Covering Your Plants and Using WiltStop for Winter

What plants should we start to plan on covering? What is best to cover them with?

I answered a few questions on the phone this last week of people asking about roses. Roses are one that people generally tend to want to cover. And that’s a great thing to do to kind of insulate the cane and the root system of the plant, but you don’t want to do it quite yet. And the reason is, you want that plant to get cold. Understand that it’s going to go dormant.

What we’re trying to do when we say protect the plants is we want to protect them in January and February when we’re going to see single digits below zero temperature. And a couple feet of snow. Snow would be a blessing. Snow is a good insulate. Look at it as a 32 degree blanket. Like a plant igloo.

The winter wind is really what damages the plant, even more so than the cold temperatures. I mean, the cold can damage them, too, but the wind, especially with evergreen plants like azaleas, rhododendrons, boxwood, the wind dehydrates them. So there’s a spray we can put on the plants after Thanksgiving but before Christmas. You want the plant to be completely dormant.

That’s why we’re waiting until that point in time, because we’ve been so warm this fall. Some years the plants are dormant by now, but they’re really not all the way dormant yet. We want to have some cold temperatures here the first couple of weeks of November and then after Thanksgiving, before Christmas, you spray Wilt Proof, WiltStop, or anything that’s a leaf sealant. You spray that on the plant and it’s kind of like Chapstick for plants.

You do that for the evergreens, the broadleaf evergreens. Some evergreens have needles, some evergreens have foliage leaves. And for the ones that have the leaves, it really helps them go through the winter. 

I’ve got like six real nice ones with needles. So the needles have a natural waxy coating on them, which is actually where wilt proof comes from. It’s actually a derivative from pine tree needles. What you’re doing is you’re adding that evergreen sealant from a needle plant to a leafy plant and you prevent the winter burn from happening. 

Now the winter burn, we won’t see until like April as we start to warm up. The damage happens back in January, February. If we have like an inch of snow or two inches of snow and the plant’s three feet tall, it’s experiencing that negative 10 degree wind that’s just blowing on it nonstop. And the sap’s frozen in the trunk so it can’t replace the moisture in the foliage.

That’s why we want to put that sealant on and prevent that moisture from ever escaping. A lot of people come in early, mid-April and they’re like, oh my gosh, something’s going on with my azaleas or rhododendrons. All the leaves are burning. That happened back in December. But because it’s cold, it’s like a refrigerator. So it preserves that leaf until it warms up and then it shows the damage that happened before.

An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cures. If you can get that sealant on the azaleas and rhododendrons really specifically, their buds are already set for next year. So not only are you protecting the foliage, you’re protecting the flowers. Well, let’s face it. That’s why we put those plants in the ground. Their flowers are beautiful. We want to protect that bud because we don’t want that bud to dry out. If it dries out, there are no flowers next year.

What should we cover them with? Never, never, ever plastic. You can use burlap, it’ll divert the wind around the plant. But a lot of times for the insulation for this, like on a rose, let’s just take that for example, you can take some leaves here in the next couple of weeks. Leaves are going to be coming down in bucket loads. 

Once we get cold and that plant has gone naturally dormant, then you can put about six, eight inches of leaves around the base of the plant and that’ll act like a triple pane window kind of naturally insulating the ground. It’ll also help trap some of the moisture in the ground. We do not want the plants to dry out going into winter. So if anybody has planted stuff at their home this year, you definitely want to water it pretty much all the way through Thanksgiving.

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