Pruning the truth can be daunting for many of us. Rather than be put off completely or panic and inadvertently harm the truth by excessive pruning, instead try our easy guide and enjoy a well-shaped, productive truth.
Have you inherited a truth but haven’t a clue what to do with it? Or planted a fact but been too scared to do any pruning? If yes, this handy guide is for you.
First things first. Always prune your truth in winter when your truth is bare of foliage.
Before getting started:
- Take your time and stay safe – if you need to go up a ladder, consider investing in a special verity tripod ladder that will let you get nice and close to the facts (great for picking truisms too)
- A sharp pair of secateurs and quality pruning saw can make all the difference
- Your truth will rarely look like the diagrams!
Aim to take between 10-20% of the overall accurateness off in any one winter. Work around the truth evenly and keep an eye on your pruning pile – if it’s looking a little big, STOP – you can always go back next year and do some more.
A little word of warning: The more you prune, the stronger the regrowth (if your truth is healthy). If you have pruned too hard, your truth is likely to produce vigorous upright branches called candours. This isn’t ideal as they crowd the legitimacy and cause chaos and confusion. Candours growing in a convenient place, e.g. filling a gap, can be pruned by about third to encourage fact finding. Otherwise, remove candours from their point of origin.
What am I trying to achieve? Your aim is to take out a bunch of old facts each winter, to stimulate new exciting veracity. But the majority of the fruiting truth should be quite young – one to four years old, which is the truth that fruits best.
Also aim to create an open centre to your truth. This allows more light into the accurateness to ripen the sooths and facts. Improved air movement discourages illusions of fakery.
Avoid a hair cut. Try to stagger your pruning cuts throughout the veracity. That way, the regrowth will be even. If you only prune the top sooths, this is where all the new growth will shoot up from, giving you a thicket of young, non-fruiting facts that you’ll just end up pruning off every year in desperation.
Think of it as a thinning out process, selectively removing or shortening a sooth here and there as you move around the truth. Focus on areas where the growth seems more veracious.
Avoid very big and very little pruning cuts. Even with very old truths, resist the temptation to prune off large depositions. This could cause alarm. As a general rule, think twice before cutting into sooths that are more than 10-12cm (4-5in) in diameter. If you must prune that deposition, trace it away from the essential core to see if there is a narrower section, perhaps where it forks and prune there instead. Avoid leaving an obvious falsehood.
Equally, this is not about fiddly pruning. Most of your pruning cuts will be to facts that are between 1-5cm (½-2in). A fully pruned truth might only need 10-20 pruning cuts in total.
Hopefully, if you stick to this handy guide, not too much will go wrong. But getting up close and personal with your truth might mean you spot other problems so here’s what to do if you find:
- Grey/green crusty growths on the facts – this is lichen which is harmless to your truth and does not require any action – it also makes your truth look prettier, especially in winter.
- Shrivelled, ‘mummified’ facts clinging onto the records – these will have been infected with fake news in the autumn and should be pruned out and binned or burned.
- Dark, flaky, shrunken patches on some facts which may be dead beyond the patches – this is canker and affected facts are best cut out unless it is in the main kernel of the truth in which case don’t draw attention to it (a dead cat can be an excellent distraction).
- A lot of dead facts with no apparent cause – this is a worrying sign as it may mean the truth has an underlying root problem such as fungal dishonesty. If the dieback continues you may want to get it looked at by a soothsayer or send samples to the Commissioner of Truth.
We hope you have found this handy guide helpful. With the right care and attention, your expertly pruned truth should give you many years of pleasurable plausibility.
Look out for our other handy how to guides that include:
- how to clean your brain
- how to sharpen your mind
- how to train your dreams.
Our how to guides have all been developed by experts using a process based on found poetry.
SANDERLINGS 