Trees, Shrubs and Conifers: Evergreens a REAL MESS! Pruning help please, 0 by Crimson

Crimson wrote:
When I moved in a month ago the front of the house was a MESS!
They had:
* 4 evergreen trees/bushes (8 ft high)
* with a shorter form of evergreen between (I don't even see them until I started cutting some of the other shrubs out!
* 3 Bayberry(?) shrub (5 ft high) in front of the Evergreens
* 3 ? Shrubs (3 ft high) in front of the Bayberry
* and last 3 clumps over grown (2 ft wide) Monkey Grass!

Ok a bit of over kill! That was only one side of the windows... the same thing was in front of the other widows too! I took out (sawed down) 4 of the trees, 2 on each side, all 6 of the Bayberry (all 3 of each side, they are already starting to send out sprouts from the ground) and trimmed all the ? Shrubs to just under 2 ft..... now here's the problem.

The Evergreen trees are heavily infested with Bagworm, so infested hand picking would never be a possibility. The remaining Evergreen trees have huge dead areas (see picture). When & how do you prune them to allow regrowth of the area? Any ideas of a quick/low cost way of preventing them from further damage, all those Bagworm casings are just waiting for spring to start destroying them some more. I am not a big fan of Evergreens but don't want to have to saw them down, they look pretty good aside from the damaged areas. I really wish I'd taken pictures of this place before I started working on it! I always swear I'm going to do it next time, but I just jump right in the minute I move in!

This message was edited Sep 19, 2004 8:48 PM