Growing Hydrangeas

[Music] hey it's Michelle with gardening with the landscape connection welcome to my channel and today's episode which will be all about hydrangeas hydrangeas are some of the easiest shrubs to grow and so if you've never grown one come along with us today and learn about some of the different ones that are out there and we'll also discuss maybe some of the problems that people are having with them and I think that we'll go over probably four of the most common questions that we get asked here on the garden center one being what kind of hydrangea do I have and they're not sure how to identify what they have at home because maybe they planted it two or three years ago they have no idea what it is or they inherited it when they moved into their home or they don't know why they're not getting flowers on their hydrangeas so we'll talk about that as well people also want to know how do I change the color of the hydrangeas and can you change the color on all hydrangeas and last but not least they want to know which one to play plant in their yard so we help guide them through all the different ones that are out there and help them pick the one that's just right for them so I'm hoping that today's episode will take you through that as well I personally love hydrangeas I have them growing all over my yard I have them growing at the Garden Center and we have quite the collection here available for people to come and purchase and I love to use them when I'm doing landscape design they have a super long Bloom time great structure and for the most part they're very easy to grow there are five categories of hydrangeas the first one we have are the PG hydrangeas or the panicle or peniculata they're called all three things so whatever you've learned to call them that's what they're called then there is the smooth hydrangea these are native to North America they're your Annabelles there is the big leaf hydrangea and then we have the mountain hydrangea now the mountain hydrangea is a Serrata hydrangea and then there's the oak leaf hydrangea which also is native to North America So within those five categories is we're going to talk about some of the different characteristics of each of them we'll start with the peniculata hydrangeas Proven Winners probably has the largest uh variety of those out there so I did link their website below so you can go check out all the different varieties paniculata hydrangeas grow in zone three through eight now if you're in zone three four and five you probably can grow these in full sun and have great success with that if you're in zone six seven and eight six that probably goes either way but depending on where you plant it they probably need a little more protection from the hot afternoon sun and you might experience some scorching on the leaves if they're getting all that sun but I do think that the paniculatas are some of the easiest to grow and they are absolutely gorgeous and they come in all different kinds of sizes so you can get like a limelight which is probably the number one selling hydrangea in the world that gets you know six seven eight feet tall and probably six feet wide to like a little fire light tidbit that might get two and a half three feet by two and a half three feet so all different kinds of sizes and you can certainly find one that's going to fit the needs of what you're looking for in your landscape now all of these hydrangeas bloom on new wood so if you're going to be pruning them you prune them in late winter or early spring when they're dormant and you take off the top third of the shrub and you know you're basically cutting all the flowers off now what I love about them as well is the flowers dry fantastic they're great for crafts they're great for dried products I use them in my winter pots I use them inside they're just endless uses for these hydrangeas and I love this category so if you're looking for a hydrangea to try this might be a category to check out these are my quick fires and so as you can see it's got more of an open lace flower on here absolutely gorgeous and as these age they will turn pink and so I have five of these in a row and then on either ends of these it's like a big Arc behind my pergola I have the Limelight hydrangeas now these are just now starting to bloom and as you can see when the flowers are closed they're like this lime green and then see when they first start to open they're lime green but then as they age they turn this beautiful white can you see that all right then they go from white and they start to turn pink now if you're going to grow a quick fire or a limelight you better give them plenty of space because these can get upwards of seven eight feet high and probably five to six feet wide so you need to make sure you give them room if you don't have that much room plant a smaller cultivar they have the little limes which don't get as big they get like maybe uh five or six feet high and four to five feet wide so there's a smaller cultivar of the Limelight they also have the Limelight Prime which was just introduced and that only gets about five by five so a nice hydrangea that you can tuck into the landscape also the quick fires there are quick fires there are little quick fires there are I think it's called tiny quick fire that was introduced this year that's uh small like two by two and then there's the quick fire Fab which kind of has the same characteristics of a limelight as far as like the flower is shaped like a pinnacle but they don't get as big and they bloom a month earlier than all the other hydrangeas just like the quickfires do thus their name so I love the quick fire family of hydrangeas I love this cultivar okay the next one I want to talk about are smooth hydrangeas so smooth hydrangeas basically grow in zone three through eight as well these are ones that are going to grow in full sun and I found that no matter what zone you're in if they're in full sun they're going to need supplemental water and these are the ones that when they are thirsty they will tell you because they they kind of droop the other thing is when they get wet these stems on the old-fashioned Annabelles which are the natives they'll droop as well but Proven Winners has done a lot of development with the Annabelle and they created the the series of Incredibles Now The Incredibles take everything about animals and make it so much better I love Incredibles now I've had these here for a long time like 10 years and I don't think when I first planted these The Incredibles were out maybe they were but I didn't know about them so I planted Annabelle's because I love them but I don't like the drooping part of them but what I love about the Incredibles is they're designed to have stronger stems so they stand up better and the flowers on them are ginormous they'll grow in sun or shade now what I found about the ones that I grow in the shade is they never get as big as you want them to they'll get flowers on them but the flowers are a little bit smaller and more sparse I have one at my house growing in the shade and it's not as big as one would be if I planted it in full sun now I have found that I do have to supplement the water on them even when I get them established and I'm okay with that but if that's not something you want to fuss with this maybe not may not be the hydrangea for you but these flowers dry incredibly well they make great wreaths they do well in dried flour products or crafts or things like that whatever you want to do and I just love that about them now when these flowers are done they start to turn brown so if you want to get them when they're like this and dry them you want to pick them when they're white incredible comes in white but it also comes in a blush and this year they introduced a wee white which is like this it gives like two by two it's like the perfect size to tuck somewhere in the landscape and I planted two of them over at my house and I dunked them right in it was perfect and I loved it and I love Annabelle's and I think that they are easy to grow you really don't have blooming problems with these I'd say the number one complaint I get is when you plant the old-fashioned annabels is when they're wet they droop or the stems aren't as strong as the incredible stem so if this is a cultivar you'd like to try go for it because I think they're fabulous the other thing to note about your smooth Leaf hydrangeas is that they do Bloom on new wood and what that means is they're going to grow on all the wood that came up this year because they're blooming on new wood you can cut them to the ground every year to do your cleanup okay the only other thing I would say with these that you might have problems with is deer so deer do like to nibble on the blossoms of your hydrangeas so if you have deer pressure that might be something that you're going to have to put down in a repellent or something to keep them away and you can tell it's deer damage because you're going to see ripping of the leaves they're going to look more like ragged edges they like they like tear the leaves off and so a lot of times they're grazers though they won't typically eat all the buds off of one they'll eat like two or three and then move on to the next one and eat two or three and then move on to the next one and eight two or three look at the size of that bloom here's my hand it is bigger than my hand so this is a fire light isn't that great I mean I love the shape of this flower I love the look of this flower absolutely gorgeous look how big that is now remember they get six to eight feet tall and four to five feet wide and these are still in their cans look at this oh my goodness there's my hand I just gorgeous so all the flowers are a little bit different so this one as you see it's white and then it starts to age that pink but it's got more of that open Airy flower look like a quick fire but it's not it's a Pinky Winky and it's got more of that conical shape on the flower see like a limelight does they're all so different it's so awesome check this one out this is the quick fire Fab huh oh my gosh I love that look how big these are and they're in their cans and see they're too heavy for the cans they're leaning over they won't do that once they're in the ground because they're going to have more of a structure to build off of Once you get them in the ground but in the pots when they're carrying that kind of weight oh they're kind of flopping over a little bit but look at how big that flower is oh my goodness I love this I'm gonna these are new to me this year so I'll be planting a couple of these I can't wait these are little quick fires growing at my house and as you can see this one is about five by five um yeah that's about right and then this one here years down to about four by four and then about three by three now the reason they're teared up like that normally they're all the same height is I had to prune these two back really far this year because see they're on the edge of my driveway I hit them with the plow so they had quite a bit of plow damage and I had to cut them almost back to the ground but look they recovered and they look great I actually did a video back in I don't know I think it was March and it was on winter pruning and these were some of the shrubs that I pruned and you saw how severe they were so I'll link that down below you can check it out there are serious pollinators all over this thing and as you can see see it's already starting to turn pink in that same video you saw me severely prune bath this Limelight which last year all of these bottom branches were totally weighted down and falling on the ground and I'm hoping that by pruning it back as far as I did back in March that I strengthened some of this bottom branching but we've got some good structure going on up here and some great blooms this one here is getting Morning Sun until about I'd say noon and the ones down at the end probably get a little bit more Sun than this one it's closer to the tree and I have these planted there is a big maple tree right there and the sun rises over there so I planted them here in the hopes of creating like this little hedge this is the little lime fruit punch and when I grew them last year they were super tiny they didn't have any flowers on them even at the end of the year and so this spring they looked pretty pathetic I fertilized them and I was like I hope they do well here or I might have to move them to give them more on but they're not as big as I want them but they've still got time to grow they're you know I planted them and I think August of last year so they're not even a year old and they're full of flowers so I love these it's like this little mini version but it gets this really really dark fruit punch red uh pink color on them as they age so I can't wait to see that happen this is an oak leaf hydrangea that I have growing at my house it's called ruby slippers and it's going to grow three to four feet tall and it's gonna grow four to five feet wide I have this one growing in pretty much all shade it gets a little bit of sun on the edges and as you can see here see there's the leaves starting to change color and it's got that beautiful Oak shaped leaf on there see they're pretty big isn't that great all right now this is another Oak Leaf hydrangea that I have growing and this one didn't get any flowers this year but it's only two years old and Oak Leaf hydrangeas sometimes can take three to five years to give you the flowers while it's developing it's Roots developing its structure I did go in and clip it down just a little bit a couple branches here and there because I'm trying to like create the form that I want it to look hopefully we'll get flowers on it next year in year three now the Alice hydrangea gets white flowers again the leaves are going to turn red in the fall but this one can get anywhere from five to eight feet high and five to six feet wide so this is a fairly large uh hydrangea they're not flowering that might be a reason why and or maybe you pruned it at the wrong time because remember you only want to prune it in early spring dead diseased or dying branches blooms on old wood okay so this is an example of an incredible planted in the shade it gets only dappled Sun so it probably needs more sun but I'm okay with it here I think it looks okay it could get a lot bigger if I gave it more sun but it still got really big flowers but the thing with the flowers is see they're green they're not white they're not that intense white I'm hoping that they turn white but I don't I don't remember if they do or they don't but right now today it's the end of July and these are green and I don't know I'm okay with that the plant itself is very healthy so I'll take it so we have talked about smooth hydrangeas which are your Annabelle series we've talked about the oak leaf hydrangeas and we've talked about the panniculatas or the panicle hydrangeas so this next one I want to talk about is in the smooth Leaf big leaf family but it is a mountain hydrangea and it's called a Serrata and this is from Proven Winners this one is called tough stuff it's called called aha isn't that a beautiful flower so it's got kind of that open Airy lace leaf or lace cap flower on it and you can tell the difference between this one and a big leaf hydrangea because the leaves are smaller and typically the plant is smaller too so this one is going to top out maybe at 24 inches 24 inches wide they do Bloom on old wood so you don't prune them back and the other thing that can happen with these is I do find that in zone five especially maybe zone six two they really don't want to be in anything colder than minus five in the winter and here because of zone five we can get up to minus 20. so I find that I do have to wrap these in burlap over the winter to protect them or what happens is it freezes off all my flowers and that might be why you're not getting flowers the other thing that can happen is once it's like 15 degrees all the time you can unwrap them but if we get a really super cold snap after those buds start to swell then you can lose your flowers that way too so there could be a lot of reasons why you're not getting flowers on this and the biggest one is if you know a frost is coming after the bud starts to swell get out there and cover it up the other thing is I don't think that these do well like out in the open I think you do have to have a protected area this is along the wall on the south side of my house and I do have trees on the other side of the sidewalk so that offers protection as well now the other thing that can happen with all of your hydrangeas is if you over fertilize with too much nitrogen you can push growth and it's going to push big beautiful green leaves and no flowers if you over fertilize with too much nitrogen so I'll show you the fertilizer that I use in just a second here's the last one we're going to talk about and this is a big leaf hydrangea kind of looks like that a Serrata that we just talked about right well if you were to pinch a leave off of this one see how big the leaf is and then I went and pinched a leaf off of the Serrata see how small that one is so usually the great big leaves that's how you know you have a big leaf hydrangea it's different than a smooth hydrangea because those have smaller leaves it's got the veining and it's got that serrated edge on there and that's how you can tell the difference and then if you have a Serrata their leaves are a lot smaller like this was the biggest leaf on the Serrata this was like one of the bigger leaves on the smooth Leaf so that's how I can tell the difference between the two now as you can see here this one doesn't have any flowers on it it is called pistachio I've had it for three years it's in its third year and it can take again three to five years for this to get its flowers now on the big leaf hydrangeas they're always making improvements so some of the older cultivars they bloom on old wood and some of the newer cultivars they bloom on old wood or new wood so if you don't know what you have the best thing to do is to not cut it back the first year and let it come back and kind of see what it does the following year all right let's figure out why it's not blooming so the first thing I ask myself because these are the ones nine times out of ten that people are having problems with not having flowers are usually the big leaf hydrangeas so we always ask them did you cut it back okay yes or no don't cut it back and see what it does the next year maybe it is going to get its flowers on old wood so you do that first oh if we have decided the next year that it doesn't get flowers but you didn't cut it back that might not be the problem but if you had been cutting it back and the next year it does get flowers it's like a oops I guess I was cutting the flowers off so you stopped doing that and pop problem solved okay but now let's say maybe you didn't do that it could be again do you live in too cold of a climate for this big leaf hydrangea maybe you are in a zone four trying to grow a zone five plant and even in zone five they have to be protected you might have to wrap them in the winter they really don't want anything below five degrees and zone five zone six guess what you guys are hitting -10 minus 20. on averages so it might be that you need to wrap this hydrangea and are you covering it if you're in those zones when you get an unexpected Frost in the spring are you taking out all the flower buds and that's why you didn't get any flowers that could be a reason as well the other thing is let's say you don't live in a cold find it but you're not getting flowers if you have deer coming through and grazing on your hydrangea Buds and you'll see the tearing of the leaves or The Ripping of the leaves is that what's going on with your hydrangeas so those are some of the different hydrangeas you can plant but there are other issues that you can have too so actually watering practices can definitely play a role in why you're not getting flowers if you are consistently letting them dry out in between waterings that can be a reason why they're not producing flowers so you want to make sure that you are consistently Watering your hydrangeas smooth hydrangeas the serratas the big leaf hydrangeas they want more water than say the peniculatas or the oak leaves that's what I find anyways here at my house now a bonus with your hydrangeas is you can grow them in heavy clay so you gotta love that about it all right so there you have it you got smooth hydrangeas peniculata hydrangeas your hydrangea Serrata or your Mountain hydrangea you've got your Oak Leaf hydrangea and then you're your big leaf hydrangea now all of these I have grown all of them I love all of them have pros and cons I do fertilize all of mine in the spring and I like to use the fertilome garden special now the reason I like this one is because it's kind of a balanced fertilizer but it's got a little bit more potassium to help with that flour development it's got a slow release and a quick release fertilizer to it it's about a half a cup of fertilizer sprinkled around the base of your shrub for every three feet in height and the other question that we get asked from people is how do I change the color of the hydrangeas now on a lot of hydrangeas you can't change the color there are some that you just they just that's the color they are paniculatas for the most part the color they are is the color they are the ones that you can change are really um some of the big leaf hydrangeas and even then like the City Line has one that's red and you can't change the color on that it's red you're going to do this in the fall and you have to work lime or sulfur one of the other into the soil so espoma makes products for this or you can you can buy garden lime it doesn't have to be a spoma but espoma has a garden line bag lime is pretty inexpensive and it's easier to make them pink and it takes less product than it is to make them blue so if you're going to try and change uh your hydrangea to pink or keep it pink then you're going to work about one cup of this into about 10 square feet of soil and you do need to work it into the soil you can't just put it on the soil and hope that it works it is an inert chemical so you've got to work it in and water it in and let it have time to work thus you're going to put it down in the fall and you're going to use lime to turn them pink now if you're trying to turn them blue you're going to use sulfurs or a soil acidifier and again a Sperma makes a product for this too it is harder to turn them blue now if you want to turn them blue you're going to use about three cups per 10 square feet work it into the soil do it in the fall water it in and then just let it do its stuff over the winter and I have found that trying to turn them blue it might take you a couple Seasons to actually flip the pH of that soil so that you really get the blue that you're looking for and you have to do it every single year it's not a one and done so even if you buy a blue hydrangea it might not stay blue if your soil isn't acidic enough you might have to supplement the soil to make that happen Okay plant your hydrangeas okay and well-drained soil now it can grow in clay but they gotta still drain hydrangeas hate sitting in standing water your hydrangeas needs Sun every day you know I think a lot of times we think of them as shade plants but they look and flower their best with at least four hours of Sun ideally in the morning and the peniculatas need more sun than that so they can really tolerate more sun in the northern climates make sure you give them plenty of water especially as you're getting them established they have shallow roots so they do dry out quickly you want to make sure you're mulching around the base of them because that's going to help hold that moisture in the ground all right everybody that's a wrap for today's video I hope that this was helpful and that you learned something about hydrangeas that maybe you didn't know or it helped you figure out what hydrangea you have or it helped you figure out what hydrangea you want to have I know I love them and I hope that this helped you love them too I'm Michelle thanks for watching keep on gardening we'll see you in the next video bye everybody [Music]

Channel: Gardening TLC

Views: 11,415

Keywords:

Id: Ic2nu90S_0U

Length: 23min 41sec (1421 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 31 2023