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Thin leafed poor blooming azaleas?

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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.






Blue Iris

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Wordless Wednesday

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I found these blooming in my garden bed this weekend. I used to have several clumps of these, but the rest seem to have disappeared or else they are coming up slower than this clump of blue iris that happens to be in a very sunny portion of the garden.

I just love how delicate the petals look. Each petal is so thin, and fine, with shades of other colors within.

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The Christmas Rose – helleborus orientals

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Yes I know it’s Tuesday. I did not forget about Green Thumb Sunday. I just wasn’t able to make my post on Sunday because I was so busy. I’d rather have been posting, or gardening or pretty much anything else other than what I was doing! I was doing taxes!

It turned out to be a beautiful day on Saturday. I actually got outside, enjoyed some time with my husband sitting at our patio table that my husband had just hauled out and put back together that morning, and walked around taking photos of some of the flowers that were blooming.

Like this one. This is helleborus orientals. It’s also known as the Christmas rose. It’s called the Christmas rose because in some areas it blooms around Christmas time – even in the snow. Our area is too cool in the winter for it to live up to it’s name, however ours often is an early bloomer, tending to bloom around the same time as the crocus’.

I discovered that our Helleborus had one fully open flower and several buds that will soon bloom. I’ll try to get another photo when there are several buds blooming.

Isn’t this a lovely plant? The flowers are gorgeous but shy. They hang their pretty heads so it’s hard to see them in the garden. They draw you close so you can see their true beauty.

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