Or: How to Record a Gardening Video Using a Potato
I am sorry everyone, really. I genuinely didn’t realise how bad the camera in my potato is: it was a good potato when I bought it second hand down an alleyway ten years ago, so it came as much of a shock to me as it did to you.
Cutting back Buddleja (butterfly bushes) is best done around early Spring or late Winter, when the worst of the frost is over.
The standard way to prune Buddleja in the garden is down to a low stool, under a metre. This encourages masses of shoots that flower their socks off at a good height for viewing.
If you don’t prune your Buddleja, it will get taller, scrubbier looking, and the amount of big, beautiful flowers you get per square foot of shrub will decline, gradually replaced with twiggy, leafy growth that has small flowers.
By hard pruning the Buddleja every year, you effectively replace the canopy, so that it is always full of vigorous new shoots that produce a dense mass of large flowers.
However, you can prune Buddleja back to strong growth at any height that suit you, and you still get all that lush regrowth from the base, plus more on top.
For example, the buddleja in the video was about 4 metres tall before pruning, and afterwards a few of the stems were still over 3 metres. This will help to block the view of the potato factory across the street.
