Will EverBloom™ Garden Pinks REPEAT Flower? (Dianthus EverBloom™ Strawberry Tart & Watermelon Ice) 😉

Well, hello and welcome to Over the Vest Nurseries. It's a beautiful sunny, if not a fairly breezy day here in the nursery, but you know what, it's great to be able to be outside and best of all to get the opportunity to show you some of the fabulous plants that you can grow in your garden right here in this region. That's the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states of the US. And if you'd like to find out more about the plants I'd like to suggest that you think about subscribing to our channel and if you see any of these videos that you like then it would be really nice if you could hit the like icon too because then that will help other people find the information and if you don't mind, it would be nice if you let me know in the comments column that you've liked or subscribed to each of our videos as well. Now today is a rather special day because as you know, I really love my job and the exciting part of that is introducing to you new innovative plants that are really special and here in front of me is a really innovative new breeding line that's been developed near Penn State in Pennsylvania by a company called Garden Genetics with a very talented breeder called Rick Grazzini and here's the exciting part, as you see these are wonderful little perennials, they are in fact little garden pinks botanically known as Dianthus, and this particular variety here in front of me is one called Everbloom Strawberry Tart and then if I pan up through this little batch of plants that we have here then you will see that there's another very nice brighter pink with a pickety edge to one called Watermelon Ice. Now these are just two of an emerging collection of these ever-blooming types, and that's the exciting and innovative thing about this breeding line, in that as you see they flower very nice in early summer, but then unlike some of the older traditional types of garden pinks which are really beautiful and gorgeous plants these ones actually repeat through the season so that's why they're called Everbloom, quite literally these plants in our trials have kept on blooming right through the summertime and into the fall. Now the interesting thing is right throughout history it seems like almost from the time memorial people have admired and adored these pretty little flowers the color pink is said to come from guess what, the little garden pink and when somebody asks you how are you and you say I'm in the pink, well that comes from these plants too because they looked at these perfect little flowers and said you just don't get any better than that so I'm in the pink, and when you're talking about pinking shears you're cutting out a piece of paper, when you look at the edge, the serrated edge of these flowers that's where pinking shears comes from. Really gorgeous little easy to grow perennials. Now this individual variety I'm particularly fond of, this is Strawberry Tart, because when I zoom in here on the flowers you'll see that they're really quite large in comparison to a lot of the other little garden pinks but you'll also see that they have this really delectable shade of pink and then in the center of each of the flowers there's this lovely red eye, just beaming out color and on top of that, a lovely delightful fragrance that wafts in the wind. Here's a plant that you could grow in a little tiny space somewhere in your garden here's a plant you could put on a bank or in a rockery a sloping hillside, anywhere that basically is free draining and sunny. They will grow in a partially shaded site but they'll really honestly respond best when they're growing in a sunny location. What's exciting about this variety is the way that it repeats. A lot as I mentioned earlier of the traditional varieties give you absolutely smashing color in the early part of the year and then maybe a little bit of follow-up color going into the autumn time but these are really remarkable and I believe a major step forward in bringing us colorful and hardy and I nearly forgot to mention this is a hardy little plant too that will grow anywhere throughout our region. Now if you want to find out a little bit more about how to grow these things I'll refer you to another video that we have here on this channel that takes the growing a little bit further because in there you'll see that I take the nutrition of the plants and show you what to do with them so that you can get the best growth and the best performance from them. In the short term, it's adding lime because these plants come from calcareous soil areas. In fact, one of the parents of this range of breeding line comes from the Cheddar Gorge, the same place as the famous cheese comes from and if anybody's ever visited the Cheddar Gorge, a very famous scenic spot in Western England, Southwest England in Somerset to be precise they'll know that there they have well-draining calcareous soils, limestone soils and if you have a pH that's somewhere elevated more above neutral, that's around about ideally a pH of 7, you'll find that these plants will respond well to that and in that video I'm showing you how to do it, when to do it and so on. Now, it's true they'll keep on flowering and if you look at this plant here now it's producing plenty of new flower buds but then it's also got quite a few of the old spent flowers on there too and what I like to do with them is look at the plants and when a high proportion of the flowers are going over that's the time to go in with a pair of pruners or hedging shears or something and just give them a little trim over, just trim off the old flower heads and that way when you do that you'll create a nice tight cushion for the new buds to push up through so that you'll get a fresh display all the way through the season and you might have to do this three or four times during the season if you don't do it, they'll still be fine and they'll still grow out and flower but that's a way to keep them extra lush and fresh and colorful as well as having pretty foliage. Now, there's another little thing I want to tell you about these that's really I think very very valuable. Besides ever blooming, besides carrying their flowers on what's neat about these plants is that they're continually pushing up new growth from inside the crown of the plant. You might have some of the older traditional varieties that create what they call a donut. They have this kind of bare center to them and they spread out into a kind of a ring around the outside not with these, because this young growth pushes up from the center and therefore you don't get that hole in the middle that you get with some of the others So an exciting new development, this is the Everbloom series of Dianthus or the Little Garden Pink and the one here in front of me that I really really love is this gorgeous variety called Strawberry Tart and then the one behind it with the Picotty and a kind of nice bicolor is this particular one too that's very nice, a little bit taller growing as you see it's called Watermelon Ice. So there you are That's why I'm so excited about this new Everblooming series of Little Garden Pink Here's two varieties but there's more coming so I hope you get a chance to grow these because they really are very special and I think you're just going to love them This is David Wilson, enjoy your gardening it's good for us and it's very good for our environment too