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Hi, I am David Epstein and welcome to Growing Wisdom. And today we are going talked a little bit about ornamental grasses and through the winter, what do you do with them?

So, the interesting thing about ornamental grass is to me they really peak in the fall and I want to enjoy these all winter. Now, the problem is, is that the snow, especially the first heavy wet snow of the year, inevitably will push this down to the ground and they will look awful. So what do I do? Pair of scissors, little bit of string and I am actually going to tie around the grasses. I am going to try almost like a belt, I am going to put a belt on my grasses that is going to help to hold them up all winter long and I will enjoy the snow cover as it falls on the grasses rather than flopping them down.

If you get a really heavy wet snow fall, it will push them to ground and then you will have to cut them back and you can do that at any time. You could do that January, February, March or April, you just want to make sure that you cut them back to the ground before the new growth starts to come up.

All right, so what we are going to do, we are going to put that belt around the grass and this a little bit tough. There is a couple of ways you can do it. One is, you could try to reach around with your arms but that can be difficult on a big grass. So, tie one end to the string to a few blades of grass and then what you want to do is we are just going to sort of wrap this around, lifting up as much as you can off the ground. So that you are belting the entire grass then they come back around where I started like this, you can see and I have really created a belt. This is a grass belt and just like a belt holds up your pants.

This grass belt is going to hold up the grass really nicely all winter, then I kind of fluff up the top a little bit. This is a little bit of a flimsy string that I might have wanted to use. So I will probably end up doing another one around there but look at the difference between this grass and the one that I have not done. The one that I have not done sure, it is much wispier but the problem is the snow is going to get into that and really packed that one down. This grass, this will be able to stay up all winter and with the snow around it, it is absolutely going to look spectacular. By the way this is a Miscanthus, one of the bigger ones. This is over 5 1/2, almost 6 feet tall.

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