Hydrangeas | Growing Tips & FAQ: Garden Home VLOG (2019) 4K

[Music] hello everyone [Applause] we're all cozied up here to talk about something we all love hydrangeas right yeah you know I never met a hydrangea I didn't like if you well it's a wonderful plant and I'm so excited that you all are here and share the same level enthusiasm that I have for them what do you think of our floral display up here well these are some things that we've been growing around the farm and I wanted to share some of our experiences with them and some of those experiences have been God's add that's what happens I first want to thank all of our listeners out there on our vlog and those that want to watch this on youtube you can see it you can watch yourselves a little later and I know that Patrick's already told you we're gonna have a time for Q&A so if you've got some questions about hydrangeas we want to make sure that you have a chance to get those out there and I'll do my best to answer them because I have lived a lifetime with hydrangeas and it's made me a happier person all right they just make me happy so why don't we start first with just some of the basic hydrangeas so we all understand the different types of hydrangeas how's that does that sound good alright so first of all I like to talk about the native hydrangeas the hydrangeas that are native to America and so one of my favorites is this one which has a cone-shaped bloom on it and it has an oak like leaf on it does anybody know what the name of this one is oak leaf hydrangea there you go wow I love it it's just so great to have an audience full of Captain Obvious as yeah so good so anyway this is a wonderful native plant grows in the southeast you see it you it's a ubiquitous plant in the northern Georgia all through up through the Carolinas and even up north it's a wonderful fall plant because of its great deep red leaf and I love the shape the leaf you know it is an Oakland okay there are a lot of cultivars of this so when you when you're thinking about hydrangeas you also have to think not only about the species but what variety so it starts getting really complicated so you go oak leaf hydrangea so if you use the Latin it's hydrangea that's the genus corsa folia Quercus is Latin for oak folia is Lea foliage alright so Quercus quirky folia alright and then they complicate it with all these cultivars alright so you can get Snow Queen and there's something I there's lots of different kinds of oak leaf hydrangeas that you can find out there Snow Queen is one that I've grown before and they have the the panicles on the hydrangea are so heavy they will fall to the ground and that that can be a little bit of a problem sometimes you have to prop your hydrangeas up and we certainly have to do that with our peonies do you all grow peonies that I love peonies then when my favorite flowers so the oak leaf hydrangea is a very good good one for shade any of us who have tried to garden and shade you've probably very frustrated and wondered what in the world can I grow in the shade and so hydrangeas can are one of those great plants that come to our rescue and they love the shade and the oak leaf hydrangea in particular will do well in the shade I think better than the European types which need a little more Sun we'll talk about those in just a minute but first there is another native hydro that we have to talk about and that's this hydrangea does anyone know the name of it no here I'm gonna hold one of them up look at this gorgeous thing blooming just now yes it was discovered in the United States as a native plant this is hydrangea arborescens or sometimes called the old Anabel hydrangea and these will bloom amazingly and they're in full flower right now I'm going to pass some of these around so you all can look at them let's just pass some of them around we're gonna talk a little bit about if we'll just go to the next stop down the aisle there we go look at that it's just like church isn't it now what I think is so wonderful about that I feel like dr. Phil yeah we'll get into personal problems a little later in the show but what's what's amazing about this plant is this is our first hydrangea to really flower here on the farm and so this one sort of heralds the summer for us and that's why I like it so well now how many of you got a Gilbert H Wilde catalog did you get one hold it up Gilbert H wild and the reason I have that for you if you'll turn to page I don't know 41 or something like that the hydrangeas are listed there a lot of people have have complained that they have not been able to find some of these hydrangea varieties on the is that a regret page 41 page 41 and you can see this one is called incredible this is incredible so I'm gonna go back just a moment the Latin is hydrangea arborescens I'm okay but this cultivar is not Annabelle this one is incredible now why is it better than Annabelle well the stems are stronger and she doesn't end Annabelle gets weepy when it rains okay she's kind of weepy and these have very strong stems on them as you can see and that's why I wanted to pass this around for everyone to see the huge blooms on these and this is small oK we've grown them where they were almost this big it looked like we'd been feeding them atomic pellets or something so this hydrangeas are also beautiful for flower arranging and let me just pause a moment before I jump into some of the other varieties they a couple of tricks you want to cut them in the morning early okay while the stems and the leaves are really full of moisture that's very very important the more mature the bloom the more likely the the more likely the plant will are bloom will hold up they will actually withstand you cutting we had a few that are a little droopy that I think they took out because they were embarrassed by them but they didn't make it on the stage sorry but what I was in a show is an immature bloom having been cut and it didn't really withstand being taken as a cut flower all right so what you want to do these are these are just mature enough to start cutting and using an arrangement have you ever used a hydrangea an arrangement just flopped it just didn't hold up one of the things you can do a trick is you can cut these off with the stem and stick the end of the stem and alum now you all know about alum don't you who's made pickles in here before if you won't crispy pickles you're going to use alum right okay that makes them crispy well a little bit of alum on the end of the stem before you put it in the in the arrangement will help hope they hook now why I don't know but it seems to work don't ask me that but it does seem to work so this is incredible now you all have walked around the gardens here at Moss mountain farm and at the back you probably saw some containers with some pink flowering and they look very much like this there is a pain form of Annabelle hydrangea all right and that one's called invincible these names all right I'm sorry I can't do anything about it called invincible so that's why you'll have pins I see you're writing everything down very studiously I'm very impressed there'll be a quiz later and we'll see who moves to the front of the class all right so this is our hydrangea arborescens Annabelle is the one that was discovered in Illinois and it was that and it was a someone had just observed it in a garden it was from the wild and it stood out among all the others and that's what happened with Incrediball somebody was looking at a big block of Annabelle's and here was one that stood up with strong stems and was really tall with huge blooms they said we're gonna call that one incredible alright so that's how this happens alright so those are the two native hydrangeas that I I wanted to talk about and just give you a little tip on the arrangements of those one of the questions we get a lot here at the farm is how do you deal with pests and we are organic here and we really don't use any kind of chemicals we use things like vinegar if we want to kill weeds you can pull them up and lay them out on the hot concrete and watch them die I love that it's it's a it's like a therapy for me do you all do that feels so good or we will use vinegar and spray vinegar on the grass so we don't use roundup we use we try to use organic controls one of the things that we do to try to keep things under control is in the spring to late winter we will use dormant oil all right so I dormant oil or a dormant spray is just a horticultural oil and what's great about it is that you apply it in the winter when the plant is dormant now this is what orchardists have used for a long time and what's so wonderful about it it's an oil and it will suffocate the spores of funding funguses it will our fungi it will suffocate the eggs of insects the pupae and the babies of insects it's wonderful to suffocate them and so you you can apply this and it really really helps so that's one of the methods we go around and we spray everything so if you come here in February you probably are get sprayed with dormant oil so be careful and be warned that we will use the dormant oil okay works very well all right now what I want to talk about is some of the European hydrangeas now this is our friend we who doesn't love this one the grandma had this one right this is old hydrangea macro sila macro sila big leaf the big leaf hydrangea and it comes in two flower forms you see this one is the mop head form it has a round ball like form and these really aren't that large of a flower you've you've seen them this big before and then there's the lace cap and I don't think I've got an example of a lace cap up here to show you today although they are in the garden and that is also a macro phyla type okay now one of the things that we do here with these did you all walk down to the Rose Garden have you been around and seen the garden and you saw the containers where we have planted that particular one is one called rhythmic blue now if you walk down the paths you're thinking these don't look like blue hydrangeas to me well as you know hydrangeas are sensitive to the soil pH the acidity or the alkalinity of the soil that's very important so in order to make these go more blue you want to acidify the soil and one thing you can use is aluminum sulfate okay and what we've been doing is we've been adding some aluminum sulfate to those pots now don't think that you can go run run down to the store and buy some of this and take it home and put it on your pink hydrangea and have you know wake up the next morning have a cup of coffee and go out there and it's blue it doesn't work that way all right you have to do it gradually so you will a it will take a couple of seasons to get it to change the color that you want now if you want your hydrangeas to be pink what do you add the opposite something to sweeten the soil and you could use hydrated lime did I bring yes so or you can use just agricultural limestone all right agricultural limestone just that will sweeten the soil and that'll make those blue hydrangeas go pink and somewhere in the middle they're going to be purple right because they're confused and you're there right at neutral so kind of expect that and that's that that's then what we like to do is we use a fertilizer a liquid fertilizer we love to use chicken manure and poultry manure of all kinds in our compost and we put it around the hydrangeas every winter they get sprayed with dormant oil the stems the bare stems and then we put the manure around them in January and February and then jump back because as soon as they start to wake up we want to make sure they've got plenty of food and so when they wake up there it is it's there available for them and through the summer we'll give them an organic fertilizer this works really well I have a little bit of it my coffee in the morning and but any any organic liquid fertilizer add that to them because on these they bloom on old wood okay now we're gonna have a little pruning lesson here I can see I all I have to say is pruning I can see fear in your faces how many are you afraid of pruning you're gonna do the wrong way well there's a few honest people here I noticed how they raise their hands now the thing to think about here is on the Annabelle's if you come here in February we have cut these down to halfway below my knee they are stumped off because they bloom on new growth all of those out there that you saw today that are this high were this short in February be ruthless with them cut them back go out there and get serious with them and they will flush and come up and at the end of every stem you will have blooms like this now do not do that to these macro Filas do you know why you'll cut off all the flowers because they are on they bloom on old wood and that's why I'm telling you to feed them through the summer feed them through the summer because they are forming those buds for next year for blooms all right if you've had issues with hydrangeas not blooming sometimes that's the case now think about it put yourself in the position of a hydrangea I want everybody to get in touch with your inner hydrangea okay now do you realize how much energy it takes to produce flowers like that and some people will go well my hydrangea last year was just great this year that thing getting blooming worth a Dern you know like it's a poor Grainger's fall did they ever think about feeding it no so if feed them along the season that's what's really important they need to be fed along the way okay now the other thing that I want to point out because we're talking about seasons of bloom we talked about the the old Annabelle the improved Annabelle blooming first and then we talked about coming right behind it come the old European types and then this is the panicle hydrangea that begins to bloom now there are no blooms on it yet but if you look closely you'll see buds of flowers how many in there grandmother or great grandmother's garden or yard had an old PG hydrangea that made almost a hydrangea treat you all remember those I remember him when I was growing up well that's the old PG hydrangea or hydrangea paniculata okay hydrangea paniculata and it will come into flower in the summer if you go up through the east coast and you look at these wonderful gardens in Rhode Island and and all through new Massachusetts and New Hampshire and so forth you'll see a lot of these panicle type hydrangeas blooming okay they literally make trees and so one of them is limelight hydrangea do you know limelight hydrangea this is a limelight hydrangea that will bloom later in the season and it's a panicle type okay very good I've had a PG not PG it's PE eg 8 PG that so if you look it up that's what is that's the old fashioned well then someone went along and they said gosh look at that PG hydrangea that one's really special so they named it limelight and gave it a name and registered it and now they get a royalty off of it so that's why you see that one out there in the market and it is better it blooms heavier and the stems are a little stronger to hold up those big blooms then the last hydrangea the last one of the season blooms here and you have to come here in July to say yeah and it's hydrangea of a tardy hydrangea late the Latin word for late I don't know about being late don't you well that's the latest of the hydrangeas to bloom hydrangea tarde OVA and I've had one of those for almost 20 years as well downtown into the historic in the historic district where we have a cottage it's been there and I look forward to it blooming every July and August all the way until early September so that's the range of hydrangeas that that we grow here and kind of the approach that we take in in using them as cut flowers and also as growing them as great garden plants we find that these these all prefer filtered light did you notice how when you walk down that la we were trying to create a space of a high canopy where there's just a little bit of sunlight filters through all day long that is an ideal setting for hydrangeas they like that if they prefer a they prefer 8 a if you have to give them Sun full Sun full morning Sun is much better than afternoon Sun you will hear them scream and die if you if they get full on what all day and Western Sun it's just too hot for them all right you can grow them in containers you saw those after they've been out there for years in containers we use a those are don't tell anybody but plastic containers you didn't know that did you did you ever knock on them and see where they were really terracotta is it real or Memorex or whatever good enough yep so those have had containers have held up very well and they have a little patina on them now so they look a little more convincing but we've dropped down to six degrees here and they've been up above the ground in those pots so think about that they've been very hardy-har dy not to be confused with hearty which means their vigorous hearty implies the plant is cold tolerant it has heart the hardiness zone we hear about that right so there's a difference in those words so these are these have been very Hardy they have taken the cold very well in my opinion so why don't we answer a few questions I'm Mollie Warrington and I'm from Denton and I have purchased vanilla strawberry hydrangeas yes which I love and are they considered the pentacle vanilla strawberry hydrangea is a panicle type hydrangea that's right Molly so it would be a paniculata so it's a hydrangea paniculata and that's a very good one and they call it strawberries or strawberries and cream and another strawberry one that you met again it's all these names and those will take more Sun and so you'll find the panicle types PG limelight strawberries and cream and the one you have is what vanilla vanilla strawberry all of these will take more Sun than some of the others they will bloom on new wood and so you can cut those back and if you do cut those back like the ones we talked about earlier the Annabelle's they will bloom like crape myrtles they will bloom on that new wood that emerges in the spring very good question yeah she's Babette in Arkansas there we go all right Thank You Molly yes I'm Debby Lawrence from Fort Smith and I need a little bit more help on the market because I don't understand the old-growth how to prune around the UH growth and handle that I have a lot of foliage this year and very little blooms Debbie Alma on these these big leaf hydrangeas the hydrangea macrophylla the what you want to do when you prune them is remember the 3ds okay you want to take out anything that's dead diseased or damaged that always should come out of any plant really and then don't cut them back unless they just are in the way okay and then what you need to do is I mentioned earlier you need to be feeding them now start feeding them now and it doesn't hurt to use a dilute organic all-purpose fertilizer I like to use a liquid so I can dilute it down and I'll pour that around them through the growing sebat once a month and that that will help them build up those buds and when you fertilize and all-purpose fertilizer is good but if you go with a higher middle number which is phosphorous its phosphorous that really helps build a good bud set and gives us a good fruit set if we're growing apples or berries or something like that so I hope that helps yeah hi there I'm Charlotte Meeker from Pendleton Indiana oh great Charlotte I was just an Elkhart Indiana so yeah and I've ordered some new peonies - thanks for your discount Oh anything to keep your hands in the soil all right that's your eyes but I have a huge lime line and I mean huge it's up to the rooftop yeah and I just how far do I trim that down I've been hesitant I just cut out the old every year and it just is beautiful and so many blooms so I have the question how far to cut it and my other one is do you leave all the blooms on it in the winter I sometimes have so many I just leave them there I think they're beautiful in the winter yeah so these are all very good questions that I was mentioning to you all about the old PG hydrangea how long do you think your your your hydrangea has been there how long do you think probably six seven years six or seven years and it's already that big yeah how big around of the trunks about the size of a mop handle or small yes some of them so what we tend to do is on those panicle hydrangeas I cut them back to the you know the big fat crayons that we used to use I go down the stem and I'll start and when I get down to about that thickness I'll cut just above a bud and I'll cut them back and that'll cause them to shoot out more blow more buds and at the end as you know at the end of every one of those new stems guess what you get a flower they and they bloom and the idea of keeping them all winter yes I think they're beautiful then they capture the frost and the snow and that sort of thing won't hurt them at all but then go back and cut them back in late winter we I try to get all my pruning done by and my potatoes planted by George Washington's birthday here that's where I remember that yeah very good thank you for coming from nd yeah hello my name is ginger Godfrey and I'm from Bradford Ohio very good ginger I have a question that I think have already been answered I have a lime light and it's only been growing like two years and I haven't had blooms yet but he's on the west side of the house but my question was how far should I trim it maybe I'm cutting off the blooms well ginger the if you have it on the west side of the house and you live in Ohio do you ever notice the the leaves ever blister in the summer do they get brown because they've gotten too hot yeah I just told him I think I need to movie yeah yeah it sounds like and and this fall gently dig dig it up and and move it and and once it goes to sleep that's the time to move them and just set it over and and and put it on the east side and add plenty of good compost around the base of it everything and you can go back and on a young plant like that I would go down to about the size of a pencil the stems and just cut it back and it will bloom for you next year if you'll fertilize it as soon as go ahead and put some fertilizer in the hole it'll be dormant but when it wakes up or you can even wait till February or even March in Ohio and but when it wakes up you want to make sure it's got a cup of coffee and a good breakfast okay very good thank you for coming to from please from Ohio very good all right yeah very good question I want to thank all of you for coming to see us here at Moss mountain farm we love having people here we want to thank you for supporting Gilbert H wild and Sons they were started in 1885 a great American company and we hope you will come back and visit us soon thank you so much if you like this video be sure to subscribe to my youtube channel and be sure to ring the bell for 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Channel: P. Allen Smith

Views: 587,244

Rating: 4.9021497 out of 5

Keywords: hydrangea faq, growing hydrangeas, hydrangea growing tips, garden faq, hydrangea planting tips, native hydrangeas, hydrangea origins, hydrangea care, Garden Home Vlog, hydrangea types, hydrangea garden, p. allen smith, hydrangea pruning, hydrangea flower, hydrangea cuttings, hydrangea tree, hydrangea centerpiece, preventing pests, perennials, perennial plants, perennial garden, perennial flower garden, garden home, gardening ideas, gilbert h wild and son, masterclass

Id: vAyydDz0SpE

Length: 29min 24sec (1764 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2019