The Yorkton and District Horticultural Society will be holding their regular meeting tonight, Wednesday, April 20 at 7 p.m. in the Sunshine Room at SIGN on North Street. Our special guest will be Robert Vallaster speaking on 'Growing and Using Herbs for Natural Healing'. Everyone is welcome, and we hope you can join us.
Also, I'm not sure if there are still seats available for the road trip to Regina on April 30, but if you would like to go, call Liz at 782-7230. The group will be visiting Dutch Growers and the Regina Floral Conservatory, so there will be many sights to inspire everyone for the upcoming season.
I read a great little article called 'Why Bad Pruning Is Like Giving Your Garden A Bad Haircut' by Carol Chernega. I thought it was very timely this year. I don't know how the shrubs are in your garden, but many of ours look bedraggled, broken and bent out of shape. Between struggling through last summer, and then enduring a winter with so much snow, they look pretty sad. So this little article gave some great insight about how to deal with our shrubs. There were five key points, and here they are: Number One, cut the dead weight first. We have to clear away any broken or dead branches first and then work from there. Number two, crossing over. Check your shrubs for any branches that may cross over or rub together in the future.
Eliminate the problem now. Number Three, know what you are pruning. If you have a mystery shrub in your yard, do some homework and find out what it is and how it should look before you go wild with the shears. Number four, cut back to the branch. Cut to a bud or branching point, and don't leave a long unsightly stub. And number five, cut with the flow. Cut out all branches that are not going in the natural direction of the plant.
If you watch the DIY shows on TV, they always say, measure twice, cut once. So it is with pruning. Be careful about which branches you cut, because once they're gone, it may take years for the shrub to grow another one to replace it to that level of maturity. So take your time and "check twice, cut once".
We know of someone who, with all good intentions at heart, went to town trimming some tall cedars, thinking that they would 'grow back'. The result was a gardening train wreck: you didn't want to look, but you couldn't look away! The lush cedars were cut back to the point where several leggy, bare stems remained. By the time this gardener realized how extreme his trimming had become, there was no turning back. All that could be done was to clear away the cuttings before his wife got home. (Yes, he did this as a surprise!) There are simply no words that could describe the look on her face when she saw "the surprise". Needless to say, they never did 'grow back", so the moral of the story is, check twice (or three or four times!) and then cut once.
We may have our work cut out for us this year with our shrubs, gardening friends. So let's keep Carol's tips in mind, and that project will be easier! Have a good week, and Happy Easter!
