Fall Watering

One of the most common questions right now at the Nebraska Extension office, is tree and shrub leaf problems resulting from drought stress. If your plant has been developing brown leaf splotches which started to appear in July or August, it’s a good bet you have leaf scorch.

Foliage on Spring Flowering Bulbs

Tulips, daffodils, hyacinth and crocus are great for spring color. Nothing says spring like these bulbs. In order to keep them coming back strong year after year, one or maybe two steps are required after bloom. What are they?

Cut Back, Clip Off

There are times in a landscape’s life when it’s important to clip off certain plant parts. This is one of those times, particularly for bulbs and roses.

Pruning Planning for 2021

Pruning is like a lot of other things in life – it needs to be planned beforehand, you should do it only when needed, not too much at a time, and the right way.

Spring Flowering Shrubs – Now and Then

One of the true joys of the well-balanced, diversified landscape are the spring flowering and summer flowering shrubs.  Now is the time when we can enjoy the spring flowering shrubs such as  dogwood, viburnum, lilac, cotoneaster and forsythia.  The good part is that there are many cultivars or varieties of these spring blooming species to…

Shrub Pruning – For Some Shrubs

It’s late March and if you’re like most Nebraskans who tend to their landscape, you’ve been looking out the window all winter and wondering if it is time to prune the shrubs.  It might be…depending on the shrub.  This handy chart will steer you in the right direction.   Prune Now: privet, burning bush, spirea,…

Caring For Newly Planted Trees – Pruning

Like staking, pruning is an “as needed” procedure, although the need in the first year is not great.  In fact, because young trees need every leaf that they can get their chloroplasts and vascular bundles on, pruning should be avoided in most cases.  If branches are removed at planting time or shortly after, the tree…

Pruning Hydrangeas

I’ve been planning to write a blog this month on pruning hydrangeas.  Why?  We get lots of questions on doing so, as it’s a bit confusing, and they certainly look better and are healthier if they are pruned, and pruned correctly.  This morning, lo and behold, a wonderful article on this subject came across my…

Pruning Fruit Trees

In order to be productive, fruit trees need to be pruned each year…yes, every year.  In fact, one of the most common problems that we encounter is homeowners with trees that have been unpruned for a year, or two, or three and as a result the tree is a tangled mess of branches here and…