hydrangeas

I'm at a client's office trying to repair their crash-happy computer. (I seriously need this T-shirt.) Right at this moment the disk doctor is running, so rather than sit around looking stupid I might as well do something of my own. Luckily I brought my own computer along.

So, this past weekend we planted the hydrangea bed in front of the house. The bed in front of the house has been a problem for a long time, because the dogs like to sleep up against the foundation. I guess it's cooler against the concrete blocks. They also like to dig at the ground wherever they sleep, again to cool down. Over the years this has resulted not only in nothing growing there, but also in a ditch a foot deep or so, all along the front of the house. This is very bad. It encourages water to sit there, which can eventually cause the foundation to crack. You really want the earth up against your house to be higher so the water will run off, not the other way around.

I never used to like hydrangeas, but someone mentioned them to me recently (I wish I could remember who so I could thank them), and I was surprised to discover how many varieties are available online. We bought all different varieties, but tried to choose ones that will be about the same size (4' high and wide) but have different flowers. Of course we'll probably end up with one that's much taller than the others, but it will be a few years before they get big enough to notice.

We ordered six from Joy Creek Nursery and one from Hydrangea.com. I had hoped to get them all from a nursery nearer here, since that way we'd know they could handle Southern summers. Hydrangea.com is in Atlanta, but they are very expensive and seem to specialize in lacecaps, which I'm not crazy about. Those are the ones that have a mass of little tiny flowers with a ring of big flowers around it. I prefer the ones with a big pom-pom of flowers, which are called mopheads. Joy Creek, in Oregon, had better prices and a really good selection of mopheads, so most of our order came from them.

The plants from Joy Creek arrived last Thursday and luckily, the one from Hydrangeas.com came the very next day. They were all very well packed and looked healthy. Actually one of the Joy Creek plants was a bit the worse for wear, but I think it was because the plant was leggier, so the leaves got bumped around a bit more. The root structure looked great so I think the plant will be fine. A couple of them were in pots but most of them were wrapped in damp newspaper with plastic wrap wrapped tightly around the newspaper, instead of a pot. I think I already posted about putting them in shade and mulching them so they'd have a couple of days to get used to their new home before planting.

Creating the bed was actually pretty easy. We hardly had to do any digging because the dogs had already dug up that whole bed. There were just a couple of lingering plants to be removed, and a little digging near the edges of the house where the dogs don't tend to sleep.

We filled the space up with two giant bags of peat and eight bags of compost. Also, when the dogs were digging they tended to kick the soil up onto the concrete path, where it packed down and eventually covered the path. I had almost forgotten that there even was a path under there. Georg scraped all that soil off the concrete and shoveled it back into the beds. Not only did that add a bunch of surprisingly nice soil to the bed, but the path looks great! Like a real sidewalk that people would actually want to walk on. He even swept the walk after he was done shoveling.

Because of all the peat and compost, the soil in that bed is about a hundred times better than anywhere else in the yard. I hope the hydrangeas are happy there! The light there is good for them too: dappled semi-shade most of the day, then in late afternoon (4 pm or so) the left side of the bed moves into full sun and the rest of it goes into full shade. We put the sun-tolerant ones on the left side, but none of them will ever have that brutal mid-day summer sun beating down on them.

The last step was to prevent the dogs from digging again. I don't want them to get in there and undo all the work we did! We put up a lightweight 2 foot fence, just bamboo stakes and some plastic mesh. It wouldn't keep them out if they really wanted to get in there, but it's enough of a visual barrier that they haven't even tried. I'm hoping that by the time we get that whole bed mulched and planted up with ground covers, the dogs will have forgotten they used to dig in there all the time, and the fence won't be necessary. Which sounds silly, but sometimes my dogs' habits are surprisingly easy to break. If you can just distract them long enough, they seem to forget all about it. (My friend Nellorat used to say that when talking about dogs, "loyal" is a good euphamism for "stupid," i.e. "Dogs are so loyal.") For instance, Lina used to sleep on the bed all the time, but we kept her out of the bedroom for eight weeks after her surgery so she wouldn't jump. When we finally stopped shutting the bedroom door, she'd lost interest in the bed & hasn't tried since.

Unfortunately I don't think we'll get any flowers next year, because hydrangeas bloom on the previous year's wood. And the plants are so tiny now that they don't yet have any branches big enough to produce flowers. Actually the one from Hydrangeas.com might; it's quite a bit bigger than the others. I guess that's maybe why it was more expensive. But whenever they do flower, they should look really nice. We got three blue ones -- one bright blue, one lighter, and one with interesting flowers that don't open all the way -- one bright red/purple, one bi-colored purple and white, one white with a hint of blue, and one pure white.

Of course, the soil acidity affects the color. Soil here in Durham tends to be acidic, which would make the flowers all blue, but we added so much fresh soil to that bed that I think it's probably fairly neutral right now. I guess at some point we'll do a soil test and see if we need to add lime to keep the red ones red. Gina told me she knew of someone who had poured sulfer around the outside of a hydrangea, and lime in the middle, and ended up with blue and red flowers on the same plant! That sounds really amazing, though I think we'll get to know our hydrangeas the way they are before trying anything fancy like that. (Remember how I mentioned that I tend to go for information overload? A month ago I didn't know anything about hydrangeas. I thought there was only one kind: blue.)