Laurel prune

 

                January can be rough in the Willamette Valley.  It’s chilly, and wet, and there is mud everywhere, and the tires from cars have turned all the leaves into slippery piles of goo. There are indoor activities, like browsing seed catalogs, reading, and repairing chairs, but we need to get outside. The one thing I can do in the yard right now is prune. I start on one side of the yard, with the laurel, and work my way round: laurel, fig, apple, plum, grapes, lilac, hazelnuts, back yard laurel. I try and stagger the laurels because of the vast amounts of biomass a big pruning creates.  

                This year, it was the side yard laurel’s turn. I do it in January so it has time to fluff out before summer; the laurel is our best privacy screen. When I first became the caretaker of this hedge, I worried about pruning it too hard—would I kill it? But then one of my students, who was helping me paint the house, gave a section a huge whack job. “Don’t worry,” he assured me, as only 15 year old boy can, “It will be back.” He was right. Before we took down the garage, the roofline was my guide to the right height. This year, I went lower, below all of the other year’s trimmings.  I wanted to clean up the huge masses of gnarly branches and suckers, all holding dead leaves. With my beautiful new pruning saw, it was a project. Without it, it would have been impossible.

  

              Pruning the laurel is a three step process. First, I work on our side of the hedge, pushing all of the branches back. Then I bring everything that I can reach down to the right height. This requires considerable ladder maneuvering and long reaches across the surface, stretching and pulling branches towards me while I saw madly. I toss all of the trimmings behind me into the yard, away from the ladder (I’ve learned a bit after tripping on a few over the years.).  Once I have brought down and pushed back about two thirds of the hedge—which takes two sessions—I clear up the mess, hauling most of the green branches back to the compost pile and cutting up the heavy logs for the street compost cart.

                Today, I finished the other side of the hedge. The neighbors moved their car so that they way was clear. In less than an hour, I had it all down and out of the driveway—a new record. Mark cut it up and moved the brush while I sawed and worked the loppers. It’s not perfectly even and there are few dead branches poking up that I still need to pull out, but it is done, just before the rain started up again.