Great Garden Questions from Subscribers - Moss Problems, Transplanting Redbuds, Azalea Pruning

Welcome to Heart Tube. My name is John Putnam. This is the garden question and answer video that I do pretty much every Sunday. You can ask gardening questions down in the comment section below this video, and that's where we pick from each week. I think Steph wrote down 22 from this past week's video, and always getting great questions, and I try to get ones that are somewhat seasonal as we go along. So again, there's way more questions than that. I understand that, but we stick with around 20 to 25 each week, so thank you very much. The Learn to Garden video series is $50 off for the entire month of October, and you just use the word October to get the $50 off over on the hearttube.com website. Steph's third design video is up over there on the Learn to Garden video series now, and there's like, I don't know how many videos are up over there, 35 or something like that on that Learn to Garden video series, and the weekly garden planner the rest of October went up, and November and December have actually been shot, so I hope to have those up here in the next few weeks as well. There were a bunch of plant-specific videos that went up this week, including Florida Sunshine Elysium, maybe this Early Wonder Camellia, I don't even remember. I'm moving, so I'm moving the videos from the Garden Plants with Jim Putnam YouTube channel over to the HortTube channel, and we've shot a bunch more at the same time, like 18 or something at this point, in addition to the ones that are coming over, and we're continuing to shoot them, and we're just building a library, and we're putting them all in various playlists, so here is a gold foliage plant for shade. You know, if you wanted to find things that are variegated or gold for shade, that playlist exists, and it will, and zone-specific, so zone seven gold foliage shrub for shade, you know, those kind of, those playlists are being developed around these plants, so you'll be able to, hopefully in time, be able to research different plants for different types of spaces in your garden, depending on whether you're in zone five, or six, or seven, or eight, or nine, or 10, or whatever. Okay, there we go. Let's jump to some gardening questions from last week's video. Somebody, there were a couple people that said something about doing videos on landscape hurricane rehab, so those folks that had, you know, maybe in Western South Carolina, or Northern Georgia, or wherever, where they've had trees down, other things down in the garden, and want to rehab some of the existing plants that are there. There's also some folks whose gardens became very sunny, you know, all of a sudden, and they've had a shade garden up to this point. I probably won't do, necessarily, a landscape hurricane rehab video, but when the leaves fall off my vitex over here, I'm going to be doing a video on, it's leaned over because of some of these storms. Our storms here in Raleigh are nothing compared to what's happened in Western North Carolina, and other places, but we've had enough that some things here need to be staked, and pruned, and moved, and several other things. So some of those videos specific to some of those things that you would need will be coming up, transplanting things, staking things, reducing the size of things, rescuing plants from themselves, basically. Some of that video content will be coming up. Okay, and I probably will do, I'm going to do a live Q&A at some point, so if you've got some of those specific questions that you can ask during the live Q&A, and I'll let everybody know when the live Q&A is coming. Somebody asked if waxleaf privet is the same as waxleaf ligustrum. Yes, so all ligustrum can be called privet. Typically, we use the name privet for the Chinese privet, the small leaf privet, people also call the Japanese privet, or the Japanese ligustrum with the larger leaves, which is a couple of different species that we use in landscaping, waxleaf privet as well. So the word's just kind of interchangeable. Which one is better as a hedge? They're both the same, but if you're using like recurve, ligustrum recurvifolium is probably the most common one that's used as a hedge now. It's fast-growing, has interesting foliage, a little easier to keep smaller than, I don't know if you can see my 40-foot-tall ligustrum over there, easier to keep smaller than those. Keep in mind, they are invasive, so if you do use them, you can shear the flowers off. After they flower, you can shear those off a little bit and keep those seed from forming later on. Not really gonna change the world a whole lot because there's a Chinese privet over here that with a half a million seeds on it and a Japanese privet over there with the same kind of amount of seed on it and the birds will come through soon and spread them everywhere as they're migrating. Let's see, so somebody asked about using pine straw as a path mulch or is it too slippery and moves around? Someone answered that it's fine, but I actually do find that it's kind of slippery. So it depends on the kind of work you would be doing on it. Like if you were, if it's just a decorative path and you're walking on it occasionally, it's probably no big deal, but if you wanna push wheelbarrows through it and if your dogs are gonna run on it, that kind of thing, it will definitely slide and slip and create some space, opportunity for weeds to germinate and that kind of thing. So it would not be, I used it as a path back here. So this is so funny. I'm gonna tell you that this isn't the best idea, but when I first did this plan for this back garden, I did pine straw the paths just to differentiate them because it looked good from the video up above, but it is kind of slicky. I love these wood chip paths. I can't rave enough about these wood chip paths. They're so soft to walk on. They're always spongy. I'm sure the plants around them are taking advantage and rooting in and under the paths to get that moisture that's in the paths. And that material is breaking down and feeding the plants that are along the paths. So I'm sure, I just like these wood chip paths a lot. They're soft to walk on. The dogs really like it. Nothing to complain about on the wood chip paths. Let's see if you're just looking for a natural material and they were free. Oh, let's see. So somebody's in central Oklahoma. The soil doesn't freeze. Any worries about transplanting broadleaf evergreens and marginal perennials or shrubs if there's no risk of roots freezing? So I don't think in Oklahoma, it's more about the roots freezing. So for me here in Raleigh, where soil doesn't freeze, we're kind of equal. We're on par there. We're both, maybe you're in zone 8A in Oklahoma because there is that in Oklahoma or 7B. And so maybe we're similar low temperatures for the winter. And so I'll move things around. You probably want to wait until late winter because your actual biggest issue is probably winter wind, which can desiccate some of these plants. So if the roots didn't have, if you reduced the root mass on the plant and didn't reduce the top growth, you know, they could desiccate a little more during the winter time. So if you are in a windy open space in Oklahoma, you know, tends to be that way, then I might wait until late winter. So that'd be the only, that'd be my argument against it. Despite the fact that we might be in the same zone for average low temperature, you may have an additional issue, which is the winter wind may burn your broadleaf evergreens with the root damage that your plants are going to take. Okay. Somebody is in zone 6A in Southern Maine. They have an Acer palladium, Japanese maple in a cup pot. They want to move it to an unheated garage for the winter. There are windows. Do they need light or darkness? What about watering while in the garage? They'll be fine to drag into the garage if you have windows in there. They really don't need a whole lot of sunlight, right? The thing's going to not have any leaves on it. Watering wise, you just have to keep it moist, but not wet. And so let it dry out almost completely. It's not going to use a whole lot of water in the winter, right? It's going to be asleep. So I don't think you'd have to water it more than a handful of times the entire winter, especially if it was outside. But I'm going to encourage you in zone 6A in Maine, this thing probably needs to be outside as much as possible, if you could. So whatever days it's not going to be frozen solid, if you can drag it back out, that would be kind of optimal. Or if you're going to get a week where it's going to be above freezing or right around at or just above freezing, then I would have it outside the vast majority of the winter, and it should be fine. But I don't think you need to do anything in particular to a plant that goes completely dormant, bringing it in outside of not drowning it. Okay. Do you still have to plant high if planting in the dry shade? Well, that's what they've been doing. I still plant things a little high and it's just as much out of habit as anything. If I was in a sandier soil, I'd probably plant more flush in my dry shade condition, but I still have this clay-based soil and I like to plant up high and let the plants root down in it. What you can do is where you plant up high, you can feather the soil out more, rather than having them on a hill like this, right at the root base, you can just add a bit more, maybe add a little bit more amendment as you're doing it, and then have the pancake part where it's higher than the surrounding soil just be wider. And that may add some additional moisture around them without having, you know, that may compensate for having to do additional watering because you raised them up in the dry shade conditions. But I still do just out of, you know, in my clay soil, because a lot of these plants just don't like their roots sitting down in that clay. They'll choose to do it, but not the roots that are in the container the day you buy the plant. They're not used to it at all. I mean, a lot of times you'll, you plant a plant in this clay and let's say it's a five gallon, seven gallon container and the roots are this deep in the container. You go to transplant it nine months later and you'll find that the roots are only up in about half the depth they originally were and they've gone outward. They just can't live down deep in that clay soil or they, at least the ones that were, you bought the container where you had all that air down in the bottom of that bark mix in that container. That air doesn't exist necessarily down deeper in that clay soil. So I still mound up a bit. Again, depending on soil type. Okay, somebody has a big daddy hydrangea. They want to turn the pink blooms blue. Should you add fall or spring application of sulfur? So you can add whatever soil acidifier you're going to add. Aluminum sulfate's what we actually added to the containers at the nursery when we... So you're adding sulfur to kind of lower the pH to acidify the soil, but we had actually pretty low pH in our soil mix, but we were missing aluminum. So it can be, it not only needs to be acid, but it also has to have aluminum present to make those blue flowers. So, you know, hopefully the sulfur's enough, but sometimes it's not. The reason, and this is in the weekly garden planner. This is one of those weekly garden planner things where we're shooting all this video content on a week by week basis throughout the year. In November and December, I made video content about this is the time of, that's the time of year to add any soil changing nutrient. I don't recommend trying to get your soil absolutely perfect, get a soil test and get everything absolutely perfect. It's near impossible. And you'll probably overdo something. You're probably more likely to overdo something and cause yourself a problem than you are to get it right. But let's say you just are just basically absent of phosphorus in your garden, or you want to add this sulfur or you're liming your lawn or whatever, whatever the one of these things you want to do. This is the time of year to do it, October, November, December, because the freeze thaw in the winter can help get some of those nutrients down into the soil. So that's the argument for doing it this time of year and making them more effective. So do it pre-winter basically. But again, not a big fan of getting a soil test and going, oh man, if I add this much phosphorus and this much potassium and this much calcium and this much magnesium, or you're going to get one of those things wrong potentially but if you're absent of something, it makes sense. Or you're trying to change a hydrangea from pink to blue or whatever. Somebody bought a supposedly male Ginkgo autumn gold and it's fruiting and it stinks and it's awful. Are they able to change sex? I did read a study where there's some evolutionary trait where Ginkgos can in fact change sex and on male trees can have female branching appear on them. Nobody really knows why they did that on an evolutionary basis, but why they did that. But yes, they are capable. More than likely the grower got it wrong and you don't have one of the few documented Ginkgos that changed its sex. Maybe you do, but probably the grower potentially got it wrong and sold you something that's not right. Are there any public gardens you haven't seen that you really want to go to? So I'm going to go to Denver. I've been in Denver a couple of times but I've never been to the Denver Botanic Garden. Of course, there's several in Europe that I really want to go to that I haven't been to. I checked the Berlin Botanic Garden off the list last year and there's several more though across Europe that I'd like to see. But in the States, I've been to a lot of the big ones and see, this channel is seven years old or seven and a half years old or whatever it is, but my time in this business is since I was 16 years old. So I went to a lot of these things or did. I always go to Gibbs Gardens, go to Gibbs Gardens, go to this garden, go to that garden. And I've been to them. I just haven't been to them with the camera portion of my life. So at some point, they'll all hopefully come back around. But I haven't been to the Denver Botanic Garden. I haven't been to Missouri Botanic Garden. I'm about to check both of them off the list before the end of the year. And I won't be there at peak time by any stretch of the imagination. There's a couple things in LA that I'd like to see and I'm going to be out there shooting at Verde Nurseries later in the year too. And I'd like to go over and see a couple of things in LA that I haven't seen, but I have been to a couple of gardens in LA. So there's always more gardens. I don't care where you go. That Delaware Botanic Garden came out of nowhere. We were in Delaware and I happened to post something on Instagram and somebody said, you need to go there and I hadn't been there. And then it turned into a thing and it was a great video and a beautiful garden. To be honest with you, I didn't know that garden existed before that trip up to Delaware. And I'm glad I do. It's beautiful. That pollinator meadow is beautiful. But again, there's gardens that I don't even know about so much less that I haven't seen that I really want to go to. I'm sure there's even more. And there are a couple up in Western Canada that I'd like to see as well. We did a few going around Lake Ontario. There are a few great gardens up there too. Let's see. Zone 8A Alabama Edgeworthia is full of flower buds. Will they hold off blooming until spring? I do not know. It's the weirdest thing. Several Edgeworthia I've seen, including mine, the buds are really, really swollen on them. Like they want to try to bloom right now. And I'm hoping it holds off. I'm hoping the buds aren't so open that they're going to get damaged by cold. Have no idea. Never seen it happen. They have the buds on them. It's normal for them to have the buds on them, but not to be swollen as much as they are right now. So, I mean, the Empress of China Dogwood's blooming in the front garden. You know why? I have no idea. Second time blooming this year. There's some people throwing out that maybe the summer dormancy, because it was so hot, the heat of the summer, the dryness of the summer put the plants in a dormancy. So they think they're coming out of a dormancy and they're growing. I don't know. Maybe. Kind of weird though. And then the next question was another Edgeworthia thing. Is it time to transplant Edgeworthia in zone 8A, North Carolina? You could, but I'd probably, I'd wait until the foliage drops off of it. So they'll get that bright yellow foliage in a few weeks. And then once it's completely defoliated, that would be a good time to move it. Keep in mind, you may lose some flowers over the course of trying to move one. And they have fairly shallow surface rooted plants. So get as wide as you can go. Shallow, wide root ball. And that's going to come up in just a minute as well. Okay. Somebody has a Japanese maple with a long leader. How to prune it to push more branching? Just prune it down to a bud along the stem somewhere. You should be able to see a few buds along the stem. So once it's dormant, sometime in the late winter, you can snip that thing off right above a bud and it'll branch from there and it'll probably force more branching down lower on the plant as well. And you can choose which ones you want to keep at that time. Best time to dig and divide Lycoris radiata. Wants to share with others. So Lycoris or Lycoris, they're bulbs, basically. You know, they are bulbs. And those bulbs divide just like any other bulbs, daffodils or anything like that. And so you can pop them out of the ground and just split the bulbs apart. Reasonable size ones. I wouldn't, you know, break off little teeny tiny bulblets. But as long as they've been in the ground for a while, there will be additional bulbs down there that you can divide off of them. Late summer, early fall is the time to do it. So while you can still see them right now. Let's see. Somebody has a pineapple sage. It's about three feet by two feet that they did from a spring. They had from a spring cutting. They're in zone 8A in Charlotte. Can I cut it back to the ground, heavily mulch the top and have it come back? Will other perennials work with this technique? You gotta be careful mulching too much with some of your perennials. If you mulch these beds too deep while these perennials are dormant, some of them won't come back from it. Some of them just really suffer under it. Some of them thrive under it. So that's really kind of a learning as you go kind of thing. I don't re-mulch these beds really that I have lots of perennials in until they start to emerge a bit in the spring and then I can mulch around them. It's a little harder to mulch, but I certainly know that they're coming back once they've started to break ground. The pineapple sage, you're in 8A in Charlotte. Under most winters, it should come back regardless. So I'm gonna, mine is in bloom out there right now. It should get, it'll get knocked to the ground first freeze. I mean, it just gets absolutely toasted and I don't do anything to it. Maybe some leaves will certainly end up on top of it and its own, the plant itself will be still sitting there. Right? And it'll melt basically onto the top of itself. And then a few leaves will drop on it and that kind of thing, which I won't clean up until spring. So that's the mulch it's getting. I wouldn't go out there and try to put through three, four inches of mulch on it. I think you may end up keeping it too wet, keeping the crown of it too wet during the winter time, nor do I think it's a good idea to cut it back while it's still actively growing. Cause it'd be nice if it had a chance to pull some of that energy back down into its roots and get a little more energy over the next few weeks before we, 8A Charlotte, you're unlikely to get a frost until almost November. So you got a few more weeks that that thing could be growing. So again, be careful burying a lot of these dormant perennials too deep in material. You know, hosta, it's fine. Some things just don't care, but some things do. It keeps the crown too wet on them. And you know, they just don't come back or they come back half the size they were the previous year. Somebody's in zone 5B. They have Danica arborvitaes, which is supposed to be a little dwarf one. But the question said that they have gotten too large and have outgrown this space. And this is true with every dwarf conifer. They just keep growing. Like I had a dwarf globe arborvitae on the corner of my porch at the old house. Planted it. One of the first things I planted when I moved into the house and this dwarf globe arborvitae was supposed to get three by three or whatever. It was six feet tall by the seventh or eighth summer. The summers are longer here too. So it just keeps growing all summer. You want to cut it back, which will be to the ground brown growth. If they do that, will more foliage grow? Yeah, I cut my, I cut that six foot globe arborvitae down to about three feet. It was nothing but brown at the end of one winter. And you would have thought it was dead for sure. This was 20 years ago probably. So I didn't know either whether it was going to come back. It came back beautifully. Took a little while. Same thing with cameo cypress too, or false cypresses, like gold mops. I've cut them down to just wood and they come back from it. It just sometimes takes a minute and it is scary, right? But if they're too big, they're too big. And so you're either moving them or you're cutting them. It's one or the other. So you might as well try. But I would wait until later in the winter. A lot of that foliage will protect the inner part of that plant during the winter, especially in 5B. Although it's a huge occidentalis, which is probably hardy in zone three. So quite hardy in your area for sure. Let's see, somebody's in an area that's still kind of drought stricken. How does watering as temperatures get cooler change? This is question 17, by the way. But there's still no rain. This is another thing we talk about in the weekly garden planner. Fall is a weird time of year. It's actually, I think April is statistically our driest month of the year on the calendar. But October is always slanted a little bit because we occasionally get a hurricane, sometimes major hurricanes, that give us 12 inches of rain and that slants the October rain total quite a bit. So October is the second driest month statistically, but in a year without a hurricane, it's definitely our driest month. We virtually get no rain during the month of October here in Raleigh. It's a little clouded over this afternoon. That's about as, this is about as cloudy as it gets. I mean, normally it's just bright and sunny all of October. October is beautiful here. Typically starts in September. We get a lot of rain in August. It's our wettest month. And then we just dry out during late September, October, mid to middle November. So before any rain typically comes back again unless disaster strikes in some way. So I talk about in the weekly garden planner, you'll be in these areas in the fall where you may have to do some ongoing watering and be thinking about, we talk about fall is for planting and a lot of people put in woody plants this time of year, hardy, you know, woody plants. And you may have to do some ongoing watering. Now what's different about watering is the days are shorter. The plants aren't growing quite as much, although some of these things are still putting on, you know, a little bit of growth right now. And then the nights are cooler. And so that combines that with the water goes further. So if you do have to water, it's not like you're gonna have to water every day or anything, but you do need to check them. And if you need to water, water really saturate the entire space around that plant and then, you know, back off and you're not gonna have to reapply water as often because of the, again, shorter days, cooler nights, less growth overall on the plants, but you do need to be checking. This is a dry time of year for us in North Carolina. And I know a lot of the Eastern part of the country, even the Pacific Northwest stays dry until probably about the 1st of November or so. Well, let's see. So somebody has green, a big moss invasion in their garden, mostly under trees, of course. Nothing will grow. How do they get rid of the moss? Well, moss is generally a combination of multiple problems, okay? You typically, it's kind of not a problem either because it can be beautiful if you want a moss garden, but it's typically a combination of soil erosion has happened probably. You don't have, you know, a lot of your topsoil has washed off over the years. And that happens in our modern subdivisions quite a bit. We don't even know it's happening. Sometimes in the lawn, you know, even you're losing soil even out of your lawn and don't even really realize it's happening. You got a little pebbles sitting on top of the soil, don't realize how it's happening. You know, you're losing topsoil. And then, so it's between losing organic material and then usually it's super compact soil. And usually it's, the soil's very acid. So, you know, very low pH of some kind. That combination together with a little bit of moisture and a shady condition can give you, you know, moss and a lot of people want moss and can't grow it very well. But there is this kind of combo that I see here in the Raleigh area and the Ears Eye landscape that I noticed that, you know, they were missing topsoil, roots exposed from the trees was a good indicator that they had lost topsoil. It was super compact, probably had some, a lot of foot traffic on it in the past, or just because the topsoil was gone, we were down to the subsoil and it was compact. And then of course the pH here is between 4.5 and six, you know, on average. Mine's about 5.8 here, but it's lower in other areas of the city. That combination. And so, you know, for me, I think the best strategy if you wanted to get rid of it is to try to build some topsoil again. So I'd bury it in wood chips. Don't, not up on the trees, not like, don't make big cones up around your trees, but the areas in between, you can start laying in some organic material in these spaces. I don't think you're going to grow lawn necessarily in this deep shaded area that has moss covered, but you can probably get it where you can grow some other perennials and some other things. So I'd try to start rebuilding some topsoil. And you can do that by, you know, putting wood chips in some of those areas. Again, don't bury your trees, but any open areas in there, you can, you know, put a pretty good depth of wood chips and bury that moss and try to get some, try to get some earthworms and some soil life to come along and help you turn that subsoil that's remaining or that, you know, into topsoil again. And that's, that rebuilding soil will help this, but it's a combination of a lot of things that leads you down to having this, what they call a moss invasion again. But I love it when I see a, you know, a lot of people are trying to have moss and then some people have it to the point of, you know, they can't do anything else. This person's in zone six. They have a whitewater redbud, really doesn't matter what redbud it is. Whitewater's a, it's a nice hybrid. It's about four and a half feet by four and a half feet. They want to transplant it because it's not tall enough for what they're trying to do in that space. Heard they aren't fans of transplanting any tips to help it. This is one of those things. If a very prolific garden writer somewhere moves a plant and it dies, and then they write about that it doesn't like to be transplanted, but then and now it doesn't like to be transplanted. That's kind of how that works. You know, rumors get on the internet that something's hard to transplant. Really what you need to know about transplanting various plants is how the plant roots in the ground typically. And for redbuds, they tend to be very shallow rooted. And so my, I had a very large redbud at the old house. If anybody, you know, if you follow the channel long enough to remember at a 20 foot wide, 15 foot tall purple foliage redbud at the old house, when it was about two thirds that size, I moved it and it was big, it was quite big. But what I knew about redbuds is I have to build, I have to dig a wide, wide space and a shallow, it has a shallow root system. So I dug a, basically a pancake root system and then I slid it up onto a piece of plastic and then I slid it to where it was going and I slid it into the hole. So I didn't knock a bunch of soil off of it, as little as I could. And I dug the appropriate, you know, root system, basically just copied the root system that it has. So if you're doing like azaleas, blueberries, ericaceous plants, we know they have super shallow fibrous root systems. So we dig a wide, we dig a wide hole for those and a shallow hole. We know other things root deeper in the ground. So it's really, how does that thing root? That's the way I'm going to dig it. And then I'm going to move it while it's dormant. And then it's not going to even know it was moved. So it doesn't mean you won't kill something. So Jim's advice, you know, doesn't, you know, again, it could die. You know, you're moving it. There's no, I don't know what conditions you're moving it to. I don't know, you know, it may have all rooted in one direction. And so, you know, there's nothing over there on that side. And when you move it, all the soil falls off of that side. So things can still go wrong. But what you do is you try, you know, if you know a little something about how that plant roots out into the soil, the wider, the better. Shallow, pretty shallow root system. And you drag it across. Don't put it in a wheelbarrow and slam it into a wheelbarrow and, you know, struggle with it a bunch. Just drag it to where it's going and slide it off right into that new space where you've already dug the hole and leave it a little more elevated than it was in its original spot so that it doesn't sink into the ground in time. Cause it's going to be difficult to raise something like that back up. And you should be fine. I had no problem. I've had no problem moving them. But again, wide, shallow root system. And that's the way the internet works. You can find almost every plant on the internet. Somebody will tell you it doesn't move well because it died on them. Things die on me too when I move them. It just, it happens. So it could happen. In deeper shade condition, is there an advantage to planting traditional azaleas instead of repeat bloomers? I've talked about last week and just talking about the hybridization of these repeat blooming azaleas are one of the parents is a rhododendron that needs a lot of sun. And so, yeah, the older varieties are probably better in the deeper shade for performing overall. Somebody purchased two yuccas. They're in Aday, North Carolina. Should they plant them in the fall or the spring? Color Guard is hardy to zone four. It's kind of funny. You look at a yucca and go, man, that thing is definitely, you know, a desert plant. There's no way that thing is cold tolerant at all. But keep in mind, some of these like, some of these yuccas and other desert plants, it gets cold in the desert. And some of these places are mountainous. So yucca filamentosa, which is the species for, it's Color Guard. It looks like it has little filaments that come off the side of it. So filamentosa is a pretty, it's a good species. It's a good name for that species. You know, it may have come from a mountainous region in Mexico. You know, it probably had a snow line or something like that. You know, it originated somewhere like that. And so that thing's zoned four hardy. The issue with fall planting it will not be anything to do with how cold hardy it is. It will be how wet is the space you're putting it into. So when we disturb the soil in the fall and in the winter, we can create a pocket where water can drain to. So make sure it's not an area that's going to stay wet or that you mount it up just a bit when you plant it, because you want it to dry out between rains and waterings. But the cold is not going to be the killer of your Color Guard yucca. And desert gets quite cold at night, even in the flat, you know, even in the flat spaces that aren't mountainous. Let's see. My encores are in optimal condition, sun, afternoon protection, neutral soil, but adding holly tones. So they're using a soil acidifier in their fertilizer. They have great spring flowers, but less in the fall. They're in Maryland zone 7B. Suggestions to increase fall bloom. I literally, it's so weird that this question came up because I visited a couple of nurseries this week and I'll visit nurseries to film for the HortTube channel, but I'm also visiting for Southern Living Plant Collection and Encore Azalea. And I, you know, will talk to growers, you know, and just kind of see where they are growing things, make suggestions for other things that I know that are in demand. You know, from your guys' comments, I kind of know the plants that are in the collection that are unavailable because I know I get the question. I've been looking for this plant for three years. You know, so when I go to a grower, I go, hey, I know this plant's in demand. If you'll grow it, you know, you probably have cells for it already built in. So I go and, but I'm looking at some of the Encore's at some of the growers and, you know, they're a bit thin and leggy this time of year with only a few flowers on them. I believe they need to be a little more aggressive pruning them. So after that spring flowering, I would definitely be pruning them, fertilizing them at the same time if you haven't already fertilized them with the Holly Tone before that. And then you have the option of pruning them again, mid-June, and that's plenty of time for them to flush out and flower in the fall. So you can prune them right after flowering, which might be April 15th, and then again, June 15th, and that will get them tighter, more compact, fuller, and I think have a lot more fall blooms when that comes around. You know, I've got a few right now that are just, the buds are swollen and they're about to open up, but they're pretty full because again, I've, you know, I've got Autumn Lilac, which stays naturally full, which is the one I'm looking at right now, but I got a Lilac over there. I took out of too much shade and put in the sun. It needs a little bit of pruning to get more flowers on it next year, but I know it's even a thing with growers where I just don't think they're trusting themselves to do that second pruning or, you know, to keep, to make sure that they come into fall just in full, you know, really compact size and get that full flower again. Okay. So again, question 23, I always get this when they're concerned about wood chips from diseased trees. You know, should they use them or wait for them to be fully broken down? If you're scared of them, you can compost them on your driveway or in a pile somewhere, and then use them as compost later on, let it heat up for a while. I know other people have gotten poison ivy in wood chips. People are always scared about, you know, insects that are gonna be in it, all kinds of things. And I just don't, I just haven't worried about it ever. I've just gotten it, worn a pair of gloves when I put it out and used it, and I've never had a problem with it. I'm sure that I could, I'm sure I could talk myself out of it for sure. And I'm not really worried about the, you know, if you are concerned about what any of the list of things that you can come up with to be worried about on the wood chips, you can just get your pile of wood chips and let it heat up and compost them and use it as compost. And if it's gone through that heating process, all those worries, you know, will be taken care of. But I just, you know, I get it. I use it, I don't worry about it. I'm sure I could have some issue at some point, but I'm not, I just try not to, I just try not to, I try not to borrow problems from the future as much as possible. It's easy to do, right? It's easy to come up, you know, to borrow problems that you don't have yet. But I don't, I try not to anyway. But again, I could get poison ivy in it. I could get, you know, I don't think the disease tree issues, it'd have to be the same species of tree and it'd have to be, however that particular thing is spread. Typically most disease issues from trees are gonna be spread by an insect that's not trying to spread a disease. It's just an insect that just happens to move from tree to tree to tree and picks it up or some sort of boring insect that's not really being, you know, anyway, I don't think most of those problems are gonna come from, again, just try not to borrow problems from the future. And I just use it and, you know, if something goes sideways, I'll deal with it at that point. But again, if you do have those kinds of concerns, just get the free wood chips, leave them piled up, let it cook, because it will, boy, and you'll have to add some water to it at some point. Let it cook for a while, turn the pile a couple of times, and you can cook it down to compost and use it that way. So there you go. Again, the Learn to Garden video series is $50 off for the month and use the code October to get the $50 off. Steph's third design video, and she shot a fourth one, and I haven't got the footage off the camera yet, but I'll get that one up sometime, hopefully before the month is over too. We're continuing to add to the Learn to Garden video series and the weekly garden planner. So thank you guys very much who have bought them and are considering them. There you go. Ask gardening questions in the comment section below this video, and we'll pick from those next week. Thanks for watching.