Prune your plants today

The unseasonably warm days we experienced last week were a timely reminder to get on with some necessary pruning.

Grape vines should be cut back now, before the sap starts rising. If you leave it until later, sap will bleed heavily from every wound. Most grape varieties are kept in order by spur pruning, which is a very dramatic removal of 95% of last year’s growth.

To spur prune, cut all of last year’s canes back to two buds. You should leave only a short length of cane at the point where it emerges from the structural old growth. If more that one new cane sprouted from the same stem last year, cut out the less vigorous one entirely. Leave only two buds to grow on for this year’s crop.

Any waste canes the size of your little finger or wider can be used as cutting material. Cut them three nodes long and bury the canes deeply until only the top bud is above soil level. Most of the cuttings should ‘take’, giving you plenty of new vines to give away or sell at the school fete.

You should also take the secateurs to your citrus trees now, removing any shoots with the swellings that indicate citrus gall wasp. If you get rid of them now, you prevent the wasp grubs inside the stems from finishing their transformation into adults. Gall wasps don’t travel far from their home tree, so if you wipe out the current generation there is a good chance that you won’t have problems next year.

Check before you cut – old galls will show a hole where the wasp emerged, and it’s pointless to prune them out now. The new galls, complete with grub, should be disposed of by sealing them up in a plastic bag and throwing them in the rubbish.