Hydrangeas care tips | Why Aren't My Hydrangeas Blooming? | Hydrangea

hey flower drive it's kelly lehmann and lucy lehman and today we're going to answer the question why aren't my hydrangeas blooming so a lot of you have put in questions and comments below on youtube and on instagram and one of the most popular questions that we have is why aren't my hydrangeas blooming and i'm going to give you a couple reasons why you might be having a problem getting blooms from your beautiful hydrangea so guys the first thing to consider is is your hydrangea getting enough sunlight so different varieties of hydrangea need different hours of sunlight so these are endless summer and these guys really enjoy having a lot of morning sun and then afternoon shade but other hydrangeas like limelight hydrangea they can take a full day of sun and do just fine they can do spectacular so it's really important to know what type of hydrangea you have first and then take a look what the requirements for sun are because they're going to be different for each plant but most hydrangeas need at least partial sun to do really well and like i said some of them will do better in full sun and there's some that do better with shade especially in the afternoon most hydrangeas like a lot of sunlight in the morning and then a little bit of afternoon shade another thing to consider is are my hydrangeas getting enough water hydrangeas love water they really do but they don't want to have wet feet i want to show you the best way to water your hydrangeas because if you don't provide enough water you may not get blooms and if you over water your hydrangea you also may not get blooms and so let me show you how this works out we had enough lucy okay so you're going to water your hydrangeas at the base of the plant in the mornings you don't want to do this at night so you're going to come on to the base of the plant and you're just going to give it a good soaking all the way around the plant on the base of it and you're going to do this when the soil feels dry so a good rule of thumb is to put your finger in the soil about an inch or two deep and if the soil is moist your hydrangea probably doesn't need water and if you feel the soil is very dry then you're going to give it a good deep root watering now you don't want to do overhead watering and i'm actually going to do it on this plant because we just had a huge rainstorm so it already had an overhead watering so when people overhead water like this especially at night the leaves get super wet and then they stay wet and then what happens is sometimes temperatures drop during the night time and that's when you start getting these spots on the plant so if the plant is really wet at night and temperatures plummet this is probably what's going to happen so another reason why your hydrangeas might not be blooming is because you might have too much nitrogen in the soil and i think this happens to a lot of people and here's the story with nitrogen nitrogen promotes lots of beautiful lush green leaves and a lot of you have said i have these beautiful hydrangea plants with beautiful green leaves and zero blooms and what happens is if you have too much nitrogen in the soil you're going to have a giant plant with gorgeous green leaves and probably hardly any blooms whatsoever because it'll also kind of inhibit bloom growth because it's so busy helping the plant to have these gorgeous lush leaves and here's the thing guys when you fertilize your lawn a lot of lawn fertilizers have a high concentration of nitrogen so when you're looking at some products that have fertilizer in them they usually have like three numbers the first number is the nitrogen number and if the nitrogen number is higher than the other two numbers that means that that fertilizing product has a high nitrogen concentration and then when people fertilize their lawns sometimes uh some of those sprinkles get put into the garden bed and then all of a sudden you have a very high nitrogen level in your soil and you're gonna have super beautiful green leaves but no bloom so keep an eye on that guys and i'm gonna put a link below uh for places where you can get your soil tested to see where your uh what your nitrogen levels are there's a lot of organizations uh state to state that you can kind of do a soil sample and send it into and they'll let you know what your nitrogen levels look like if they're high or low so that's the nitrogen story and another reason why your hydrangeas may not be blooming is because you might have pruned them at the wrong time of year so if you guys uh went and pruned some of your especially nico is back like in the beginning of spring it means that you cut back a lot of the buds that were forming on last year's old growth and you're not going to see any blooms this year because you kind of cut them all back by accident and we have a video that kind of explains this called how to get more blooms from your hydrangea and we'll put a link for that below also so make sure that you don't over prune your hydrangeas the rule of thumb with hydrangea pruning is plant it in a spot where it's happy and if you don't have to prune it because you don't need to like make it shorter to fit in the bed uh better or if it hasn't given you blooms for years and you might want to just give it like a little recharge i hardly ever prune my hydrangeas back these guys haven't been pruned back in like probably like three years and i get beautiful blooms from them so don't over prune your hydrangeas winter zap is another reason why your hydrangeas may not be giving you blooms so guys i'm out here in spring it's a little bit after mother's day with my endless summer hydrangea row and i want to show you what happened to these gals so a lot of these buds were formed on what's called old wood so these stems were from last year and what happened was sometime after summer these new little buds and these new stems of growth started forming on the old wood now what happened was we had a super super warm january and february and so instead of just being little tiny nubs that are kind of protected on these wooden stems i started to get a lot of leaves and a lot of growth and it's almost like the plant was tricked into thinking it was spring and it started to develop a lot of these early flowers early on and the problem happened when we got a huge freeze later on in the season so we had temperatures that dropped below freezing like later on like an early spring and actually we had snow here just a few days ago in may and that snow and the freezing zapped these plants and what's probably going to happen is these gals are probably not going to give me any kind of flowers on the the blooms that you see now because you can tell they're all kind of brown they're all kind of frozen off so they got what i call a winter zap your plants age may also have something to do with why it may not be blooming younger plants sometimes don't produce blooms and they take a few years to get established before you see those beautiful blooms come into place so this guy's about a year old so there's no blooms yet but it will be worth the wait and then over here is a hydrangea that's about two years old two or three years old and so the blooms are starting to come and then after a few years they're going to be magnificent uh another reason why you might not be getting blooms from your hydrangea is you might have gotten a hydrangea as a gift like during around easter or mother's day uh passover and a lot of times those are kind of like um the florist gift hydrangeas that were grown in greenhouses they're not very hardy and they might not grow in your planting zone so make sure that the hydrangea that you have belongs in your planting zone because a lot of times these cute little gifty hydrangeas that come in like the little tin foil with the pink or the purple a lot of times they're kind of like you know grown in a greenhouse setting and they have a hard time lasting in a field and they might not belong in your heartiness zone so make sure that you know what your planting hardiness zone is and if your hydrangea belongs there you might just you know might be able to grow that in your neck of the woods and so those are some of the major reasons why your hydrangeas may not be blooming in your area and i hope you guys learned a lot from this video and let me know if you have any questions or comments about other flowers or hydrangeas and i'd love to make videos to answer them and let me know where you guys are viewing this from in this great big beautiful world i love to see how our flower tribe is growing around the globe each year and i will see you guys in the next video

Channel: Kelly Lehman

Views: 178,437

Rating: 4.9282117 out of 5

Keywords: hydrangea care, kelly lehman, blooms, hydrangea, hydrangeas, hydrangea care outdoors, hydrangea flower, Hydrangeas, Hydrangeas Blooming, hydrangeas grow, hydrangea flowers, hydrangea plant care, pruning hydrangeas, hydrangeas pruning, hydrangea tips, how to make hydrangea bloom, how to grow hydrangea flowers, how to care hydrangea plants, Hydrangea care, hydrangeas tips

Id: 4Bpe0uPKuZM

Length: 8min 30sec (510 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 26 2020