Which compost for hydrangeas

This may look drastic but it ensures strong shoots which should stay upright. After pruning, or at any time in the growing season, feed by sprinkling Vitax Hydrangea Feed around the plants, work it into the soil surface with a fork or hoe and water thoroughly. Your hydrangeas will respond with fabulous flowers and foliage for one of longest lasting flower shows in the garden. Your login details have been used by another user or machine. Login details can only be used once at any one time so you have therefore automatically been logged out.

Please contact your sites administrator if you believe this other user or machine has unauthorised access. This Website uses cookies to provide best user experience. Cookie Policy - Privacy Policy. Getting the best from Hydrangeas. Products you will need to complete this project. Hydrangea Colourant. Hydrangea Feed. You might also be interested in How to Keep a Blue Hydrangea If you want to keep the soil around a plant acidic, then mulch with Irish moss peat once a year and let the worms mix the peat into the soil.

Alternatively, you can grow Hydrangeas in a pot. Hydrangeas will grow in either multipurpose or ericaceous compost but if you want them to turn blue, it is best to pot them in ericaceous compost. If your soil does not naturally have aluminium or iron salts in the soil, it can easily be added by mixing Hydrangea Colourant into the soil. Hydrangea Colourant, on the other hand, is a mixture of Iron salts and Aluminium Sulphate.

This is the easiest way to create homemade compost. Cold composting means dumping organic matter — usually cast-offs from your kitchen and trimmings from your lawn and garden — in a big heap outside. If you want to get fancy, you can make or buy a bin to keep the pile a little tidier. Then you wait. Just be prepared to wait a while. It takes a year or so for a cold compost pile to decay into usable material. With these methods, you can have usable compost in a month or two during the warmer months.

Raw Materials. Brown ingredients include dried leaves, straw, newspaper, and small branches or wood shavings. Green ones include fruit and vegetable scraps, fresh lawn clippings, eggshells, even seaweed if you can get it. Turn your pile over once a week or so with a shovel or pitchfork. If the compost starts getting smelly or looks too wet, aerate it more frequently and add some extra brown ingredients. When the compost is ready to use, it will stop giving off heat. By this point, the heap of raw scraps should have been broken down into dry, dark, and crumbly material.

Set up a bin filled with red wiggler earthworms and appropriate bedding, and feed it your kitchen scraps about once a week. This process has too many variables to cover in-depth here, but there are lots of guides available in print and online. The effects of working compost into your planting bed are gentler and healthier than aggressive pH adjustments using strong additives. Plus, hydrangeas love the moist, rich soil that compost creates. You've noticed that hydrangeas like a lot of water every week, yes?

Most gardeners enjoy both blue and pink bigleaf hydrangeas and accept whichever color the soil pH gives us. The first goal is health of your hydrangeas. By adding compost, the soil that sustains your beloved hydrangea shrubs is improved and nurtured so it can bolster the healthiest hydrangeas you've ever grown. He is right to be proud of his Hydrangea macrophylla bigleaf hydrangeas and we thank him for sharing his joy in his plants and our compost. Hillary Thompson.