Pruning & Fertilizing Winter Damaged Ninebark Shrubs
Well, we’ve got another question here, from Jerry in Louisville. ‘I have about five ninebark plants and they really had a tough winter. I tried to baby them along and they still look pretty raggedy. Is there anything I can do to help them?’
So the number one thing we do with our ninebark when they have a tough winter is we trim the deadwood out. We want to get rid of any branching on the plant that does not have, like if you scratch the bark and it’s not green underneath, it’s not going to produce growth. So we’re going to take that out. Once we get all of the dead wood out then, normally earlier in the season I’m going to recommend a heavy fertilizer, this time of year coming into winter the only type of fertilizer I’m going to recommend right now is more of a root development fertilizer. Biotone will help it to grow new roots.
It helps produce new roots in the next two months before everything really shuts down and goes dormant. We’ve got about two to three months here to grow roots. If we can grow a really good root system In the spring that plant’s going to come back tenfold.
Early spring is the best time to cut them back. If you cut them back this time of year, there is potential, if we have another super hard winter, that hard trim can be detrimental to the plant. I would rather see you wait till early spring, and then I would highly encourage a heavy pruning. Especially on a plant that’s been struggling. And when you do that heavy pruning in the spring, say sometime beginning, middle of April, you’re going to put a ton of all season fertilizer on it.
In the spring, I would take them back a foot at least, you don’t want to cut them to the ground. They’re not a perennial, but you could take about a third off that plant. It’s going to thicken that plant up. But when you do that pruning you want to do the fertilization immediately afterwards.
Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).