- Hi, thanks for joining us for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South, I'm Chris Cooper.

If they are happy, shrubs can get large and out of hand.

Today, we will learn how to prune them.

Also, snakes are beneficials in the garden, but running into the wrong one can ruin your day.

That's just the head of The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

- (female announcer) Production funding for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South is provided by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

[upbeat country music] - Welcome to The Family Plot.

I'm Chris Cooper.

Joining me today is Joellen Dimond.

Joellen is the Director of Landscape at the University of Memphis and Andy Williams from Lichterman Nature Center will be joining me later.

Hi Joellen.

- Hi.

- Why do we prune?

[laughs] - Pruning is the removal of a part of a plant.

- Okay.

- And pruning, there several reasons why you should prune.

The number one is probably safety.

- Okay.

- Shrubs get too big around your house and you wanna get them lower so you can either see in or out your windows and just keeping them in on the sidewalks or the driveway, trying to keep them out of the way of your vehicle or pedestrians - Lawn mower.

- Lawn mowers, yes.

- Cutting grass.

So, there's a lot of reasons to prune.

- Okay.

- Safety is the number one.

- Safety.

- But, they're also for the health of the plant.

If a tight plant doesn't have any air circulation in it, you can prune to make it more airy so that has better light and air circulation to keep diseases and pests away.

- Okay.

- Another one is for flower and fruit production.

Think about an apple tree.

It's got tons of little apples on it, well, you don't want a whole bunch of little apples.

You'd rather have just a fewer bigger apples.

So you'd have to take some of those off.

And of course, roses, rosarians they really prune hard and they keep just one bud on each stem to get those huge flower buds.

So, there's lots of reasons to prune.

Of course, there's specialized pruning like bonsai, Espalier.

- That's real specialized.

- I mean that's a whole other subject and we're just talking about pruning around your house.

- Okay.

- Now, there are some, several tools that you can use to do that.

This is probably the number one used This is probably the number one used and bought item for pruning.

And, I have this wherever I go, I use it for a lot of pruning reasons.

This would prune up to three fourths of an inch.

- Okay.

- In diameter.

When you want something larger, you are going to have to go to what they call a lopper.

- Okay.

- And, this will get up to one and a half inch diameter branches.

Anything larger than that, then you really need-- - Let hold this, okay.

- If anything larger than that and you really need a pruning saw.

I like these because they are close-up and the blade is away from you and you simply open it.

- There it goes.

- And, it locks.

- That's nice.

- And, pruning saws have a wide-set, sharp teeth and they cut, unlike other saws, on the pull.

So, when you get next to a branch and you pull, that's how you cut it, it cuts on the pull.

And, this is up to maybe one, two and a half, three inches.

Anything larger than that, then, I really suggest you get someone who knows what they're doing, like a certified arborist to prune your trees.

These are the only hand pruners that I have.

And I, these you see, look very nice because I rarely use them.

- Okay.

Let me hold that.

- If nothing else, make sure your tools are sharp.

So always get a file and make sure your tools are sharp, they're clean, they're oiled so that they work well.

There is another pruning item that a lot of people like to use and this is a pruning shear.

Shearing plants is not a healthy way to keep your plants looking good because they force a lot of growth so that the interior of the plant does not have leaves.

So, like this one isn't sheared.

And you can see, there's leaves clear down in the plant.

And that's what you want, to get air and light movement into your plant.

Shearing stops that.

And, a lot of sheared plants end up with a lot of pests and diseases because of that.

So, it's not as a healthy way to prune but people still use this.

- They do.

- I don't, there's all kinds of hand shears but I rarely use these, if ever.

[Chris laughs] - So, that's that.

- Okay.

- Some of the things that you're going to have to know about a plant is gonna help you prune it better.

- Okay.

- The first thing is all, excuse me, all branches have what they call a terminal bud or an apical bud, same thing.

And if you, this particular bud inhibits the growth of lateral buds.

When you cut the apical bud, the lateral buds tend to break and grow.

- Okay.

- Because the hormone that's inhibiting them is gone.

So, in that way you can learn how to give fill in a plant or give direction to a plant, have a lopsided plant.

You can cut the terminal buds on them, lateral buds will come and fill out that side of the plant.

So, you can use that to your advantage.

If you look at each of these leaves, there is a bud that comes out between the leaf petiole and the stem.

between the leaf petiole and the stem.

That's where all the buds reside and those are points of growth and that's where you prune to.

But, you'll notice these leaves fa ce different directions.

Well then, if I cut this plant right here, Well then, if I cut this plant right here, this leaf is growing in this direction.

That means when the bud comes and breaks, it will send out a stem in this direction.

So you can control the di rection that your plant grows by which bud you leave out and you cut up against.

And, that is also helps you take our plants and shrubs and let them go out.

- And instead of going in.

- Got you.

- And then, that keeps light and air movement through the plant.

- That makes sense.

- To help with diseases and pests.

- Okay.

- So, those are some of the principles that we use and when you do cut it, we'll cut a quarter of an inch in the direction that the bud is going.

- Okay.

- And, 'cause you don't want to put a whole lot of material above where the bud is, don't cut in the middle because the plant will have to harden that off.

And, you don't want the plant to waste energy when something you could have cut off real quickly, you want it to put energy into the bud.

That's gonna build that stem out.

- Makes sense.

- Now, we're gonna talk about different types of plants.

Look at these.

These are blooming, the best time to prune any shrub, it doesn't matter what kind.

Any shrub that blooms is within a few weeks after it finishes blooming.

- Okay.

- That way, the plant has an entire year - That way, the plant has an entire year to build buds for next year's bloom.

Next thing you wanna look at Next thing you wanna look at is see how the bottom of this plant is further out than the top of it.

is further out than the top of it.

And so, unlike my father, he used to do this all the time.

He had boxwoods and he made a little round circles out of them, - The meatballs.

- Drove me crazy, but he continued to do it.

The problem is when, if I did that with this plant and cut this, this part will be shaded by the top part of this plant.

And it won't bloom.

That's why they tend to get leggy and you'll see lollipop plants is because they took away the lower limbs so that they're not getting light.

So azaleas and things that bloom, especially you want a nice angle on the plant.

Now, you can make it rounded, but make it mounded and not rounded.

- Mounded.

- Yeah, mounded with the base further away than the top at an angle.

- Got you.

- And, this one here is getting a little tall.

So again, I'm gonna find a point of growth and prune it off.

and prune it off.

And, the main point of pruning like this is to make it look like you haven't pruned.

When we get done, you'll never know I was there.

You won't notice that somebody has pruned.

- In an essence, you hiding the cut.

I think I've heard of that a couple of times.

- Well, when you prune correctly at a point of growth where a leaf is, then it's the leaf that's there is naturally kind of hiding where you cut.

- Okay, that makes sense.

- So, we can, now, that's flowering plants.

There are vase-shaped plants.

Vase-shaped plants have a whole bunch of stems that come right at the base of the plant and come up.

Now, they do have some other branches that are taller that you can prune but majority of those, you cut one third of those shoots that are coming up out of the ground.

So, you'll go in at the base of the ground and cut one third of those out.

- Wow, okay.

- And, you usually use the older ones, keep the newer ones.

- Okay.

- And, you can tell by the color of the bark, whether they're new or old and the size of the bark.

- Got you.

- Where there's a Florida anise, a little bit out of control.

But, this is a little bit tall here by taking the apical dominance of this particular branch out, we will force others below it to branch out which will make this plant more full.

[pruners snipping] [pruners snipping] And, you don't have to prune much to stimulate that type of growth.

And, usually what I will do is I will stop and I will, when I get done, I think I'm done, I look back at it and say, "You know, I don't like that.

I think I want to go further."

So, I go to down to another point of growth.

- Okay.

- You learn to prune by pruning.

You see, I don't like that so I go to another point of growth.

I don't like that so I go down to another point of growth until I get the plant looking more round like I want it to.

And also, this is gonna force the lateral buds to come out and make it more full.

- Good stuff, Joellen.

I appreciate that.

[gentle country music] - Okay, so we've just finished pruning.

Now I wanna clean my pruners and disinfect them in case I need to prune something else.

There, we've disinfected them and if I hadn't oiled them before I started pruning, I would oil them again because you want to have a nice easy grip and have it move very freely and not make a lot of noise.

Then, you know it's oiled well and then to file them, you have to go with the blade and you just take a file, a metal file, and you file them.

Make sure you've got a nice sharp edge on this.

And, if you want to know if you've got a sharp edge you should be able to cut a piece of paper.

[gentle country music] - Let's talk about the benefits of snakes in the garden 'cause we always hear the bad, right.

Let's talk about the good.

- Of course, there are a ton of benefits but you know, no one feels neutrally about a snake but you just think about the hype and not the reality.

But, they're important part of the food web, they eat all sorts of things.

We'll talk a little bit more about this milk snake in a minute, but they're very opportunistic feeders.

They will eat slugs, they'll eat worms.

As they get older, they'll start eating mice and rodents and all sorts of things.

There are a variety of water snakes.

Everyone focuses on water moccasins, as such, but there also a lot of other water snakes that live in and around the water that help take out disease, fish out fish populations, and help thin the herd and kind of keep them on their toes, as it were.

But, particularly in residential areas where we have upset nature, here we put in these tame grass lawns, and that sort of stuff.

The food changed in a food web just get out of control.

In particular that gets out of control in the way of rodents.

And so, it's kind of interesting.

The more you learn about snakes, you learn how much you really need them around the house, but it also gives you some insight if you're so afraid of snakes, you don't want the benefits, some ways to control them.

So, for example, that snakes like this one in an adult size that eat mice and rats and rodents and such, they, you'll be shocked but they like the same habitats as their prey animals.

And so, if you've got an areas with tall grass, a lot of boards, flat pieces, places to hide that foster development of particularly rodents, and such, you're bound to have a lot of snakes because they like the same habitat, in general.

And, they like the same habitat because there's a lot to eat.

- Sure.

- But, with the mice and rats, just like, most of us give our dogs and cats flea and tick preventatives.

Well, the mice don't get that.

[laughs] And so, they're covered in fleas and ticks and that sort of stuff.

And so, a side benefit of having healthy snake populations is that it helps keep the fleas and ticks under control.

- Interesting.

- There's a study, it's actually with the timber rattlesnake which is a much larger snake.

But, over the course of the year, with the rodents it eat, it consumed they counted between 2 and 4,000 ticks that were stuck to the mice.

A hosta enthusiast, how many people like voles in their garden?

- Yeah.

- You're exactly right.

- And again, hostas, you typically have the mulches, the vole highways on that to get to the hostas and other delicious plants.

[Chris laughs] - Snakes love this sort of stuff.

And so, when you have snakes in the yard, well, your vole population is going to be under control.

- Yeah.

- There are native king snakes that actually, they're not as opportunistic.

If they have a choice, they prefer meals and other snake.

So, if you like snakes, that's it's kind of plus or minus but, they're said to be immune from other snake's venom.

So, if you don't like snakes like copperheads, which are fairly ubiquitous, we don't have it.

We have, Tennessee has timber and pygmy rattlesnakes, but they typically are more rural sorts of snakes.

- Okay.

- They don't like all the fuss that goes around the garden, but when you see snakes, it's always startling because you hear the stories, no matter how much you know, your first thought is, "Is it venomous?"

Because there a number of ways to tell but whether it's venomous or non-venomous, anything with a mouth can bite you.

- Sure.

So, just look at it.

And, if you see it first, just take three steps back and walk away.

It's pretty easy.

I feel like a broken record though at work.

I tell people of all ages what to do when you see a snake, take three steps or any animal, you don't know, take three steps back and walk away, but apparently, it's really hard to say that enough.

[Chris laughs] - Oh, right before you asked me to come on in the month of May, there were not one but two national news articles about people that just had to go touch them.

- Yeah, picking them up, yeah those were some good stories.

- Snake bites are relatively rare and there's a relatively low incidence of being bitten.

Forty percent of most snake, venomous snake encounters for someone getting bitten involved someone handling him.

- Sure.

- And 40% of those people, frequently, alcohol's involved.

It's really, if you've got to drink and walk around [laughs] That's especially good time.

- Sorta like drinking and driving.

Don't drink and handle snakes.

- They're really surprisingly few combinations where that's a good element, but there's a guy in Alabama who picked up what he thought was a harmless milk snake.

Picked it up, [laughs] and let his kids examine it.

And, he was going to save it for his brother.

- Wow.

- So, clearly he didn't get the message about not backing up, but there they are similarly marked in one thing, I do have to say this happened in Alabama but we're not part of the natural range of coral snakes.

- That was a coral snake?

- But, a coral snake, I brought a replica of a coral snake and you can see they had the same warning colors.

The red, the black, and the yellow.

There all sorts of rhymes.

Once again, if you have to remember a nursery rhyme, "Was it red on black, friend of Jack, red and yellow can kill a fellow?"

- Yeah I remember those.

[Chris laughs] - Actually, my personal favorite way to remember it is that if red and yellow are the colors on the stop sign.

And so, even if you're just tempted, just stop on that.

But as an extra bonus today, I brought you each a coral snake reminder.

- Ah, how about that!

[laughs] Cool.

- That's adorable.

- This replica gives you a better idea of how the actual bands all appear, but you can see that the red touches the yellow and that's a good thing to remember.

- Pretty cool.

- But, even if you've killed a snake, a lot of people, just their instinct is just to chop the head off.

Another national news article, and I thought it was the New York times last week, and it sounds like fake news, but it's real.

Someone in Texas chopped the head off a rattlesnake and so, he separated it in two, but he had to pick up the head.

What could go wrong?

[Chris laughs] - Well, the answer is that they have a really bite reflex that is super strong and persists for up to an hour after their-- - Amazing!

- After you chopped the head off.

- Amazing.

- But, I don't know why he picked, felt need to pick it up or what do you think?

- I'll have to say this kind of fair.

It was sort of revenge for the snake.

[laughs] - Hopefully, the consequences weren't quite as dire for the human.

- Well, actually they were because most snakes conserve their venom.

If you get bitten by a juvenile or baby snake, they don't know how to control the venom but they want it to last.

- But did it kill him?

- No-- - Then, it is not as dire.

[Chris laughs] - It is not as dire, but it required something like three or four times the amount of antivenom.

- Wow.

- Then it would have originally taken because the snake was, it was just a bite reflex.

So when the snake bite, it ejected-- - A lot.

- A lot of the venom.

- Interesting stuff, Andy.

And, while we're talking about snake bites, well guess who got bitten by a snake.

- Well, - Can you share with us-- - I did.

- Your experience.

- I luckily, I knew the percentages that the mortality rate is like 0.01%.

And so, I was never afraid.

I did a lot of research afterwards and it turns out that I did a lot of the wrong things.

Like, I had to walk back to the house.

I was well down in the valley and had to go back up to the hill but it was really not an, I was never afraid that it was gonna be fatal because the only people that usually die from copperhead bites are those who have anaphylactic shock.

So, if you live for a few minutes and the other thing I learned, I think is very important.

We were always told to kill the snake and bring it with you so you could know what kind.

And now, I know that you don't and I didn't anyway, I didn't ever consider killing the beautiful copperhead that bit me, but they used the same type of antivenom no matter what the poisonous snake is here in Tennessee, because it's gonna be the same kind.

- They are all hemotoxins.

- Yes, it's the very same one so don't kill the snake and bring it and certainly don't risk any more damage by trying to catch and kill the snake because it's not gonna matter once you get to the hospital and even whether or not you get any venom, it's a judgment call.

- Well, and you didn't kill the snake.

- No, I admired the snake.

He was there first.

Really, the only real lasting damage he did is that I feel like I'm a little more cautious now than I used to be oblivious, which I enjoyed.

- Well, Andy, we appreciate that information.

It was good stuff.

- Oh, thank you.

- I appreciate that education about snakes.

A lot of stuff I didn't know before, I know now.

- That's right.

So don't handle the snake folks, all right?

Three steps back, you'll be just fine.

Thanks again, Andy.

- Welcome.

- All right.

[gentle guitar music] - There's lots of different mulches you can use on tomato plants.

And, what we're going to do here is we're actually going to use newspaper, which is a really cheap mulch and has some advantages.

So, the first thing we're gonna do, I tend to use two layers of newspaper.

It makes it last the whole season, since it does break down through the year.

To get it around your plants, it's nice because you can just rip it how you want it to be and just kind of tuck it around the base of the plant.

[newspaper rustling] If it's windy at all, the one downside of putting this out is you have to weigh it down.

So, we're gonna put down some dirt clods here just temporarily to hold it so it doesn't blow away and you just continue spreading it out.

The way to really get it to stay down is just to water the paper.

And, that'll just get it wet, kind of get it to stick to the dirt.

Now this plant is mulched.

It was free.

You can go to your local grocery store and just pick up the free paper and use that Then, you should be good to go.

They should last about one season.

When you're done, you can just till it back into the ground.

[gentle country music] - So Q & A segment, you ready?

- I'm ready.

- We have some good questions here.

- Yes we do.

Here's our first viewer email.

"What fungicide can I use to prevent "phytophthora leaf blight on my peonies?

"I have it every year and do no t know what to treat it with.

I have already re-planted to improve drainage."

and this is Donna from Eads, Tennessee.

So, she's already done the one thing that I thought of, right, which is to improve the drainage.

- Right.

- What else do we think?

- Well, they might still be crowded and they need air circulation.

Maybe, she needs to divide them and space them apart a little more.

- Okay.

- She could do that.

If not, one thing it's gonna be not only on the stems, the roots, it's also in the soil around it.

So, you can spray at the bases of the plants with fungicide Mancozeb and Maneb.

- Okay.

- Either of those.

- Both of those are copper-based fungicides.

- Yeah, and it has to be every seven to ten days.

- Right.

- But, that can get tiring for a long time.

- A lot.

- Yeah, but treat the soil too around, surrounding the plant because the disease lives there too.

- Okay.

Yeah, but improving that drainage is definitely good.

- That was an excellent idea.

- That's good.

- But, she's just gonna do a little bit more.

- Okay, yeah, so Mancozeb, Maneb, which are copper-based fungicides.

There's one chrolothanonil which is Daconil that you can use.

But read and follow labels.

- Definitely.

- If you're gonna use that.

But, we think you're there.

- You're getting close.

- You're almost there.

All right, here's our next viewer email.

"Can you identify these flowers?

"I've looked through several guides and can't find anything just like them."

This is Rick in Corinth, Mississippi.

So, how about that?

- Yeah.

- Yeah, I.D.

those flowers.

So, what do we think those are?

- Well, they look like asters.

And I'm wondering when the picture was taken.

- Okay.

- Because it doesn't say when it was taken, - All right.

- 'Cause most of the asters that look like that bloom in the fall, so, I was wondering if what time a year it was but they do, they look like asters.

- Asters, kind of reminds me of the ones that you planted for us before.

- Yes.

- Just similar.

- Uh huh.

- Okay, so there you have it, Rick, asters.

Okay.

All right, here's our next viewer email.

"Can or should you prune or trim Japanese maples, "especially if branches are touching the house?"

This is Ms. Barbara from Atoka, Tennessee.

That's down by your way as well.

- Yeah.

- Okay, so yeah.

Can or should you prune?

- Sure you can.

- That are touching the house.

[laughs] - Yes, sure you can.

Yeah, just cut them back from the house.

Again, to a point of growth, another branch that's coming out or a leaf.

- Okay.

- So, just cut them back to one of those points.

- Okay.

So, you can do that.

- Yes.

- Anytime of the year.

- Anytime of the year you could do that?

- Yes.

- So, there you go Ms. Barbara, you can do that.

Don't be nervous, right, just get in there.

Cut it back to the point of growth.

- Yeah.

- Thank you Ms. Joellen.

That was fun as always.

- It was good.

Yes.

- Thank you so much.

Remember, we love to hear from you.

Send us an email or letter.

The email address is familyplot@wkno.org.

And the mailing address is Family Plot, 7151 Cherry Farms Road Cordova, Tennesee 38016.

Or, you can go online to familyplotgarden.com.

- That's all we have time for today.

Thanks for joining us.

If you would like more information on shrub pruning or snakes in the garden, go to FamilyPlotGarden.com.

We have links to helpful extension publications that you can print and take into your garden.

Be sure to join us next week for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

Be safe.

[upbeat country music] [acoustic guitar chords]