Welcome back to Garden Ninja. Today I'm going to be showing you how to hard prune a shrub. But the reason why you need to hard prune a shrub is that it can help increase vigor in the plant. So as the plant gets older and more woodier, what you may find is that the foliage becomes sparser, doesn't flower as much and altogether it looks a bit ememic, like it's kind of got a bit gangling. So what I'm going to do today is to show you how to hard prune a shrub. Hopefully give you some reassurance that what you're doing is the right thing and then I can show you exactly how to do it so that you can hard prune. So the first thing to do is to take out the main lead stem. This will then send all the energy to the other sheets and help the plant to bush out. So about to go. Yep. You've always got to make a clean cut in a diagonal fashion so that any water that falls on this newly cut stem can run off and it won't cause any rot. Just pull that out there. Now what I'm going to do is work my way around and show you how to trim some of the smaller branches. So I'm going to be pruning back third to half the branches over length. Any branches that are diseased, dead, damaged or crossing remove those two. And you always want to take it back just above a bud, cut a diagonal away from the bud so that any rainwater, any moisture, can't sit down on that bud cause it to rot. So you do need to be quite bold with this. My advice is keep going a little by little. Better to take off too little into too much so you get it into that shape with the third to half of the shrunk. So there we have it. I've now finished hard pruning for this attinion. I've taken good shrunk off, probably nearly half of the bud. I've taken a lot out the height, any dead material crossing material gone. The reason for that is now that it's early spring, but all its efforts is to send me new buds from these side shoots and should then start to bush up more rather than getting taller and taller and thinner and thinner. It's definitely worthwhile, be brave, be bold, use sharp tools and make sure it's not raining. So I've been Garden Inja, if you've got any comments, please leave them, subscribe to my YouTube channel so you can watch more tips and things that you can do in your garden. Thanks for watching.