Perennials | FAQ: Garden Home VLOG (2019) 4K

[Music] well hello everyone I'm sure you're enjoying the beauty and bounty of spring there's nothing like it particularly after this past cold winter today I want to talk about one of my favorite subjects it's very broad one but it's perennials those wonderful garden plants that come back year after year without replanting I consider them loyal friends in my garden and I bet you do too we're going to talk about some of the more common ones such as day lilies iris and peonies but we're also going to talk about some new johnny-come-lately and also some different ways to go about planting perennials so why don't we start in the past how did our ancestors plant perennials well they pass them along all right did well over the garden fence hey yeah I've got some of this let me dig some of it to give it to you and they also were accustomed to ordering plants through mail order well today with so much being shipped around the country by people ordering online the bare-root mail order perennial business is bigger than it's ever been so if you go to your local nursery you'll get this much in terms of variety now there are certainly some exceptions out there some marvelous retail garden centers but often if you go to a catalog where they're growing lots of different perennials you'll get a much wider array of perennials as well as a lot of the new ones the latest ones coming along as well as some of the great old standbys the what I call the heirloom perennials so going back to our ancestors I remember my great-grandmother and my grandmothers sharing plants that they had in their garden these pass along plants were just a part of well the community you just shared what you had and often people would just dig them up and you've probably heard this about your grandmother or great-grandmother she could just take a stick and stick it in the ground and it would grow well there's a lot of truth to that what I want to talk about first is this idea of getting a bare root perennial and what we have here is a bare-root daylily it's kind of like a little space alien I know whichever these nice tuberous roots love the aroma of the fresh soil and you can see the young day lilies beginning to emerge now this particular day Lily is one of my favorites it's a fairly common one and for good reason this one's called happy returns and I use it a lot because it only grows to about 18 inches but it is a rebloom err so it's a good front of the border sort of day lily I love mixing it with purples like catnip like Walker's lo catnip that beautiful sort of lemon bright fresh yellow against purple is really outstanding so in this day lily this is a very generous clump and if you ordered a daylily like this or you dug it out of your own garden and shook the soil off of it to transplant it of which I don't recommend if you're moving it in your own garden leave the soil around it is just transplanted and it's better to transplant when they're asleep not to say you can't move them any time of the year if you water and take care of them but ideally when the plant is dormant if you move it that's the time to relocate it somewhere else in your garden but when you order them bare root you'll see they'll usually come in like this you want to make sure that those tubers are nice and turgid firm and what I like to do with a bare root plant like this is to soak it in water before I plant it so let's say three or four hours maybe even six hours before I I plant I will sit this plant down in a bucket of water and let those roots rehydrate I keep the crown if you can keep the crown of the plant this is the crown the top above water but just set it in water and let it just sit there and those roots will absorb and begin to rehydrate that gives it a little bit of a boost from the time you take it out of the bucket and actually Nestle it into the soil I've planted thousands of bay perennials and it is a great way to go about it because you're not lugging pots and containers and digging big holes and so forth what you want to do is you always want to prepare a bed you want to make sure the bed has good what I call friable soil soil that if you squeeze it you break it apart in your hand it falls apart that's a true test for me means it doesn't have too much clay in it and I like to nestle the the perennial and I'm using a daylily of course in this example where the roots are spread out like this and then I pour water in the hole again another act of rehydration and then bring the soil just up to about where it would have been in the field where it was growing and in this case he'd be right about there you don't want to bury them too deeply if they've got a little crown and you could usually look do no matter what it is you can see that little stem or that little emerging bud you want to just bring that right to the edge of the ground just as it would have been where it was planted previously now a clump like this is very generous now you could take this happy returns and I could tease that apart and look at that I could get two happy returns out of this in fact I could get three happy returns out of this in fact let's see if I can get four happy returns out of this by gently teasing it apart look at that four four plants out of a single clump of happy returns each one of these even though they're bare root will flower this year now you want to get these planted as soon as possible day lilies of course love full Sun many of us know that but the day lily if you're beginning and gardening is probably one of the easiest flowers to grow and you know there are lot of snobs out there let's just face it and I know a bunch of them day lilies why would I put a common old day lily in my garden Oh give me a break some of the finest gardens I've ever seen in England have day lilies there's nothing wrong with day lilies are absolute fantastic and they're edible I love to eat the flowers and the petals are gorgeous and salads every part of the plant is edible and it's a marvelous marvelous perennial that comes to us from China and there's so many different shapes and colors and forms of day lilies how can you say I don't like day lilies because there's just they're just too diverse these days there's spider types they're those with ruffled edges they're just a fantastic perennial all right enough about day lilies I know I'm getting all myself box about that so if your daily least knob do not tell me because I don't like that now let's talk about some of the other perennials for instance lavender who doesn't love lavender I like any kind of perennial that has an aroma right fragrance is important to me it's one of the things always look for particularly if you're designing a space where it's sort of close and intimate maybe it's a little patio just outside your living room or your kitchen maybe it's a place you'd like to go out and just have a cup of coffee fragrance add so much to that experience I think you would agree lavender for me is one of my all-time favorites this is a Spanish lavender in my part of the world we have heavy clay soils ok so growing lavender is a challenge not every perennial is going to be a walk in the park ok you need to choose perennials at work in your area the day Lily just about grows anywhere that's why I started with day lilies but I'm telling you lavender is worth a try even though I live in a hot humid clay ridden environment I'm going to try my hand at lavender every year you can count on it now what I've learned if I want to grow this wonderful perennial lavender I will plant them in containers because I get them up out of that heavy clay soil because lavender resents having wet feet what do I mean by wet feet well that's water gathering around and hanging around the roots too much there are certain perennials that actually will thrive like Japanese iris for instance or Louisiana iris many of the iris members the iris family will take a lot of water except for the beautiful tall bearded iris you know the ones I'm talking about with the big gorgeous heads and blooms on them but your typical sort of Louisiana iris and even Japanese iris they're they're fine in water and even Khanna's will grow in standing water but lavender they're on the far end of the spectrum they really want to be on a restricted water diet if you will and you don't really need to fertilize them that much what I love about them beyond the fragrance is that they're really good-looking in containers and what I do is a really loose sandy mix with my soil I'll take a regular potting soil which usually works as it drains very well but I'll take like three to four parts potting soil and add one part sand and that makes sure that I get that sharp drainage around the lavender and always place a saucer underneath the lavender container because you don't want them to completely dry out all right the other thing is they prefer a slightly sweet soil so if your soil is very acidic which ours is which is another problem you may want to add just a little bit of hydrated lime to the soil which will sweeten the soil what I found believe it or not one of the best lavender plants I ever planted I took a concrete block that had two holes in it I knocked the centrepiece out of the block so I had a long sort of trough I put two lavender plants in that and those lavender plants thrived growing out of that concrete block because they were elevated right because I made the soil that I packed in around the roots very loose adding a little sand and the concrete blocks were alkaline they were made of lime and so that's sweet in the soil and those lavenders really perform very well I know concrete blocks are not the sexiest sort of material to use for a container but it's a lesson for us all to learn if you don't really care about what you know the aesthetics of the garden are and you wanted to do a small four foot square bed of lavender think about using concrete blocks and border it with concrete blocks and then maybe put a veneer around the concrete blocks if you don't know if you don't like the way they look but the lavender will thrive in a situation like that and just like these day lilies the lavender is going to require full Sun as you know I try to answer as many questions as I can keep the questions coming try to get to them it's wonderful hearing from you and I've got a few that I'd like to share with you because I think everyone learns from other other people's questions so this is Cheryl she's saying my hydrangeas aren't looking good they are from 1965 Wow there's a testimony to the longevity of some of these great garden plants and only produced about eight blooms on each bush and the color was very light blue what can I do for them well it sounds like a plant that is that old may need to be root pruned and what I would do is stimulate it by cutting the roots about two feet from the plant driving a Spade about every foot apart around the plant stimulate it make sure Cheryl you've cut out all the dead wood of that hydrangea okay I don't know what your feeding program has been but you really need to feed that plant if you're only getting a few blooms I think bolstering it with an organic all-purpose fertilizer would be very important one with a little higher middle number that's phosphorus that's where you're gonna get your bloom set you're gonna need to do that in the summer so you'll see a lot of blooms the next spring okay so this year this summer it's probably a little late now to see results because the buds have already formed on hydrangea macrophylla which is what you have that's that great old fashioned one you'll want to make sure that you fertilize it and feed it so when it begins to set those buds and summer there plenty of food therefore it okay if you want to bolster that blue color because you mentioned color one of the things you want to do is change the pH now I've talked about this a lot but it bears repeating the pH is is really the soil chemistry and what we want to do the bluer the hydrangea you want to go more acidic so you'll want to put an acidifier and an acidifying fertilizer you can buy this as a liquid or or granular it's acidifying fertilizers or for azaleas and camellias and rhododendrons and hydrangeas if you want them to bloom blue on the other hand if you go sweet with the soil if you add the lime to the soil that's going to make it the the pH is going to become much higher and the blooms will turn pink so if you're going for blue go for acidifying that soil by using us an acidified fertilizer or just aluminum sulfate now that's not a food it's just a compound that will make sure that the soil is acidic and give you that blue color you're looking for I hope that helps keep us posted on how that goes can't believe you got a hydrangea s'en it's there since 1965 I'm very envious okay so here's another hydrangea question I had ranges used to be prolific now they seem very sad yeah I'm gonna cry what would you do for them what fertilizer would you use also I'm in California Southern California huh this is from Phyllis a lot of what I said we're responding to Cheryl applies here I'm assuming that maybe Phyllis's are recently planted first of all hydrangeas in Southern California you got to give them some shade Phyllis you just can't put them out in full Sun north side of the house where they're going to get some shade is ideal you go around these old places here and you see along the north side of the house hydrangeas the drip off the house gives them the Moi's sure the Northside gives them that cool shady side and they just do so well so siding is very important there if you've got them out in full Sun they're going to stress out make sure your soil is very well worked up they have fibrous roots and you want that soil very loose and houmous rich lots of houmous in that alright and then just follow some of the directions that I mentioned about the fertilization you're going to see your biggest blooms next year if you start now okay and get an all-purpose organic fertilizer it can be a liquid form or granular or whatever you want to begin feeding them and you'll know you're feeding them well when that leaf color turns really dark green that'll be your sign okay OOP that helped people just love that hydrangeas and why shouldn't I I mean I love them okay so here we go I want this is from KC I want to move a bush and flowering tree in my yard so that would mean uprooting them what time of year should I do that all right KC what you want to do is move plants when they're asleep we were talking a little bit about this earlier in the show with these day lilies trees and shrubs I usually start moving those as soon as they go to sleep and they begin to nod off once they lose their leaves I'm assuming you have deciduous trees here it's a flowering tree and a bush what you want to do let's say that you're going to move on this fall what I would do is do some root pruning okay and I would take in three places and go around that trunk of that plant and I would drive a Spade in in three places in a circle and I would drive that Spade in and cut the roots okay and let's say that's one foot out from the trunk then when you dig it I want you to dig an 18 inch diameter around the trunk you see what I'm doing you're establishing some feeder roots then lift that up the soil and everything it's going to take a little work and move that over to the new site and do that in November in December before the weather gets really cold and then water the men and mulch the men and usually you want to create some sort of stabilization so the wind doesn't blow them around so drive a stake by them tie them to it so that they're not getting knocked around and loosening the roots and the roots connection to the soil the problem is you get a lot of that theater theater root gets disturbed they get torn and then what I like to use is a root stimulator at that time a lot of people say why would you do that because it's already turning cold well the soil temperature stays really warm okay so using a root stimulator you want to start getting those little roots going as quickly as possible and depending on where you live those roots will grow all winter long so that's that's the best way I've seen to move plants it's a very good question because there I'm always moving things around so I know exactly how you how you feel okay here's one from Colleen Taylor my sister bought a house last year and was elated to find one small penny Bush from the previous owners what can she do to make sure it flourishes this year and for 20 more well I want to take a moment and talk about that operative phrase twenty more this is the beauty of the peony isn't it if you are lucky enough to live in a part of the world where you can grow peonies that means that you get a nice long cold winter from about zone eight as the limit north is where you want to grow them they'll do very well now what you want to do with that peony is feed it with an all-purpose organic fertilizer just side dressing it what I what I call sod dressing if this is my plant I'll just take and sprinkle around the drip line of that plant some organic fertilizer okay and as soon as those flowers fade cut that bud off alright because we don't want any energy going into making peony pods and seed we want that foliage last as long as it possibly can because that foliage is a solar energy machine through photosynthesis it is taking light and it is transforming light from the Sun into carbohydrates and they are building up the tuber of that peony and that is going to do nothing but in earth to big beautiful blooms for you the next year now please make sure that that peony is getting at least 6 hours of full Sun a day all right so if there's a tree encroaching on that plant you may want to lift it and move it and we just talked about moving plants the best time to move that peony if you have to and I don't recommend it they resent being moved it would be to move that peony sometime in the fall once it goes to sleep and then nestled it over and don't plant it too deeply ok this is the number one reason peonies do not bloom is that people dig a hole the penny saddles the soil fills then around those buds and they won't bloom they'll come up with foliage but they won't bloom so I always try to plant peonies a little high and then they settling gets just about right and if you get them in a position like that they will come back for 75 years that's the wonderful thing about them if you've ever been to cemeteries you'll see old-fashioned roses you'll see a lot of old-fashioned shrubs like the spiraea that we have here and the Kannamma lays the japonica you'll also see iris and of course you'll see day lilies and peonies these are all old standbys and people have planted them in honor of their loved ones and in these cemeteries these flowers have flourished without very little care so to me that's always a good place to think about let me check out the plants there because these will be the easiest for me to grow in own garden and of course many of them are perennials this is such a beautiful time of year and I just love the enthusiasm that I see in your your messages on our YouTube site keep them coming and thanks for subscribing you know the the perennial is a wonderful plant obviously because it comes back but the beauty the beauty of them is just really extraordinary we we are moving at Moss mountain farm to more perennial planting and fewer annuals and I think a lot of you feel the same way we're all time oppressed and and hate that and we want to spend time in our garden but we don't want to be you know replacing plants all the time so we're coming up with lots of combinations of perennials where to me it's like a play you have actors coming on and off the stage you get this crescendo of bloom at certain times and so we're trying to work on perennials that bring that beauty every week of the season so I'm coming off and others coming on and so working on that dance that choreography is really exciting and that's what I like for people to observe when they come to visit us at Moss mountain farm we're open from the 1st of April until the end of June on Thursdays and Fridays and you can make a an appointment on our website and we'd love for you to come and then we pick back up in September September through Christmas and the fall is a wonderful time to come to Moss Mountain we also showcase perennials from Gilbert H Wilde and Sun this is a company that's been in business for well since 1885 strictly perennials and so our gardens are full of what ghw are given h wild grows they produce these are in fact these are the happy return day lilies they of theirs you can see that's a single clump from Gilbert a child that I divide it into four so they're very generous with the plants and the plants are very unique I'm excited to be helping them curate plants look for new varieties of perennials that will add a little more design pizazz in the garden not just your regular standbys but peppering it through with some you what I call johnny-come-lately that are very striking so thank you for following us on social media thank you for watching our PBS show garden home and our syndicated show garden style we appreciate all of you who've come to visit us at the farm we love having visitors and if you want to see this show you can see it on YouTube just go to youtube P Allen Smith make sure you become a subscriber we're posting virtually every day new content and we want to be there to answer every garden question you have we'll catch you next time [Music] you

Channel: P. Allen Smith

Views: 226,042

Rating: 4.932714 out of 5

Keywords: growing peonies, perennials plants, perennials garden, perennials that bloom all summer, garden home, daylilies garden, p allen smith, p allen smith garden home, p. allen smith, moss mountain farm, spring garden planning, gardening tips, spring garden, garden tips, gardening ideas, gardening (interest), home and garden, perennials flowers, bare root perennials, daylilies care and maintenance, daylilies care, daylilies plants, growing lavender, growing hydrangeas

Id: 0tl_hcgVcc4

Length: 25min 36sec (1536 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2019