How did your Azaleas, and Rhododendrons do this year? Did they bloom well? Is the foliage lush and full?
If you azaleas didn’t seem to do as well this year as they have in the past, or if the leaf coverage is rather thin you might want to be proactive and take some measure to help them get healthy so they’ll bloom well next season.
Apply azalea fertilizer in the spring. You might want to give your plants one light dose before they begin to bloom, perhaps just as they come out of dormancy, and another dose shortly after they’ve finished blooming. Fertilizing will encourage better growth and the plant should get fuller looking.
Lightly pruning blooming branches and bringing the flowers indoors or lightly prune immediately after the blooming season ends.
You’ll be cutting off some of the new growth, but when pruning takes place near the beginning of the season it actually encourages new growth. By pruning, fertilizing and watering regularly throughout the season your azaleas should be stronger the following year.
You might even want to thin some of the older branches after the blooms fade in order to shape the tree for the following year. It make take a few years to prune your azalea into a nice shape that shows off it’s fullness as you do not want to prune too much off at once.
Azaleas don;t do all that well, period, in the Tampa area. But, just three hours north in Gainesville, it is like an azalea paradise. They just love the long growing season and the damp warmth. I did not feed my azaleas, but my neighbors did and you could see a small difference.