Azaleas: Planting & Pruning

We had a question from a customer: would an azalea be okay in a north facing spot of the house? It’s in a nook doesn’t get sun until the early afternoon.

A perfect space for an azalea is on the east side of the house where it receives morning sun and afternoon shade. It will work on the north side, but you’re going to have to watch that plant because the afternoon sun’s a little bit hotter. You may have to do a little bit more watering to establish the plant on the north side. The other thing azaleas don’t like is winter wind, so if that north side of the house is exposed to the wind then that’s enough concern and there might be some better options for that on another side of the house. If it is protected from the winter wind in that nook and you don’t mind doing a little extra watering to get it established, it should do fine on the north side.

When you plant rhododendrons and azaleas, it’s really important to use extra soil amendments. Rhododendrons, azaleas, dogwoods, redbuds, all those plants like a real rich organic soil. A lot of times we have sand or clay up here in the dirt in Ohio. So what we want to do is do about a 50-50 mixture with Sweet Peat and your existing soil. You want to introduce the roots to what they have to grow in, but you want to give the plant a two or three year head start by having that rich soil around the roots. Then also using the all season green pellet fertilizer when you plant them, that really gives them the best boost and the best chance to take off.

As you’re putting something new in, just remember to feed it and take good care of it, really give it all the love that it needs right off the bat, and that will help a lot.

Now if the azaleas are larger and only blooming in one area, then the time of year you want to attempt to cut it back is coming up as soon as they’re done blooming. You want to put a really, really hard shear on them, and then fertilize them very heavily with the all-season fertilizer. Normally with shrubs we recommend three scoops, but when we’re talking about an old azalea, we may go as much as five or six scoops around the base of that plant and that’s going to encourage it. Then you want to make sure if we don’t get rain, you water to get that fertilizer in. That’s your best bet to recover that Azalea.

Most of the nurseries are going to tell you never cut back more than one-third of the new growth. The problem with that is is when the plant gets really big we got to cut back a couple years growth to get down inside of it when we do that. It’s best chance survival to do it, right? Fertilize extremely heavily to encourage it to do push the foliage out from the older wood. The further you cut them back to higher the risk so that’s really up to you where you feel comfortable risking it but a third of it would be ideal.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).