6 Tips To Revive Your Container Garden After Winter

Follow me as I revive my balcony garden after winter! I’ll share with you 6 easy to follow steps on how you can revitalize your plants and get your garden ready for spring!
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Hello everyone! Welcome to this new video! Today I want to show you how to revitalize your plants after winter and how you can get your container garden ready for spring! So follow me as I complete some of these tasks in my own garden as well! Okay so one of the first things that I like to do in my container garden is to prune my trees and shrubs. Late winter/early spring is a great moment to prune many of your plants and pruning is obviously a really important maintenance task, because by pruning your plant you are not only keeping it in a nice shape, but you’re also making sure it grows healthy and blooms beautifully for you come summer. But that being said obviously there are always some exceptions and some plants can’t be pruned at this time of year … the rule of thumb is – "If it blooms before June – don’t prune". So all of those early bloomers, all of those trees and shrubs that bloom in the spring or early summer they should not be pruned at this time of year, because they will soon be blooming so if you prune them now we will be cutting off potential blooms. Many of those plants bloom on what we call "old wood" and here we have a perfect example Hydrangea macrophylla, it blooms on old wood, so that means it produces its flower buds on the branches it produced last year. So as you can see we have this beautiful framework of branches and the Hydrangea started already to leaf out so it’s on those branches that it’s going to produce flowers in a couple of months. So if I were to prune it now I would be cutting off potential blooms. But nonetheless there are still a few things that we can do to those plants that that are blooming either in the spring or early summer and that is cutting out 3Ds: dead, damaged and diseased wood. So as you can see we have a couple of dead branches in here so let’s go ahead and let’s prune it this doesn’t matter because obviously those dead branches are not going to produce flowers and by cutting out that damage or dead wood we are sending more energy to those healthy shoots and we are making sure that this plant is going to grow healthy. And with this type of hydrangea the only thing that I would do is I would just deadhead the plant so I’m just cutting off those spent blooms from last year and that’s literally it. Task number two get rid of dead plants! Some plants won’t make it through the winter maybe you had seasonal plants that were not winter hardy or maybe you had perennial plants that were supposed to be winter hardy in your growing zone but you know how it is, they don’t always make it through the winter. So it’s a good idea to get rid of those plants because that plants can harbor pests and diseases that can then spread further into your garden. But at the same time don’t be too quick about getting rid of your plants because sometimes those plants need a bit more time to wake up in the spring some plants wake up really quickly as you can see most of my perennials here are already waking up and leafing out while others still look pretty dead and someone actually asked me recently why do I keep a dead plant on my balcony if that’s a new trend or something and they were obviously referring to my Clematis montana ‘Mayleen’ and it does look pretty dead from afar but this plant is very much alive and is just now starting to leaf out. So give your plants some time and and if they don’t wake up from their winter dormancy, well then it’s time to say goodbye! Okay next task is repotting and dividing your plants. When plants are grown in containers after two three years they usually need to be repotted into slightly larger pot if they outgrew their previous container. But even if they didn’t, it’s still a good idea to refresh that potting soil because potting soil tends to compact really easily and after a while it won’t hold water and nutrients as good as it used to so even if the container is still size appropriate it’s still a good idea to take your plant out of its pot shake off all that old soil and transplant your plant into fresh potting mix, add a whole bunch of organic matter to make sure that your plant grows healthy and happy! And if you’re repotting your perennial plants, herbaceous perennials, it’s also a good opportunity to divide your plants because after a while those plants start to be a little bit crowded so you can easily divide them multiply plants and make sure that the plant has enough room to grow in that container. So today I’m going to be transplanting and dividing my ornamental grass Carex ‘Ever Gold’ it’s an evergreen winter hardy, ornamental grass, that I absolutely love and they grow so fast I need to divide them every like 6 months and I have so many of them already on the balcony but they are absolutely beautiful. I think that they add a lot of movement and I just like to place them in different places all along my balcony cause I like that repetition, I feel like that makes your balcony or your garden look more harmonious. Just going to shake off this excess soil as you can see it actually started to be a bit pot-bound as I said this plant grows really really rapidly so dividing ornamental grasses is super simple all I do is I basically just cut the rootball in half I’m using pruning saw, but I mean you could do it with a knife or with with a pair of scissors even or secateurs Okay so I divided my plant in half and now I have two new plants out of one so just going to repot it into their new pots now Okay next task is mulching! Mulching your potted plants has many great benefits! Not only it protects the roots from frost in winter protects them from heat in summer but it also helps to retain soil moisture! So the potting soil…. there’s a bumblebee! And on top of that obviously it also adds that beautiful kind of finished look to your planter. So let me show you how I mulch my container plants and this method also works really great for all of those larger plants that you have in your container garden, for example if you have some larger trees or shrubs or climbers that you cannot really repot every two to three years this also works really great to refresh soil in their containers when it’s not possible to repot. So first I scrape the top layer of soil, of that old soil it’s actually mixed with with the old mulch but that’s okay so I just scraped really the top layer but if you have older plants you can scrape as far into the pot as you can and now we are going to add a layer of either a fresh potting mix or better yet a layer of organic matter for example compost or humus. So if you added a nice thick layer of organic matter like compost or humus that’s already great and this could serve as a mulch itself but I like to make it look a little bit more decorative so on top of my layer of organic mulch I add another layer of mulch and I absolutely love using pine cones for that purpose. Pinecones are free and they actually look really cute so I use them in most of my containers. Okay in the last task and probably one of the most important tasks that you can do in your Spring garden is to fertilize your plants! You can’t expect to grow healthy plants if you don’t fertilize them because fertilizers are plant food they are essential nutrients, minerals that your plant needs to complete its vital processes and to just grow and stay healthy. And in the ground you know when we plant plants in the garden, plant can spread its roots in search for water and nutrients, but they cannot do it in containers, because they grow in that restricted environment, so they rely fully on you to deliver those nutrients! I personally use liquid organic fertilizers. I’m not a fan of slow relase fertilizers for container gardens. Slow relase fertilizers work really well in the garden because as we said garden soil and potting mix are not the same things. Garden soil can retain those nutrients, so your plants have all the time that supply of those nutrients in the ground but poting mix will not retain nutrients the same way as garden soil and on top of that when you have a container you’re going to water that plant more often because obviously soil dries out quicker in containers versus in the garden. As you water your plants and as this water passes through that container the nutrients are being leeched out, so as I said I’m going to rely on organic liquid fertilizers that I’m going to be using weekly. I have a whole video where I spoke about the products that I use and how I use them what they are meant for etc. So I start to fertilize my plants when the weather warms up and the plants are actively growing and at first I will start with half strength fertilizer and then as the season progresses I will slowly increase the full strength. So for all of those plants that are just producing foliage I’m going to be using Alga Grow and those plants that are blooming I’m going to use Alga Bloom. Okay so here it is, six simple tasks that you can do to help your container garden regenerate after winter! hHope you found it helpful and happy gardening!