Between April and September, boxwood topiary in particular must be pruned regularly. This results in a lot of very fine clippings, which should always be removed to protect against infection. With a suitable underlay, you can finish tidying up in no time at all.

Using an underlay when cutting saves time when cleaning

Why do you have to put away the clippings at all?

Of course, you can also simply leave the fine shoot tips and leaves where they are or just sweep them up with a rake or rake and just collect them roughly. However, this is dangerous: due to the susceptibility of the boxwood to fungal diseases, clippings must always be cleared away. It potentially contains pathogens and pest eggs, which can persist for an extremely long time - and keep infecting the otherwise healthy box again and again. In particular, box tree dieback and the stubborn box tree moth, which is difficult to combat, pose a major problem to which numerous box tree plantations have now fallen victim.

This saves you the hassle of collecting clippings

For this reason, it makes sense to remove potentially infectious clippings as a source of danger. In order for this to succeed without much effort, place a suitable underlay under the boxwood to be cut. You can buy so-called topiary towels that have a hole in the middle and often have handles at the corners. Wrap them around the box, cut it, and then simply lift the cloth up at all four corners. However, it is even cheaper, because you can make such a pad yourself from different materials. For example:

  • a discarded oilcloth tablecloth
  • a plastic sheet
  • Pond liner left over from pond construction
  • an old shower curtain
  • an old tablecloth made of thick cotton fabric
  • a discarded duvet cover

For a solitaire, cut the shawl in the right size (better too big than too small, so that nothing falls out!) on one side down to the middle. In turn, cut out a small circle in the middle, in which the trunk of the boxwood is framed. The edges of the fabric can be folded up and fixed at the corners with clothespins, for example.

How to remove the clippings too

Instead of collecting the small parts on a pad and then disposing of them, you can simply vacuum them up with a leaf vacuum - or, if the box is in the middle of a lawn, run over it with the lawn mower. In this way you kill two birds with one stone: the lawn is mowed and the clippings are also removed.

tips

Healthy Buchs can be wonderfully composted. For this purpose, you should chop up thicker branches and twigs, and also mix the boxwood clippings with grass clippings or similar. Buchs rots very slowly and therefore needs an accelerator.

Category:

Vegetable garden