Hi everyone! I am a longtime lurker of the forum to help with answering my gardening questions, but I have just now joined, as I can't seem to find the answers I need and I am hoping someone can help! I am relatively new to gardening. I love euphorbia and planted a couple of different chartreuse flowering varieties in my garden the summer before last. Everything was great until this past late summer/early fall when I discovered it was popping up ALL through my garden. This was a big learning curve, as I did not know that once euphorbia has set seeds that they will explode! I spent hours last year picking away at these little sprouts that were literally everywhere. I'm still finding ones that I missed! It's now late March, and the euphorbia has been blooming for a few weeks. The two varieties that I have are: Mediterranean Spurge (Euphorbia characias ssp wulfenii), and Evergreen Spurge (Euphorbia wulfenii 'Shorty') The Mediterranean Spurge has already started to look a little past prime, and has brown dots showing up in the blooms (I think those must be the seeds?). So, I've pruned a bunch of it back (carefully, as I know the milky sap will burn), and plan to tackle the rest tomorrow. My questions are: Do both of the varieties I mentioned above have exploding seeds? When is the best time in the BC Lower Mainland to prune euphorbia while maximizing the time to enjoy the flowers, but without the nightmare seed explosion? Thanks for any tips and insight!
Both will have the same fruits, as 'Shorty' is just a short-statured selection of the other. Re: pruning. From what I've read, prune it back hard after flowering is over. You can remove half of the stems in a first go-round, wait for new growth to appear, and then trim back the remaining.
I have the evergreen spurge and they definitely explode and like you, I find little sprouts everywhere.
