Thanks! Since I bought them from a nursery that sells Monrovia plants, I went to their website and found some good info. I'll link to it below. I noticed they mentioned feeding before spring growth. Has anyone fed theirs after this time period? I fed mine after I planted them in the containers and I'm about to give them a bit more. The alkalinity of our water is turning them purple but I'm trying to keep them blue. As Nell says, I'm sperimentin' ; ) Diana Here is a link that might be useful: monrovia site

Hi Erica, I'm thinking it was a combination of more fertilizer (which they don't need the first year), the insecticide spray, and the sun! Is it possible that he tender leaves did not like the spray on them and burned in the sun! You may have to cut them back and wait for new growth, but no more bug spray and limit the sun until they get used to it. New plants in pots look great when you buy them but they don't acclimate themselves to the elements for a while. I have a bed of 6 hydrangeas in shade most of the day but they get 2/3 hours of sun in early afternoon and this year we added 3 new plants to the planter and the flowers burned to a crisp on the new ones and the older ones that had been in the ground for a year or so sailed through the heat and sun with no problems! The temps went up to low to mid 90's for several days, and all the hydrangeas in my yard wilted from the heat but the flowers perked up in the evening. Don't be afraid to prune them back if necessary, it will thicken the plant for you and you should still get some blooms later on the remontant types. Good Luck! Donna

Do not feel bad; you are not the only one complaining about lack of blooms with ES in cold regions. There are many causes and they depend on whether the plant produced flower buds or not. For example, if the plant produced flower buds and you got no blooms, something obviously happened to the flower buds. Possible causes include such things as late frosts, pests like bunnies and deer who just love to eat the flower buds, lack of water killed the buds, etc. If you got no flower buds then maybe the plants got too much fertilizer, winter dried out and killed the flower buds or again, it could be that the plant is suffering from periods of dry soil followed by moist soil followed by dry soil and so forth. Too much nitrogen keeps the plant producing nice green leaves at the expense of flowers so just fertilize it once around June and leave it at that. The first thing to be aborted when there is not enough moisture will be the flower buds so try to keep the plant well mulched (3-4" of organic mulch thru the drip line) and the soil evenly watered. While the plant is dormant and the ground has not frozen, do water the plants because the roots are still growing. You can reduce waterings to once a week or once every two weeks (try giving the plant one gallon of water per watering). In the summer months, check the soil more often to make sure the soil is not drying out. You should have to water more frequently now than you did in Spring but then again, you will need to reduce the watering when temperatures go down in the Fall. To determine if you need to water, try using the finger method early in the morning for 2-3 weeks: insert a finger into the soil to a depth of 4". Then water when the soil feels dry or almost dry; also, make a note in a calendar when you watered the plant. After 2-3 weeks of doing this, review your notes in the wall calendar and determine every how many days did you have to water. Then set the sprinkler to water 1 gallon of water on the same frequency (every 3 days or every 4 days or....). If the temperatures change a lot up/down and stay there, use the finger method again. Luis

I'll tell you what I did and then decide if it is suitable for you. First, I'm in a warmer end of z6 and only on a rare ocassion all buds of 30+ macrophyllas I grow got killed. So, I didn't protect any of them and had no serious reason to grow ES since there are many much more interesting hydtangeas. However, I had one particular spot in a garden where macs don't want to bloom even after relatively warm winters. Problem with this spot is that it's in a full sun the whole winter and early spring and then become part-shaded as season progresses. What usually happens there is that hydrangeas buds start swelling very early and got zupped by March frosts. I planted three ES there last year and usual thing happened again even though we had an unusually warm winter. On April 1 I pruned all three of them to 6-8" off the ground leaving two pairs of live buds on a stem. By July they produced a lot of new growth from the old stems as well as from the base. First bloom occured on or about August 1, 4 months after pruning, on a new growth from the old stems and since then they are in a CONSTANT bloom because new growth from the base also produced flower buds, but 1-1.5 months later than the first set. This picture was taken last week. As you can see, right now I have a combo of aged (pink), semi-aged and new(blue) flowers on a same plant. Though plants are only 2'+ tall (no wonder with such severe spring pruning) I finally made hydrangeas bloom in that spot. How all this should be translated to z5? Unless you want to go a long way to protect current year top growth and have a mid-summer bloom, you may instead simply settle for the late-summer bloom on a new growth and do nothing, except mulching to protect the root zone.. Before ES was invented you had no luxury to chose the bloom time. Now you do.