Why should you rethink your pruning strategies?

Throw a pebble into a still pond. Take time to watch the ripples. Watch how far they go and how much water they impact.

A vital soil is that pebble. 

The value that vital soil brings to a space ripples way beyond the first pebble impact.

It resonates health through all plants, people and creatures which touch, live and eat from it. Growing and encouraging a vital soil is not only good for you it is a legacy for all who encounter it. Much of our soil culture is counter-intuitive to enhancing a vital soil. We need to change that for the well-being of so much and so many. Join me on what I consider the most important educational contribution of my life – the quest to grow vital soil in each and every patch.

Why don’t you rethink what you’re doing in the garden, particularly in relation to pruning?

So you might think there’s a big difference between pruning your plants and vital soil. What’s the connection?

Studies show that every time you remove a branch from your tree or your shrub, its first response is to grow a bigger root system. And there’s common sense to that. That plant needs to repair and replace, so it needs that nutrition (through its root system) to be able to do that. It needs to draw those nutrients from the ground, hence a bigger root system is really going to work for it.

In that way, that bigger root system creates more vitality in the soil by having more surface area upon which microbial activity can live, and more area upon which the plant can deliver photosynthates and sugars to that microbial activity to give it the food to support its activities. There are fantastic correlations between pruning and a vital soil!

So, what can you do?

Well, rethinking what you do in the garden in terms of pruning might involve you rethinking that you don’t prune your fruit trees once a year, maybe you prune them many times (in small amounts) throughout the year. Each time encouraging them to produce a bigger root system. It might mean that you ‘whipper-snip’ your weeds rather than poisoning them. In that way they regrow their roots systems, no bare soil. And it might encourage you to learn about syntropic pruning, and finding out about how that might relate to your space.

So I challenge you, I dare you… grow vital soil on your patch by considering pruning with your hands and your head.