One of the most important cares for many plants is pruning. It helps maintain plant health, and prevents pests or disease (not 100% but at least it’s a preventative system). Therefore, today we focus on when to prune lemon verbena and how to do it.
If you have this plant in your garden, or in a pot, and you want to know when is the best time and how to go about it, keep reading all the advice we are going to give you.
Contents
When to Prune Lemon Verbena
We’ll start by telling you when it’s best to prune lemon verbena. You already know that this plant has a common cycle, that is, in autumn it begins to lose its leaves (especially if it is cold), in winter it will be bald, and in spring it will begin to sprout.
This is normal in many plants. But during all this timeIs it best to prune it in fall, winter or spring? The answer is not as simple as it seems. You will see:
You can do a drastic pruning in fall and winter as long as the climate where you have it is not very cold or freezing. By pruning it before the cold weather sets in, you’ll ensure that it doesn’t expend too much energy tending the few leaves it has left (and staying active), but rather goes dormant and spring it will have more energy to germinate. But severe frost can kill it or make it sick.
You can wait until late winter (if it’s warm) or early spring to prune it. However, you risk that when you make it, it has already sprouted and cutting it can sometimes slow the development of the plant.
For that, our recommendation is to do it at the end of winterwhen there are no frosts (even if it is still cold) because that way you will avoid bad things from one season to another.
How to prune lemon verbena
Now that you know when to prune lemon verbena, Want us to give you a hand on how to prune it? Well said and well done, here are the steps that, for us, are the most important.
Prepare the tools
The first, before doing anything, is to prepare all the tools you will need to prune your plant. Of course, this will depend on the type of plant you have. That is, whether it is big or small.
In general, what you will need will be:
- Clean, sharp scissors. Be sure to sanitize them before using them and also after you are done. This way you won’t spread disease between plants.
- Some gloves and goggles. To avoid damaging your hands or getting something in your eyes that could irritate them.
And nothing more. As an aromatic herb, it does not grow so large that it requires a larger tool, although if it is very leafy, With just a pair of scissors, you can waste a lot of time cutting.
time to cut
One of the care you need to perform is often for flowering. It is important that when the flowers fade you cut them off to prevent them from attracting pests or diseases. However, as we are talking about pruning before flowering, this You should start by removing leaves and branches that are dry and old, the ones you already know are not useful for the plant to grow back there.
We also recommend that you eliminate branches that cross or prevent the sun and the air from penetrating well through the plant (so that it is well ventilated and nourished).
In addition, large leaves and branches are unattractive and detract from the beauty of the plant. So try pruning them (both) so that the plant does not have a more uniform shape. In fact, once you clean up the leaves and branches which are not needed the next thing you should do is prune it to keep the shape you want it to havewhich involves cutting the branches that come out of this formation.
One piece of advice we give you is not to oversize if possible. It is better to cut it twice, or three times, than in one because that way you give it time to recover, and it activates over time, wearing much less than if you had to take care of everything in same time .
Finally, and depending on whether you have transplanted it or not, you can add fertilizer or a specialized product for its growth, in order to give it energy to move forward after its pruning. But If you’ve changed land, it’s best not to since it already has the nutrients to do so.
Check for pests and diseases
Plague weather can be the perfect time to give your plant a thorough overhaul. That’s why we told you to put on gloves. And it is that, although it is not a plant very affected by pests and diseases, There are two that need to be controlled: spider mites and root rot.
For mites, it’s best to check the branches for anything that shouldn’t be there, as well as the leaves (if there are any) to make sure there are no no unwanted insects. If possible, have a magnifying glass handy in case of suspicion.
In the case of root rot, the only way to know for sure is to take it out of the pot and see if the soil is too soggy. But if it is planted in the garden, it is more difficult. SO what you can do is insert a stick to see if it comes out very wet or not and look at the plant itself (at the base) in case you notice rot in the stem, if it moves a lot, etc.
As you see, trimming the grass Luisa has no mystery. It is enough to do it in time to know which branches to cut, until when and how to do it. Do you have more questions? Don’t worry, leave them in the comments and we’ll try to fix them.