Planting Mums, Wintering Them, & How to Have Them Come Back Next Year

I also have an email, they wanted to know how late in the fall can you plant mums?

Really, you can plant them until the ground freezes. You can plant anything until then. With mums though, the quicker or the sooner you get them in the ground, the better chance you have of them coming back. When you plant them for survivability, there’s a higher likelihood of them coming back. It’s never guaranteed with them, though.

We encourage you to use a product like biotone or something that’s going to develop a strong root system, and then piling up leaves or something where the mums are as they go dormant later in the fall. It creates a layer of insulation, it just helps protect them for that first winter.

The main thing is to give it a good drink before going into the winter before that ground freezes, around Thanksgiving. We just recommend going around and watering basically everything you planted this year, even last year around that time. Even if it has rained, it’s a good piece of mind. That way you just know.

Then when you put the moms in the ground, what do you do with them after they’re dead? You let a couple frost get them and all that will die off. It’ll just be brown on top, but you can just cut that off and it comes right back fresh from the ground. A lot of times like a one inch two inch stubble. Sometimes it’s not a bad idea. It helps you remember where they are. I do that with a lot of things, like perennial hibiscus.

Talking about trimming in the spring, when your mums do come back, you’d want to pinch them. So basically after they start developing sets of leaves, give them a little pinch. After they start growing a few sets of leaves you want to pinch back like the first or second set of leaves down. And don’t let them grow too much because that will force out more growth on the auxiliary sides, on the outer parts, and that will make more branching, which makes more blooms. Because a lot of times if you don’t, you get out there and your mum’s like two foot tall.

Sometimes they’ll bloom too early, and when it’s hot the blooms don’t last long. So pinching them back is crucial to have success with mums. There’s a few things that are like that, dahlias are another one.

I usually do planters. I like them, and then when they’re done once they’re done. I think that’s why we say that we just treat them like annuals more or less, because of the work involved and honestly they take so much fertilizer. And once you get to that point in the fall of next year, and then the new mums come out you look at yours and you’re like, I want a different color.

But some are considered hardy, there’s just a few things you gotta keep in mind. You just pinch them once or twice, like usually they say till like mid to late july. That’s when you stop pinching them. I would encourage if you’re going to plant them, to plant multiples, like early bloom, mid bloom, late bloom, that way you always get a burst of color. We do the same thing with perennials when we’re planting them, that way there’s always a new point of interest in the landscaping and it’ll spread your color out over months instead of weeks.

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