Foundation Plants Pruning Tips

Over time, the shrubs around a foundation can grow into each other's spaces, blocking the light and air necessary for continued healthy growth. Dave shows you how to improve the circulation of light and air around your foundation plants.

Dave Epstein: Hi I'm Dave Epstein this is Growing Wisdom. Its early spring walking around my yard seeing what needs cleaning up, pruning and what has died. And one of the things I've noticed is that over the years some plants start to knit together and that can be a nice look because it looks nice and full, however sometimes as the plants knit together the backs of plants or the fronts of plant where they're meeting don’t get enough light, so they begin to die. What we’re going to look at today is a Delaware valley azalea that has grown together with out little blue spruce. We’re going to clean out the area in the middle and give them both a little more light and airflow. So what we’re doing now is we’re just cutting out some of the dead from the blue spruce. You can see all these stuff are dead and we’re removing it, get as close to the main branch as you can when you remove branches and on the azalea we’re doing the same thing, we’re taking out some of those lower dead branches. And now look we've created this nice little pocket here where light and air can flow much easier and both plants will be happier. You don’t have to create a gap that’s five feet wide, but give them both a little bit of room to grow and a little bit more light and air will flow in between. So we’re going to continue to walk around the yard and look at what else we can find. For example this mahonia and azalea probably also need to be thinned out as well, so I'm going to get to work thinning these two things out and I hope that this video helped you to be better gardeners. Come back every week for all of our tips and some helps at Growing Wisdom.