Shine Light on Your Lawn with Proper Pruning

There's nothing more frustrating than installing the perfect landscape lighting services just to have them blocked by shrubbery. It's time to catch up on the pruning so your yard isn't in the dark. Pruning your shrubbery and vegetation is an essential step in the upkeep of your Ottawa outdoor lighting, but it takes slightly different techniques than regular pruning. Read on for tips from the pros at Landscape Lighting Ottawa.

When to prune
The best time to prune your landscaping is during the early spring, prior to any growth or budding in your shrubs. If you wait until after the budding and growth has occurred, you'll be pruning your plants at a time when much of their energy has already been expended. It's important to get it done and over with quickly after winter to allow your plants time to heal before they begin to flourish.

It's also important to keep up on regular maintenance. Throughout the summer and fall, make sure your plants aren't becoming overgrown again, and are not surrounded by dead twigs.

Why it's important to prune
There are several reasons that pruning your lawn is important. Apart from the effects that non-pruned vegetation will have on your landscape lighting services, plants that are allowed to grow out of control aren't as healthy as those that are well trimmed. Branches and foliage that extend a great length will suck all of the nutrients from the base of the plant. This means that the plant's overall foundation of strength and health will be diminished.

Untrimmed foliage can also block out your outdoor lighting. You may begin to notice that your landscape lighting services appear dimmer and dimmer as time goes on. This isn't necessarily because the bulb is dying, and is more likely to do with coverage from untrimmed foliage if you aren't keeping up on the pruning. If you want to get the most out of your Landscape Lighting system, it's important to keep the surrounding vegetation in tiptop shape.

Tips and techniques for pruning
Your vegetation is most likely used as concealment for your Landscape Lighting Ottawa fixtures because good landscape lighting services will maintain as much anonymity as possible for the source of the beam. This means that pruning is essential to the overall effect of your outdoor lighting, but will also take specific techniques to ensure it's done right.

If there are simply weak, dead, or diseased branches in the foliage of the shrub or tree, remove it. This is called cleaning the plants.

Raising is the process of trimming and thinning branches that are near the ground base of the tree or shrub. Raising is used when you have outdoor lighting fixtures positioned in the ground around shrubbery, and offers more visibility and clarity to your lighting.

Finally, thinning is the act of removing strategic branches and foliage to thin the tree out. This lightens the load for the plant, and offers more areas through which light can shine. A few good rules to remember is to thin out older trees less than younger as they can no longer handle the same trimming, and to only thin approximately 25% of the branches at a time.

Get started on your Ottawa outdoor lighting services today with a complimentary quote from Landscape Lighting Ottawa. Enjoy summer evenings like never before!