Chrysanthemums are among the most popular garden plants this time of year. Properly cared for, mums can be kept over the winter and then will continue to brighten home gardens the next year.
“Mums will do well in most climates in Virginia,” said Chris Mullins, Virginia Cooperative Extension horticulture and greenhouse specialist at Virginia State University. “People will buy them in decorative pots, making it easy to put them on your patio or porch,” added Mullins, who is also the host of “From the Ground Up” garden segments on Virginia Farm Bureau Federation’s television program Real Virginia.
“When they were growing in a farmers’ field, they were watered every day. And they’re in a soil-less type media,” Mullins explained. “So if you have these in a pot on your deck or patio, you want to continue watering them just about every day in the fall.”
While potted mums are usually large plants and aren’t expected to survive winter weather, smaller mums can be purchased and planted in well-drained soil in the early fall. After blooming, the plants will die back in the winter but will survive with regular waterings, Mullins said.
“As the season progresses the plant will start to die back, and when it freezes the plant will die and turn brown. I’d leave all that brown material; it will give the plant some protection in the wintertime,” Mullins noted. “Probably sometime in May you’ll start to see some shoots coming up. Then you can start to clean up the old vegetation from last year’s plant.”
“What you can do is go ahead and pinch the shoots back—about half of each stem— and that will cause the plant to branch out and get more rounded,” he continued. “Otherwise it will get real tall and leggy and tend to fall over when it blooms. A couple of these pinches through the summer, maybe the last pinch around the Fourth of July, will help to delay flowering until the fall when you want it.”
Fall garden mums are part of Virginia’s $251 million green industry, one of the top sectors of the state’s agriculture sector.
To watch Mullins’ segment on garden mums, visit the VFBF YouTube channel athttps://youtu.be/7FfmVpdEvg4.
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