The shrubbery and trees in your yard can easily become overgrown and too thick for good vegetation health if you let them go for a season without pruning. However, with some good practices in pruning or hiring a pruning professional, you can keep these vegetation features in your yard attractive and healthy. Here are some recommendations and tips to use as you get your yard back in shape with regular pruning practices.

Trim According to Growth

There is likely a variety of vegetation and trees in your yard that need to be pruned back to help promote the plant's health, keep it looking attractive, and also grow in the right manner. For example, you don't want a large bush next to your home growing up and onto your home's exterior and roof because it can cause damage to your home's surfaces. However, you don't want to prune off branches at just any time of the year, because if you do it at the wrong time you can harm the plant's growth, buds, and fruiting ability.

A good rule to follow is to look at how the plant grows new blooms and trim according to where the blooms emerge. If a shrub or tree blooms new growth in the spring, for example, you should prune before the growth occurs in the early spring or in the late fall and winter. This prevents you from cutting off the new growth just after it emerges, thereby also preventing the blooms from occurring because the new growth was improperly trimmed off.

However, on vegetation that grows its blooms on old existing growth, you can trim them in late spring or summer after the blooms have already faded and died off. For example, shrubs that grow spring blooms can be pruned in the summer after the spring blooming. 

Follow Trimming Guidelines

Once you have determined the best time to trim your yard's different vegetation and trees, you should be sure to prune them in the appropriate manner. You don't want to trim off too much of a plant's growth because it can cause the plant stress and make it susceptible to disease and insect problems and also put it at risk of dying. Removing too much of the leaves on a shrub or tree will remove the plant's ability to make food from the sunshine, thereby killing it. So always follow some basic rules for pruning so you don't overdo it.

Remove any dead branches or sections of the vegetation that are thinning. Then, trim just above the bud or node on the plant so you promote good growth after pruning. If there are any suckers or sprouts coming from the base of the trunk of the main stem, you should trim these off because they pull nutrients that would go to the entire plant. Contact a pruning service for more information.