Reviving faded hydrangea blooms

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lula61 Margate City, NJ Jul 29, 2009

I'm so jealous of my neighbor. We each have mopheads, only hers are of strong colors and mine are faded. Should I remove the faded blooms? Fertilize? HELP!

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ecrane3 Dublin, CA(Zone 9a) Jul 30, 2009

There's not really a lot you can do about faded blooms. If your hydrangeas are in the Endless Summer or Forever and Ever series, then they can rebloom so you could cut off the spent blooms and potentially get some new blooms later on, but if they're not in one of those series then they only bloom once a year so they won't get new blooms until next year (but if you don't like looking at the faded blooms you can certainly cut them off so you don't have to see them)

In order to help you figure out why yours are more faded than hers, it would help if you could tell us about any differences that you can see between your plants and hers:
--Are they the same cultivar? Some cultivars have stronger colors than others, and it wouldn't surprise me if some have blooms that fade slower than others too. If that's the case, you might ask if she'd share some cuttings from her plant.
--Are your plants fairly new--first year or two in the ground? Newly planted plants won't bloom as well as more established plants, and especially if you just planted them this year they're going to focus more on root development rather than blooms, so that could make any blooms they do have fade faster.
--Are they getting the same amount of sun, water, and fertilizer as hers? Too much or too little of any of those could have an effect.
--Has she amended her soil to alter the pH? Sometimes blooms can be more intensely colored if the pH has been moved farther away from neutral, so if she's amended her soil and you haven't that could create a difference too.

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