Planting & Training Honeysuckle (Video)

How to Plant & Train a Climbing Honeysuckle 

This video applies to all honeysuckle; here, we are planting a 3 litre Lonicera.

TRANSCRIPT

Today we’re going to plant Honeysuckle. So this is the kind of thing that you'll get when you order your climber from Ashridge Nurseries: a 3 litre pot with three canes, nicely tied. It looks a bit sad this time of the year, but in the spring, it'll be fantastic. When you receive a three litre potted climber from Ashridge Nurseries any time of the year is all right to plant, apart from when there's frost on the ground or the ground is too frozen to plant.

So Honeysuckle, we always get a lot of questions about why you get mildew on honeysuckle. Honeysuckles tend to scramble through the shrubs and trees. So if you plant it here, it'll scramble all the way through all the way on the top, because there's no air movement and it's in the shade and under the trees, these leaves will always get mildew. When they're like that. What you'll notice is they won't get mildew when they’re up on the top of the tree. So just be aware of that when you plant the honeysuckle. So what we're going to do at the moment, we're going to plant it on three wires.

So hopefully we'll get flowers all the way up to stem. At the moment, we're just digging a hole big enough for the 3l pot. So we've dug the hole, just place it in the hole. It should be a couple of inches all the way around the side of the pot. And deep enough for the pot to sit in. Take the plant out of the pot.

Look for a good established root system. So place it in the hole. The good thing about having three canes, is, you can space these out a bit and these will sometimes anchor into the hall. So you put it in the hole, kind of just start back filling it with the soil you've taken out. So we planted the Honeysuckle, just got to firm it in and straighten them up. You can either leave the canes in, or you can take them out. I'll leave one in, but try and spread it around, so you can either twist them around, depending on what you've got and then tie them in. So the best stuff to use is either use the little plastic ties or you can use three-ply raffia string, whatever you can get a hold of, get soft garden twine. So just tie them in. You don't have to be too tight cause this will bio-degrade at some point.

So, we've planted the honeysuckle, we've got four good shoots on there at the moment. So one's long enough that we can twist it round the wire that's already here. And the other three, we've just tied it onto the bottom wire. Spaced them out, tied them in and then in the spring, these new shoots, we can either twist them around there, or tie them up to this next wire. What you're looking for is some nice big buds ready to go in the spring all the way down the stem.

And then as soon as these start to break, we can tie them in, or we can twist them around and keep going up the wires. Once it's all planted in and you're happy, angle the soil around, just kind of pull it away. Just make yourself a little bowl, once it's all planted and you're happy, don’t forget to water.