hi everyone this is Noelle from Petitti garden centers and we're up here in
Oakwood village near our corporate office and we have a lot of macrophylla
hydrangeas those hydrangeas are the big leaf and also the domed pom-pom flower
type that you can turn blue or pink some of them come in white too don't get
me wrong and then you'll also might know of a lace cap type as well they produce
those types of flowers too so that's your macrophylla type we had kind of a
nasty winter and so we had a lot of die back on the hydrangeas
now I had a video before about a couple years ago where we talked about pruning
into the hydrangea you want to prune in the spring on macrophyllas you just
want to prune to the uppermost buds well let me tell you there were not a lot of
buds that were above this green growth here so what I did is I went through and
I pruned out a ton of old wood unproductive wood nothing was showing no
new buds you're gonna see only a few branches actually exhibited new growth
towards maybe midway the rest of it was pretty much died back okay so we went
through and pruned out as much as we can again any of this old wood that is
brittle broken that you can pull right out do it try to clean up the center of
this hydrangea as best you can the reason being there's all this new
growth that's tucked in just waiting to emerge down there so Taylor will show
you a lapse video of me going through trying to remove as much of this old
wood as possible I'll probably come back through and work on it even a little bit
more the next thing that we wanted to show you is we have a lot of questions
about how to fertilize my macrophylla hydrangea it's not blooming well I want
to turn it blue all of those questions come in and so spring is a really great
time to do that so the first thing that you want to do
is pull back the mulch with the cultivating fork go ahead and pull back
the mulch to around the drip line the hydrangea that's where the branches
reach out to okay the next thing is you can apply in succession a lot of
different things so the first thing that I applied was actually triple phosphate
triple phosphate is a fertilizer it's a high phosphorus fertilizer that we use
to kind of push plants into bloom cycle so if your hydrangeas are not blooming
well you know you're getting enough sunlight you know it's getting enough
moisture try applying triple phosphate it only takes a very small amount so the
directions on triple phosphate are 1/2 teaspoon per foot of branching so again
I used one teaspoon on this hydrangea it has about two foot diameter of branching
okay so I spread that around first the next thing that I did was the holly tone
we're gonna try to turn this hydrangea blue when you want blue hydrangeas use
acidic fertilizer the acid fertilizer is Holly tone that we used Holly tone says
about a cup per one foot of branching again so two feet diameter here I use
two cups the next thing that we used was actually aluminum sulphate aluminum
sulphate is an acidifier for the soil we use it around the hydrangeas we want to
turn them blue because the aluminum helps that blue color plus the sulfur
reduces the pH makes it more of an acidic condition which again will make
those macrophylla hydrangeas turn blue so the aluminum sulfate was very similar
to the Holly tone it's about one cup per foot of branching okay after that I went
ahead and I scratched it in with the cultivating fork all the way around the
hydrangea and after that I went ahead and I watered everything in around the
hydrangea moistened it in and we're ready to go we're ready to turn this
macrophylla hydrangea blue and we'll show you later in the season
if we succeeded enjoy