(upbeat music) - Welcome to Digging Deeper with Backyard Farmer.

I'm your host Kim Todd, on digging deeper we have in depth discussions with extension and industry experts about those important landscape topics.

Tonight, we're going to be talking about pruning evergreens with special guest Nebraska Extension Educator, Elizabeth Exstrom.

So Elizabeth, thank you for driving in as always all the way from Kearney and an array of evergreens.

And part of the reason I thought this would be a timely topic is we get a lot of questions on Backyard Farmer about pruning in general.

Evergreen seem to present really quite a challenge for people, especially since to start with they can't necessarily differentiate between pine, spruce, fir, juniper, yews, arborvitae.

So let's pick one and talk in general about that particular classification or category of evergreens and what you can and can't prune and what looks good and what doesn't.

- So we're just going to pick this one because we had a lot of death and die back in evergreens this year, what we have is the fir.

And so as you notice on the fir, what we're looking for is we're looking for that new supple growth.

When those new candles come out they're coming out now.

So if you take a look at this fir, you're going to notice a couple of things.

First, while there's a brown spot.

So that's the number one thing why I picked this one first and number two is we don't have any new candles on here.

You know, if we compare that with the spruce that's right next to it, you can clearly see the brand new growth that's coming out here.

But on this guy, we do not have any new growth.

One of the things that we need to consider is any time we have dead damaged or diseased branches at any point in time, whether it's winter, summer, fall, those branches need to be removed.

And so what we want to take a look at, is on this fir, how far back does that go?

And so if we were to take our pruners which is why we have them today and we just cut off the dead, that's all it's gonna do.

It's not going to re sprout new buds in this area.

It's not going to make it have a flush, a new growth.

It's not going to have any new growth in that area.

You're just going to have a knob there.

So your best bet is to take it back to that next branch union.

So that way it's a little bit more hidden, but unfortunately this guy is just not showing much new growth.

We have a little bit here on the end, but not enough that it's going to make a lot of difference on.

So first and foremost, remove the dead, the damaged, the diseased first, and then start to take a look at what your overall goal is of that evergreen.

- So really you're cutting back to a good side branch or a lateral branch, or if it's a big dead branch, all the way to the trunk, is that correct?

- All the way to the trunk, if you have that really big dead branch, don't just leave a knob out there because those evergreens are not going to re sprout new growth on that knob.

Go ahead and take it back to the trunk, make a clean cut, stay outside the branch bark collar.

So that way you're not cutting too close to the trunk and go ahead and do that with those really big branches.

- All right.

So fir and spruce are relatively the same in terms of pruning.

So let's talk about, that's a real Norway, a big Norway, an old Norway.

- An old old Norway, and this old Norway also has similar characteristics to that fir.

Where if you take a look, there's really not a whole lot of new growth on this guy.

And it's going to be the same thing.

Let's say we just cut it off at that, wherever we think we need to, it's not going to sprout new growth in that area, and it's not going to want to spur it or do anything along those lines.

So, I mean, if you wanted to, you could cut it back to here but you're really not gaining a whole lot by taking off some of that branch.

And I think this spruce has some insects on it too.

So it might be a little stressed that way too.

But that's the main thing is when we take a look at it take a look on the overall health of the plant.

First, take a look for new growth, you know, remove dead damaged, diseased and then decide on what your overall goals are for that tree.

- Well, and we do get a lot of questions from people who have new growth on the tips of their spruces, but not on the interior.

And that's probably a classic example of that on that old one.

- Yeah and it's easier when it's on the exterior where you have the new growth on there.

But once we cut back to an area where there's no new buds no green growth, a bare stick, it's not going to sprout new growth there for the most part.

Now we have some that it might take awhile, but for the most part once you cut it back to that area where it's really Woody and there's not a lot of needles there, we're not going to see any new needles begin to sprout on that.

- So let's look at our weeping Norway spruce which is threatening to take over the Backyard Farmer garden.

Because we do want to do a little pruning on that one.

- You know, this guy is healthy.

That's what we can determine just by the amount of the new growth and the new candles that we have on here.

You can really tell that this guy is really healthy.

And right now, if you wanted to control the size, you could control the size by doing the candling on it.

Just make it a little bit more compact, a little bit smaller and cause it have a flush, a new growth or a little bit more buds at the end.

But this guy is very healthy and very happy.

And so that's one of the things you can by that new candle.

- So obviously the cut that I made just to bring it in, is not where you should cut.

Although if you could see where I took it off, there's a side branch.

- Yep.

- But if people really don't want to candle because it would take a long, long time, can they on spruce, cut back to one of those points where either those new buds have already broken, or if it's a little earlier in the season to where those new buds are?

- You know if you really do your homework, you can really kind of make your determination and try to figure out where those new buds are going to come out.

If you decide you want to just take it back a little bit, you could that guy's got some new candles that are gonna come on there.

Now what we do not want to do is we do not just want to mid branch go ahead and cut that off.

- 'Cause it's not going to have new growth there.

It's not going to sprout any new buds.

If we're going to take that branch off, we're going to take it back to the next lateral location there.

So that way we've got that going.

But yeah, you could take off just the tips to make it flush out with new growth on the end there.

- All right.

And so another example here of, I think that's a Colorado spruce which is showing a little bit of stress.

And an awful lot of weird candle growth and then some branches without any new growth, new buds breaking at all.

So is it possible on that one again to see where cuts could be made, If somebody wanted to?

- You know this guy he's really taken his sweet time candling out compared to the weeping Norway.

You know on the end here, we definitely have some death and die back.

So if we're looking at pruning back these up here, we would take a look on where those buds are going to come out and then we'd remove, well that wasn't a very big bud, but you would remove that part that's not doing a whole lot of good.

On some of these other ones, like this little knob right here, it really doesn't have any new growth on it.

It's just gonna sit there but we've got new growth back here.

So what we could do is we could come in there and just remove that one.

So that way, that new new bud has an opportunity to go ahead and come out of it.

You know, really let the health of the tree be your guide when you're doing pruning.

If it's like this guy and you can tell, okay, he's really stressed, we're still breaking bud.

I would maybe reconsider how much pruning I wanted to do, because if the tree's not in overall good health, it's really not going to do a whole lot of good to go ahead and prune it.

If the tree on the other hand is like our little weeping Norway friend over here, that's got a lot of new growth on it, by all means yeah then we can go ahead and get pruning on it and do some good from pruning.

Don't just prune for the sake of pruning, prune with an end goal in mind as to what you're actually going to do.

- Just because you love to do it doesn't mean you should.

- Yeah, that's correct.

- Take those pruning tools away from... (Elizabeth laughs) So before we go on to pines, we want to encourage you to give us all your comments watch us of course on Facebook, which is the only way you can see us on this.

And we love to hear from you both with subject matter and the kinds of things that interest you and whether you like our segments on digging deeper.

All right, Elizabeth.

So part of the issue then is spruce and fir have needles in singles and then pines, of course, they're in a bundle.

So that helps our audience know the difference but let's talk about a little handful of pines before we go to our shrubs here.

- So we've got a lot of different pines that we have here.

First off, we have the white pine right here and this is one that we can tell that it's been around for awhile.

We don't have a lot of new growth here on the end.

And as you can tell, it kind of looks like a little palm tree, which pines, usually aren't supposed to look like palm trees in Nebraska.

So this is one where, okay, we probably have a shade issue because it's reaching for the sun or we've got some other environmental issues going on.

We want to take a look at, you know, if we have this dead damaged, diseased branch, we want to make sure we take it back to that next branch union.

So that way it's just not sitting out there.

And then, you know, we take a look at candling.

When we we'd take a look at candling, there's the new growth that we see here on the end, it's going to usually be that different color.

It's going to have that new fleshy growth to it.

And then we've got the past few years growth that's sitting right back here.

Now it's a lot easier to candle a pine than it is to candle some of those other evergreens, whether it be a fir or spruce.

But what you can do is once they start to elongate and this guy doesn't have much room to wiggle with, you can go ahead and pinch it or cut it back to encourage those buds to break on the side which means that it's going to branch out more - And on white pines, a healthy one, you'll see candles of foot long sometimes.

And if you don't pinch, then you can end up with a trunk, no needles, no branches.

So it is really one of the pines that occasionally people will candle.

At least as long as they can reach up into the canopy.

All right.

So we also have, I think maybe Austrian and a Scotch there.

That actually is a scotch, which is still living.

This one is, yeah.

- So again, with these guys we've got several different things going on.

As you can tell, we do have a lot of the brand new candles that are coming out of here.

And we've even got some little side buds going on.

If you look really closely, you can see baby pine cones which is something that's kind of fun to see.

Some trees will have one year old pines or one year old cones.

Some of them will have two year old cones, but when it comes down to it, this little purple thing on the end is actually going to turn into a pine cone.

And then as we rotate the branch, we see the little tiny pine cone and then we've got the mature pine cone on there.

So we've got several different stages of pine cones on there.

And then we also have something that everybody thinks is an insect egg on our pines.

And it is not an insect egg.

It is natural.

It is something that happens.

So because we have male and female flowers, what we have here is we have the male strobili.

This is where the pollen comes from.

So all of you that suffer from allergies, when these are ripe, we tap the branch.

And all of a sudden we get that yellow puff that comes out of there.

Now what happens sometimes and why some people get a little scared, is because then they start to turn like this papery brown color, and then they fall off.

And then all of a sudden we've got this branch right here that has absolutely nothing on it and it's bare.

And we think something happened to our pine, something ate it.

But it's just those male strobili that they matured and fell off.

- So pinch one of those so people can see how you do this.

- I'm not actually going to pinch because I don't want sap all over my fingers.

That's the tip of the day.

Use your pruners.

If you don't want to have sticky fingers all day.

But we just come in here and sometimes we'll go down about a half or so.

And just go ahead and cut that back.

The ones that you accidentally cut off and give a little haircut to, they'll be fine.

It's not going to harm them very much.

The other ones will start to come out and then they'll start to fan out and then we'll see more candles that come out through there.

- Right and so next year where you made that cut you'll see four or five new buds breaks.

So again that's what helps make the tree get shrubbier, or bushier.

- Fuller.

Yeah.

It'll fill in, in those areas.

So this guy.

- Same thing really based... - It's the exact same thing, but he's already got a heads up on that other one he's already broke out and had several different candles coming out of one location.

So if you continue to do that year after year, you're really gonna see that tree be really full.

- All right.

So then we have junipers, yeah.

Stickery old things.

And whether it's a shrub form or the more upright tree form, the pruning is essentially the same on these.

These a should or should not be sheared.

- They do not respond well to being sheared.

You could shear it, but it's not going to end well for the shrub.

And so one of the things we need to keep in mind, especially with our arborvitaes, with Cedars, when we take a look at them and we prune them, let's say back here where we've got this nice, Woody branch going on, and we just cut that branch off, this is not going to re-sprout.

That area right there is just going to be a knob.

And that knob is going to stay there.

So a lot of times people want to prune their junipers pretty severely and take them way back, to encourage new bud growth.

And that's not going to happen.

You're going to have a bare spot in your shrub and it's not going to regrow.

So ideally you'd like to come back to the main branch union and go ahead and cut that back.

When it comes to, when we're pruning, we want to take a look and kind of try to feather prune it.

You know, if you make like a, just a blunt cut, everybody's going to tell that you pruned your shrub.

But you want to kind of go in and try to do some hidden pruning cuts.

And that helps to kind of take down the size, take down some of the maturity on those and take it out of there without it being like a blunt cut or shear.

- Right and when you talk feathering, you're meaning cuts at different points on the branch.

- Different points on the branch, not all the same one all the way across, some here, some down in here, some all over and kind of give you that appearance.

- All right.

So our last one is yew, which of course can be sheared.

- It can, I grew up in a household with sheared yews.

And so if you are going to prune or shear a yew, one of the things to keep in mind is you want to wait for that new growth to come out first.

Otherwise you will be pruning again, when that new growth comes out.

When we hedge, or when we shear, we want to make sure that, especially at the bottom it looks like a ladder.

We don't want it to go in.

We want that shrub to go out.

So if you do decide to make more of a hedge and shear it, that you leave the bottom out.

So that way it gets some sunlight down there, otherwise it's going to be really bare and then you're going to want to completely go in and prune it.

And it's going to take a while to regrow some of those branches.

- So on that one, since you really can't cut back to bare wood on juniper, on that yew, basically a person could go back to the laterals again.

And I know that on campus and in several older neighborhoods people have taken old yews back to great big old branches.

Over time, they will re-sprout right?

- They will, but it takes a long time and you have to have a healthy shrub and a happy shrub in order for it to come back.

- Right, so again, I mean with hedging, people will use mechanical hedging equipment.

Is that all right as long as it's a good scissor cut and very sharp or are you still better off to take hours and hours?

- It really depends on how much time that you have.

I know the hedge trimmers are really nice.

The electric hedge trimmers are very nice, as long as they are sharp and they make a clean cut.

If they're making ragged cuts, then your best bet is to go in and you either use the big wooden ones, you know, the hand sheers, or you could go in if you had a lot of time on your hands and trim them off as you go.

The thing to keep in mind, sometimes it's hard to keep all those clippings out of the shrub.

So don't be surprised if they fall down in and all of a sudden you've got a lot of brown deep down in your yew going on there.

But it is one that it depends on how much time you have.

- Exactly.

Well, Elizabeth, that's good information.

And of course, this is the window.

We don't want to prune too early or too late.

So here we are in pretty much prime time for pruning those evergreens.

All right.

Well, you know, that is all the time we do have for Digging Deeper with Backyard Farmer.

Thanks to Elizabeth for coming in and talking to us today.

We will be back next time with another in-depth discussion.

Do be sure to watch Backyard Farmer live, every Thursday at 7:00 PM central on NET.

Thanks for digging deeper with Backyard Farmer.

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