Susan Harris: Hi! I am Susan Harris and I am talking about sustainable gardening. In this clip, I am going cover one of the yearly jobs in the sustainable garden, which is a little of bit of pruning. Now, this shrub is a flowing shrub called as Spirea and like all flowering shrubs, you would best prune it after it's flowered so that you are not removing the flowers. So, this is going to flower very soon and after that what I would do is I might take my hand pruners and remove something that is in the way or to remove all of the I would remove all of the dead flowers and then about three weeks later it will have a rebloom. So, the fastest way to do that is to use these hedgers. So, I just go across the whole top of this shrub and remove all the dead flowers. So, that's make pretty quick work of that.

Here is another kind of shrub that I do a little bit of pruning on every year. This is a Cherry Laurel and it can pruned really anytime. And the reason you might - could be pruning is if it gets too big, if the branches are going where you don't want it go, for example, so, here is the branch, that I would remove because it's starting to get in the way of this other shrub. So, I take a lopper which does the same thing as that hand pruner, but it handles bigger branches. So, I just snip off that whole branch. Another reason to prune might be because it is getting crowded and it is helpful to thin out plants occasionally so that they have better air circulation.

In the next clip, I am going to talk about the kind of maintenance, you will be doing in your sustainable garden through the gardening seasons that is; during spring, summer, and fall.