Birch Tree & Old Rhododendrons

Erica sent an email in earlier this morning, a picture of her birch tree. ‘There’s growth at the top, should I replace the tree? What should I do?’

I would give the tree a little bit of time. It looks like it is fairly new planting in there. It’s very, very important that birch have enough water. And when I say enough water, most varieties of birch, you cannot drown. They will literally grow underwater for short periods of time.

There are a few exceptions to that rule. The purple leaf birch doesn’t like as much water, but the type she has from the picture looks like DuraHeat or Heritage and those varieties love moisture. The other thing that it’s definitely going to need is some fertilizer to recover from some winter damage. It’s really important late in the fall, if we have a dry fall like we did last year, you absolutely want to water plants that like water.

Even though the top of the plant’s gone dormant, it’s still storing moisture in the trunks and the branches for spring. You want to make sure there’s moisture available for the plant to do that until the time the ground freezes. I would use some all-season fertilizer, very heavy dose, a tree that size, probably seven to 10 scoops, and then water it extremely well and deeply. You’re going to put the garden hose on it and let the hose trickle out and really soak deep into the soil and move the hose to different spots around the root system. Let it run for maybe five to 10 minutes per spot. Again, not full blast. You don’t want to wash the soil away. You just want that water to have time to seep deeply into the soil.

She also asked about a rhododendron that she had, and she was wondering, it’s 19 years old. It went through a rough winter, dead stems, two flowers. What should she do?

That’s pretty common. Our azaleas, rhododendrons, pears, japonica, they all took it on the chin a little bit this year with our hard winter that we’re having. So I would definitely recommend, again, the all-season fertilizer for that. You want to put a pretty heavy dose on if the plant’s old, especially if it hasn’t been getting fertilized the last several seasons.

You’re going to try to make up some ground and put some extra nutrients in the soil so that plant has the ingredients it needs to recover. Check the soil. You shouldn’t need the water in this environment that we’re having here, because we’ve had quite a bit of moisture. As we go into the summer months, it’s okay to supplement water when you’re trying to get a plant to recover. Plus, it’ll actually wash over the fertilizer and rinse those nutrients down into the soil.

Important product you want to use on a rhododendron when it’s recovering, and even to prevent the damage from ever happening, is a product called Wilt Proof. Wilt Proof, Wilt Stop, there’s several different varieties out there. What you do is you apply that after Thanksgiving, but before Christmas. For lack of a better analogy, it’s like a watered-down glue or chapstick for plants. You spray it on the foliage; it seals that foliage and prevents that loss of moisture in the winter. When we have a lot of snow, it’s a good thing, it protects the plants. When we don’t have a lot of snow, that negative 20-degree winter wind just dehydrates the leaf terribly. This prevents that dehydration from happening and then the plant doesn’t have to work so hard to recover in the spring.

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