beautiful plants with low maintenance requirements and varieties to suit all gardens
ferns are something you will absolutely enjoy growing
in the ornamental plant series
today we will look at growing ferns they come in a lot
of different varieties and in your local garden center you can see a lot of
different varieties of ferns that you can pick up for growing in your home
garden and there are a lot of fern varieties over hundreds of thousands of
varieties that you will find however I will go over two of the most common
varieties and the most beautiful varieties in my opinion in today's
episode they are abundantly found in nature here
you can see a couple of photos from the Redwood National Park and let's now jump
into the first fern variety which is asparagus fern this is a beautiful
looking fern variety with beautiful leaves as you can see here and they can
be shaped to almost any size you want or any shape you want just like all other
ferns they love shade and they produce these nice green leaves and the only
maintenance they really require is pruning and as I mentioned you can shape
them into any form that you want and we will talk in more detail when we look at
our next fern variety which is the fox tail fern which is another very popular
fern variety that you can easily find in almost any gardening store and since
the leaves look like the tail of a fox it gets its name the fox tail fern and
as you can see here this is a beautiful looking fern variety the one that
you're seeing right here has a little bit of yellow leaves and ferns are
shade-loving plants so even with the slightest sunlight you will see that
some of the leaves turn yellow and that is why it's recommended that you grow
ferns in shade or partial shade at least and let's look at the watering
requirements now most ferns like moist and humid conditions so don't let your
fern plants dry out make sure they're on a good drip
irrigation schedule and that way they can produce the best leaves if you have
weeds growing around your fern plant make sure that you remove those weeds
because they will compete for water and nutrients and since you water your fern
plants a lot you can see weeds like clover growing around your plant like
you see here so just make sure you remove all the weeds around your plant
and then your plant will stay healthy ferns prefer soil that is loose and rich
with organic matter they don't really need a lot of fertilizer but if you want
healthy plants and you want nice green leaves on your fern plant then you can
use either of these two fertilizers you need to use a high nitrogen fertilizer
for good leaf growth so if you're using an organic fertilizer you can use blood
meal which is high in nitrogen and if you like to use salt based fertilizers
you can use a high nitrogen fertilizer like the one you see on your screen here
or any all-purpose fertilizer so the maintenance that you need to do for all
fern plants is pruning the dead leaves the fern leaves will dry and
become yellow and brown so you need to remove them to preserve good aesthetics
for your plant and just by doing that and by regular watering you can have
beautiful fern plants that will adorn your garden and as far as insects and
diseases go the fern plants are relatively maintenance free there are
not a lot of insects that attack the fern plant the only exception may be
slugs and snails which try to make holes and some of the phone leaves but unless
you are growing the large fern leaves like the Australian fern you won't
really see a slug problem in your fern plants as well check out my video on
controlling snails and slugs to control them in your home garden now fern plants
do require re potting when you're growing them in containers and they do get very
root bound as you can see here the roots are pretty interesting they have these
rounded kind of tubules on the end of their roots and they
do get root bound very quickly so I recommend that you re-pot your fern
plant at least every two years for optimal growth
so there we have it folks
let me know if you like this episode it's a break from growing all the
edibles that I've been posting for the last few years and if you like me to
post more videos or ornamental plants or flowering plants do put in your
comments below and I would also like to know if you grow ferns in your garden
see you again soon happy gardening