Azaleas
Azaleas
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Just a note about why the site exists; I just wanted to experiment with making a simple web page and my backyard is where I spend most of my time nowadays so the backyard seemed a good subject. I really didn't expect anyone to visit the site but if you are here keep in mind I'm not trying to impress anybody.
Also of note is that I haven't looked at this in while and was wanting to change some things and I've forgoten how. I was going to add a new home page and a new catagory of Blueberries.
Update as of February 2025: The dwarf varieties have not done well; most have died and I have replaced them with A. Royalty. Now I only have a few that are not the Royalty variety.
The heat and drought weakened the pine trees encircling the "Azalea Garden" and pine bark beetles finished them off. So it didn't end up like I had pictured - so it's still a work in progress. Now it's just a slightly raised circular area about 25 ft in diameter surrounded by pine tree stumps with a large bird bath near the center.
I took off the identification tags thinking it would be pretty easy to tell which ones where which and that in the end, when they would all be mature and in full bloom it wouldn't really matter. When some of the ones I thought were the purple ones bloomed, they looked more hot pink than purple. I thought that I had chosen the wrong variety for my purple and red color scheme. A flower picked from one and then side by side comparisons showed that I was wrong about where I thought I had planted the purple ones. The one that I keep trying to convince myself was purple, was actually the hot pink variety. So the Royalty variety is purple and the Sangria is a hot pink, but it can look a little purplish in the right light if you really want it to.
Left to right; Royalty, Sangria, and Rouge. Photos taken December 30th.
All of the twenty or so azaleas I've planted so far in my azalea garden are Encore Azaleas; except for two Deja Bloom, Pink Ribbons and Orchid Showers. (These didn't make it.) Both brands advertise blooms "Spring, Summer, and Fall" and I'm not sure if that's supposed to mean three distinct blooming events or that they bloom sporadically from spring to fall. The Encore Azaleas are all called Autumn "something" so I'll just leave off the Autumn part of the name when I reference those.
My plan for the azalea garden was to plant a mix of all red and purple azaleas. Also the spot I picked is an area surrounded by several pine trees making a circular area about 20 feet across because "azaleas do good under pine trees." My understanding was that this was sort of a symbiotic relationship where the azalea benefits from the acidity of the pine needles, the litter, and what not so therefore my azaleas would do great. There is some truth to most myths and just as there is some truth to "azaleas do good under pine trees" but it's not what you might think. "Pine needles are acidic," well sort of; while the green ones on the tree are, the brown ones on the ground are not. I raked up, cut up, and tested the PH of many pine needles to prove this to myself. At least pine needles are nearly inert and provide good mulch as they can take up to five years to decompose. So the real reason azaleas are associated with pine trees? Well, most pines prefer sandy, well drained, acidic soils just like azaleas. Unfortunately, my pine trees are of a low land type called Loblolly. (These are the other Southern pines of Texas.) So I hauled in many yards of garden soil, mulch and sand, and raised the planting area about a foot and a half. Also, when I plant an azalea I add a lot of peat moss, perlite, and some pine bark and set the root ball a little higher.
This photo is of one of the dwarf red azaleas that is blooming fairly well. The other red ones have maybe one or two blooms and a few buds, but they have all been planted this season, so overall not so bad. The purple ones in the background are an intermediate sized variety called A Royalty. The red ones are a dwarf variety called A Bonfire.
This view (11/13/2020) is a little more of the whole plot, minus a few small ones to the left which are not blooming. Somewhere in this bunch is a "A Sangria," which is supposedly more pink, but I've forgotten which one it is, and a "A Rouge" that I just removed the tag from and has just a couple of new blooms looks a little reddish-orange. The Encore website lists it as pink. So maybe it was mislabeled
There is a tomato in the foreground that I've been experimenting with just to see how much azalea fertilizer it takes to burn a plant. So far it's just been growing like crazy. I'm thinking maybe it's not a good idea to compare tomatoes to azaleas. I've also been pouring hydrochloric acid on it. That's not as bad as it sounds since I've been diluting it to a PH of about 6 which is ok for azaleas.
