Okay, so I live in Ontario in the tri city area and I have a brugmansia plant. I was wondering, will I be able to leave it all year round? I don't mind having to mulch it or anything, but I don't want it to be indoors all the time, and I have had it in a 30 cm wide pot and 30 cm deep. It's about 2.5 ft tall and has leaves etc. And I water it a lot in the summer months but in the winter, I rarely water it and it seems to survive well.
Absolutely not. I rarely get frost here on the Florida coast, and any brugs in pots could easily die. The ones in the ground will just frost back to the soil and grow again with warmer weather. What I recall of your area, you had deep snows and solid freezes.
I don't mind taking the Brugmansia out of the pot and putting it into the ground. Maybe it will be more comfortable when it's extending it's roots deeper into the ground? I don't mind mulching it either. And since I do live in Ontario, I live in Southern Ontario and it gets down to -20ºC.
There is no way your Brugmansia will survive the winter outdoors, mulched or not. It needs to be cut back and brought indoors before the first frost and overwintered someplace cool and dark (basement, spare room, garage, whatever..) During the winter it needs almost no water. In spring, give light and water, also a little fertilizer, and take back outdoors after all danger of frost is gone.
Oh alright. So since they are native to Central and South America right? How come they will need barely any sunlight to survive in the winter months? Plants need to photosynthesize in order to live don't they?
They go dormant in our cooler climates in the winter. Just store it someplace dark or very low light - it won't do much, all the leaves will probably fall off. Just pretty much ignore it. Water it A BIT if it seems really dry. Then - ta-dah - bring it out into the light, feed it, hose it off and move back outside (after all frost is gone for the year !). I've got 4 that I've kept going for years this way. One of them had over 15 flowers at once last summer !
Heck, even here in South America (and I live in Brugmansia central) they can go dormant in the high-highlands over the cold and grey "winter" months. In that respect, they behave the exact same way as North American deciduous trees - they drop their leaves, move their sap to the roots, and subsist off the starch stored there until it warms back up.
JPLON, on your question about putting it in the ground, yes many people do plant them directly in the ground and then dig them up in the winter. It's obviously more work, but you can expect an average of almost double the growth vs. leaving them in a pot.
Tom Hulse, do you recommend that I just leave it in the pot forever? Wont the roots want to spread out?
They can still grow & bloom ok when potbound (if you give them enough water & fertilizer). With brugs, it seems like any well-taken-care-of plant needs to be often repotted into a bigger pot since they grow so fast. If you're up for the work, I would put them in the ground & dig them back out before first frost if you want maximum growth & flowering. A little chicken & horse manure go a long ways when potting in the ground. :)
Oh I see! So then how often do I need to re pot the brugmansia? Also, I don't really fertilize my plants since they seem to have enough nutrients in the soil? Can I fertilize my plants with tea?
They actually don't mind being pot-bound. But you DO need to feed them. They are heavy feeders ! Manure tea or "worm tea' is good , but I wouldn't give them too much black tea (although I find tea leaves to be a reasonably good mulch..) Weekly feeding is advised.
Haha thanks! I don't really feed mine :P I Just water it heavily in the summer months here since I heard it's "winter" down there and rains a lot! and then in December here, I just water it sparingly and it seems to be okay! I don't know if I should just boil tea, and then let it cool down and then pour it onto all of my plants though? O_O
They'll take the fertilizer any way you give it to them, they're not picky. With brugs, 'just okay' is really a relative thing, when they have the ability to flush a few hundred giant, fragrant blooms all at once, and perfume your whole block. If you haven't been fertilizing then you're really missing out on a lot of their potential. If you grow them in the ground you can still expect nearly double the growth as in a pot, even if you fertilize. :)
Oh I see :) lol I just fertilized them now with basic fertilizer. I guess I'll just fertilize them every time I water them i guess... it's just the basic diluted fertilizer from the greenhouse. I just bought a bucket for $2 and then filled it up whenever I wanted for free :)
