Trimming Redbud & Hydrangea, & Killing Off Grass in Pachysandra
It’s Ed from Canton. “I have several questions, if you don’t mind. I have an eastern redbud, and it had some lower branches on it. Can I trim those off now, or can I wait until spring?”
Okay. How much of the tree do those branches that you want to trim off, how much of the total tree head does that make up? Is it less than 10 percent? If it’s less than 10 percent, you could do that pruning now. Again, ideally, in a perfect world, the first thing in the spring would be the best.
Trimming Hydrangea
“Second question, I have a hydrangea, not sure of the name of it. It’s beautiful. It turns white, and then it turns red. When can I trim that back? That thing really grew this past summer.”
It’s probably a variety called quickfire. They do get six to eight feet tall, but they do make a little quickfire and a tiny quickfire. So, it could be one of the other varieties as well that’s naturally going to stay smaller.
Those are pretty tough plants.You can take the bloom heads off this time of year. If they’re starting to turn brown and past their peak, you can take the bloom heads off this time of year. That won’t hurt anything. If you’re going to get hyper-aggressive with a pruning, I might wait until spring to do that.
Getting Rid of Grass In Pachysandra
“And the very last question. I have a lot of grass growing in my pachysandra. Is there something that will just sort of kill off the grass and not the pachysandra?”
Yes. That’s a great question, and there are some smart chemicals out there. I believe the one we have is Grass Beater by Bonide.
What that will do, is you can spray that in areas that have ground covers. It does say on the bottle, you test a small area, see how it works. We don’t want to go ahead and spray the entire pachysandra bed. Even though it’s quite commonly used in pachysandra, everybody’s areas are a little different.
I would also probably want to make sure that that area has a good drink of water. If the plant is stressed from being in a drought situation, which we’re in, and then you go ahead and put a chemical on it that’s not normally supposed to hurt it, you could see some detrimental effects and burning on that plant just because it was already stressed from the drought.
So if you’re going to do that in that area, that’s completely fine to do. But I would make sure that area is well watered before you make those applications. You can use it on ivy, pachysandra and a lot of the ground covers. And it’ll list it on the bottle.
Yeah, I would never recommend you do something against what the label says. And we’ll work with you. If you come into the nursery there, I know at Rohr’s Portage Store, the 7211 Portage Street store, we’ve got that Grass Beater product in-house there. And we can pull a label open, walk through it with you, make sure that you’re good to go there to use that.
Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).
