And I am wanting to use latex paint to match my walls in my bedroom I am still, yes still working on. Last year not one flower came out :-( Happy to report that I see blooms starting this year on them.I have had the hardest time growing hydrangeas. Depending on the look you want, they can be solid or tinted and they can be any color. All these strategies tend to turn soil more acidic, and eventually transform the bloom color to blue. Last year, I wrote a tip post on caring for your hydrangeas. I am not exactly sure why, but you can’t buy it in CA, FL, HI, MN, MO, NV, OR, PA, WA .Using any of these products takes the guesswork out of figuring out what to add for the color you want your blooms.This was the perfect tool to get all the leaves out of the dense base of each plant.Once I got all the leaves and junk that settled into the bed over the winter I needed a regular size rake to put all the leaves in piles and then I cleaned up the small debris and then sprinkled the lime around each plant. Because of this trait, gardeners can chemically manipulate hydrangea bloom colors using soil additives. Hansen's work appears regularly in consumer and trade publications, as well as numerous internet gardening and lifestyle channels. The hydrangea is unique among plants in this ability to indicate soil acidity. Unlike other hydrangeas, your Endless Summer will bloom on both old and new growth, branches that grew last year and the new branches from this year. I cut right above the woody part of each stem. Thanks for the link to the hydrangea site. These are my favorite colors. I cannot believe the rich, true color and the huge blossom clusters. Home Depot just taking my money or is it me planting them in the wrong spot. The mulch was the shredded kind and looked great – with no added color. I watered them once a week with it and they became a beautiful shade of pink/purple. so I am anxious to see the results.Thanks for the info…I just purchased endless summer and I wondered how I was going to acidify the soil.Hi Diane, just a note to your followers, Certain ways of pruning can cause the plant to provide very little blooms. Not all bigleaf hydrangeas have this capacity for variable color, but for those that do, aluminum determines the degree of blue. They are more akin to the colors seen in litmus paper, the chemically treated strips classically used to determine whether solutions are acidic or basic.
Another unique feature is that this hydrangea will continue to set buds and bloom throughout the season; deadheading the spent flowers will encourage this.Feel free to cut the blooms for drying or fresh cut in vases because you will actually encourage the plant to produce more blossoms. Each fall after good hard freezes and the dead wood is left, I cut the dead wood branches down to about 6 inches. :-)Hi Terry – I would try using Miracle Grow’s, MirAcid. It could be they just don’t like the soil where I live. I have had success with getting more blooms every year doing this, but they still are not as abundant as I would like. It was weird to see the shapes of it. They come out pretty easily.There is a hedge of hydrangeas that I drive by frequently. Spring is the best time to prune. To grow the best blue hydrangeas on the block, it all starts with testing your soil; if it's not acidic enough, you may end up with pink or purple flowers instead. Introduction of the molybdate ion into the hydrangea shrub through the soil has proven toxic to the plant, but long-term experiments are in progress exposing hydrangeas to very low concentrations of MoOAnother result of our research is the production of unique red-blue patterns on hydrangea sepals by controlled aluminum diffusion through cut stems and by direct sprayings onto blooms. My hydrangeas have started to send up green shoots and I am excited for them to bloom again this year. grrrrr. I feed them with MirAcid every other week in the spring and summer and sprinkle the garden lime over the beds in the winter. They are so new, I don’t recall all the colors. Your article was very helpful. If it does, it stays, if not I remove it. As far as cutting back the long stems n the fall. Me, I am partial to the blue, but I would love any and all. So far the hydrangeas have returned and grown back each year (3 years).