Now in a slightly strange juxtaposition - let's talk some more about pruning.......
There’s an awful lot of palaver made in gardening books
about getting the angle of your pruning cuts exactly right so that the water
runs off. This has always struck me as slightly spurious – we’re not talking gate posts or shed roofs here!
I think it’s easier to remember what to do if you think
about how plants grow – it’s all about the nodes. The bit where a bud/leaf emerges from a shoot
is called the node, and the bits in between are called the internodal spaces
(feel free to impress your friends down the pub with that one). In terms of growing action, the plant can
only produce a new shoot from a node.
When you’re making a pruning cut, the thing you want snuggled right up close to the end of the shoot is a bud.
If you leave a stub by angling your pruning cut the ‘wrong’ way, or
cutting halfway up the internodal space, the plant tissue will just die back
until it gets to a viable bud. So if you
were doing something like an apple tree where you cut every single shoot, you’d
end up with a halo of dead stuff all over the plant. Your pruning cuts should leave the plant
ready for action when the sap rises in the spring with a nice healthy bud at
the end of each shoot.
 |
| too long |
 |
| sloping wrong way |
 |
| correct |
The same theory applies to taking cuttings – the thing you
need at the bottom of the cutting for root production is a node. So make the cut at the bottom of your cutting
just below a bud/leaf joint. Convention has it that these cuts should be
straight across rather than angled. The
main benefit of doing this is it helps you tell which way up the cutting should go
when you stick it in the pot – pointy at the top, flat at the bottom.
 |
| pointy end up - flat end down |
No comments:
Post a Comment