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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.






The garden grew overnight!

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Yesterday I told you about how lightening puts free nitrogen in the air and that often after a good storm that includes lightening you’ll notice that your plants have grown.

Well, the storm that I was referring to occurred about about 4 a.m. on Thursday the 10th of May, and here it is the 11th of May and when I look out at my garden everything is a mass of green and or blooms.

I wish I had a before and after picture to show you of my messy garden. You see, I haven’t finished trimming, pruning and pulling out all the dead tangle of old plants that died off last fall so there’s lots of graying dead plant stems and leaves throughout half the garden. Up until today that was clearly visible in many areas of the garden but when I look outside today the lush green vegetation of the super charged plants are hiding a good portion of it.

I went out and took a photo at about 2 pm this afternoon .. you can see in the left flower bed that I still have a lot of work to do to make it look really nice … but the plants sure have grown in just one day.

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What do you think?

An emerging hyacinth

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Hyacinth buds

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On Friday, after the scent of blooming hyacinths drew me out of the house I went outside with my camera. There were so many different spring flowers blooming!

I don’t know how many photos I ended up taking but it had to have been at least 50 pictures. I’m so thankful that I have a digital camera as it gives me the ability to take as many photos as I like and discard any that don’t turn out well.

I found this small hyacinth just getting ready to go into bloom. I love how the red tinged mauve buds contrast with the bright green leaves.

This hyacinth does look a little sparse. I’ll have to check on it later today and see if more buds came out. It might be that it’s a new bulb, or one that’s beginning to lose it’s strength. Hyacinth bulbs don’t always have the longest lifespan.

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