him who's boss. So you get to show the plant who's boss. Whoops, one more here. All right, so here's a renewal pruning. This is again where you remove a lot of the old material, one fourth or one third of what was there the previous year, remove it right at the ground and just get rid of it. You're opening that plant up again for air and sunlight and the left-hand side of the picture is what the shrubs look like originally. These are the same variety of currents and then on the right-hand side is what it looked like after I pruned. And on the very right-hand side, that's what I removed. Those are my loppers that I used and then that's the material. Some of it's lighter or redder color, some of it's more white colored. Again, you can just look at those. Once you get to know your shrub, you can just look at those branches and know how old they are. All right, and then I have some honey berries here. On the left-hand side, it's one thing I haven't really pruned in a while, so it's getting kind of thick. And then on the right-hand side, I've used my renewal pruning method to just remove branches at the base and thin it out a little bit. I think it could even be thinned out a little more, but sometimes you just don't feel like it in one year. You want to keep that one quarter to one third so you don't remove too much. So those are my examples and then just finish up here to say my mantra is prune it now or regret it later. I learned that the hard way by not knowing what I was doing. I mean, I knew it in theory, but again, I got a plant. It was pretty big, a couple feet tall, and I felt sorry for it. I didn't know when to prune it. I wanted to just let it grow. Well, I mean, it grew for like three years and it always had intercrossing branches inside of it. And finally, when it was like four years old, I took after it, but then I removed a lot of its fruiting potential. I should have just done it right away and it would have really put out a lot of new branches. So prune it now or regret it later. There you go. Envision upward and outward. I don't know if you can see me, but if you stand up and make the letter Y with your arms, that is upward and outward. And then face toward the sun and close your eyes and just imagine the sunlight and the air coming into that tree from that openness of the plant. So for most plants, you wanna keep an assortment of the ages of the branches. And I hope I can say this at NDSU, but you will say crap at least once during your pruning experience, probably more than once, but especially if it's a shrub, it will regrow and you can re-prune it next year and make all the same mistakes, but hopefully you won't make all the same mistakes. You've learned from your mistakes and then your shrub or your tree will be a great success. So you just have to go for it. And this is the end of my talk. And in this side, I always regret it. See that little lump there to the left hand side on the branch, that little place I pruned. I always feel like I did it a little high and I always kinda see that when I show this picture. So all right. Okay, thank you, Cathy. And let's remember to delete that four letter word that you can't hear. Okay, we're just gonna add some rapid fire questions here. How about in general, do you like pruning in spring or fall? Oh, spring is the best time. That's when all the energy's in the roots and you can direct it where to go. It's not good to prune in the fall because pruning encourages growth and then you are encouraging your plant to put out new growth when it really should be hardening off for the winter. So fall is really the worst time to prune. Right, good. Okay, we have a gardener just pruning their spirea. They know us old prune branches at the base of the plant. They're basically dead and woody. Can't we just leave them there? They're kinda hard to remove. But for a spirea, you can actually remove the whole plant. You can just do the renewal pruning where you just cut it all off. So maybe we're not talking about the correct plant, but a spirea generally you can... I think Peggy, you gotta cut it all off. He said, show who's boss, get in there and cut it down. How about any suggestions for pruning a reblooming dwarf lilac? Oh, the worst. So generally when things bloom in the spring, you want to prune right after it blooms because then it has the whole summer to form new buds and new growth and get ready for winter. I think that's probably a good plan still for the reblooming lilac because they bloom several different times. I don't think they're continuously blooming. So I was still prune after the spring flush of blossoms because you won't prune everything out, right? You're gonna get some new and some elderly parts of the plant and the older stuff will still bloom. Okay, I think you prune your hascaps every spring. Or should I say late winter? I do prune my hascaps every year. And I've seen a farm that has hascaps in Oregon and they do prune every year and it really encourages some new growth and I'm gonna be more aggressive on my hascaps this year. I'll go back to the spirea, it's a very popular shrub. Can you do a renewal pruning after it blooms in the spring? Most, I've seen people prune it in like, I think more mid-summer, it has to get some, it has to get some energy down into the roots because I know you can prune them and then they will rebloom for the fall. But I think that's more of a- Yeah, that's just trimming off, that's almost like deadhead cutting off the spirea. Yeah, it would be more deadheading in the summertime. Yeah, new blooms, yeah. Okay, here's an old Juneberry shrub that's way too tall. 16 feet. There's only bare stems and a lower half of the plant. Should've been prune years ago, but now regrets. How can it be pruned to renew the plant to get that plant that is half its current size? I actually think that this is a case where you should just cut it off. I think- Rejuvenate it. Rejuvenate it. Cut it down at the base. If they're almost all large, cut it off about, I don't know, six, eight inches tall and I really think you're gonna see new growth from that. If you don't, I'm sorry, but then you can get one of the new varieties that are better probably. But in general, you should, once those Juneberries are about four years old, you should start doing renewal pruning. When the older branches get to be about one inch in diameter at the base, you should start trying to remove about four or five of those big old ones every year. And then during the season, when you get like, because you've simulated growth, you might get a new shoot that comes up and it might get five feet tall in one season. You should reduce that height by about a foot or even half and then the next year it will start to make side branches and you'll get more fruit than lower down before it gets too tall. I have made this mistake and when they first start to blossom at eight feet tall, that's just stupid because you're never gonna reach them. So just keep an eye on it during the summer too. Okay, we're gonna go through these very quickly. We're gonna stand time tonight. How about your Carmine jewel sour cherry? Do you want to have a single stem trunk at the bottom or do you want multiple branches from the ground level? You know, multiple branches is the way to go. I planted mine only like an inch or two deeper than they came and mine are single. They come out of the ground in a single stem and then they branch out into a nice shrub but I had mouse damage and it girdled that single stem and then it all died. Carmine jewel has root, root suckers so it would actually repropagate itself. Karma, crimson passion does not sucker. So the best thing to do for one of those Canadian cherries is to bury it about five or six inches deeper than you got it or lay it on its side and then bury part of the stem and leave part out. That will help you get more branches coming out of the ground. Okay, do you prune the tops of a haskamp? I would actually just renewal prune that haskamp. I would take out the older wood and let new shoots come up. How about Cathy? Do we still have time to renewal prune a spirea? You do, yes, everything's still dormant. This is the best time to prune. Can you renewal prune a lilac? You can renewal prune a lilac. Cut it right down to about six inches tall. But not every year. The plants are still dormant for the next question. The ground's still cold. It's a great time to prune. How about, what do we do about a mugo pine? A mugo pine? I don't really know much about pine. I'm a fruit girl. I think on pines you pinch the tips back after they're green and they're soft you just pinch them back about halfway. Pinch off the candles. Yeah. There you go. Okay, when's the best time to prune grapes, Cathy? You can start now. You can also wait a little bit and kinda see what's starting to bud out on your plants but don't wait too long because those buds get kinda, I don't know, tender. You're gonna brush against them with your arm and snap off those buds. But you can do it now or wait just a little bit. There's rabid damage on a young tree stem. Can a tree be saved? If the tree has enough connecting tissue from the lower part to the upper part, it can regrow but if it's a really, if there's only like an inch on a four inch tree, boy, it's gonna be tough. If the tree's gonna look bad. Why don't that tree, I'm not sure about giving it any fertilizer but definitely treat that tree very nice. Maybe put some mulch around it if it looks like it can be saved. Right, it's called girdling. They can find an information on that. How early is too early to prune in the spring? January is too early. February is too early in North Dakota. End of March is probably good. April, you prune too early. You've got that open wound that's desiccating in the wind. You wanna kinda get it just before it really starts to wanna grow so that it's not open too long and when it does grow, it'll kinda heal that over quickly. Okay, we just got two more questions Also Kathy can always email Kathy with questions. I'm gonna be outside a lot now. Good luck. Okay, have you heard the phrase spring prune for growth and June prune for shade in regard to apple tree? Yes, yes, you can do summer pruning of apples. You would be removing some of the water sprouts that come up or just stuff you really hate. Just thin it out a little bit. If you see a large branch that's broke from the heavy snow, where do you suggest to prune it back to? Well, you'd wanna prune it back to another branch that looks good on that. So you've got the main branch and you've got some little branches. You wanna prune it back to a little branch, but if the little branch is so small compared to the main branch that's broken, you're gonna just, I think the best thing would be to prune it right at the trunk. I mean, not at the base, but prune it at the collar and remove the whole branch. Make sure you do wanna do a couple of cuts because when you make that cut, you don't want it to tear the bark down along the trunk of that plant. You wanna take off the heavy part and then do your final pruning. And last question, you got a following plum that is black nut. How do you prune that? I'm not super familiar with doing it because I don't have to, but you prune about, is it like eight inches or so below the fungus that you see, that knot, and then you just keep doing it. It's not really helpful to use a fungicide. You just keep pruning. Yes, and collect the clippings. Yeah, get rid of them. Okay, thank you, Cassie. I was outstanding. We're gonna take a quick five minute break no longer and then we're gonna go to Minot to learn about the soils.