Beginner gardening guides - How to Prune Ornamental Grasses

There are some simple tricks when pruning Ornamental Grasses that will keep them looking amazing during most of the year. Garden Ninja gives his easy guide to ensuring your Ornamental grasses look magnificent each year with this easy pruning guide. By pruning grasses you can ensure a full season of colour and interest. Even if you don't know what species of ornamental grass you have this pruning guide will help you quickly tidy up your garden. You can even use tools you may already have in your kitchen to help cut back your ornamental grasses. #ornamentalgrasses #gardenhack #gardentips #grass #pruning Presented by Garden Ninja, Manchesters Garden Designer and blogger Lee Burkhill. He's an RHS Award winning Chelsea garden designer and expert panellist on BBC Radio Manchester's Saturday morning garden phone in. Why not subscribe to my youtube channel? https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuhMHrXyf2bvga2Mq0DJvwQ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gardenninjadesign/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Garden_Ninja Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/garden_ninja_lee/ Welcome back to Garden Ninja today's video is all about pruning these ornamental grasses now I absolutely love the grass family if you've seen my work you may notice that most of my designs use grasses in some form or not any of you have asked me online how you can best look after them to make sure that they look the best year after year if you've seen their work you'll notice that I incorporate grasses and so most of my designs I absolutely love them they add heights drama interest and believe it or not you'll get structure from them we probably around ten months out of the year A few of you have asked, how do you look after ornamental grasses and how to stop them looking tatty and so this guides for you. So I'm going to show you some quick tips to keep your grasses in perfect condition so come on let's get cracking! So here in the exploding atom garden today which is full of different varieties of grasses and I'm going to be showing you some of the examples of how to prune them If you don't know what the exploding atom garden is then check out some other videos which explains the entire concept behind this garden. So first things first you're going to need to have a rough idea of whether your grass is an evergreen as in it keeps its color all year round for its deciduous now deciduous plants are really easy to spot he's in the winter time like this Calamagarostis behind me they go either a straw color or they go brown and crispy if deciduous grasses we're going to be cutting them all the way back and I know that may feel brutal you just look up these lovely seed heads but it's what's required if you want a year-round interest. So you can use secateurs like this what I tend to do is grab the weave grabbed its hair and then plug away at it See if theres any more stragglers okay you're taking this back to the ground if you were to leave this grass as it was it becomes congested and looks unsightly and next year's growth gonna be really poor. Now if you're using the bread knife or the scythe methods it's a lot quicker and easier and the techniques slightly different so I tend to grab hold of the grass like so and then with the side literally... Tada! You can use a bread knife but a scythe there's a bit more advanced and a lot sharper! So once you've cut it back to the ground that's pretty much it now some people say you shouldn't mulch them glasses they never really need a huge amount of nutrients so I tend not to bother the key thing here them is to cleanly cut them back to the ground ready for all that new growth so if you have a lot down here you'll see a Festuca now this is a form of evergreen grass and this summer this goes a bright blue it sends up these little Oaty seed heads it's gorgeous but it's evergreen it has a different pruning method if you were to hack this back to the ground it will really struggle to reform itself it takes ages so what you do with evergreens is rather simple so you want to take your gloves off for this and really put your things in you're basically pulling through the weave of the grass and you'll pull out all this debris yeah I tend to pull my fingers through in the spring and you'll see that it brings out all that debris. There we have it my super easy way pruning ornamental grasses whether they be evergreen or deciduous if you've liked this video why not subscribe to a YouTube channel where there are load more garden design hints tips and hacks if you've got questions put them in the comments if you've got more questions and tweet me!