Having a beautiful, manicured yard improves the look of your home, and, when done thoughtfully can increase your privacy while controlling erosion and air quality. Keeping your yard tidy with beautiful landscaping will enhance your outdoor space, improving your home’s curb appeal, while creating a lovely outside entertainment area.
It takes work to maintain a good-looking yard, but it’s well worth the effort. At Arbor-Nomics, we’re proud to be the top Georgia lawn and yard care experts, providing services like weed treatments, lawn aeration, fire ant control, outdoor pest control, and ornamental tree and shrub care.
Interested in learning how to trim overgrown bushes? The following are some DIY tips for trimming overgrown shrubs and bushes.
While keeping your hedges and bushes trimmed is important to keeping your yard looking its best, it’s also important to trim these plants because:
The following is a step-by-step guide for how to trim overgrown bushes yourself:
Using the right tools is crucial to trimming overgrown bushes. Some options to consider include:
Preparing your tools ahead of time will make the job easier. Sharp, clean, and well-lubricated tools will keep you safer, keep the plants healthier, and reduce the effort you have to put in to make each cut.
For DIY hedge and bush trimming, you’ll also want to have:
When trimming overgrown bushes, you should learn about the species, and its natural size and shape, so you can plan accordingly. Assess any potential hazards the growing plant may cause, look for dead or diseased branches, and think about what your overall goals are for the entire outdoor space before proceeding.
Another consideration is the time of year, especially for flowering plants. If the plant flowers in the spring, trim it right after it blooms (this includes blooming evergreens). If it flowers in the summer, trim it before flowers bloom, preferably in the winter or early spring.
Strategic trimming means planning everything including the type of trimming you want to do. While shearing indiscriminately is faster, a thought-out thinning is healthier for the plant. The “one-third rule” for thinning out a plant simply means you shouldn’t remove more than one-third of the total wood in a pruning session. It’s better to cut too little than too much.
First, take out any dead, damaged, or diseased wood. To tell if the wood is dead, cut a notch in a branch. If there’s a green outer rim, it’s living. If it’s brittle and brown on the outer rim, it’s dead and can be removed.
The purpose of thinning is to open the plant up to light and air. When thinning out a living branch, cut it back to a bud, or at the main stem, rather than making random cuts. If the plant has alternating buds, an angled cut a half-inch above the bud will work well, but if the buds are too close together, cut below them.
Another way to thin out overgrown shrubs or bushes is to cut back one-third of the oldest stems, right to the ground. This removes the oldest wood, giving the plant more energy to expend on growing the newer wood in the future.
Once you’ve taken care of the health of the plant by removing dead branches and thinning out the rest, you may wish to make some final cuts to improve the overall shape of the bush. It’s easiest to do so by stepping back and assessing how it looks. Avoid the temptation to shear off too much live growth too fast. Creating sculpted topiary takes years of careful cuts, so restraint is key.
While trimming overgrown bushes isn’t necessarily difficult, learning how to trim overgrown bushes does take a lot of patience. Learning proper techniques will make sure your plants stay healthy. With regular TLC, your yard will keep the fresh manicured look you love for decades.
While Arbor-Nomics does not provide landscaping services such as pruning, we can help ensure your trees and shrubs are healthy and well cared for year-round. Contact Arbor-Nomics to request an estimate. We help Atlanta-area homeowners keep their ornamental trees and shrubs looking beautiful, year-round.