3 Methods for Pruning Herbs To Stimulate New Growth

Herbs are some of the most fun and rewarding things you can grow in the garden. However, if we don't take care of them, they won't be as healthy, they won't be as productive, and we certainly won't get as much out of them as we could. So in today's video, we're going to grab some tools from Centurion Tools, who sponsored the video, and talk about how to prune weeds properly. Different types of

herbs

and some general things to keep in mind. So there are a couple of things you should keep in mind in general when

pruning

herbs

.

The first is to not remove more than a third to a half of an herbaceous plant at a time because that will damage the plant and may stunt its

growth

, while removing about a third or so is a good option. idea to

stimulate

new

growth

. Another good idea is to prune if timing is important. And of course it is specific to individual plants. But a good rule of thumb is not to prune about eight weeks before frost because then all that new growth that's coming out will die before it can harden off and survive the winter if it's a grass that can survive. winter.

Now let's go ahead and find out how to prune some of the most popular herbs that are likely to be found in your garden. Let's start with one of the most popular in the garden, which is, of course, basil. I have an African Blue Basil bush here that, as you can see, has put out quite a few flowers. Now, when basil, especially an edible basil, sheds flowers like this, it is a sign that it is reaching the end of its life. In fact, it is starting to shoot and produce flowers and then seeds, and that can often change the flavor of the basil.

So what you want to do is remove them to encourage more vegetative growth, but the area you prune will determine how bushy and productive the basil becomes. So let's go ahead and take a look. So let's take this piece of basil here. What we could do is go through and remove all this flower and that's it. This flower spike will definitely help. But you can see that we've left two branches right here. There is one that comes out here and another that comes out here. We have some more flowers. So I'm going to go ahead and take that off and I'm going to go ahead and take that off.

And now we have a section that is going to produce a lot more vegetative growth because we have removed all the flowering spikes and you can see that more growth will come from there, from there and also from here and here. . Let's do one or two more of these just as an example. So you can see again that we're cutting around there. So we cut off the entire flower spike and in this particular case we're going to get new growth from here, here and also up here in two different places. It's basically like Medusa: you cut off one head and two more shoots come out.

Now, what if, as is the case, sometimes even this section we just pruned seems too bushy, too tall and unruly? Well, what you can do is take this to the next area where new leaves start to appear because you'll get some branches right outside of that leaf node. So if I wanted to, I could take this and I could cut it like this and we'll make it even shorter. And you can see that there's actually a new branch coming out right there and a branch coming out here. That's another way to do it, just above the next growth node.

So let's go ahead and finish this job. There we have it, with some simple micro-tip pruners, we've gone ahead and removed some of this basil. Of course, if this were a basil that I used as edible basil, it is more ornamental to me. You could use this in cooking, use it for herbs, spices, whatever the case may be. But for now this will probably go in the worm bin and we have pruned our basil. So let's move on to the next herb, the second herb on our list, also the greens, chives or green onions, they are both effectively pruned the same way.

They both belong to the allium or onion family and we eat the tops. So the way we prune them is the same. The way these guys work is they grow from a central point. And so, instead of branching out like we showed you with basil, what they do is continue to produce new growth from a smaller central point. So the first pass on something like this little patch here of green onions is going to be just cleaning up some of these yellowed sections, these dry ends, etc. So what I'm going to do is go through and just clean it up and then we'll talk about some harvesting techniques.

So when you prune chives or green onions, what you want to do is remove the outer leaves all the way to the base. And what you've done now is you've left this inner leaf and of course even more will come out here to grow. So you can keep them in the ground for quite a while and get successive harvests. Here's another really good example. You have this sheet here, this sheet here, we can go over and just cut this, cut this. We'll use it in our salads and then this guy will continue to grow and eventually more growth will come out of it.

Our third herb will be rosemary. I actually isolated a single stem, so I pruned it right here at the base of the soil and I wanted to pull it out to demonstrate. It can be a little difficult to see if you're just looking at a giant rosemary bush. And when you look at this, what you notice is that there's a main stem here and then it starts to branch right here, right here, the main stem continues up and then branches more up here, so you're not going to get any new rosemary growth. if you start

pruning

in this area.

Certainly, the more bare the stem is, the less new growth and even no new growth you are going to

stimulate

, so if you really want this rosemary to grow a little bit more, what you can do is you can start to take off and sometimes it is easier if you look at it from the back of the rosemary, where there is a little less contrast, you can start to take off. For example, I could remove this right here, this main leader, I could just remove it and now I'm going to get some branches right here, so that's going to help me.

But actually, with rosemary, the lower you go, the better because it will grow even more and then you can continue doing that process. And another thing I'm seeing here is, you know, let's say this is a whole plant, I might even decide to remove it right here and prune it completely. And I would have this happening now. These would start to go boom and boom. And you can even see that there are some ramifications that will develop right here. There is one that will develop here as this one continues. And then you're in a very good place for your rosemary.

And that's really what I would say. Another thing you can do with rosemary is if it grows straight up, let's imagine it's straight up, you can bend them down a little bit and you'll start to get new growth shooting up from the horizontal branches. And that's something that happens with rosemary that's really interesting. So if you were to do this somehow and keep it a little bit bent, just do it without breaking it of course, then you would actually get new growth this way. It's a really creative technique with rosemary. One last thing, when pruning rosemary, as far as timing goes, the best time to give it that hard, gnarly pruning will be late winter to early spring.

That will be the time when it will start to return to its growth cycle and you will give it a good haircut, stimulate new growth and then reshape it and maintain it and you will get a beautiful amount of rosemary. Guys, when you prune herbs, you not only prune them, but you also harvest and eat them. So if there are any herbs you'd like me to talk about, definitely let me know. I chose these three, basil, chives or green onions and rosemary because the style is a different method for each of them, different considerations, but there are three categories of herb pruning that you will end up doing.

And again, thanks to Centurion Tools for sponsoring the video. I used the microtip for the entire video, although they have a whole line of affordable tools that I recommend you check out, and if you want to see me make another video like this, leave some comments in the comments section. I would love to give some more simple gardening tips like this. Until next time, good luck in the garden and keep growing.