Summer Pruning Guide: Lavender, Salvias, and Other Perennials | Garden with Marta

Hey guys, it's Marta. Welcome. Today I wanted to take you with me to work in the garden. Today I'll be pruning my lavenders. I've pruned some but I left some to show you exactly how I do it and why. I'll be also pruning my salvias and we'll work in this border also so we'll need to prune some roses. Let's begin. As you can see here, some of my lavenders have been pruned. When do you do it? I usually would do it at the beginning of August after the flowers are spent, they lack color. This is the moment I would do it but we were on holiday, sometimes it's too hot, sometimes it's raining, you know, you have to do it when you have time. It's best to do it earlier so the plants have some time still in the season to bulk up, to grow some new stems and this pruning technique that I will show you in a second does exactly that. It will prune harder than only cutting the spent flowers off so they can be more bushy, more robust and I've started doing that I think two years ago and I see great results. Michael is asking me what about this, why do you have some dry stems, what is this? This is the creeping phlox. I love this plant. I've been showing you this plant in spring. It's beautiful, it's almost evergreen, maybe it lacks a bit of color in the winter but it still stays a bit green and I've never cleaned it after flowering and the other one, the older one that I have is completely green. This one had a lot of bigger flowers, they are definitely bigger than the other ones so we can see some of the dried flowers. You can remove them but you don't need to if the aesthetics is your way to go. Of course whenever you see some kind of dry stems you can prune them out. This year has been extremely dry for us. We usually have pretty good watering system from the sky but this year it is definitely something is wrong with it. We either get very long dry spells and then we get huge amount of water which is not perfect. I would definitely prefer once a week like proper rain but not like a huge storm with a lot of water but we get what we get. With the phlox you can of course trim it but you can leave it as it is, it will be fine. As you can see those lavenders have been pruned I think a week ago and I can already see that some new stems are emerging and from one cut you will see at least two new stems and this will help the plant to be more robust, more bushy. In the past I've been just pruning out the stems with the spent flowers but the plant would stay taller and then those nice, not the woody stems, but those bendy stems would become wood and the plant would be too tall and then I would not be able to keep the nice shape of it. So I started pruning in a different way so I'm just pruning right after when the woody part stops and then we get this nice fleshy growth. I try to trim it as much as I can, almost going to the woody part but still only pruning the fleshy stems and this gives the plant the ability to bush out, to be nice compact and but also you know robust and this type of pruning in the summer has been very beneficial for my lavender. I left one lavender on the other side of this border and now we'll prune it. Okay guys so this is our area to work on. We have a lavender, as you can see we still have some beautiful blooms, just a few. I will use them in a decoration in the house but we'll prune the whole plant. Right next to it you can see the salvias. I've been showing you how I pruned my salvias, it was in the beginning of the summer, I think in July, we had beautiful blooms. I was really happy because the blooms were almost as abundant as the first time. So it was a really nice second bloom which when you have perennials you will know that the first flush of blooms is always the most robust and then you get some but they are usually a bit more less showy. So I was really happy with the result. Some of the lavender salvias have been blooming already three times so I will be hoping for the fourth bloom especially from April night. This is the salvia that is the most robust and it started blooming the earliest so we can expect another bloom and I'll be also pruning very hard. But we'll start with the lavender. So when you look at your lavender plant you will see that in the middle of the plant there is like this woody stems are the main thing and you don't see too many silver leaves. The upper we go, the higher we go, we can see more growth that is definitely bendable, pliable and we want to prune this part not the woody part because when you prune the woody part sometimes you can get away with that but it's very hard for the plant to grow new stems there so it's very good from the young age as you get your tiny plant to prune it regularly. I always get the questions do I start with a young plant or do I wait a few years? Definitely start doing that in the first years of the lavender life sometimes even sacrificing the flowers so we'll be pruning like three to four times a year the young plant but it will be more dense, more bushy and then you will let it bloom in the second year or in the third year even if you're very patient but it it will give you such incredible results because of the dense structure and this beautifully packed plant. So as I am pruning my plant I'm trying to give it a nice shape a round ball but when the lavender grows alone it doesn't have any competitors it is perfect then it will be a perfect ball of beauty but if you have other plants growing next to it here you can see the salvia sometimes it can be a rose another perennial you will see that the plant when it has a lot of light it will have a nice shape but next to another plant it will lack some of the structure. I will be pruning the salvia in a second it will have some ability to grow this way but definitely I want a nicer shape around this rocky thing and I just want to shape it as a ball as well as I can. So next up are my salvias if you've been watching the channel you know that I like to treat them really badly so I prune really really hard almost to the ground I only leave the fresh emerging leaves from the ground but I cut all of the stems I've been doing some tests and I've been doing them for some time but this year I also pruned some of them higher and most of them right to the ground and what happened listen those cut right to the ground were definitely more bushy they had super healthy leaves and they bloomed more than the ones I pruned higher the higher pruned ones had definitely worse leaves they definitely had some problems with the leaves and they had less flowers so again another year of those tests shows me that pruning the salvias really hard almost to the ground is the way to go. As I am pruning my plants I can always see when I take all the leaves out I can see some neighbors that were not invited here so you will always have weeds. I always try to remove them because they are the competition they will be competing for water for nutrients with our precious plants and this moment of pruning is the moment that is not that super super for for your plants they will be struggling for a moment they need enough water they need enough nutrients if you have any like guesses that your soil is incomplete in some nutrients you can add like one third of the portion of the fertilizer I use the fertilizer for blooming plants in liquid so those that I use for my supertunias will be fine like one third of what package says I will give them right after the prune so they have a little boost and they can still produce the leaves and then another flush of flowers but the weeds need to go because we don't need any competition now. Here you can see a really young plant it's only two years old of course it is very dense planting as everything in my garden but I've been pruning it for the first year I didn't let it flower and I've been pruning it I think twice or three times that year this is the second year it was blooming I pruned it early and now we have some again some growth that is not everywhere it's not the same so again I will be pruning very hard now to keep the shape to keep those stems very very short so they can bush out again and it will be even more dense so I will be pruning just part by part very close to this woody part so it is more compact and dense so I pruned all of the salvias really hard I know it looks really scary when you look at them but you will see that the growth will appear very fast if they have enough water and nutrients so I will be also cleaning this part of the border from the tiny weeds that I can see and even all of those seeds from the birch trees we are having them bucket loads of them so I'm always trying to just remove some some of them but then I will just water the plants I will give it some a bit of fertilizer and I'll be hoping for some rain in the next week when I was pruning my salvias in the last video I had a lot of questions about Veronica's can you do the same to this perennial and my Veronica was blooming in June it looked beautiful and then the leaves started looking not as you know like nothing they were really ugly and I decided to do the hard prune on the Veronica as well as you can see the new growth is beautiful very very healthy no signs of any kind of pests or diseases and it started to bloom it looks like it's June not the end of August so I'm really happy with this so the report is yes you can prune Veronica's right to the ground and you will get incredible results another plant I wanted to show you is Gaura this is a beautiful perennial that sometimes in my zone 6b 7a depending on the sources but we are in this kind of zone sometimes it dies in winter some do some don't I don't know why I cannot find the correlation with the sometimes I will have two next to one another and one will just die in the winter another will not these have been blooming beautifully since May since I planted them and I'm really happy with this sometimes I get a lot of questions from my followers that they have Gaura's and they don't want to bloom and we've been discussing on Instagram why this might happen so I've seen that if they have too much too many other plants around sometimes it is a problem if the too dense of planting can start their flowering so that was one thing and another they really need full sun and they bloom beautifully but I'm really curious about your experiences with Gaura's what do you think they love most I've seen the most beautiful Gaura's in Portugal in very dry soil full sun and they were just huge plants and blooming like that it was like mounds of flowers so I know that sun hot climate does well to those plants and probably not too many competitors around now I'll take you to my cut mint I've done something different this year and I got great results so maybe this is something you want to try next year let's go so this year I was going on holiday and I was pruning my cut mint I've had some problems with weeds with ants and I said to myself I will prune them hard too it will be easier for me to dig out those plants they were those weeds they were a real problem I will address the problem with the ants and I pruned them like five centimeters from the ground five centimeters would be like two inches from the ground so I did that and I think this is the best second flush of cut mint I've had a lot of blooms very nice shape of the plants and I think I will start doing that to all of my cut mints because I'm really pleased with the results sometimes you will do something you'll be like okay I will be gone for two weeks I will not see those because when you prune them it really looks ugly you are like I pruned the whole plant but then the results after a few weeks are really rewarding so for me I will be definitely doing that next year so guys let me know in the comments what are your experiences with hard pruning of your perennials maybe you have some experiences that you would like to share with others of how to make your plants look healthy at the end of the season so from late august to september for me the hard prune is exactly that I get very fresh flush of leaves that look very healthy the end of august and september is the time when the garden is not looking that lush a lot of leaves are yellowing they have some black spot or they have some kind of pests that make the leaves look ugly so whatever I can do to make them look healthier and be healthier is really a plus for me so I'm really looking forward to hearing from you what do you do not only the prune maybe you do something different that really works let us know in the comments maybe others will also use your experience and have their garden looking healthier I'm really looking forward to your comments if you like today's video please give it a thumbs up consider subscribing and I think we'll see you the next video I think will be in september the beginning of september I cannot believe that this uh this season was so fast again I don't know if it's my age that I'm getting older it all seems to be going so fast let me know if it's the same for you and we'll see you in the next one hopefully it still will be warm bye