Best Time to Split a Hydrangea and How to Do it
I have this email from Colleen who says, Our hydrangea plant has split into two plants, and I would like to transplant part of it. When is the best time to transplant it, and should I cut it back before I transplant it?
All right, so those are great questions, and there’s a picture provided. That is also a macrophylla hydrangea. No blooms on it, but the best time to transplant that would be the end of March, beginning of April. You want to do it before the plant wakes up in the spring.
You could do it now, the problem is we don’t know what kind of winter we’re going to have. And if we have a devastating, brutal cold winter, it has the potential to hurt that plant. If you wait until the end of March, beginning of April to do that, you want to dig as big of a root system up as you can move, and then you’re going to divide it with a shovel or a hatchet or something like that, and you want to make a clean cut as possible. I mean, I’ve even seen people use sawzalls to cut a root system in half.
Then you’re going to replant the portion of the plant you want there, and then you can divide it somewhere else. There is risk involved in this. I’m not going to tell you that there isn’t some risk involved, but doing it at that time of year gives you the highest likelihood of success.
And I do like to use a product that’s called Biotone by Espoma with that. It’s a good thing for transplanting. It helps with root development and stuff. It’s good for transplanting, it’s got mycorrhizae in it, and they’re designed to cause the plant to fiber root.
The fiber roots are what actually absorb the nutrients and the moisture out of the soil. So the quicker we can replace those roots, the faster the plant will recover. And then later on, if you were to divide this in March or April, I’d say we’d use that Biotone on it. But then later on towards May, once that plant has recovered, rooted in, then you could go to a slow-release, all-season fertilizer.
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