What you should be pruning in your garden right now. That’s coming up on This Land of Ours.
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Now is the right time to reach for the clippers and pruning shears and get to work on some of those tall summer-flowering perennials. You’ll want to keep them in scale with other plantings by removing up to one-third of stem height. Cutting back these plants does delay flowering, so keep that in mind. It also causes plants to branch and become bushier, which means you’ll have more flowers in the end.
Perennials to prune right now include: joe-pye weed, tall coneflower, bee balm, catmint, yarrow, balloon flower, Culver’s root, Veronica and garden phlox.
With fall flowering perennials, early summer pruning helps reduce plant height at flowering, which can prevent flopping and the need for staking. Fall perennials to prune in early summer, include: asters, Russian sage, garden mums, helenium, turtlehead, boltonia, tall sedums and monkshood.
Listen to Cathy Isom’s This Land of Ours program here.