Rosemary is a perennial plant which can increase the beauty of your garden with its beautiful flowers. It has a nice fragrance and can be used in cooking for flavoring purposes. Also, it is a very resilient plant and can live for many years on end. Rosemary could either be standing tall like a fence wire or it may give you a more laid down look. It has pointy leaves with spiky stems looking somewhat like an arrow.
You have two options when it comes to planting your rosemary. Either you could plant it in a pot or give it a free space in your garden. Rosemary has a fairly controlled growth when planted in pots. However, when given a free space to grow, it will potentially take over your whole garden. In order to safe yourself from the trouble of having to trim down your whole garden, regular pruning of rosemary is a necessity.
Don’t worry! This ‘how to prune rosemary’ guide will walk you through everything even if you are a novice in gardening.
Tips to Better Prune Your Rosemary:
You cannot go wrong when it comes to pruning your rosemary. Rosemary is tough to kill. It grows back up quickly and needs little to no care. Primary goal of pruning rosemary is to control the growth of the plant.
When to Prune?
Rosemary can be pruned starting late winter all the way to summer. However, no pruning should be done 4 to 6 weeks prior to the first frost as you don’t want new and weak growth to face the music of winter frost.
Why Even Bother?
Before we jump into how to prune rosemary, it’s important to know the why first!
It’s true that rosemary can grow just fine without the need to be pruned. But there are a number of reasons why gardeners turn towards pruning their rosemary: to train their plant to a particular shape, to help grow flowers, to give it a bushier look and to get rid of overgrown rosemary.
In order to shape the plant, to encourage flower growth and also to give it a bushier look, a general pruning method is recommended. But if you want to get the control of your garden back from rosemary, you would have to go for hard pruning. Both of these pruning systems are discussed below.
Warning!
Don’t prune your rosemary with a dirty shear as it would lead to an uneven and weak cut which can lead to disease manifestation. You would ideally want your shears to be clean and disinfected before pruning your rosemary.
General Pruning: Shaping up
Pruning done to shape the plant, to induce flower growth or to make it bushier falls under this category. This can be done at any time except very close to the first frost.
1) To Shape the Plant:
You should have a clear mental picture of how you want your plant to look. Cut the unwanted stems to the ground. As for the pruning of excess length of the stems, you need to be careful not prune back more than one third of the stem as it could lead to the death of the stem.
2) To Induce Flower Growth:
If the flowers are not blooming, you should pinch or shear 1 to 2 inches from the top of the stems to encourage flower growth. However, don’t do more than a couple of inches as you would be sacrificing flower buds if you do that.
3) To Make Rosemary Bushier:
There is a chance that your rosemary would grow vertically more without showing much lateral growth. To encourage the plant to grow those lateral branches, a cut is made at the point where you want branching to occur. The cut shouldn’t be made so low that there isn’t much foliage to support plant growth. Also, keep this in mind that the wood doesn’t play any role in the process of branching up. It’s the lateral offshoots that turn into branches when cut from the top. So, avoid cutting below all the lateral offshoots during the early stages of plant growth
Hard Pruning Rosemary:
There are two cases when you would want to go for hard pruning rosemary: to get rid of overgrown rosemary, to set your plant up for new growth in the coming season.
1) Getting Rid of Overgrown Rosemary:
If you have got rosemary growing everywhere and you want to take the control back, hard pruning needs to be done. What you should do, is cut the stray stems to the ground and prune back all the rosemary by one third. Cutting more than one third could generate a shock in the plant and the plant could die. If you want to cut more than one third, you could wait for a few months and then again cut one third.
2) For New Growth:
Some people go for hard pruning at the end of the winter season to have a new growth in the coming season. This, again, should be done in stages to prevent shock. No more than one third plant should be cut at a time.
HOW TO HARVEST ROSEMARY?
Want to enhance the flavor of your cuisine? Put some rosemary into it and see the magic. The flowers of rosemary are tasty and edible, however most people want foliage. The best time to harvest rosemary, if you are not into flowers like most people, is before the blooms appear. When the new growth has finally hardened but isn’t woody yet, you should pick up your (clean!) shears and go for it!
There isn’t much difference between pruning system of rosemary and how to harvest rosemary. Just don’t cut more than one third! It should not become the last time you taste fresh rosemary from your garden.
Conclusion:
Rosemary is very resilient, and it doesn’t need care like other plants. Unlike other plants, you need to put in a lot of effort in order to kill it. So, there is not much which can go wrong. Some people are overly conscious of the one-third limit of pruning rosemary. You must understand that it’s just a safe limit. People have gone on and cut half of the plant off and yet their rosemary only grew in size. There is no hard and fast rule to start measuring your rosemary with a scale. Your rosemary won’t know how much you cut off. Trust me! However, one thing which rosemary will definitely know is when the most of the foliage is cut off and their aren’t enough photosynthesizing leaves on the stem. Then there’s a chance that your rosemary may die.
In order to avoid such a misfortune moment, follow this incredibly simple guide on how to prune rosemary. You won’t find a more complete guide on the subject.
Trust me!
