Pots and Polytunnels: The perfectly legal pinching of plants...

Once plants are growing one of the jobs of a grower is to make them shine and be at their very best when they go out for sale. Nobody wants a thin and lanky shrub when they could have a strong, bushy plant instead.

To encourage certain plants to 'bush out' we pinch the tips of their stems; by 'pinch' I mean we remove the topmost growth, often about 3-4" but it can vary greatly according to the species and how it's growing. This action redistributes chemical messengers called auxins in the plants stems and causes dormant buds further down to break make the plant grow bushy.

Take this batch of Olearia traversii (left) and Olearia macrodonta (right)...

As you can see, they are growing away happily in the tunnel...

With each batch you have to 'go by eye' and pinch back the tops on each plant to the same level each time, leaving the whole batch a uniform size. For tough stems you need a pair of sharp secateurs, but most of the time you are pinching out very soft new growth long before it gets woody, so pinching out the shoots with your thumb and forefinger is the easiest, and most importantly the fastest, way to do it.

This all sounds a bit pedantic but is actually very important- can you imagine how annoyed you would be to plant a hedge where some plants were taller to start with than others?! Doing this at home it might seem even more pedantic, but planting out a group of plants of a roughly uniform size will be more aesthetically pleasing, so pinching out new growth to create uniform bushy plants is well worth doing.

The pinched plants are then loaded to be hardened off outside- the soft new growth has mostly been removed, so hopefully as the new shoots appear they will be tough enough to stand up to conditions outside the polytunnel.

Off they go- Olearia macrodonta pinched back and loaded on their trailer for the short trip to the outdoor
growing area. The pot in front contains all the pinched shoots from this load alone!

Also on my 'urgent' list of plants to pinch back are the Camellias, particularly varieties prone to making long growths in spring at the expense of growing bushy.