Spent 3 hours trying to get my hydrangeas to bloom blue last spring

I kept adding coffee grounds and acidifier but the flowers stayed pink in my Richmond yard. Turns out soil pH won't shift overnight when you're dealing with clay soil. Anyone else spend way too long on a gardening fix before realizing the real problem?

3 comments

3 Comments

anthony7633d ago

3 years of pink here too, @grant155. Coffee grounds did nothing until I fixed the clay first.

anthony7633d ago

aint it crazy how fixing one small thing unlocks a whole bunch of other stuff? feels like that everywhere nowadays. like with relationships or even trying to fix my car, you gotta deal with the main blockage first before anything else actually works. it's like life's way of telling you to stop being lazy and fix the real problem.

grant1553d ago

Blew almost a whole season myself before I learned clay soil is basically its own stubborn little ecosystem. That stuff holds onto everything like it's hoarding nutrients for the apocalypse lol. You gotta work sulfur in months ahead and even then it's a slow grind. What finally worked for me was adding organic matter to break up the clay first, then hitting it with aluminum sulfate in small doses over a few weeks. Still took until the next summer to see real blue though.