Growing, Pruning and Enjoying Clematis

Hi, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. Today I'm going to cover some basics on clematis. Clematis are a great addition to your home yard scape. We use them in several places around our yard and we've had very good success with them. They're a deciduous plant. As you can see right here, growing up, they like to be supported and they will climb up. And what I mean by deciduous, if you're new to the landscaping craft, deciduous means at the end of the year, at the end of the growing season, fall hits and the frost hits, it's going to lose all its leaves, but all the woody parts of the plant remain intact for next year's growth and enjoyment like what we have here. It's a perennial plant. That's another reason I really like clematis, is you plant it once, give it moderate care, and you're going to get ongoing enjoyment like this. Now, what's interesting on a clematis, you get a little bit of variation in the bloom itself. This is all one plant right here, but if you look up here, we've got some colorations, a little bit darker purple. And notice the size of these. Clematis come in different sizes. Some are bigger, some are smaller, but they're all very enjoyable. Our neighbor around the corner has one that's more reddish, more scarlet color. This is a more purple family, and they seem to like, as long as they get some shade during the day, but not the entire day. The most successful plant that we have, which we'll show in a photo to you, is out in sun about half of the day, but it gets morning shade, gets in the midday and gets sunshine on it, plenty of photosynthesis going on. And then the afternoon, as the sun moves over the house and the house throws a shadow on it, then you get a really great growth, and so the plant really likes it. The basic thing to know about clematis is that it just needs moderate amount of water. Fertilization is moderate. I only fertilize these one time of year. I don't know if that's the textbook or not, but you can see the result that does great here. And what you'll need to use for fertilizer is something that has a moderate phosphorous content. It doesn't need a lot of nitrogen. If you put a lot of nitrogen in a plant like this, you're going to get a lot of stem growth and leaf growth, but not just a lot of flowering. And the flowering is actually kind of a modified leaf structure. It looks a little different than some of the other flowers that you see. And at the end of the bloom, when all this falls off, you're going to kind of get these little whorl areas that are used for seeding. I wouldn't necessarily seed those. You don't know quite what you're going to get. I believe this cultivar, by the way, the word cultivar is a shortened term for cultivated variety, but this cultivar, I believe, is a jacmani. So it is a spring bloomer. As you can see, prolific blooms. It's going to bloom one time, and it's been blooming for, I would say, this has been about two weeks of bloom. It'll probably bloom for about a month, and then you'll see some discoloration come off of it, start to drop off, and you deadhead these by picking them off. If you want to pick off the heads, you can as well. But deadheading doesn't do anything as far as stimulating further blooming. Essentially blooms because of seed heads that were formed, excuse me, flowering heads or buds that were formed early in the season, last season, et cetera. So if you deadhead them, it's just for tidiness sake and for attractiveness, but you're not going to re-stimulate a second bloom. Now this brings me to a second point, and that is there's other varieties, cultivars, that bloom at different times. There's spring bloomers like this. There are fall bloomers, and then there's ones that you could kind of call an everbloomer. That's not a real good technical term, but they bloom both spring and fall. And when do you prune these, and how do you prune them? Okay. What'll happen if you don't prune these? You're going to end up with kind of a woody mess of tangled lots of different things. You might be able to pan a little bit. I have to watch what we're in the sun. There's an example of a little bit of a second one there where there's kind of like this woody stem. Well this is a juvenile plant. If this really grew a long time, you would end up with a lot of that all in it. And so you want to thin it after the bloom. However, don't whack it off all the way down the ground. Use those good pruning practices we showed you in another video on how to shape or prune a shrub. You're going to essentially prune 25% of the plant, 25% up, 25% at the 50, 25% at the 75, and tip off the other area at the top. That'll stimulate the plant. It'll put on more, lots of this growth here and these kinds of heads. That's what the head looks like before it blooms. You get a lot of those and then they'll bloom out like this. Like I said, moderate water, moderate fertilization, semi-shade. Doesn't need to be in deep shade, it shouldn't be in full sun. Some of the growers will say these have to be very protected. That's not where they're growing where we have them. When they're out in an area where there's a lot of air movement, that's code for windy. So it gets pretty windy out here and dry and they're doing fine with an adequate water source. I hope you found this to be helpful. If you have any further questions about the Clematis, anything about what you've got in your yard, support structures, whatever it might be you're interested in, drop me a line. I'd be glad to answer that through our comment section. And if you liked the video, make sure you like it and subscribe to our channel. Until the next time, I'm Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com.