Trimming and Fertilizing Burning Bush in Summer
‘Is it too late to cut back your burning bush?
Oh, that’s a good question. So you can do light pruning on burning bush this time of year with no issue. Just a little bit of trimming. Say you’ve got a branch coming out over a walkway and it’s not a large portion of the plant, you can easily trim on a burning bush right now. But if you’re talking about taking a significant amount of the plant off, I don’t really recommend doing that now. Again, we’re going into the 90s.
That’s going to be stressful for the plant. A hard trimming is also stressful on the plant. And I kind of look at it this way, three strikes and you’re out. That’s two already. We don’t want to go into a situation where we’re into a two-strike situation. So I would wait and do that pruning probably next spring.
If you’re talking about really trimming a burning bush back hard, you would rather do that and say the end of March, beginning of April. That’s the perfect time of the year to do it. If you do it that time of year and you fertilize it real heavy, it’s a very, very high success rate with burning bush to get them to reflush.
So now that I’m thinking about that, and we were talking about lilacs earlier, what about like, because I’m thinking of trimming right now, it’s probably kind of tough with the heat coming. Is it an okay time to trim really anything?
You’ve got to be careful when the heat’s coming on like this. But lilacs just got done blooming not that long ago. So you can definitely do a light trim on a lilac.
Again, fertilize it with a good slow-release fertilizer. It’s very important to use the right fertilizer, because if you use a quick-release fertilizer when we’re going to get into the 90s, just the fertilizer releasing can actually burn the leaves of the plant. So we have something at the nursery called Rohr’s Nursery All-Season Fertilizer, and it’s a very, very slow-release product that will not burn the plants.
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