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Guy in a Walmart parking lot in Modesto asked why I was pruning his neighbor's crape myrtle so hard
I was doing a favor for a friend two summers back, hacking back this crape myrtle that had grown into the power lines, and some guy loading groceries into his truck walked over and asked why I was cutting it "to the bone." I told him the rule I grew up on, which was cut it back hard every winter or you get no blooms, and he just shook his head and said his mother's tree in Georgia only ever got thinned, never topped, and it flowered like crazy for 40 years. Turns out he was right and I was parroting something I never actually checked, because crape myrtles bloom on new wood but topping them wrecks the branch structure and you get those knobby fists forever. I drove home that night and looked it up and felt like a rookie. Any of you ever get corrected by a total stranger in a parking lot and end up changing how you prune a whole species?
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zaram4717d ago
Watched the same thing happen with a guy at my gym who swore you had to fully defoliate boxwoods every spring until a lady in the parking lot told him that just makes them look dead for months. It's funny how much gardening "wisdom" gets passed down like a family recipe without anyone ever testing it. Half of what we swear by is just something our dad said once and we ran with it for 20 years. Good on you for actually looking it up instead of arguing with the guy.
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