Spring Hydrangea Care 🌿 How to Prune & Prep for the Growing Season

It's the first day of spring and we are in the garden to check out our hydrangeas. We're going to take you through all of our different varieties and show you what we do at the start of spring. It is officially spring in the garden and you can tell because we have our first official blooms of the crocus. I love that gorgeous dark purple color but they are planted beneath the first type of hydrangea that I want to talk to you about today and that is a panicle hydrangea. Panicle hydrangeas bloom on new wood and they take full sun in our zone 6a garden. Check out this beautiful specimen here. This was originally planted to kind of block the view of this electrical box. That gorgeous gorgeous. I know. This particular variety is called vanilla strawberry but Christopher come in close and I want to show everybody the branching. This was planted back in 2018 so you can see way down at the ground those are some pretty sturdy trunks. This hydrangea is supposed to get about six to eight feet tall and wide. It is reaching six feet and this was planted in 2018 as I said earlier but check out this awesome branching and what that does is it creates a nice solid structure so that these heavy heavy blooms that vanilla strawberry puts out don't flop in the rain and I want to show you how we do that and it's really simple. I just call it the three bud system. Come on in close Christopher. Here's a great example. All I'm gonna do some of this down here. Sorry. All I'm gonna do is I'm gonna count up from the bottom three buds. One bud. You can see that ring. Two bud. Three buds. I'm gonna cut it right here and I'm gonna do that over and over again all the way throughout the shrub and this pruning technique works for every type of panicle hydrangea and you can see how it's just going to create this nice structure. What's gonna happen now this growing season is these buds here are gonna produce their own branches and so we have this nice network of strong sturdy branches. I could just leave it and it would still bloom but what's gonna happen is then it's gonna put out new growth all up here and then we have these long branches that are gonna flop. You can tell that this did not flop one bit last season. Everything is nice and straight right up. It did not even bend even with the heavy rains because this system works. It's tried and true. What do you think about the tiny insignificant branches? Do you like to take those off? Yeah something like this down here tiny and insignificant I'm just gonna cut right off because we don't want to plant too much energy and time into trying to grow those branches. Was it the rule was if it's smaller than a pencil you cut it off? Yes if it's thinner than a pencil we'll cut it off. Now if you're feeling unsure you can certainly wait until you see buds starting to really swell or even pushing new growth. No matter when you prune your panicle hydrangea as long as you do it the first half of the summer you'll still get blooms later in the season. I find that it's important for us to switch sides at a certain point just to make sure that our technique is balanced. Are you saying we don't have the same technique? Well I think sometimes that you know maybe I saw something you didn't see and vice versa so it keeps it balanced when we switch sides. I'm really excited to see this this year. I'm always amazed at how well this one does. I do think it is discontinued though. Oh is it? I think it is. There's been a lot of breeding improvements in hydrangeas over the years. I think that this one is discontinued. Last year we underplanted this with Campfire Marshmallow Bidens and it wasn't great because I think this provided too much shade. Yeah it was one of the situations where in the spring before it at all leafed out we thought there was more we had more room. So this year we will be under planting with Surefire Rose Begonia that we had so much success with on the east side of the house. Yes. That takes the sun and the shade with that really nice deep foliage. I bet you it looks beautiful over here. I think it'll be perfect. Whoopsies. Caught again. Okay enough tripod for now. We really wanted to give you a cool angle but this warm weather is coming with a very hefty breeze. Christopher come in here and show this crossing branch situation now that we can see it better. This branch right here is going into the center of the shrub and it's going to bump into this branch right here. So I'm just going to go ahead and cut it off. Lighten the load. Lighten the load. Get some air flowing through here. Getting very close to being done. Honestly that network of branches it's taken us a couple years but this is odd. This is an impressive specimen right there. Eric while you're finishing that up I am curious about this front large trunk. We've cut it back pretty hard two years in a row and I'm wondering what we should do here or if we should do anything. See how this just kind of falls forward. I'm not sure if that group of branches really wants to stay. Let me see. Oh that one in front? Yeah. I was thinking about that too and then I thought do we just get the pruning saw and take that right out because it just doesn't seem well that does seem pretty buried. Yeah I mean part of what happens over time as you add compost and stuff to your garden is it builds up and I think this is a situation where compost has built up a little bit. There are roots. There might also be a little bit of damage down here I'm noticing from the compost building up too high. Almost like a rot kind of thing. Yeah so I'm going to work on pulling this back a bit see what I find. See there's a root right there. Okay so it's happy at that level but this has a little bit of softness. There's a little bit of a hole right there. Okay I think we should leave it and see how it does this year but I this is one of the things we what we're looking at today as we're going through the garden and observing the hydrangeas is what has been buried too deep as compost keeps getting added every year. So it's a good time to go around. Oh there's lots of acorns here. Oh you think there might be some digging happening. There might be but because we're out in the front yard and there's not too many trees dropping acorns. No no for sure but there are a lot of acorns being stored here for some reason. All right so the plan is to leave this group of branches on this little trunk. We'll observe what happens in that area but I'm glad that we gave a little breathing room in that compost there. Yeah I mean there's definitely something going on there but that gets this panicle hydrangea all set for the season. On the opposite end of the size spectrum this is firelight tidbit. Another panicle hydrangea believe it or not. It blooms on new wood but it's way smaller. This is almost the maximum size. It gets about two to three by two to three. This one definitely had some compost mounting up at the bottom. So I'm going to go ahead and pull some of that. Oh looks there's some growth happening down there too. Is there a growth or is that a bulb? I don't know what that is. Pull some of this back and this was one that we had transplanted fall of 2023 at a really difficult time of year like in the heat of the summer and so we just kind of left it. What are all these things? There's crocus there. I think that's crocus. That's not a crocus that's some kind of plant. That is something. As you can see doesn't quite have the same branching structure as the other one. Oh look at that giant spider. He's probably so annoyed I woke him up. So I'm gonna go in here just do kind of the same technique. The three bud method. Yeah and some of them are closer together than others. I'm just gonna try and get them as close to three buds as possible and make sure that it's even. Really tidy it up. Cut off anything smaller than a pencil. Reshape it a bit. Make sure it's looking good. It's gonna look pretty drastic. This will look really drastic. The vanilla strawberry has had many years to get that network built up where it's so strong. In this case it's a younger plant so it's going to look a little bit more haphazard in its growth. Yes. But over a few years with this repeated uniform pruning it'll be much more organized. Very technical tiny prunes here. I know. Well and you know normally we say anything smaller than a pencil well because it is a dwarf hydrangea. Everything's tiny. Everything's pretty small. All right how we doing? Honestly I think you are done. I think so too. Success has happened. Yep just gonna get these little dead branches off. I feel like it looks way better. Doesn't it look way better? It looks so much better. Awesome. Perfect. This is the same treatment that we'll give to all of the panicles in the garden but up next I think we're going to talk about one stick. The arborescence family or Annabelle hydrangea. So this stick in the ground was actually a rooted cutting of a lime ricky hydrangea but let's hop over to the mother plant so that we can explain a little bit more about what we're going to do with it. Much better. This is the lime ricky hydrangea. It's an older arborescence or Annabelle style big beautiful bloom. It's a chartreuse color when it blooms but this was discontinued and replaced by something called sublime with much stronger stems. You can see this has been pruned very well already. It was very tall so it's been brought down by a third. That's about all we do with those kinds of hydrangeas. Not all the way to the ground. You want these to develop their strength and they've been cut just above a set of buds. This will have the two buds there and these are in really good shape. I'll probably now just take a second to pull away some of the leaves down here but honestly I might just take the leaf blower to this on another day and the reason that we have that stick up front is something like this right here. See how this is sort of rooted? Oh yeah you can actually see the roots. Let me get in really close. See you can see how this stem must have been pressed into the ground and it's set up a bunch of roots so I could take this. I could take a trowel or shovel cut this out and move this to another spot and have a brand new lime ricky hydrangea. Oh so tempting. That's what we did in the fall with that stick and let's go check on and see if it's alive. We'll show everybody how to see if their hydrangeas have made it through the winter. Very easy trick. We're just going to take a fingernail and give a little scratch and we see green. Wait do we? Oh I'm trying to focus. There's the green. There we go. Put your hand behind it. There it is. Hand behind. There we go. So we know that our little stick has made it through. Do we want to give this a little bit of a prune Eric? Because it was so tall. I do think wherever we cut it it will branch and I think that's a good height right there to cut it out. Right here. Yep. So now it's going to branch there and it'll produce more growth from the base. Right. And eventually we'll probably put a plant support on it but it's going to look so good since this is a dark leaf and that's going to have that chartreuse with the evergreen. We could go on and on. Let's go look at some more hydrangeas. This right here is a Gatsby pink oak leaf hydrangea. Big bold oak leaf shaped foliage. Long panicle blooms that start white and fade to pink. And what we have to do for this in the spring is nothing. Walk away. You do not touch it. You don't prune oak leaf hydrangeas because they bloom on old wood. And what that means is that this year's flowers are already here in these buds. They're already in on the plant and if we were to cut them now we would be cutting off the flowers. So we're going to leave the oak leaf hydrangea and move on to the next variety. Here we have all three varieties of hydrangeas right next to each other. I'm standing next to a quick fire standard hydrangea and what standard means is it's in tree form. So it's been grown to have a trunk and this has been in the ground for quite a number of years. I want to say probably 2019 is when it was planted. Yep. It was very tiny. Behind me over here is an oak leaf hydrangea. Again we don't touch our oak leaf hydrangeas. We leave them alone. And Christopher you have Invincible Spirit 2. This is that arborescence type. So I'm going to take this down by a third while Eric does the rule of three buds. We'll get this little section of hydrangeas together. Maybe we can put the pop-up planter right between us. I guess I could share. So I'm going to go around and just count my three buds. You're going to go ahead and get everything about the same height and we're going to avoid that lovely hellebore right there. Oh my gosh I forgot there was a hellebore there. Yes. That's the magic of the spring garden is everything's a surprise to me at least. When I'm taking after an arborescence and going for the third I tend to pick a height on myself. Like right now I'm kind of thinking about the top of the little tool pouch that hangs off of my pants. So I'm just going to focus on making this particular hydrangea roughly all about the height of my pants pocket. Yeah. And all you got to do is cut above a set of buds. And I'm focusing on making sure things that are growing inward get thinned out and that I have a nice structure so that these blooms stay nice and upright. I will also take out some of those insignificant branches because we know something you know spindly is just going to be a waste. It's going to flop and not give us a nice secure beautiful bloom later in the season. It's a good time to look for crossing branches anything that's going to rub on each other and up. This is definitely a dead branch. It just sort of falls apart in my hand really. And again you can't mess it up. Like what if Christopher took those to the ground with a lawnmower? They would still bloom. They still would. They just would be a little floppy and a little smaller. But they'd still flower. Same thing here. Don't be afraid of Annabelle hydrangeas and panicle hydrangeas. Okay this is good to go. Do you need help up there? I'm pretty close to done because these do such a wonderful healthy job on their own. They don't need too much help from us. Let's check out big leaf and mountain hydrangeas. Let's do it. This right here is a trio of tough stuff mountain hydrangeas. And mountain hydrangeas or hydrangea serrata are from the mountains of Japan and they have a much cold hardier bud. But they bloom on old wood so we don't want to prune them. There's been a lot of developments in hydrangea breeding over the years and they're starting to cross serrata hydrangeas with macrophylla hydrangeas to get bud hardiness along with re-blooming. But this is kind of an older variety of mountain hydrangea from when it was called tough stuff. Whoa! What is going on? So come in here and let's talk about we're gonna check and see one if the stems are alive because they don't look so hot. And then we're gonna look at the bud hardiness on these. These we didn't protect and we're gonna get to show you some of the plants that we did protect soon to check in on them and see how they're doing. But if I go here and I just do that scrape test I can see can you see that Christopher? Oh that's dead. That the stem is definitely alive because it's green. Oh you scraped it on the back side. There it is. It's green. It's alive. I was like it's dead. No apparently it's alive. All right but let's look here at this bud right here. I can squeeze this bud and I can see that bud is a dud. It's a dud. Okay but look behind here the one on the back. This is a terrible angle. I'm gonna move. Let's go this way. It's hard because everything I'm showing on my side. The bud on the back though look it survived. It survived. So the bud hardiness proved true on this tough south hydrangea. But look at this one. I feel like that that's definitely well I don't know. I think that's alive. Don't play with it. Well it is pliable. Yep that could be alive. Okay well these are doing way better than I thought they were gonna do. He thought they were all dead to be honest. I mean from far away they definitely looked dead. Okay well we're not gonna prune them. We're obviously back away from the tough stuff. I mean this is broken so I'm gonna cut that. Okay take that one. But uh everything else we're just gonna leave the tough stuff. I didn't expect them to do this well. But proof is in the pudding. Let's look at these Cape Lookout. Now this is a big leaf variety of hydrangea not known for bud hardiness. Uncovered in our zone 6a winter. Let's see another kind you don't prune. Let's see if one the branches are alive. What did you discover? Uh oh come to this side and see what I see. Wait is it alive? It is not alive. It is fully dead. Okay. Crushes very easily. Okay. There's no life in that. Interesting. This has green under it. Wow. I mean they're alive. I'm interested to see how the buds do. And keep in mind Serrata and Macrophylla like these we do not prune because we want to keep as much in the way of buds as we possibly can. Because just like oak leaves they form their buds on old wood. Over here is a hedge of Invincible Sublime which is the improved version of the Lime Rookie. These are all pruned up ready to go. But Christopher why don't you walk us through these beautiful green things. This is a pop-up plant protector. We're doing a bit of an experiment in our zone. We know that the bud hardiness is marginal. We're feeling pretty good about it with the tough steps. But for the Let's Dance Skyview Hydrangea we decided to try and get the earliest blooms possible. This is a variety that is a hybrid between the Macrophylla and Serrata. So it has improved bud hardiness but it also has, oh gosh what's the word? Oh I know what you're trying to think of. Not redundancy. It means it's remontancy. It is a re-blooming hydrangea. So if we can save those early buds we'll get early blooms. But if we don't it's going to remontancyize for us and we'll get later blooms. I'm going to unveil this here so we can take a look. We did have a very cold winter. So let's look in here and we see our lovely hydrangea. And oh my goodness these buds are flawless. Are they? Perfect. Look at that. I mean they're swelling a little bit. Oh yeah those look good. The purpose of this plant protector is not to keep them necessarily warmer in our case but what we're trying to do is slow the freeze and thaw cycle. So if it is a freezing cold night and it's the middle of April and then there's a really warm day they're going to start breaking dormancy and we don't want that very susceptible to freeze tissue to really rapidly freeze and thaw. That's when we're going to lose all those buds. So right now if these are protected it's just going to slow that transition from the cold to the warm. I do feel like in some of these warm days they might have gotten quite warm but that's perfect. I think it'll be okay. The other thing it does is it protects them from this wind this extremely drying wind that we get all winter long. I'm wondering if that's helped because even when these had snow around them the top still would have been popped out over that and getting this here it comes again breeze. So over here we have a smaller variety. Wait a second are we missing one? Oh one of our pop-ups blew away. It's probably in the trees somewhere. Yep because there's the um whatchamacallit. There's a lovable. There's a lovable. So Let's Dance Lovable is another of the fancy brand new hydrangeas. This is known to have a ton of flowers on it. Skyview is known to be a more pastel color that turns blue easy but for the same reason we chose I guess I don't need to I can look at this one. I don't need to. I wonder when this one blew off though. I'm gonna go look over the edge of the hill. Let's go look first. I'm assuming it's back here somewhere let's look. Okay look for something dark green and a little shiny. I'm surprised it's not in the trees if anything. That is so weird that it blew off. I wonder where it is. It's gotta be somewhere out there. And I know it happened today because I was just looking at them earlier. It is probably the windiest day of the year so far. It's incredible out here. So these are little babies and that's why we really protected them. Um see how I mean they have very little very little branching but we'll move on from this to this little Taj Mahal number. This is our Jensen Urn and last year we planted it up with some annuals but also with four cascade green fairy trail hydrangeas. It's a new category-ish of hydrangeas. It's more similar to macrophylla but it is not as hardy so we decided to use this frost cloth. It looks like a tarp but I promise it's like four layers thick of regular frost. Yeah you can see through when the light shines through it. Water goes through light goes through. So this particular hydrangea really needs to be protected from that freeze and thaw cycle. I have it tied up tight otherwise I would wait should I peek? Let me peek. I'm just gonna. So it blooms really early in the season and because again of that freeze thaw that we experienced those early morning frosts if it gets direct sun first thing in the morning that quick defrost is gonna hurt those buds. I think they're alive. I think they're alive too. All right if not we have replacements waiting in the garage just in case and actually the reason that it's got that dome shape is we took the top of an obelisk that we're not using and popped it up there so that it would give it that little protection so it didn't get flattened when it was snowing. Yes. Oh there we go. That is really exciting. I'm excited about that. So wait that's all five types of hydrangeas that we have. Well we didn't cover climbing hydrangeas because we don't have it. Correct. So that would have been the sixth type. No there are five types. Panicle, arborescence, macrophylla, serrata, quercifolia. Quercifolia. The other one that's climbing. Yes. All right we got it. I was wrong you were right. So on the record. I think we should take a look around at some of our other hydrangeas give them their little bit of prune but everything's in really good shape. I'm very proud of this winter and our hydrangeas. I think they came out really nice so far. I am too. Let's go through check on each one and get them ready for the season. It is really windy out here but I am so glad that we got these hydrangeas under control. We cannot wait to show you how well they do throughout the season so please make sure to subscribe. Again I'm Eric. And I'm Christopher. Thanks for growing with us.