Taking Care of Mums to Keep Them as a Perennial
Talk about taking care of mums, a lot of people do ask if they’re hardy, which I mean, which just means if they’re going to come back everywhere or every year. They are grown to be perennial. The earlier you get them in the ground, the better your chances. A lot of times people end up just treating them more like an annual just because of using them just for the season.
If you do plant them as a perennial and they come back in the spring, you want to make sure you start pinching them back, like the first couple sets of leaves. You want to keep pinching them back, and that’s how they stay nice and bushy. That’s usually done by the end of July.
And a lot of fertilizer. I’ve seen some people keep them in pots, you know, just for decorative things and maybe they don’t put them in the ground. They’re just going to last until frost when they’re just in the pot, that’s when they’re an annual. The roots being exposed in the winter is the main thing, being up and out of the ground. Being in the ground, they’re protected and insulated.
They’re slowly starting to come in, and we do have five-six inch mums and eight inch mums, and then we do have some big patio pot sizes. We actually have some ones with three different colors in one, so when they open up, they look like one big mum with like three different colors.
They open quicker in the warmer weather. These cool mornings are great for these fall flowering plants that will really extend the bloom time. Then when it warms up, that’s when they start to show their flowers.
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