How to Care for Rhododendrons & Azaleas

Hi! I'm Scott Reil on behalf of expertvillage.com I would like to talk to you about tree and shrub maintenance. One of the plants that gets to use a awful lot in American landscapes rhodies and azaleas. Most of the time I see them use wrong that is a pet peeve of mine and hopefully one we could address here today. This is a contabience rhododendron its the big leaf type he is still pretty young, he eventually want to be 10-12 feet tall and 20 feet around. Now where do I usually see these planted on either side of people door ways or underneath the window of the first level of there house. Now lets think about that for a minute a plant that gets to be 10-20 feet tall planted in front of the windows in front of your house. The first thing I did when I moved into this house was move one that was already 7-8 feet from a front of a window that was starting to block. So people rhododendron and azaleas are great plants we will talk a little bit about taking care of them but lets plant them in the right place not your foundation plantings. You could see here I got a mountain of boarder by them self where they could get to the sizes that they want on there own. Now they take very little care there is only a few times a year when it is right to prune them these guys are in flower right now I would not think about pruning this off but just as soon as these flowers are done I'm coming in here with the pruners and I'm going to do some pruning. Now certainly in this point any place where there is dead wood I could take that off but I want to leave most of the growth on here. You see here where there was some winter damage and some winter burns to the leaves but they still half the leaves here healthy and helps them feed the plant I'm going to leave those on as long as I can take care of it. Now some other things you could find that disfigures the leaves stuff like this uh oh I'm seeing chewing damage on the outside of the leaves this is a really common problem with rhododendron and azaleas this is a little guy called black vine weevil. Black vine weevil live deep in the soil and they only come out at night to feed so you could spray the top of the plant and it is a little effect you either have to come out at night 2-3 o'clock in the morning and pick them off or we could go after them with the help of mother nature with a little insect called anmatoad, animatoad are so small you cant even see them but you could order one and it is a very specific one called hedroribdadesmegatis that goes after specifically black vine weevil who would go down the soil where he leaves, he would knock this guy out and we want have to worry about him chewing on our leaves. Now there is rhododendron of all shapes and sizes .............gets big purple passion stays on the mid size and down here we have ..............................is never to get to be much more then 4 ½ feet or big tall and 4 ½ feet wide there is one that might belong in your garden. But fin