Winter is the time to prune most of your fruit trees, your end game is healthy bountiful trees that’ll give you bushells of fruit.
Spring is the time to prune your herbs. For a lot of our herbs, their best harvest time is just before they flower or as they’re flowering. So we want to be pruning them for amazing leaf action and the best time to prune for that is Spring, just before they get their boogie on…
Plants like Southernwood, Texas tarragon (Mexican marigold), french lavender and Lemon verbena can get damn right leggy and scraggly if left to their own devices. For these ones you can get right in there and prune quite hard – they’ll come back laughing, don’t worry.
Special note for Lemon verbena though, as she’s not a slave to the seasons you’ll find she may even be still holding onto leaves and not even considering to leaf up again til early summer. So wait til you see little buds of green on the stems before pruning. If you want to be careful about it, prune just above buds.
For your tenacious herbs like mint or basil mint~ the ones that have kept on growing above ground through winter (so not peppermints) you can cut these right back to get lovely fresh spring growth. Old leaves can be a bit bitter or they might be getting rust or just not looking as amazing as usual, so cut’em all off. Cutting down to the base encourages new stems to come up too.
If they’ve gotten really big, consider dividing it up. Especially true for your bergamots, every two years it pays to divide your plants or else the roots get so tangled that they don’t flower as well as they should and for bergamots, we want to see as many of those glorious flowers as we can!
If you’re looking for advice for your white sage, go to this post here; Cultivating White Sage Smoke Cleansing Sticks.
Culinary herbs… eat and be happy
If you want to prune your thyme’s, don’t take off more than a third or they’ll freak out and die.. to be blunt. The best way to prune your thyme and any and all culinary herbs is to use them, that’s why you’re growing them right? It is the secret to happy healthy herb plants, they want to be in your dinner or in your apothecary, use them, eat them, be adventurous and remember to give your thanks to the plant. They will thank you back many times over with their flavour and/or medicinal value!
Plenty of herbs I haven’t mentioned here, please ask in the comments if there’s something specific you’d like to know~ xx
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