Pruning transforms your garden by allowing light to reach the soil and improving airflow, which promotes a healthier environment for your plants. Most plants benefit from pruning at some point, as it stimulates new growth, encourages more flowers, and helps manage their size. The best part? Once pruning is done, your garden instantly looks neater and stays that way well into spring.

Invite light and sunshine into your garden to warm the soil and stimulate growth from the roots upward.

Pruning is a bit of a mystery for most gardeners and yet it need not be. Most plants need some form of pruning at some stage to stimulate new growth, flowers or to limit size. In nature this happens with frost, hail, fire or strong winds. At home this task is one that lets you put your own stamp on your garden. Sharp secateurs, long-handled lopper and a pair of strong leather gloves will make pruning easy. A saw is needed only when really old roses or branches thicker than two centimetres are to be cut down.

Besides the usual suspects like Roses give the whole garden a nip tuck and shaping to bring on spring. Roses, Hydrangeas and deciduous fruit trees all get pruned from July into August. Hedges and topiaries should get a good shaping as spring starts to get them ready for the first flush of growth.

Roses

Roses require winter pruning to rejuvenate them for best flowering during the summer. Cut back stems by about two thirds. Remove old, dead, diseased and spindly growth. Seal the cuts with Steriseal to prevent die back and spray the plants with Kumulus to clear out fungal spores and any leftover Red Spider mites from the previous summer. After a week spray them with Oleum to rid the plant of any scale insects on the stems.

Fertilise the plants with BioOcean organic fertiliser to produce strong growth and good colour roses next summer. Iceberg roses sprout from old wood, so if they have grown too large and untidy cut them right back to short stems, however if you want them to become large shrubs you can prune them very lightly.

The most important thing to remember is that one cannot prune roses wrongly and that it is actually very easy. There really is nothing to it!

Healthy hydrangeas

The flowering of hydrangeas for Christmas can be controlled by when you prune them. Cut back now to get the best results. When you look at your hydrangea there are young, slender growths of the previous summer reaching up from the base of the plant. At the end of this stem there is a large bud. This bud, in the next growing season, will produce a short shoot and then a flower. Do not prune this stem.

There are also older shoots two seasons old with a cluster of large buds a short distance down the stem, usually four to six in number. These, if left, will each produce a flower the following summer. All that is needed is to prune the stem back to just above the cluster of buds. Older, heavier stems of two or more seasons will also be found, carrying several dead flower heads. These should be pruned back hard to the base of the plant to stimulate new vigorous growth the following season.

Once pruned feed your hydrangeas with agricultural lime, organic BioGanic fertiliser and mulch with compost for pink flowers. For blue flowers just feed with Acid Plant Food and mulch with acid compost.

Fruit tree pruning

July is the perfect time to prune fruit trees, ensuring a bountiful harvest during the summer months. Pruning not only controls the tree's size but also promotes blossom growth, increasing both the quantity and quality of the fruit.
For deciduous fruit trees, the pruning method remains consistent in their early years:

• One-year-old trees: Remove all side growth and prune the central stem back to knee height. This may seem drastic, but it lays a solid foundation for the tree's future growth.
• Two-year-old trees: Select three or four strong stems to create a cup-shaped structure, pruning these stems to 75 cm and removing all other growth.

For more mature trees, focus on selecting robust shoots growing from each main branch, cutting them back to produce a vase shape, and removing any spindly growth. This approach ensures a healthy and productive tree.

Once pruned feed the trees with Wonder 8:1:5 fertiliser around the drip line of the tree to stimulate more blossoms. Spray with Kumulus to clear out fungal spores and any leftover Red Spider mites from the previous summer. After a week spray them with Oleum to rid the plant of any scale insects on the stems.
Remember do not spray trees that have buds or blossoms on, they are the early peaches and spraying blossoms will reduce your crop.