#+pruning

Plant of the Day

Tuesday 7 July 2026

This Cotinus 'Grace' (smoke tree) is being hard pruned (stooled) every winter resulting in this vigorous, strongly coloured new growth.

It warned up today and the humidity went down, so I got out to the shed to do some painting. Mascot Froggie is supervising. 😃

I also did some trimming on the crabapple tree this morning. I like to do my light pruning a little bit at a time. After looking at for a day, a snip a little more here and there.

I am back in the house to cool off now.

Meet my basil plant. She shares a tub with a semi prostrate rosemary plant.

She's 8 years old and had her most recent prune 2 weeks ago. She's had many hard prunes over the years but always grows back with a vengeance.

Her body is hard and woody but her tips are soft and green. Her purple flowers are loved by many pollinators. Her leaves taste nice in my cooking.

Completed my first maintenance crawl-through of the season. Due to my shades and the vines' sprawl, I haven't been able to easily access the inner vines for a while. Despite my garden not being that big, this took me a few sessions:

Assess each plant's health, where its vines are going, and see if it has any female buds coming up soon

Take stock of how many secondary vines it has started, and choose no more than a few to be kept (determined by which ones are most vigorous and already aimed in a convenient direction)

Prune off redundant secondaries so the plant doesn't waste energy

Make extra sure to prune off the puny secondaries towards the base of the vine, not because they're sapping much energy but because they tend to become aphid magnets

Direct traffic of remaining vines to re-establish semi walkable rows and clear up crowded spots

Check undersides of leaves for pests

Remove dead fruits and yellowed, damaged, overcrowded, or low-lying leaves

Trim grass

Add more mulch in thin spots (the better I keep the sun off my soaker hoses, the more years they'll last me)

The east cold frame with Tidy Cats litter bucket planters of spinach plus some of the tomato seedlings, a bunch of packs of germinating flower varieties, and the single pot of French tarragon that I was able to resurrect.

The west cold frame with much of the same, including the seed snails of parsnips, beets, and leeks. Got the parsnips transplanted into the sidewalk raised bed yesterday and plan to do the leeks sometime this week. The beets will wait for a good set of true leaves first (this is the reseeded snail after the first transplanted seedlings died in a hard freeze). I do have direct-seeded beet seedlings emerging now so I'll use the transplants to fill in any gaps.

I am so glad that I found that second 4 foot shoplight during alleyway scavenging early last fall. I had to be creative while hanging it (the reason why it was junked), but I think it's made a big difference in the quality of my seedlings this year. Everything is growing fast, but more importantly growing strong.

Some things are growing a little TOO fast. The Black Beauty eggplants are now 6" tall and it's nowhere near warm enough outside for them. The "issue" was the seeds germinated immediately—I had factored in a 3 week lag. The Antigua eggplants took nearly that full 3 weeks to germinate and so are only 2" tall right now. It's a great problem to have though given last year's issues with eggplant seedlings and pests that resulted in total crop failure.

The two earthboxes of peppermint were unearthed from their heavy covering of straw and moved to the bank of other earthboxes in the back. The squirrels started digging in the boxes so I had to put a rack over them until they fill out.

Three rescued spent mums made it through the winter (plus the established one from previous years). I moved this one yesterday from its temporary location in the rear raised beds to join the other two in the front in-ground bed as part of the erosion-prevention brigade.

Potted up the first of sweet potato slips from the sprouting potatoes in my bathroom (warm, sunny). Four orange and four Japanese. There are a whole bunch of those lime green decorative slips ready in a glass jar of water too—I think I'll plant several of those per pot to use in containers later. As I have no space in the cold frames until the tomatoes start moving out, right now these are put in the shed at night and on an outdoor table during the day.

The tulip bulbs I planted from the spent bulb planter last spring finally started to bloom only to be blasted apart by a windstorm before I got a good pic. But it looks like they're pink as you can see from this petal! I had predicted either pink or red. I was hoping for red, but can't sneeze at free. Which these were. So that's yellow dwarf daffodils, dark purple hyacinths, and pink tulips—not bad.

And it looks like the hard prune reset I did on the chartreuse barberry this fall worked! It will take a while to get as big and filled out as it had been but at least I don't have to try to dig it up and replace it.