Post-Freeze Garden Pruning & Care Tips

Mary Gonzales:

Hi everybody. It’s Mary with Nelson Nursery, and after a freeze your garden can look a little rough. So here’s what you need to do. So we go in here and we’ve got a woodier perennial. It’s looking rough. You can do a few things with this guy. I come in and I like to do what’s called a scratch test and you see here we are not seeing any green growth. So that means this guy is dead. I am going to go ahead and prune this back pretty much way down on here and see if I can get some good, fresh new growth. Now I’m not trying to promote anything new. All I’m trying to do is get rid of that dead stuff and make this garden look nicer because it’s depressing to see all of the dead stuff out in the garden.

Now what I do want to do is come in and strengthen this plant. It has been through some stress, so I want to strengthen its roots. That’s what we’re concerned about here after a freeze in this mid-February. Let’s strengthen our roots. We’re not going to try to encourage growth up top, but we’re going to encourage growth below. So follow up with some ocean harvest after you do your pruning in your garden and your post-freeze garden will look great this coming spring.