Vegetable Garden | The Garden Doctors: Is It Okay To Prune Vegetable Garden?
Most plants grow to a predetermined shape depending on their growth habit. They can be low and spreading, mounding, branching, or tall and upright. The weather and browsing animals can play a part in pruning and shaping. While you can’t control the weather and stop every animal from entering your garden, you can help direct your vegetable plants’ growth by limiting the size and quantity of the fruit that they produce. Since you would like to keep a plant’s size to a certain area of your garden, you could train them to grow vertically up a trellis, stake or other type of support. This works very well with the vining type melons, cucumbers, and small squashes.
There are two ways to control the growth of your vegetables: pinching and pruning. Pinching is used quite often to remove the flower buds and/or immature fruits as the plants grow. Pruning may be necessary to remove entire branches or prevent the plant from growing outside its growing area and taking over other plants’ space.
Remember that your vegetable plants are very adaptable. As the quantity of fruit they bear is reduced, they compensate by making each fruit larger. So, when a plant grows excess foliage, it compensates by reducing the number of flowers and fruit that they set. You can increase the yield from your plants by pinching off flowers and removing some leaves. Each of the remaining blossoms that set fruit will be larger than they would be had the competing flowers and foliage remained on the plant.
On vining plants like cucumber and squash, entire branching stems can be removed, leaving a single runner to train vertically on a trellis. By doing this, you’ll reduce the amount of space where the plant can grow by quite a
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