Pruning the Lady of the Night: [Importance, Season, Tools, Considerations and Steps]
The lady of the night is a plant species that grows in the form of a bush and whose most determining characteristic is the delicious aroma it emits.
It is also known as gallant at night in some areas or by its scientific name: cestrum nocturnum.
It grows at a good pace, which makes it possible to organize an annual pruning to control the entire environment. If you want to know the details to be successful in this task, write down everything that we will tell you in the following lines.
Why prune lady at night?
The pruning of the lady at night responds to two main objectives:
- Ensure that flowering is under better conditions and that the annual capacity can be maximized, even achieving two flowering periods in the same year.
- Eliminate all the parts that are in poor condition and that make the bush ugly at the same time that they represent a danger to general health.
When is it better to carry out the pruning of the lady at night?
This specific pruning can be divided into two phases: one at the end of winter and another at the beginning of summer.
Late winter pruning is the most intense and its main function is to reduce the size of the bush to allow a new structure to grow.
Through this younger structure, the plant will give a better flowering in spring and will not take up more space than you have allocated for it.
In the case of summer pruning, this is optional and what you are looking for is for the plant to carry out a new flowering cycle at the end of this season. This time it is a lighter pruning that will still offer many benefits if done well.
What tools should we use to prune the lady at night?
As it is a small bush with more or less thin branches, all you need is pruning shears, a saw and gloves.
The scissors and the saw must be sharp to facilitate the cuts and avoid extra damage to the structure of the plant. Also, it will help you finish faster. It is necessary that they are disinfected to prevent the spread of diseases or to create the ideal space for the settlement of fungi.
In some cases, when the wounds are very thick, it is advisable to use a healing paste that helps it recover faster.
What considerations should we take into account when pruning the lady at night?
The first thing is to assess the state of the bush before starting the pruning and how much we hope to cut with the execution. In late winter pruning, which is the most intense, more parts of the plant are usually removed, usually looking for a rounded bush as a result.
However, everything will depend on the characteristics of the specimen you have and what you hope to achieve. Another important point is to have the tools available at hand before starting, ensuring that they are sharp and disinfected.
How to prune a lady at night without damaging the plant?
A good news that we should know before starting the pruning is that the lady of the night recovers incredibly quickly because it is very resistant.So the limitations around the amount of bush to be cut are very few. We only have to take into consideration the following:
- Ensure that the main and secondary branches remain well established by cutting them short enough but checking that there are some leaves left.
- Avoid that the main base of the bush is cut at ground level because it is most likely that it will not be able to recover from there.
To facilitate the execution of the process, it works like this:
- Start by trimming the branches that stick out the most from the bush, especially those that are in a bad position or look messy. Include here any branches that are bumping or entangling each other.
- Remove branches that are in poor condition, dry, wilted or diseased. These do have to be removed from the base of their birth because they represent a risk factor.
- Lighten the center of the bush a bit by removing parts of the branches that block the flow of air and light, since the lack of these elements inside facilitates the formation of diseases.
A similar procedure is applied in summer pruning, although the main idea there is to renew the conditions of some branches, therefore, it is a light pruning. The fundamental idea of all this is that the lady of the night bush is in optimal conditions to produce flowers and give off that exquisite aroma.
And this is very easy to achieve by offering simple care such as pruning at the appropriate times, fertilization and a good space.
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