There are many reasons to start your pruning now. First, the birds are finished nesting for the season so you won’t interfere with the breeding season.

Second, Santa Ana winds will blow before you know it and you’ll want to open up your trees so the wind will pass through and not topple your tree.

And don’t forget about fire season. You will want to reduce fuel near your home.

Finally, trees that fruit or flower will need to be pruned to induce buds. And get an early start on your fruit trees. Fruits trees can be lopped back now to an appropriate height for easy harvest and you can still prune further in January.

Hear an arborist explain proper pruning, what a licensed contractor is, why to prune and safety issues.

The rule for do-it-yourselfers? Any pruning job that requires a combination of chainsaw and ladder should be left to a licensed contractor.

In the meantime, what to prune? Trees and shrubs that you are going to prune in the winter such as fruit trees; summer flowering shrubs that have finished blooming; plants that are too vigorous and need reining in; plants that could take a beating during the Santa Ana wind season; and don’t forget those nasty-looking roses that are ready for a seasonal re-do.

More than you’ll need to know about pruning:

• Guide to good trees for Orange County gardens
• Pruning apricots
  
• Pruning to prevent fire hazards
• To whack or not to whack
• Never top a tree
• All about apples
• Pruning wisteria for blooms
• Trees and neighbors don’t always mix

Can you name this plant? Look closely at the flowers, the leaves, the growing environment. Then take a stab at naming the plant by clicking comments below.

Two clues: it’s is native in China, it blooms in May.

Bring your diseased, distressed, even dead roses (just be sure to put them in a sealed zip-lock bag) and then surround yourself with experts by attending the next Orange County Rose Society meeting with Tom Cooney speaking about “Common Rose Diseases and Pests.”

Afterward Tom and other consulting rosarians will answer all your nagging questions and diagnose your diseased. What’s more, you will learn what to do about it.

Be there or be plagued forever: September 4, 7:30 p.m. Westminster Senior Center, 8200 Westminster Blvd., Westminster. 949-362-2710 or orangecountyrs.org

More about roses:

• Start roses from cuttings
  
• Climbing roses explained
• Bea Grows’ rose feeding guide
• War of the roses
• Principles of a healthy garden

It’s the buzz in the blogosphere….mega grower Hines Nursery filed for bankruptcy. Read the story here.

If you want the real dirt or opinions about why the super-grower suffers from financial blight, check out The Blogging Nurseryman.

And then there is NPR’S Ketzel Levine - not a big fan of Hines Nursery stock.

A funny post from Southern Living magazine’s Grumpy Gardener starts……There’s a good side to everything in life. Take tornadoes and trailer parks, for example. Why, if it weren’t for the sight of trailers sailing through the clouds every spring, jumbo jets may never have been invented.

He goes on about Kudzu while I’ve often had some the same thoughts about snails.

Nature has cycles and so do I.

When I first started gardening I wasn’t about the soil. Soil was what you got and it was the plants you picked that made a garden. I would use a small shovel to claw a hole in the clay and pop in plants such as wax begonias and white azaleas. Hey, it was all they had at the nurseries then, but corn thrived and the beets were happy.

Then after reading the entire Tustin Library including the mysteries, I found out how to amend the soil. And I discovered a wonderful amendment that I still miss, rice hulls. Armstrong Nursery had an entire pallet discounted to a dollar a bag and I bought the lot. I haven’t a clue where to buy rice hulls today.

But amending my clay made a huge difference. The plants where thicker, happier, plumper, drainage improved and weeds were down. What’s more, I was able to expand my plant palette and due to mail order catalogs, began to grow from seed new and different plants.

Every five years or so when the clay would thicken up again and fall was in the air, I’d do the ‘ol English double dig – pull all the plants out of the garden except the structural ones such as shrubs, set them aside in a shady spot, dig the soil to two feet, work in wheelbarrows of amendment or compost again and replant. It didn’t matter what the amendment was as long as it was organic.

Gardening was good. Earthworms were abundant.

Then the thinking cycled back to planting only in native soil – an idea I embraced for a few reasons. It made sense to me that amendments rob the soil of nutrients and oxygen because like anything organic, it ultimately needs to break down and decompose. And while it is doing this, the thinking continues, your plants aren’t getting what they need because decomposing amendment is using it up.

What’s more, my new landscape of sandy loam was easy enough to dig, I had a lot of area to plant in a short amount of time and going native terra firma was the easiest way to get it done.

Today there are many plants that thrive in my unamended sandy soil – conifers, native grasses, shrubs such as pittosporum, and good old California native plants such as Manzanita, Matillija poppy and one Aspen tree I’ve been coddling.

Anything in the “pink” family, such as carnations, couldn’t be happier. I even have tulips that I didn’t plant, but came with the property, that reliably reappear every spring.

But I’ve also had more failures than I ever expected. The pretty plants such as annuals and perennials and virtually all of the vegetables I’ve grown lately have a weak showing or worse, tank on a regular basis.

Two gardens brought me back to my senses — Beth Flanigan’s luxurious shade garden of hostas and hellebores that was deeply amended before she planted. Beth had worked in pallets of organic matter and it showed in her happy plants.

The earthworms virtually jump for joy.

I had forgotten all about amending. Hadn’t done it in 5 years. Never done it on this property.

A second garden brought the idea home.
Last spring a visit to Bea Grow’s garden in San Clemente hit me in the head. Where my nasturtiums were spindly and weak, hers were spilling on to the lawn. Where my roses were sparse, hers were thick with flowers.

Foxgloves? Forget it. I started a swath of apricot foxgloves from seed, babied them for two seasons and they had a weak bloom and didn’t come back the following spring.

Everyone who knows Bea knows she is a chronic composter and amender. In fact, her soil is so fluffy I am certain you can dig two feet with your bare hands. She probably hasn’t touched a shovel in ten years.

So while amending may not be appropriate for some plants such as conifers and carnations, it is obviously the way to go with others.

Amending is my fall project this year. I can feel fall coming. I’ll be out in the early mornings and cool evenings cutting back the perennials as usual, and moving bulb plants around like I do every fall, but I will also be digging deep with anything that says amendment on the bag. And lots of it.

I am going to amend my flower and vegetable gardens until the earthworms come up for air.

More:

• Bea Grow’s amendment schedule
• Cover crops in the vegetable garden
• Amendment explained
• Amending the vegetable garden
  
• All about compost
• More on compost
• Compost tea from Sunset’s blog Fresh Dirt
• The French gardener’s style of soil improvement

Great idea from a backyard vegetable garden I visited in San Clemente. These concrete “stones” are easy to make and work beautifully at terracing a slope.

Here is how the gardener did it: She stacked bags of concrete in a row, then wet down the bags for a week or until the concrete hardened. Once hard, she tore off the paper wrapping.

Then she added another row on top of the first, wetting the second row of concrete bags, waiting for the concrete to harden and then removed the paper - and so on until she had her vegetables beds at a height that worked for her.

Easy. Cheap. Not bad looking, and entirely doable.

Don’t hate ajuga just because your grandmother grew it. There is a new ajuga in town, Caitlin’s Giant, a bigger, beefier more versatile plant than ever before.

Use Caitlin’s Giant as a ground cover. It wants full sun or part shade and lots of water. Tuck it into pots so it spills. Pair it with gray-leafed helicrysums and convoluvus to complement its blue summer blooms. This newer, hipper ajuga is bound to grow on you and become one of your favorite plants.

Oh yeah, when it spreads? Dig it up and plant it in places we haven’t thought of yet.

Granny plant? Sure, if your grandma was ahead of her time.

Read more about ajuga: Poolside plants, Divide and conquer, Top 10 easy plants.

Almost always it is as if the girls are joined at the wing. Where Dixie is, Dot is near. When they run, and it’s hilarious, they dash about side by side instinctively turning in tandem, not unlike a flock of birds or a school of fish.

But Dot travels alone this morning. Dixie is laying her egg back in the chicken hutch. Pretty soon I spot what Dot is up to, scratching my alstroemeria beyond recognition. That’s the thing about free-range chickens: They’re scratchers on the lookout for bugs.

What brought me outside, though, are the miles of dirt between my blooming itea and blue, ground-hugging convolvulus. The variegated periwinkle I planted a month or so ago is not bridging the gap.

So I snipped some of my iris from another area, and poked them in the ground. It does the trick. As soon as the iris are finished blooming, I’ll be moving them to their new home, the big blank where the periwinkle lives.

But notice that Dot comes over immediately looking for bug possibilities. She’ll have my iris unplanted in minutes.

More about chickens with: What comes first, the chickens or the coop?

This isn’t me in the photo obviously, but it looks a lot like where I am in the high Sierras near Bridgeport, fly fishing, looking for wildflowers, checking out the birds and reading a lot of books.

I’ll be back August 25. In the meantime, standby for some garden posts that I prepared ahead.