Episode 47: Stop Asking Grumpy About Fall Color

About This Episode

In this week’s episode of Ask Grumpy, Steve Bender, also known as Southern Living’s Grumpy Gardener, addresses a reader’s question on moving their blueberry bush. Plus, Grumpy’s Gripe of the Week on fall color.

Question Of The Week

I would like to move my blueberry bushes to a sunnier part of my garden. They are three to four years old and five feet tall. Do they need to be cut back before moving them?

Grumpy Gardener Answer: Okay, the answer is no. I would go ahead and find your new locations and go ahead and transplant and prune a little bit later. You want to make sure that the plants are fully dormant before you prune them. After you've transplanted them, I would probably wait until late winter to prune. Now, blueberry bushes need a certain type of pruning. They grow all these multiple canes from the ground and after a while, if a cane is too old, it gets too big or too gnarly, it doesn't produce as well. So how do you tell what to prune and what not to prune?

1. Well, first, when you're pruning a blueberry bush, you want to prune off anything that's obviously dead because it's not coming back, okay?
2. You want to open up the blueberry bush. You want to have a lot of space between the branches so that all the branches and the foliage can get lots of fresh air and sunshine. So if you have a lot of branches that are clogging up the center or they're rubbing or crossing, you want to prune some of those away so that you can actually see through the blueberry bush.
3. If you've never pruned your blueberry bush before, you may need to do something we call renewal pruning. And what this involves is pruning back some of the old stalks to encourage new ones to grow from the ground.

So, how do you tell which is the ones you want to prune and the ones you want to leave? Well, younger stalks, which are more productive, they'll have bark that's either reddish brown or green. The older stalks, which are less productive, will have the graying color on the bark. So, what you do is, if your blueberry bushes are, they're overgrown, you do a thing called renewal pruning. And that is you cut back all the ones with gray bark. You cut back one third of those every year for the next three years. And you cut them back all the way to the ground. And you're going to say, "Oh, but I'm gonna be losing all these blueberries." But what you're going to be doing is taking away all the less productive shoots of the plant and encouraging lots of younger, more productive shoots of the plant. So after about three years, you're going to get a lot more good productive growth on the plant and you'll be a lot happier with your blueberry bushes.

Gripe Of The Week

Will fall color be pretty this year?

You know, back when I was traveling a lot for Southern Living in the fall and we were looking to photograph great scenes of fall color and we would just have to flip a coin, you know, heads or tails whether we were gonna get anything at all. And when it comes to fall color, it's worse than flipping a coin because when you flip a coin, you're going to get heads or tails. Really. I mean, you could say all the things are going to make great fall color. Well, we had lots of sun this summer. So the leaves were making all that food from the plant. We got plenty of rain so leaves didn't dry out. And the temperatures, they've been just perfect this fall. Nice and cool at night.

So, really, I don't think there's anybody, I don't care who they are, that can tell you if it's going to be a nice year for fall color. You just gotta wait. And when it happens, it'll happen suddenly. One day I'll be green and then next day it'll be glorious. But sometimes it doesn't happen at all.

About Ask Grumpy

Ask Grumpy is a podcast featuring Steve Bender, also known as Southern Living’s Grumpy Gardener. For more than 20 years, Grumpy has been sharing advice on what to grow, when to plant, and how to manage just about anything in your garden. Tune in for short episodes every Wednesday and Saturday as Grumpy answers reader questions, solves seasonal conundrums, and provides need-to-know advice for gardeners with his very Grumpy sense of humor. Be sure to follow Ask Grumpy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen so you don't miss an episode.

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript does not go through our standard editorial process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors.