What's up plant family? So today the question is how late is too late? I was driving around the other
day and I saw some beautiful plants that had a sign plants on sale but I'm here in the middle
of December in Westchester, Pennsylvania, Zone 6B. So the question, how late is too late? Can I
actually get these plants on discount and plant them and will they actually survive through the
winter? Well that's exactly what I'm going to be addressing in this video as well as giving tips
and tricks how to do so most effectively. So this video is primarily concerned with shrubs and trees
both evergreens like these Ilex hollies, as well as deciduous shrubs like this viburnum over here
Herbaceous perennials have a little bit different rules of thumb than these guys because these are
a little bit more robust. Now most of us know that early autumn is the absolute best time to get our
shrubs, trees, and perennials in the ground because it often gives our plants about a month
to six weeks of time in the soil before our first freezes, which will allow them to really acclimate
their roots into the ground. Now that being said, if you are into your late autumn or early winter
and you can still get your shovel or your spade into the ground and dig a hole, then that means
it's okay to get your plants in the ground for both our shrubs and our trees If your ground is frozen and you can dig into it then you going to need to think about an overwintering strategy if you already pulled the trigger and bought those
plants on discount. Thankfully for me, as you can see, I can get my shovel into the earth
So that means these plants are going to be a-okay to get planted right now on December 15th here in
Westchester, Pennsylvania. All right, so now that we know we can get our plants in the ground
there's a few things we want to keep sure that we do not do when we're planting our plants at this
time of year. Number one, we don't want to add any soil amendments to our soil. Oftentimes in soil
amendments, whether it be compost or bagged potting mix, they will have some fertilizers in there and
that can stimulate growth and we want our plants to have an opportunity to kind of rest over the
winter time so we don't want any sort of stimulation. Furthermore, we will not be adding any slow
release fertilizers or watering in with any fertilizer either at this moment. Okay, so now
it's time to take our plants out of the pot. And if we are planting in the springtime or the early
autumn, we will typically kind of rough those roots up. But in this instance, we want to disturb our
roots as little as possible. Since the soil is not warm enough to allow for root growth to really
occur right now, we don't want to rough them up. We want to just let them be so they can kind of
just get nice and situated in the soil over the wintertime. So then when the spring season arrives they able to start growing naturally as easily as possible Furthermore we don want to do any pruning at this time either If we are pruning
them, that also they're not going to have an opportunity to heal those wounds. And often what
will happen is that they will have desiccation, which basically means the stems will dry from
the inside out. And then in the springtime, you're going to have to go and remove all of that dead
stem material. So you don't want to do any pruning now. Wait to do any pruning in the spring
So now we'll just go ahead and get it planted up like we normally would. And now once it's planted in, we want to give it a nice heavy drink of water. And we're going to
want to monitor the precipitation. And if we're not getting weekly precipitation, you're going to
need to go, you know, bring, most of us have probably turned off the valves of our hoses. So
that's why you can see I have my hand pail here and you're going to need to give it additional
water once a week as long during the weeks that you don't get any precipitation all right
and if you have a hard freeze on your forecast it's awesome to give it a nice heavy drink of
water just prior to that hard freeze and that's going to help really protect it from
getting dried out during that cold extra cold weather Now one thing we want to be on the lookout for is something called heaving Heaving is basically when the ground freezes sometimes it can push your plant and its roots up out of the soil and that will expose the roots of your plant to the cold air
That's not good. You don't want that to happen. A common plant that that will occur to is coral
bells, heuchera. Now that we have it planted, watered in, we want to give it a nice three to
inch layer of mulch that can be wood chips, aged bark mulch, could be gravel, leaf mold compost
I actually just had my gutters cleaned and they bagged up some of the leaves that were in the
gutters and I'm actually going to use that as my mulch for this holly. And one last tip is that
during the winter time deer are hungry so I always like to add some deer scram
deer repellent to my plant and that's going to just give it a little bit of protection from the
deer. If you're looking for some just check the link in the description below for a link to this
stuff. And that's pretty much all that you need to know regarding whether or not it's too late to
get your shrubs and trees planted in your garden right now. If you do have any further questions or
comments make sure to leave them in the comment section below. Don't forget give this video a like
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