Welcome back to Garden Ninja today's video is all about pruning these
ornamental grasses now I absolutely love the grass family if you've seen my work you may notice that most
of our designs use grasses in some form or not any of you have asked me
online how you can best look after them to make sure that they look the best
year after year if you've seen their work you'll notice that I incorporate
grasses and so most of my designs I absolutely love them they add heights
drama interest and believe it or not you'll get structure from them we
probably around ten months out of the year
A few of you have asked, how do you look after them how to stop them looking
tatty and so this guides for you. So I'm going to show you some quick tips to keep
your grasses in perfect condition so come on let's get cracking! So here in
the exploding atom garden today which is full of different varieties of
grasses and I'm going to be showing you some of the examples of how to prune them
If you don't know what the exploding atom garden is then check out some other
videos which explains the entire concept behind this garden. So first things first
you're going to need to have a rough idea of whether your grass is an
evergreen as in it keeps its color all year round for its deciduous now
deciduous plants are really easy to spot he's in the winter time like this Calamagarostis
behind me they go either a straw color or they go brown and crispy
if deciduous grasses we're going to be cutting them all the way back and I know
that may feel brutal you just look up these lovely seed heads but it's what's
required if you want a year-round interest
so you can use secateurs like this what I tend to do is grab the weave
grabbed its hair and then plug away at it
See if theres any more stragglers okay you're taking this back to the ground if you were to leave this
grass as it was it becomes congested and looks unsightly and next year's growth
gonna be really poor. Now if you're using the bread knife or the scythe methods it's
a lot quicker and easier and the techniques slightly different so I tend
to grab hold of the grass like so and then with the side literally... Tada!
it away you can use a bread knife at a side there's a bit more advanced and a
lot sharper!
So once you've cut it back to the ground that's pretty much it now some people
say you shouldn't mulch them glasses they never really need a huge amount of
nutrients so I tend not to bother the key thing here them is to cleanly cut
them back to the ground ready for all that new growth so if you have a lot
down here you'll see a Festuca now this is a form of evergreen grass and this
summer this goes a bright blue it sends up these little
Oaty seed heads it's gorgeous but it's evergreen it has a different pruning
method if you were to hack this back to the ground it will really struggle to
reform itself it takes ages so what you do with evergreens is rather simple so
you want to take your gloves off for this and really put your things in
you're basically pulling through the weave of the grass and you'll pull out
all this debris yeah I tend to pull my fingers through in the spring and you'll
see that it brings out all that debris so there we have it my super easy way
pruning ornamental grasses whether they be
evergreen or deciduous if you've liked this video why not subscribe to a
YouTube channel where there are loads more garden design hints tips and hacks
if you've got questions put them in the comments if you've got more questions
and tweet me if you want to know what's new defense let me know I've been the
garden ninja I'm off inside a cup of tea happy gardening!
you