Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 11, 1993 TAG: 9307120256
SECTION: HOMES PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: John Arbogast
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A: The substance on your azalea branches sounds like lichen, which is a growth that can occur on different woody plants but is not harmful. Lichens are the color you noted and are usually papery and sometimes soft. Actually, lichens are a combination of green algae and fungi.
There is no control for lichens themselves, other than to prune surrounding vegetation to increase the amount of light and air flow. If I am correct in this lichen diagnosis, something else is causing the branches of your pink azalea to die. In order to find out if there is anything you can do to save your azalea, bring at least pencil-size branch pieces with the substance growing on them and with some leaves showing decline to the Roanoke City Extension Office between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m., 2728 Colonial Ave., Office 10, Roanoke. The telephone number is 857-7915.
Q: How does one properly care for hydrangeas? They do fine inside for a couple of weeks, but when we move them outside they deteriorate very quickly. The last one died within a few days. Please help; we have a lovely blue hydrangea that we would really like to plant outside. A.F.B., Pearisburg
A: Since your hydrangeas deteriorate or even die very quickly after being moved outside, I'm almost sure this is the result of shock to the plants, particularly a change in the amount of sunlight that the hydrangeas have been placed in outdoors compared to the lower light intensity that they were likely growing with inside.
The solution to this would be to acclimate the potted hydrangeas for several days with a gradual change from outdoor shade to increasingly more outdoor sun. I am assuming that you are waiting until warm weather in the spring before placing potted plants that have been growing indoors into the outside environment.
There are several different varieties of hydrangeas, so I can't give a lot of specific details about all of them. However, the hydrangea with the blue flowers is probably one of the Bigleaf Hydrangeas. These plants need full sun to partial shade and will produce blue flower parts if grown in an acidic soil with pH of between 5.0 and 5.5. Also, expect some winter injury and thus fewer summer flowers on this hydrangea in the Pearisburg area since you are on the northern edge of its hardiness zone.
Q: I bought eight geraniums. They looked healthy and were blooming. All of the blooms are off now. I have several questions about them. How does a person raise pretty, healthy, blooming geraniums? Do they need a lot of sunshine? Are they supposed to be watered very often? What will make a geranium leaf turn yellow? I planted these geraniums in potting soil. They were really pretty before the recent storm. They got very wet then. My other flowers are doing well. Mrs. M.L.H., Roanoke
A: Follow these cultural care practices for attractive flowering geraniums from mid-spring until frost in either containers or in flower beds:
Provide full sun;
Plant in well-drained soil;
Wait until the soil an inch under the surface feels damp but not really wet before watering again; yellow geranium leaves without leaf spots can be caused by the soil staying too wet or from drought stress;
Thoroughly mix a moderate amount of 5- 10-10 or 10-10-10 fertilizer into the bed or potting soil before planting geraniums and then fertilize with a water-soluble fertilizer for flowering plants at six-week intervals;
Continually remove faded geranium flowers when about half of the parts of each flower begin to die.
Send short questions about your lawn, garden, plants or insects to Dear John, c/o the Roanoke Times & World-News, P. O. Box 2491, Roanoke, Virginia 24010-2491. We need your mail, but this column can't reply to all letters. Those of wide appeal will be answered each week. Personal replies cannot be given. Please don't send stamped envelopes, samples or pictures.
John Arbogast is the agriculture extension agent for Roanoke.
by CNB