Making the cut: What and when to prune
This is the time of year when gardeners find their way back into the garden and start cleaning up the decaying remnants of last season and begin snip, snip, snipping away with pruners. It’s easy to get carried away when you get outside in the fresh air with a pair of loppers in your hands and start slicing off chunks off trees and shrubs. The danger, of course, is that you can get addicted. Pruning can be very emboldening. You can end up doing more harm than good. Your personal safety is also at stake. Pruning trees and shrubs can be tricky, even dangerous, especially if you’re high on a ladder, trying to cut large branches. Branches can look a whole lot smaller from the ground than they do once you get up in the tree. Let’s take a moment to consider what can and can’t be pruned right now and how we should go about it to get the best results. First, if you’re thinking of removing a large tree or shrub or slicing off large branches, you should seriously consider hirin...