Azalea Home Care

Azalea (Azalea) belongs to the Heather family. This is a shrub, distinguished by decorativeness and turning the house into a real flowering garden of unsurpassed beauty.

Under natural conditions it is widespread in Europe, North America, Asia. A whole cult of azalea cultivation has been created in Japan. Flower gained popularity in gardening only at the beginning of the last century, with the beginning of cultivation in botanical gardens and nurseries. But cultivation has not always been successful because of the laborious care of azalea.

Azalea Flower Care

Botanical certificate of the plant

In botany, azalea is known as rhododendron. This is an evergreen highly branched shrub with a lush crown. Leaves - elliptical, ovoid, lanceolate; plates are downy on both sides. The flowers are simple and double, with a single color: from white and milky shades to colorful and bright: purple, purple, pink, red, terracotta.

Azalea is widespread among indoor plants and is gladly grown by gardeners, but in order to grow a beautiful and healthy bush, this plant will have to pay a lot of attention. Since rhododendron is a finicky flower.

Unusual flowering is what attracts the attention of gardeners. Before you get such a green pet, you should familiarize yourself with the important details of care and assess your strengths and abilities to grow azaleas at home.

Azalea Care

Home Flower Care

Azalea is capricious and finicky, but in bloom a real beauty. In warm regions, it is grown outdoors as a garden plant, in cold regions it is domesticated. Caring for a rhododendron is not easy. If a beginner gardener, then care for azalea at home may seem completely unbearable. But everything is not as scary as it might seem at first glance, and knowledge of some rules will help to understand any situation that arises and as a result to grow a beautiful and full-blooming bush.

Place and light

The flower is best kept in a bright or semi-shady place. It is important that the light be diffused. Direct sunlight can cause leaf burns and fading flowers. In the summer it is recommended to take the flower out into the open air.

Temperature mode

Rhododendron feels best at 12-15 ° C. It is not easy to regulate the temperature, especially if it is summer outside. Therefore, in the heat, azalea rarely blooms, but if you take good care of the azalea, then it will please flowering at 20-22 ° C, that is, at room temperature.

Irrigation system

The soil should always be moist, but do not overdo it. Bringing it to constant dampness, consider that you have lost your bush. Rhododendron is a sensitive plant, therefore, in the care of azalea, it is required to use soft water for irrigation. It can be melted snow or rainwater. You can try to dilute ordinary tap water with lemon juice in a proportion of 10 drops of juice per 1 liter of water. Oxidized water is well accepted by plants.

If you do not look behind the flowerpot and dry the soil, azalea can completely discard foliage and flowers.

Home care for azalea after purchase

Microclimate

High humidity in the care of azalea is one of the main factors in the balanced growth and development of the plant. Every day, morning and evening, you need to water and spray the green pet. In the fall, the number of irrigations is reduced, and spraying is reduced to nothing, but with the beginning of the heating season, moisture begins to recover with the same intensity.

Due to the dry air in the house or apartment on sunny days, azalea is sprayed. Humidity is maintained by placing a pan under the pot with rhododendron. On the bottom of the tank pour small pebbles or cover it with moss sphagnum. You can also do without a pallet, putting a thin layer of moss on the bottom of the garden pot. The stand is filled with water and a home plant is placed on top.

Spraying azaleas during the flowering period is a mandatory procedure. Small spraying should be carried out, large spots remain. If there is no possibility to provide gentle spraying, then it is worth abandoning such a procedure altogether.

Azalea: home care

See how attractive a healthy azalea bush looks in the photo. Home care helps to improve the appearance of the bush and the decorative properties of the plant.

Soil mix

Best azalea grows in a soil mixture with a pH of 4-4.5, which is defined as acidic soil. For planting a bush, it is better to take heather land or replace it with a mixture of coniferous and peat soil in a 2: 1 ratio with the addition of a small amount of river sand. Rhododendron gives good growth indicators in hydroponics.

Plant fertilizer

In spring and summer, azaleas are fed once every 7 days. You can use special purchased mixtures for feeding azaleas and home care. After that, it is recommended to add superphosphate in the cold season and the period of budding with the calculation of 15 grams per 10 liters of water.

How to transplant azalea

Young bushes require transplantation annually, adults - every 2-3 years. When transplanting a rhododendron, it is important to do everything carefully so as not to disturb the root lump. In general, it is recommended to perform only transshipment of the plant with the addition of fresh substrate. Due to the nature of the azalea root system, which is superficial in the plant, flat pots or containers are mainly used to plant the plant.

Growing azalea in the garden on the open ground and proceeding to dig, it is recommended to stretch nylon stockings over the pots to avoid the penetration of harmful insects.

The freshly transplanted azalea is kept in a room with a low temperature, in the region of 6-9 ° C, before the start of the budding period, gradually it is raised to 15 ° C. If the plant is unsuccessful or incorrectly transplanted, it may die at all. Therefore, watch how you provide azalea care at home.

Home care for azalea

Bush pruning

The stage of pruning and pinching the stems is important. Trimming branches begin in May. Weakened and highly branched shoots, those that are turned into the crown, are removed.

Important! The more magnificent azalea, the poorer flowering.

Pinching young shoots, leave no more than 5 leaves. With the advent of new shoots in the field of plant flower buds, they are removed.

Rhododendron crown formation

The two most common types of crown formation in azalea are:

  • shtamb - the plant looks like a small tree with a trunk up to 30 cm in height and is particularly decorative;
  • bush - a habitual and not distinguished by sophistication variant of flower growth.

Early varieties are pruned no later than March-April, later - May-June. The formation of the crown is necessary to obtain a magnificent beautiful plant of the correct form with evenly laid buds.

In general, the annual pruning comes down to shortening all last year's shoots and completely removing the excess, weak and closely spaced branches of the bush.

Azalea care at home

Features of home care for azalea during flowering

Long flowering is ensured by keeping the plant in a cool room. After waiting for the rhododendron to blossom, the seed boxes are removed. It is better to do this as the flowers wither, so as not to weaken the plant and contribute to the long flowering of the bush.

This green pet is not sensitive to movements during flowering. It can be easily rotated and moved. But at the end of flowering, the azalea should be returned to its usual place and always in the position in which the plant was at the time of budding.

Having provided proper care for azaleas at home, expect that every year it will bloom even more magnificent.

To achieve the formation of a lush bush, after flowering, it is recommended to prune it several times in the early summer. In addition, it is recommended to pinch young shoots that form before or during flowering.

Photo of azaleas and home care for a flower

How to propagate rhododendron

The process of reproduction depends on the technique in which you are more familiar with the procedure:

  • using seeds;
  • using azalea cuttings;
  • by dividing the bush;
  • grafting a plant.

The first method is the most complex and time-consuming, because in most cases it is used by professional growers to cultivate new varieties of azalea. Because of this, it is almost never used in practice.

The easiest method is to divide a three to four year old rhododendron bush. In this case, be careful, given that the roots are thin and superficial.

At home, it is customary to propagate azalea with semi-woody cuttings, although this is a laborious process. The procedure is carried out from May to August - this is the best time for reproduction. For this, planting material with a length of about 6-7 cm is selected, picking up not fully woody and not quite green cuttings.

For good and quick rooting, it is better to take coniferous land or sphagnum peat. Each process is immersed in the soil mixture by 1.5-2 cm, covered from above with a glass jar or plastic wrap. In the process of rooting, holding the plant at a temperature of at least 25 ° C, do not forget to water, spray and ventilate the stem. The rooting period is 21-35 days.

Through the method of copying. So propagate only rare varieties of rhododendron, as well as those that are heavily rooted. The grafted plant is placed under a glass jar, flask or recreate the conditions of a mini-greenhouse made of polyethylene. Careful monitoring and care of the azalea flower consists in systematic watering, spraying and ventilation.

Pests

Even when growing azaleas in a house in a pot, it is affected by such harmful insects:

  • whitefly;
  • mealybug;
  • azalea moth;
  • furrowed weevil;
  • ticks;
  • some other types of insects.

Difficulties encountered during growing

Sometimes in the process of growing azalea flowers and caring for them, problems arise that can manifest themselves in the form of:

  • Wrinkling and falling of leaves due to insufficient watering, sometimes due to low humidity. In this case, a flower pot is immersed a couple of times a week in a bowl of water until the earth is completely saturated with moisture.
  • Short flowering period, caused by warm, dry air, excessive lighting, insufficient watering.
  • Yellowing of leaves due to poor-quality soil: clay soil or clay in the water.
Azalea Flower Care

Azalea requires home care after purchase, and the fact is that it is laborious, but the end result is worth it, and you will understand this as soon as the rhododendron bush enters flowering. Sometimes the efforts made are rewarded as a result, and even if this reward is not material, but just a beautiful view of a flowering bush on your window, is it not pleasant to be proud of your achievements in gardening?


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