This week I made it to my yard. It’s the first time since we moved in this summer, and if you’ve never experienced Arizona weather you wouldn’t know that it is just now becoming gardening/outside weather here.

Today’s tip is another double header for content and meaning. It’s on maintenance and pruning.

Part of what made this tip come about was having my 4 year old son follow me through the process. He questioned everything. And he helped me see as I explained things to him how so many of the aspects of gardening are lessons for life too. He was deeply concerned watching me pull up green weeds and pruning green leaves and branches on my rose bushes. He kept asking why I was doing what I was and then he’d repeat the answer: “Oh, so the plant get strongs?” and so on.

So here’s a brief list of some of what was covered in the mother/son experience:

Maintenance

• If you don’t maintain your plants, garden and yard it will quickly become run over with weeds.
• Weeds spread.
• Some weeds have deep roots, others put down shallow roots as they spread horizontally.
• Weeds choke out plants and rob them of their nourishment.
• While you can spray the weeds with chemicals to kill them for you, it is problematic and can cause inadvertent damage to surrounding plants. The fastest, safest and most complete way to remove them is by hand - good, old-fashioned, hard work.

Pruning

• My roses will grow out of control without pruning.
• To control growth and enhance flowers you have to prune with care.
• The dead stuff is obvious, but sometimes live branches and leaves need to be plucked so that energy can be better used for bigger and more vibrant blossoms as well as overall plant health.
• Too much pruning can be a bad thing.
• Not enough pruning can be a bad thing.
• There are better times to prune than others.

Now as I look at this list I can see so many applications for the same lessons in terms of the goal to obtain simple balance in our lives. I was especially struck with the comparison of pruning to improve quality and health.

I love my dad to pieces. But he’s never understood the process of trimming and pruning. More is better in his department. Almost 30 years ago my parents bought a home on 3 acres. They planted several fruit trees - apple, plum and pears. While he will cut back and trim the branches occasionally, he refuses to prune budding fruit to maximize growth and balance the tree’s strength and resources. He just can’t bring himself to pluck off those blossoms or budding fruits. Consequently, over the years his trees have begun to break under the weight of all the fruit and the fruit it bears, while plentiful is so tiny that it’s hard to enjoy or work with for preserving. I’ve encouraged him to be aggressive given the trees’ maturity to prune the new budding fruit by half to get better results, but he just can’t bring himself to do it. So year after year my mother battles canning boxes of fruit the size of golf balls and the trees continue to bear the burden of too much weight.

And now I compare this to my own life and my quest to obtain balance and meaningful productivity, and I see how hard it really is to maintain and especially to prune. Sometimes you have to cut out good things for the greater good of overall health and productivity. And that’s hard to do! I invite you to go back over the list and put it in perspective with our daily lives and the task of maintaining and pruning. Who knows, maybe you’ll find a green thumb in yourself and “make the plant strongs.” It’s worth a try. *wink*

Thank you Taylor, for once again helping mommy learn the important stuff.

For other tips please see the Overview for this series.

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