Preparing the Garden for Visitors

Preparing the Garden for a Tour – In this video we do some maintenance to get the garden ready for the open house in June. It usually takes about a month for the plants to grow out a bit after being pruned so it should be the perfect timing.

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welcome to Hort tube my name is Jim putam in this video we’re going to do a little maintenance uh in the garden this morning maybe show off a few things uh that are in flower or looking good kind of in between flowering a bit this at this point you get these early you definitely get this early spring color explosion almost here in the garden and then we go through a period where we’re waiting for the annuals waiting for the uh perennials uh to bloom and uh and a few other summer flowering shrubs there are a few things flowering but it’s it right this minute it’s more about foliage color texture uh that kind of thing the pies have bloomed out but the foliage still looks fantastic on them right here in front of this golden Falls Red Bud we do have a butterfly weed uh blooming a scus tuberosa that has snuck up somehow in the middle of this uh in the middle of this grouping with the aelia and the pien and the and the red bud uh starting to starting to show off there uh but it has uh it it’s in a tough neighborhood over here because this red bud grows so fast it’s unbelievable I live if you’ve been follow if you follow the channel just like 2 months ago I I pruned this thing up off the ground and now that is in one month what what is it maybe 6 weeks since this first Leaf sign of leaves came out on this thing uh we’ve got three feet of growth on some of the branches which is just unbelievable how fast this thing actually grows so I need to lift it up again it’s laying on on all kinds of things here I want to narrow it in a bit it’s been super narrow uh a super narrow feature here in the garden it is over time you know up here adding a new Branch here or there that’s making it wider and wider so I’ll probably take a few of those off as well and just kind of narrow it back in a bit but um pretty straightforward I don’t really think about it too much this thing just comes right back from any kind of pruning I do on it so I pretty quickly just will go right around the skirt and uh lift up maybe 18 in and within month and a half 2 months it’ll be back down to the ground and that’ll probably be it for this year the most of the growth on this thing’s going to happen before Midsummer once Midsummer you know or by late June early July it’s definitely going to be like why is it so hot out here and it’ll stop growing uh at least slow down growing uh at that point this is what I was talking about about branches that have now gotten wider and wider and I’m not trying to use this thing as a screening plant we are creating kind of taller plants through the middle of this bed so that it leaves some mystery on the other side but I’m not trying to have just an absolute wall uh to accomplish that so this whole Branch uh here I’ll take off the the the smaller ones like this one I can definitely take off with a pair of hand pruners but make sure you’re sizing the tool to the to the job if I do try to do this big Branch right here with these hand pruners I’m going to do more damage than good I just leave all this material right under the base of the plant these big giant leaves it’s 90° today kind of dry outside those leaves will Wilt up to nothing in no time uh and be gone the bigger branches like this one I’ll uh I won’t put under the plant but the just the small leafy stuff uh can absolutely be tucked up under here and be its own mulch within 24 hours it won’t look anything like that uh this one branch I just want to track it back to main branch and take it off I will say no matter what you do to prune one of these Red Buds they break this is a very sharp tool and right about 2/3 of the way through it it just broke the rest of the way off I didn’t cut it I cut into it and then it breaks uh so that’s just what happens I got it it’s clean enough that it’s not a problem but um you just know that these bigger branches on these Red Buds uh these really weak wood I mean you can it’s just unbelievable how weak the wood is on one of these things uh so it’s even you know you you’ll you’ll be careful this the amount of the branch that you’re taking off I probably the way I could have handled that if it was a bigger branch is I could have started at the bottom and kind of taken some of the weight off a few times before I cut it all the way up to the top but I think overall that looks better and we’re having an open house on June 22nd so doing this on like May 22nd is uh something like that so I have a month and it should get right back to looking like it did before uh but it won’t be out over the boxwood and the Laura pedum and all the perennials that were around it that it was trying to eat we don’t have a lot of formal plants in the garden we have some several plants that just kind of grow formal looking there’s a few conifers out here that have that kind of look without us having to prune on them but we do have a few boxwoods the variegated boxwood that I have turned into a two ball topiary uh maybe two years ago this was a clearance plant that happened to have a single trunk going all the way up through the middle and I was able to turn it into this topi area in a video way back when and I have actually wanted to turn this into a three ball topiary but I cannot get a volunteer uh piece in the middle to to to come up every all the new growth it’s got a lot of growth that I I I want to prune this morning but I just can’t get one that’s centered right in the middle that I’ll leave eventually to become a new trunk and become that third ball it’ll happen eventually but it’s just interesting I’ve pred it like three times now on each time I’ve been looking there’s one right here I may leave just to see what does uh and maybe maybe that’ll end up being the one but I got to go through and just take a little bit off of uh these this any kind of pruning I’m doing on something like this uh has the tendency to create a little bit of uh shagginess down at the very bottom of the plant as well and uh I will look for that as well if there’s any growth that’s kind of coming up from the bottom I like to stand over top of them and just uh kind of go down over the side like that there been other things in the container with it all along that have kept that ball from filling in all the way around the bottom but it eventually will I always miss something when I’m talking to a camera that I usually get later try to avoid that Center piece that may end up being a a volunteer to be the third ball later I think that’s good for now it might be a little piece here or there that uh come back around to uh but not too bad again maybe one of these two right here will be the one that will give me that third that third ball in the future we planted these annuals perennials and annuals uh in the middle of this what has in the past been an annual border we put in this little miniature red bud this calic carpa is pretty easy to keep uh the size we want to keep it it’s a white burying calic carpa but some of the lower kind of horizontal branches on it are going to eat some of this bed I don’t mind if they come out and over it a bit these zenas there’ll still be plenty of sunlight on them but I do need to get in here and make sure that none of these just little bottom horizontal branches are just going to go right over the top of them I can pull some weeds at the same time and our we have a ton of tree seedlings this time of year this is something I’m on the we’re Scouting For is this is this is our native Red Bud seedlings that we get all over the place we get the Neighbors Red Bud probably seeds from I mean uh red maple probably seeds from the old red maple that was in this front garden as well so there’s a ton of red Maples there’s a tonnel of of gustum uh coming up from seed and they can hide really well inside of your plants and I can still pull them when they’re this is about the max height for these tree seedlings that I can pull them before you know I end up just breaking them off and and I don’t get to get them by the root and they just come back uh from that so I’m you know as I’m going around making some of these pruning decisions and again all this material is just going to go right back up under this uh right back up under this calic carpa and uh just mulch itself but as I’m doing this any of these weedy here’s weedy Vines this is porcelain Berry which is probably top five worst weeds top five step’s definite thinks it’s this is the worst weed I was able to get the roots on this one this is a rare thing even a very small uh one of these will only be two or three inches tall and you break them off and you don’t get the roots and they come right back from it but um this porcelain Berry is almost it almost feels like it’s designed to be torn off uh and not you know damage its own Roots by that like if something comes by and grabs it so we go by some we’ll be sticking out of a plant we’ll grab it it just breaks off there’s no you can’t get the roots on it especially when it’s down in a plant like that and then it just comes right back but again out here Scouting For small little limbs to prune on things but while I’m up in something I’m making sure and I see another red butt across the path over here that I’ll go and uh that I’ll go and grab as well we’ve been tree forming this Summertime Blues Vitex for a couple Seasons now and uh it gets a lot of suckers down at the base I cut some of those off in a video for the weekly garden planner just showing some showing some uh summer pruning um that I was talking about in a video but it has these branches that are going across the path and this is pretty typical you know this time of year you’re going to get the growth that happens in the spring is so fast so quick that there’s going to be branches that are getting in your way getting in your face rubbing up against your car and all kinds of things you know that need to be addressed this time of year but I mean don’t hesitate if you have a branch I get these you know what’s the best time to prune the Vitex well the ideal time to prune the Vitex was back in March when I just generally pruned the Vitex uh but if you’re asking me when is the best time to take this limb that’s in my face off of it it’s anytime that you’re out there and you can do it you know quick and easy uh this is you know something for the compost pile any any branch that I know in the future is going to do the same thing and I just cut this back to you know where there’s a vertical piece on it with the flower Bud flower buds are already on these which is a little little bit early uh but if I know it’s going to come off in the future I’ll just go ahead and take it off now sometimes you’ll get layering on the branches where where they’ll do this and you know an example of that is this one branch right here that’s coming from the bottom and you know I’ll know that that’s going to drop continue to drop down uh in the future so I just go ahead and take it off there’s some on the other side that I’ll grab as well but I have the path back this Branch was in my face and it’s just not something to worry about if it’s one branch here or one branch there just take it another topiary here to prune but I’m back in the bed and here’s this uh porcelain Berry which really need a triel to kind of dig out but there’s an example it’s so good at just breaking off right at the base or up the limp up the branch somewhere you think you got it you definitely didn’t get it uh here’s one coming up through the middle of agapanthus that’s about to bloom and uh there it is it broke off so about about two 3 weeks I’ll be pulling it again unless I get down in there with a tri and actually pull it out if you got any again this is this is this one branch kind of stuff that I’m doing this uh purple Daydream Laura pedum is coming back here to you know to try to eat you know this one’s one that grows wider than tall and you know we I want a short growing low pedum uh and this is probably the best of the dwarf low pedms out on the market right now but its tendency is to get wide and uh so rather than you know going up and constantly uh it is going to try to get wider and occasionally you know once or twice twice a year I’ll just make sure that I’m allowing it some Breathing Room you know allowing the things around it a little bit of breathing room right it’s laying on the uh it’s laying on the carax on the other side so quick and easy it’s already finished flowering wouldn’t matter anyway I’m not giving it any general pruning I’m not I’m just taking off branches that are potentially causing other plants problems and just like that you know the other plant that are around it are very appreciative of my uh of my uh raining it back in just a bit like I said earlier we don’t have a lot of Meatball plants in the garden meaning plants that I’m pruning into formal balls and shapes and I certainly don’t want to do that to that lower pedum as well uh so I’m not trying to prune every single branch on the on the end and put it it back into that shape I just want to get the limbs that are causing me problems and maybe one or two that’s you know growing out of proportion to the rest of the plant uh but that’s it this is another this is a beehive Holly this was another clearance plant and this one weirdly had I don’t know it was like seven trunks in the pot it still has two uh because I couldn’t get those two apart I couldn’t get those two out uh from one another they were kind of hugging one another so it has stayed as a uh you know two it’s two separate plants growing together it just needs the occasional the occasional haircut to get it back into into shape these Japanese Holli are pretty ideal uh container plants for us they’re they actually like uh a little more water than some other things and so in these containers where you’re watering these flowering things a lot they kind of seem to far better than they do in the ground if they’re ignored I think overall overall that’s better but this is a very very inexpensive clearance plant that I’ve turned into a topiary it’s got two trunks that’s been underplanted and it’s you know um much you know you you can turn something into something that would have cost you a lot of money uh if you just but again I’m looking on the table when I’m buying a clearance plant like this of these Evergreen plants and looking is there a trunk in there that will allow me to just limb the thing up like this and do something like this cuz you know for seven or eight bucks uh we got a you know pretty nice little piece here I put this photo on Instagram the other day this is this Dancing Queen hosta has really worked out well looking like it’s kind of coming out from under the deer Dolores hydrangea uh this is a remontant one from the uh Southern Living plant collection remontant just means it’ll Bloom on old and new wood so right now in may it’s blooming on the old wood from the end of last season that’s what we’re seeing here uh but as we’ve seen some new wood already coming out of the center of this thing this is this is new wood from this year down in the bottom they have uh buds as well and so what we tend to get on these remontant ones is a big heavy flowering now and then we’ll get some ongoing flowering the rest the rest of the season of course these are going to be pink or blue or purple or whatever your soil PH and alumin combo kind of allows for to me it just kind of doesn’t matter um I think they’re all beautiful pink blue whatever I’m not going to get out here and start manipulating my soil to change that hostas are starting to flow uh and a lot of our hosta are starting to flow we probably need to do a hosta video we may that do that next week um slugs are doing you know hair damage here or there on a on a couple of them U so probably do this a little sooner than later because our hosta come up and they look perfect you know for that first month two months and then of course their uh a buffet wrong plant buddy you see how their native bumblebe you know native bee comes to a sterile flower cuz it’s colorful uh and is looking around for it but we got plenty of other things out here for them and plenty of natives for our native be but he did come over here confused as to why isn’t that why isn’t that got anything for me uh so let’s move on the viburnum macrum I had it tied up to this steak in the process of tree forming it this was a little one gallon plant like three years ago maybe this was a plan about this tall that was planted here and we’ve turned it into a tree form it’s got I think it’s got plenty of thickness now to stand here I’m going to leave the steak in place but I’m going to take off the stretch tie I had done a little bit of damage with the stretch tie last year it grew so fast and the other thing is down here at the bottom I’ve got some suckering going on again anytime you’re pruning on these things uh you’re going to end up you know end up with suckering haven’t cleaned that up quite well enough but just showing you what I’m out here doing this morning is getting some of these suckers up and here is a cherry a native Native Cherry coming up again as you’re doing these little projects you’ll find weeds and weeds and things and uh here’s another one of those uh here’s another one of those Vines again broke it off didn’t get it out cuz you I’m in too big of a hurry talking to a camera but there’s a little pile of things down at the bottom of it they can just absolutely stay there if I wanted to I could go through here and take off the flowers you know the spent flowers from earlier this year I’m just not that patient I will take the opportunity to go up in here though and look for any kind of Crossing branches and I do have one that is just crossing right across everything else so another contribution to the uh pile down below but I’m just going to go through here this this is leaning against this steak and it Stakes down into the ground and so I think that I can just now I’m going to remove this stretch tie uh and it’s it’s got enough support to sit here in that but I think it’s almost good to go regardless if I feel like I need to I’ll come back over here and uh stake it again or or tie it back up and I can put a piece of uh uh rubber hose around it before I put my stretch tie on it so I wouldn’t have done that damage there’s a lot of different ways that I could have protected this trunk put something around it and then put the tie around that and that would have prevented me from doing this damage initially again I typically tie things off and then I remember to come back and take the ties off or put new Ties on this time I did not and did some damage uh to a tree so that was that’s on me if I if you think you’re going to forget about it or you want to not switch out the stretch tape uh you know very often then you would want to put something again a piece of old rubber hose is a good idea you can just cut about a 3inch piece of it put a slit down it wrap it around the tree like that and then tie it off to your steak we do a lot of dalas from seed and we actually collect the seed on them at the end of the season and then they’re planted in various spaces around the property we’re looking back from the neighbor’s house to the other side of the uh viburnum macrum that just showed off or the Chinese Chinese viburnum this uh we’re about to get some flowers first Dalia flowers we got a few open ones over on the other side of the vegetable garden but all the ones we have so we have some of the like hybrid named varieties in a perennial border over here that you know we kind of know the names of these are ones that we have collected the seed on that have actually been crossed in this garden and so it’s those ones come up from seed and they’re surprise surprise we get all kinds of different different um shape sizes and colors on the dalas we have in the garden but we’ve got them lined up in places like this where during the season you know they’ll get up about 7 ft tall they have the fence to lean on on one side this plant shrub to lean on on the other and they’ll be showing color over top of these other plants this property’s actually only had two owners and it’s 85 to 90 year history something like that uh and we took out the last of those aelas along the front Foundation earlier this year and we had taken out the uh red maple that had been planted of course that thing actually wasn’t all that old uh but anything else that had been in this Garden has just kind of gone over time we’ve we’ve taken them out but there’s one rose there’s a climbing hose along the fence it’s behind the Lura pedum it’s behind the uh behind the osmanthus fragrance and it climbs up through the low pedum it climbs along the fence and we just haven’t had any reason to take this Rose out it’s been perfectly happy back here not diseased uh it’s got flowers coming on it it’s got beautiful pink flowers I’m sure the neighbor enjoys it when it’s in flower we really can’t see it all that much from this side but it hasn’t caused us any issues uh and it seems perfectly happy back here uh and it’s got tons of buds on it of course a few few have already few have already opened and finished but interesting this is the only I think the only plant on the property that’s kind of to the original to the original owner and it can just stay we’re currently like a month before we’re going to have a lot of people touring the garden and this is about the amount of time it’s going to take to recover some of the things I’m pruning to recover so these little these little Cuts I’m making on things which isn’t a is any isn’t any real General pruning but anything I’m cutting I kind of want it flushed back out that would include perennials and annuals and other things we’re giving them a last haircut so we hoping that they’re kind of peak uh when we have when we have folks over this is another one this pearls are perfume philadelphus was just absolutely in full flour but what we know about this plant is it will continue to flour and it is it’s got new growth coming along the stems and there’s an open flower on it right there and if we look a little further down this stem I see another piece of new growth coming right there I see it right there I see it right there and it’s got a flower Bud on it this thing will continue to push and flush growth and continue to bloom during the summer it’ll never Bloom completely white like it did a few weeks ago it’s super super super fragrant but I think a just a little pruning down to some of this new growth just all I’m doing going to do is take the ends of these branches off just to kind of stimulate some new growth down in the middle of this plant and that alone is all I need to do to get this thing you know to really start to push some new growth and I think by the time a month goes by that new growth at least some of them will be some of them will be in flower and if I see the new growth coming on the side of the branch I’ll just cut it right above that cuz I know there’s going to be a flower on that for sure uh every single piece of new growth on this plant ends uh in a flower bud that’s uh that’s what we know about this plant and in fact this plant back in the December freeze in 22 so two Decembers ago uh this plant still had a couple flowers on it before that day that same day before that uh that big freeze came that night it was unbelievable it bloomed I’m not saying it was again not overselling how many flowers were on it but it was one or two flowers in December 13th which I thought you know I thought was pretty amazing because there certainly wasn’t anything else flowering in this Garden except for a few Chamas you know or something like that at that point another thing we’re evaluating this morning as we’re trying to think about you know things we need to get under control here or make sure they’re kind of Peak at the time we want them to be Peak cuz you can kind of man you know again manipulate this a bit and you know cut something a month before you want it looking great uh and it likely will be in a month looking looking great but in our blueberries here planted to St John’s wart as a what hopefully you know for just a ground cover to kind of shade the roots on these blueberries which are highly exposed to the sun we’re about 20 minutes from them being in the sun for the absolute rest of the day and they’re the blueberries are performing well enough but this St John’s work’s getting out of control and so a lot of your some of your ground cover things can really uh eat a lot of space this was a well-intended a well-intended idea that uh has kind of gotten out of control this is an area where a lot of uh because the mul Mulch and um uh wood chips have been dumped on the driveway a lot of times just as quick work we’ve dumped the wood chips along this along this Edge over here on the side of the driveway This is highly amended soil so anything you plant over here really just go kind of goes wild that St John’s work’s absolutely done that so I got to get some of this under control or at some point if you think you can’t keep control over it you probably just need to completely get rid of it and that may be the case with this St John’s work which we absolutely love and the bees the bees love the the flowers are just crazy intoxicating to bees they go they they get on them and it almost looks like they’re drunk they they they just they they go into just a hyper mode when they’re on the flowers beautiful yellow flowers whether have to rain it back in or put it in some other spot or just decided it’s not for our garden another weed that I’d like to point out this is horse nettle which is in that same same plant Solen ACA the the plant family with uh potatoes and tomatoes and peppers and a lot of the plants that we really really love we do not love horse nle look at the Thorns along the along the branches down to the bottom this is not an easy weed to pull right uh luckily the uh let’s see we’ve got it does have insect issues so that’s good at least the uh at least the and this is I said this in a weed video uh years ago one of the reasons to make sure you’re pulling weeds are out is they are kind of uh spots to uh you know where where insects can kind of hide uh where you know because this is so overgrown now and there’s so many weedy things coming from the side property and and actual you know weeds growing in here this becomes a hiding place for Slugs snails uh and all kinds of and it’s just the same kind of flowers you see these kind of flowers on potatoes and uh tomatoes peppers it’s in that same family but look at all the things that have been been eating on it but this is the Carolina horse nle it’s got a thorn it’s got thorns on the leaves so that that’ll that’ll that’ll wake you up this in the morning as well but wear gloves when you pull this one for sure this is the kind of spot that I’m looking at the color the texture of the leaves the you everything about it kind of looks great but it’s on its way to looking uh like a jungle you know it can it can go from one to the other uh real quick uh and so I think I got to get in here and these you know where this you know the the the purple wi Gila has completely grown into to the gold yila uh where the David viburnum is completely stretched up into this side of it uh any if I have uh branches that are just going completely vertical you know like this you know I probably want to just cut Trace those back down into that plant the uh even the fat hedra here is now laying all over everything it needs a little bit of a little bit of a haircut the tree form uh encor zelia you can’t see the trunk on it at all anymore so you know I probably want to cut a little bit you know just around that area and it just finished it spring flowering so I’ll also come through here and do a just a just give this thing a bit of a a kind of a formal haircut cuz it’s just a little round ball on a stick expose it just a little bit more and then in the summer and in the fall we’ll get more flowers on it it still has a single flower on it at this point but again a reshaping of it but this is kind of thing where the it’s the right things together but I think once a year or so it probably needs to go in here and just get a little bit of control of it that’s the kind of things we’re doing in the garden as we prepare you know to host a lot of people here later on in the season it wouldn’t matter if I was hosting anyone regardless I’d like to get some air movement around these plants and and and prevent them from absolutely completely growing into one another so much that it becomes a much harder job anyway there you go what you have going on in your garden right now it’s starting to get summers in the air we got a couple 90° days here uh in a row we’ve had a very extended I think overall Cool Spring I felt I feel pretty lucky in that regard we’ve had a couple 90 Dee days at this point but more coming on the forecast uh at this point so we’re um but in the morning good time to be out here uh taking care of some of these uh projects thanks for following along