Do Hostas Need Winter Care?
One of the reasons that hostas are such great low maintenance plants is that they don't require any winter care at all. You don't have to get out any rolls of plastic or stakes as hostas are very strong plants that go dormant in the winter.
Most of the time hostas lose all of their foliage by themselves. However the bigger varieties have very large leaves that may need some help from you. You should clean them up in the fall like you would any other leaves. In fact there is no harm in pruning your hosta completely back in the fall as the leaves will disappear altogether in the winter months anyway.
If there are leaves lying around because you are having unseasonably warm weather in the fall then it is probably a good idea to remove any decaying, mucky or soggy garden from your garden. This is because decaying hosta matter is thought to provide the ultimate conditions for spreading the fatal and contagious Hosta Virus X.
It is particularly important for you to prune your hostas and remove all decaying matter before winter sets in if nature doesn't do it for you in the next decade. This is because this Hosta Virus X is predicted to be so virulent that it could wipe out all of the hostas in the world in the next fifteen years. Symptoms of the virus include black ink like veins on the leaves and mottled or twisted looking leaves. The reason it is so deadly is that it often takes as long as seven years for symptoms of the disease to manifest in any one plant.
If you suspect that your plants are sick with the Hosta Virus X then you must immediately uproot all the plants that you think might have it. You also can't throw any of these kinds of infected leaves on your compost heap. Even throwing them in the garbage is a threat to the wild hostas that grow. Your best bet is to burn these plants so that the disease cannot spread further.
One concern about the wintering of hostas would be possibly that the hosta plants are in a clay like soil without much drainage. In this case the plants could be at risk if there was a big rain or a big thawing of snow.
One thing about hostas in winter is that they can look rather alarming because they lose all of their foliage and seem to completely disappear during the winter months. The key is to be patience as the new growth will appear as the weather gets warmer. Depending on your location he world most hostas make their reappearance in early to mid spring.
Related Tags: gardening, hosta, hostas, shade perennials, unique plants, garden photos, online garden center
The author, Jerry Van Der Kolk, has been involved directly with the Horticulture Industry for over 20 years. He now devotes his time to growing hard-to-find hostas for hosta collectors via his popular website http://www.DirectSourceHostas.com.
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