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Pruning and Thinning: Advice from an Old Gardener

Those two words are feared by gardeners everywhere. Here's how to master your fear.

So you like to dabble in the garden. Early each spring, you scour catalogs and can’t wait to see those beautiful flowers from your perennials or from the annuals you’re planning to purchase. You may envision only a few plants or a few hundred. And the trees and shrubs. Think of all those blossoms from azaleas, rhododendrons and laurels. Of course, there are the cherry trees and the Bradford Pear trees that are planted along our roadways. It can make your head spin with visions of color to delight the eye…for months on end after a gray winter. Oh yes, there are veggies, too. Pots or rows of carrots, tomatoes, lettuce, beets, peas and beans…it can go on and on. Ahhh!

But then there are the two dreaded thoughts that stop most gardeners in their tracks. These are the chores most of us absolutely don’t want do to, and in fact, most of us don’t know HOW to do. They come down to the two feared tasks we try to avoid over and over again: pruning and thinning. 

Why should these words affect gardeners so? They’re not really that difficult to understand or to perform with our other regular gardening chores. The problem is that we think they are hard to do and difficult to understand. Let’s make things easier by breaking them down and work with each of them separately. 

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Pruning. This can make or break a plant…literally. Many think of pruning as a haircut for a plant. Just trim it to size or shape and you’re done. Well, sometimes. Most of the time, it doesn’t work like this. There are proper ways to prune, and different kinds of plants require different techniques. What’s important to understand is what kind of plant you’re working with so you know why pruning may be needed and what it can do. Some plants take to one kind of pruning but not another. Pruning can kill a plant if done improperly or make it flourish and look healthy and vibrant. It’s worth knowing something about how to accomplish this. 

Pruning may trim a plant in what seems to be a desirable way at first, but it has to be done correctly. There is a method to the madness, and it’s not hard to understand. Pruning determines how a plant will grow and where new branches or shoots will form. The last bud on a branch, whether an annual, perennial, shrub or tree, is called the apical bud. It is from this bud that new growth will usually start and new leaves will form. Some plants have this tendency in all or some side branches (these are lateral buds), some only on the topmost branch or shoot (this would be the apical bud). For example, most evergreen (conifer) trees demonstrate a very strong apical dominance to a single vertical branch. While there may be side branches, one will dominate to increase the height of the tree. Some deciduous trees and plants (those which drop leaves in the autumn) may exhibit numerous apical buds and not have a single dominant branch (or leader) to solely increase the height of the plant. 

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Pruning branches on a tree or shrub where the leaves are parallel to one another can often force them to send out TWO branches, one from the base of each leaf just behind the cut. This can cause the plant to thicken, often a very good thing. If the leaves are not parallel (that is running left, right, left right along a branch), pruning can force the direction of growth to the direction you prefer. This is good for trees that may intrude on a sidewalk (you can prune it so the township doesn’t do the “chopping”) or a neighbor’s property, or starting to shade a portion of your garden where you would rather not have the shade. In this way YOU can control the growth and not end up with a mutilated tree or shrub, or one that takes over a spot used by another plant. 

I’m not going into all the detail regarding how and when to prune. A very good summary may be found here, and this will not burden you with the kind of information that a professional landscaper wants to know. In addition to what’s already mentioned here, topics included on this site are: What is pruning?, Rule of Thumb Pruning, Pruning for fruit trees, Grape Vines (sounds wonderful…if I had the space), What Do I Remove When I Prune?, and When do I prune? (Yes, the capitalization is strange, but I copied it directly from this website.) Learn a little about pruning, and it will go a very long way to making better, stronger and more productive plants. 

What about the second thing…thinning? What’s that all about?

If you plant veggies, this is a must, and just about everything you need to know is on the packet of seeds you are planting. The hard part is that once you have seeds growing, many gardeners don’t have the heart to follow thinning instructions. After all, a plant IS growing, and deliberately taking it out of the ground seems very anti-nature. But thin we must, and the reason is simple. Take carrots, for example. The seeds are barely larger than a grain of sand. It’s tough to plant them at the prescribed distance apart. Rather than placing seeds one to two inches apart (and later thinning them to three to four inches apart for best growth), they usually fall in clusters, often several together so that we end up with ten to twenty plants growing per linear foot. This is NOT good. Such plants need space to grow, to spread, to get nutrients from the soil. If they are crowded, they will not grow properly, they may be misshaped, and may never reach a desirable size. The trick is to look at them with a little intellectual curiosity and pull the smallest or weakest ones, with the object of finally reaching the preferred

distance apart between plants. Honestly, if you leave eight or ten per foot, you certainly will get lots of carrots, but they will be small, frequently misshapen, and often not very flavorful. The thinning process allows them to reach full potential and allows you to get the best possible crop. So forget the intellectual barrier that prevents you from thinning plants. Just do it, and you will reap the rewards of your disciplined gardening. 

There are several ways to make thinning easier. One is to mix very small seeds with another medium that is a bit more coarse. With the example of carrot seeds, you might mix them with some very coarse sand, perlite or another medium that will not inhibit growth. This makes it easier to sow into the ground when you tap them from the the container where you mixed the seeds with the sand. Another is to bend the envelope in which you received these fine seeds into a fine “V”, and gently tap the seeds out along the furrow that you have prepared. This takes a very steady hand. With each of these methods, you will still have to think but likely considerably less than if you had just spread the seeds by hand. The last method is what I very much prefer. This also might require you to order your seeds early in the season and to purchase a “seed

tape.” Here, seed is placed between two thin layers of tissue-like paper, by machine, with the optimum spacing provided for you. The paper will dissolve into the soil, and the seeds will germinate normally. Of course, there will be some thinning as the company manufacturing the tape knows that not every seed will grow every time. So they give you approximately double the number of seeds per space, but this is much easier to thin than finding clumps of half a dozen seeds in just two inches of soil. It works! We were able to purchase beets this way this year, and it made life much easier. Unfortunately, we were a week too late to purchase carrots this way. Next year we’ll start earlier. 

Now that you’ve mastered the two most difficult aspects of gardening, you’re ready to work on this year’s garden and plan for next year’s, too. No, it’s not too late to plan for a second planting or a fall planting for cool weather crops. Many crops and flowers are not limited to just a single spring planting. 

Enjoy your gardening knowing that you CAN do these two tasks that many will ignore because they’re not understood. You are now empowered to prune (after some reading) and to thin seedlings. Your garden will thank you. 

Resources (a very abbreviated list): 

What about resources for thinning? Just put your thumb and forefinger together and nip or pull. No resources needed for this. Just follow the instructions on the seed packet. No regrets, either. Again, you’ll get better and more productive flowers and vegetables. Enjoy the fruits of your labors.

Thanks, Rich

This column also appears regularly in Mr. Wolfert's blog, Nature Notes...a Lifelong Journey

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