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Maximize Your Garden Yield with Pruning Techniques
Pruning stimulates your herbs and can make them grow bushier, allowing you to harvest more and make your small space garden more efficient. Pruning to remove dying, diseased, or too-dense plant leaves will improve your plant health. Utilizing this technique in your garden also reduces opportunities for pests to infest your space. Pruning is a great way to maximize the harvest and improve the health of your small space garden.
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Benefits of Pruning
Prune diseased or dying leaves to prevent spreading infection to the rest of the plant, or its neighbors. As a plant gets bigger and it rains more, it’s more susceptible to fungal infections. Pruning protects your harvest by improving airflow which helps avoid those infections. When a plant first begins to flower/fruit, pruning will encourage your plant to focus on producing its fruit rather than growing more leaves.
As a plant nears the end of its lifecycle, pruning is not necessary. Leaves dying off is a natural part of the aging process. An example of this is when cannabis is flowering. The plant is taking the last of the energy from the leaves to produce the buds so unless the leaves are diseased they should be left alone to die off naturally.
How to Prune
You can typically start pruning once a plant reaches 3” tall and has at least two sets of true leaves. To prune, you take a piece of the plant just above a node* that branches off. In most cases, this will cause the plant to produce two more offshoots. Continuing this process will make a plant grow bushier over time. To avoid causing stress, only prune up to ⅓ of the plant at a time. Avoid pruning perennials in the fall or winter when the plants are hibernating to avoid stressing the roots.
*The area on the catnip plant circled in blue above is an example of where you’d prune. See the two baby shoots that are already there?
When you prune, use clean shears or scissors to cut. If cutting unhealthy leaves, clean them afterward with rubbing alcohol to prevent spreading the infection via the shears.
Your plant will still need leaves to take in energy, so avoid taking away too many overall. Vegetative (leaf) growth will be slowed or stopped completely while the plant is fruiting, so they will not be readily replaced.
