How to Trim Plants After a Freeze

Mary Gonzales:

Hi everybody. It’s Mary with Nelson Nursery, and let’s trim back our plants after a freeze. First, we’re going to head out to our garden and take a look at what we have going on. I have a ginger here, and if you see your plants laying over like this, they are going to get mushy and gushy and that’s going to cause bacterial growth if you don’t snip them back. So we are going to just snip these back all the way to the ground and these are going to come back from the roots.

Now for your heartier perennials, the ones that have more woody growth to them, you can trim them back. I like to do what’s called a scratch test first, to see where is that dead growth. So I’m going to take one that I can tell the leaves have died back on, go in and use my shears to go in there, and I’m going to find where there’s green. And as you can see, there’s some green right here, and there’s brown here, so I know that’s where I am going to snip it back. And now this plant has gotten rid of all that dead growth, it’s going to start getting new growth here and be ready for spring and your garden will look much nicer after that freeze.