What Could Cause Struggling Coral Bells?

We have an email here from Kim, who says, ‘good morning. The leaves on my Coral Bells are turning yellow. Why would this happen?’

There could be several reasons. So again, that is a good reason to have a picture. A lot of times, though, yellowing leaves can just mean a nitrogen deficiency, depending how long it’s been in the ground. If it’s an older plant, a lot of times it just needs a supplement of fertilizer. And using a fertilizer like the All Seasons is always a good idea anyway. It’s not going to hurt. But a lot of times that can be a watering issue. If it’s a newer planting, it could be too much, not enough, that kind of thing.

Bring a picture on your phone or an iPad into the nursery, and then we’re going to ask you so many questions you haven’t even thought of. All the questions we ask help narrow it down here. If you’re like, no, I’m watering it every day, well, then a fear becomes maybe too much water. And if you say, oh, I’ve never watered it, and I just put it in two months ago, then we’re going to probably say it’s not enough water. And if they don’t have moisture, they can’t bring up nutrients.

That’s something important to remember. I mean, you can have fertilizer down, but if there’s no moisture present, it can’t get into the plant. So we’re going to ask a lot of questions if you bring that picture in. And a lot of times when we do see a picture, we can tell right away what’s going on with it. But yellowing leaves are kind of a common thing.

So we got a follow up email with a picture of the Coral Bells. That looks like it’s getting too much sun, to be honest. A lot of the edges look like it may have gotten stressed at one point, maybe have gotten dried out and then recovered. And a lot of times the leaves can yellow out, the ones that got the worst of it, which is usually the outer leaves like that. But all in all, it does look very good. Totally savable.

I would cut those off. I mean, because I could be wrong on the sun issue. It could just be a stress thing, but I would give it some fertilizer and cut off those, those darker, the dead ones. If you see them browning and doing that again, then that’s probably getting a little bit of sun. But it does just look environmental or stress related. There are some varieties that will be okay in the full sun.

The green one, the lime ones, not always. They kind of like that more shaded environment. In fact, there are some on the table that are getting too much sun on the back row. I have to move them sometimes because they don’t like that sun. So the lighter green ones usually that’s what, why I thought that first off because they usually get burned pretty quick.

And that would be one of the questions you would definitely ask her if she came in with this picture would be, okay, how much sun is this actually? And an option would be to take this and transplant it, move it to a more shady area and then use a caramel coral bell or an obsidian or forever red. Those varieties will adapt to the amount of sun that they get. The reds and the darker leaf ones do amazing in the sun.

Just trim it up, give it some fertilizer and see what happens. If it’s still causing you issues, it might just be that it’s in too much sun.

It looks like it’s been in the ground for a while. So you may not have to water it that much. I mean, maybe just once a week just to check the soil, because once they’re established, they’re usually pretty good. And if it is in shade, if it isn’t complete shade, it’s probably holding the moisture a little bit better, too. But it does look like it just got a little stress and it’s recovering because I do see that green. And you do want to water it with the All Season fertilizer, because that’s what will activate it.

And one of the things that we talk about, don’t talk about enough is the shade. What causes shade most of the time? Trees. What happens when we get rain and you have a heavy full foliage tree? It all sheds the water. And so sometimes they’re like, oh, we got rain last week. I didn’t water it. Well, if it’s underneath the big tree, it probably got very little. Double check your shade plants, just because we had rain doesn’t mean it’s watered.

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