Pruning flowers: Benefits and Risks

Pruning flowers has its benefits and risks that it poses to the plants, how ever the benefits out way the risk and the risk may be mitigated by observing simple guidelines.

The benefits associated with pruning flowers can be summarizes as below:

Pruning flowers renews the plant and improves the plants vigor. When pruning flowers, the pruning aims at removing the old and non productive parts of the plant giving a chance to new shoots that are more vigorous to start growing. This completely renews the plant by producing new shoots that can produce better flowers, foliage and eventually a good fruit.

Pruning flowers enables the flower plant growth to be directed to the right direction especially in restricted areas of growing like in indoor plants whose space is limited. Pruning can also reduce the plant size of the plant to manageable size where the plant is growing in the way it was not intended to grow.

Pruning flowers opens up the flower plants letting in light and making it easy to control pests and diseases. A thick canopy can be a hiding place for pests and the microclimate in the canopy provided a good environment for disease causing micro-organisms.

The risks associated with pruning flowers can be summarized as below:
If flowers are excessively pruned, they can die from the resulting stress. Pruning should aim at establishing a balance between the foliage removed and the parts that are left to support the plant.

The biggest risk in pruning flowers is the risk of contamination of the plants by the tools. As one prunes from one flower plant to the next using the same pruning tools, diseases are moved from one plant to the next and the whole garden may end up being infected from just one sick plant. It is therefore important to use clean cutting equipment and to frequently sterilize the tools to make sure that disease spread is limited.

If these guidelines are observed, a gardener is able to realize more benefits from pruning flowers than from not pruning them.

To learn more about gardening,this resource is very useful and if you are a grower of roses,here is a complete guide on how to grow roses. Other useful information available are such as the vertical gardening secrets