Hello friends welcome to Gardening with Creekside I am Jenny just a few short weeks ago I had my
friend Kata from Walters Garden come and we did a front porch chat together during that video we
talked about how sometimes growing heucheras or coral bells can be a little bit of a challenge
especially here in the south and Kata and I were talking about that for me at least I had the most
success when my heucheras are in containers so what we are going to do today is show you a little bit
of maintenance that you may find yourselves having to do every so often because one of the common
complaints about heucheras is that they don't seem to last a long time especially if they're in
the landscape for me they last a lot longer in a container but the reason a lot of times that they
don't last for as long is this heaving process that the eucharist go through basically it's kind
of like they start to uproot themselves from the soil and then they're exposed and kata was saying
a simple way to make sure that they last a lot longer and you get a good lifespan out of your
eucharist is to simply replant them that is what i'm going to show you today right here i have a
fantastic heucheras that performs magnificently well for us here in North Carolina with our hot
humid days and nights this is lemon love lemon love is a heucheras that is part of the vilosia
species of heucheras vilosias are native to the southeast united states therefore they are perfect
for our heat and humidity and can handle them like a champ lemon love has been in this container
this might have been its fourth year in here i originally planted it as a mixed container
the other plants were either annuals or they were perennials that i then pulled out and
moved somewhere else because lemon love was doing so magnificently well and filled up this big urn
all by itself this summer however it was looking a little sad now i know it's going towards the end
of november and everything is looking a little sad but lemon love particularly this year was
not doing well and if you look down inside of the container and you're looking at the lemon
love you can tell why because it is starting that kind of upheaval heating process where those stems
are coming out so the roots are not down deep into the plant so we're going to fix that today
again this thing's been in the ground for like four years or in the pot for four years so if
i might be struggling a little bit with it but you know hey that's all right it'll be my workout for
the day i am going to use my um my hori hori knife remember we've talked about this before
it's a great garden tool still have not used it because it's nice and clean so this is going
to be the perfect application for me to use it because this container is a little odd shaped and
sometimes when you have containers that are fatter or wider at the bottom and the um size but then
they come in and narrow it's hard to get that soil out so my horny hoary will be able to cut it out
but first what i'm going to do is just probably just go in here and cut out the um the lemon love
see what we've got get it out kind of inspect it i got a wagon i'm gonna put it in a wagon
just so i don't make a hot mess too much of a hot mess all over the ground right here so that's what
i'm gonna do is just kind of start digging and see if i can get this baby out of here
all right well that wasn't so bad um now one thing that i always preach and i'm going to continue to
preach till probably the day that i die is that when you have a container and you are replanting
the container or you're planting it for the first time you want to have this container filled
completely with as much soil as you possibly can of course now this one does have a big hole so i
do have like a couple of rocks at the bottom just so all the soil doesn't flush out of the bottom
but do not put in the bottom of your container you know packing peanuts or pine cones or water
bottles to try to use less soil right to save you money in the beginning because
your roots cannot get nutrition out of those materials you need as much soil and good
food in the container as you possibly can for your plants i'm going to take this bad boy and try to
dump it in into this wagon so that way i can just haul it off and put it in the compost pile
and then we'll refill it and start all over again
so uh
okay so you can see that my container is completely empty i do have the rock in
there just to prevent like i said all the soil from you know going through the bottom of the
hole a trick that i learned this past season from an article in fine gardening magazine
was if you're doing container planting is to fill about the bottom third of the container
with compost so we're going to use our land and seed compost in the bottom third of this container
and then we're going to use the professional potting mix that we
use here at the nursery to top dress it from there you don't have to use a professional mix obviously
but like the proven winter's potting soil any really high quality potting soil
will work for you i just happen to have a bag of this open so that's what we're going to use today
but we're going to grab the land and see and like i said about the bottom one-third of the container
i did this with my window boxes this past year um man were they stellar so
okay so that's about the bottom third we're going to break up any chunks
the idea is that as the roots grow and as the plant matures that it then hits those
this layer of compost and they just take off it's another food source for them nice and nutritious
provides you know great drainage because it isn't a container so that's not too much of an
issue but the land and sea has great little pieces of aged pine bark finds in it so of
course that is always beneficial what i'm going to do now is take the potting soil put it in top
and i am gonna add just a little bit of the compost in with the potting soil because this
is a professional mix and there's no fertilizer in there it's just a straight um planting medium
so i'm just gonna add just a little bit to give it a little shot of food to begin with
because we are going to be potting up a perennial in a container this perennial is going to stay in
here hopefully for several more years and we are going into winter i am going to go ahead and add a
sprinkle of biotone to this container now normally of course you know when you use your biotone
you make your hole you put it in the bottom put the plant in and put the potting soil back on top
because we're going to break apart this eucharist just a little bit i don't know that i'm going to
have like a specific hole i'm just gonna put it in there it'll all leach together it is fine you
don't have to be that particular because you know what god made these plants nice and strong they're
smart they'll figure it out so we're just gonna do about two handfuls in here and then just work it
because as it rains and or we water it all this will reach its roots
and it'll be fine i think sometimes we tend to really over baby our plants a
little bit and not give them enough credit they're a lot tougher than what we think
okay now this is going to be the interesting part because
we're going to take this lemon love and we're going to figure out
what's going on here so of course you have the main plant which is back here
but there's about i don't know close to six inches
of a trunk sticking out we want that all the way down in there
i was trying to decide if i want to take these pieces off
i'm wondering if they will root themselves or let's get as many pine needles out of here
you know what that's gardening it's just experimenting and trying it
right you just got to get in there and figure it out so many times i think we want people
to tell us exactly what we what to do and that's certainly our goal here at creekside
is to help you but sometimes you just got to get in there and kind of figure it out right so
back here there's that much of a stalk sticking out we want this to be underneath
the soil level so i think that's what we're going to do is just get this girl out
maybe we really will have a hole
pull it back
there we go
still a little high
so i'm gonna do over here is separate my old soil for my good stuff
to make a pile of my good stuff away from my old potting soil
because i'm sure i'll have to come back in here with some more
once she's in and fill her in so there we go i think since i do have a hole i'll add a little
biotone straight to that spot right there here we go
also going to come over here and take off some of the root ball because those roots
had grown all the way down to the bottom of the container so we're going to loosen those up
okay
oh yeah now she's down in there now we're cooking with peanut oil all right so now we're
just going to come back through and take all the good potting soil and put it up around her
filling in any little holes and we want to go
up higher right because that's the whole point those little trunks that we're sticking out
we want them to be buried
eucharis are what we consider a semi-evergreen meaning in the winter
they never lose all of their leaves but they're not in a period of active foliage growth so the
foliage will tend to look a little ratty in the winter time and that's okay because as soon as
spring comes around this foliage will actually die back as the new foliage emerges and then we can
just take scissors or gardening pruners and just go around and just trim off all the dead stuff
do
do okay my friends as easy as that and as simple as that lemon love has been replanted should be
a very happy plant this winter and going in to next growing season again i'm not going to see
really any kind of change in this plant for the winter it won't be until next spring and summer
that i will know if what i have done has been a great success because she will cover
this entire pot and be gorgeous and look like this very happy euchra living her best life
in this container so as simple as that if you have a eucharist that's not looking well
it looks like you have almost like trunks kind of coming out of the base of it simply dig it up
get as many of the roots as you possibly can and then plant it deeper so that those trunks are now
in the soil it will make a world of difference as always we appreciate you thank you so much for
gardening with creekside you all have a great day we'll see in the next video bye friends