Mitch Baker: Hi! I'm Mitch Baker with American Plant and we're talking about great gardening tips for July. Right now we're going to talk about summer pruning. This is not a good time of year to do any severe pruning but it is a good time of year to do some shaping on trees and shrubs. So I happen to have a Japanese maple here but these pruning principles would apply to almost any tree or shrub this time of year. The only thing we're going to now during the summer months is just take some of this taller growth down that's outside of the profile. We just want to reduce it in size a bit and bring the front end off of the patio. So these branches that are sticking up out of the top, we're going to go ahead and take those down to bring them into a more uniform line with the rest of the profile. Now I've got three other taller branches here. We aways start with the tall branches and just bring them down and step back and have a look and see how it's going. So I'll continue with these three branches. Alright, we've taken the branches off the top, around the sides and reduced this front portion a bit. But now we need to remove this one last large remaining limb and to do that, we got to bring out the big pruning sheers. So we'll just do that in one clean cut, then we'll step back and see how it looks. When it comes to summer pruning, it's better to take just a little bit at a time, you can always take more later, but if you take too much at one time, you can't put it back on there. So a little pruning now can keep your trees and shrubs in great shape for the whole season.