hi I'm basil and I'm Larry and we are here to show you how to properly prune a crape myrtle in order to prune this crepe myrtle we're going to use a few essential tools one of them our hand pruners which will take care of any small branches for branches that are too big for the hand pruners will use these loppers anything too large for the loppers we'll be using a hand sole so when we're printing a crape myrtle we're typically trying to achieve one or more of the following objectives we're either looking to enhance the trees beauty increase its health or control its growth you may have noticed there are no leaves on the tree right now that's because it's late winter which is an ideal time to prune a crape myrtle one of the main aspects and probably the most important part of pruning is preserving the plants natural shape and when you prune you'd want to start at the bottom of the plant and your work your way to the top and anything that is not part of the plants natural shape is one thing you'd want to remove and by working with the plants natural shape we actually work with what nature intended which will increase the plant's beauty increase its health and its structural stability all right so when you start with pruning you want to start at the bottom look for any kind of suckers or anything like that there's none here but as you go up look at the look at the shape of the crape myrtle right here this is the natural shape and the vase shape starts up in here but this one limb is in the way so this is one you'd want to eliminate this is a limb we want to remove and it's a little too large for the hand pruners we're going to use the hand saw and to remove the limb we're going to use a three cut method first cut is going to be on the bottom side of the limb about halfway into the limb and the second cut is going to be just behind that to actually remove the limb but after you do that it's going to leave a stub and to remove that you want to go just above the branch collar and not flush with the branch color because if you do you could damage the health of the tree we'll continue working up the tree looking for issues so you know we're looking for things like dead branches which we see right here dead branch here as we move up we're looking for epicormic growth this is a great example right here water sprout we're also looking for crossing and conflicting so you'll notice right here these have been rubbing against each other you can actually see the bark is worn away up in this crotch as well the branches i've been rubbing on each other it's actually rub the bark off so we need to do some pruning in these areas as well while pruning we also want to thin the canopy this is especially important for a crape myrtle we want to increase sunlight penetration and increase airflow cutting the dead and epicormic growth will provide some thinning but we'll need to prune additional branches but you don't want to take too much at one time step back if you need to because once you cut that branch it's gone you can't put it back so err on the side of less and here it is we've completed the pruning we've achieved all of our objectives and the tree looks fantastic and that's a happy crape myrtle we're looking at the big lens right yeah look at a big one one of the most important yes good yes very good let's go get you're going to allow for more air lot air like good air like