Weekend Garden Maintenance Duty Blog for March 22-24, 2019

Claire & Lauren

Our first task was to prune the wisteria atop one of the garden’s pergolas. Since Wisteria produces its blooms on old growth, we removed all of the unnecessary old ‘whips’ from last year while still leaving a few buds for this season’s growth. As Wisteria is a voracious grower and requires pruning twice per season., Jeff taught us a neat way to remember when and how much to prune back Wisteria - in the third month (March) prune whips back to 3-5 buds, and in the seventh month (July) prune back to 7-9 buds. This will ensure that the plant produces many blooms but then stays at a manageable size. After pruning, we tied down any wisteria vine that was sticking up so that when it blooms, the panicles will fall across the pergola beautifully.

Our next task was to groom the Cotoneaster bed. We started by removing waste which had collected over winter, and used a backpack blower to further free it from leaves and branches. We used power shears to remove tall parts which had been burned by icy winter winds, and despite our warm coats we couldn’t help but feel some very icy winds ourselves! Things were a little warmer the next day when we pulled overwintered plant debris from  a selection of planters around the school, but the warmth unfortunately meant we ran into a little mud with our tractor, too!

Our final large undertaking for the weekend was to shear back all the dry ornamental grasses. We found that tying the grass into bundles prior to shearing it allowed us to collect the grass easily and more efficiently. The grass bases that are left were then shaped into attractive hill-shapes. In the end we took nearly two trailer loads plus an RTV load’s worth of grass out of the garden in total!  And rather than simply composting them, the canes of the Giant Reed Grass (Arundo donax) were lopped and set aside to be used for cool projects later on.