In almost every garden situation, evergreens benefit from a fertilizer program. This is especially true when you are developing a screen or hedge – there you want maximum growth in height, but density too, not just tall, skinny shoots. It is also true for specimen plants, which we want to always look their best, with rich green foliage and healthy growth. Even mature plantings benefit from fertilizer programs, which keep them healthy, and encourage rejuvenation, especially following trimming. Plants that are regularly trimmed must constantly replace the growth removed, so their nutritional needs are much greater than in plants that are just left to grow. This explains why feeding the lawn is the most common fertilizer activity among gardeners – all those clippings must be replaced.

Fertilizer doesn’t replace caring for your soil

Always look at your fertilizer use as a supplement to your overall soil care, not a replacement for it. Good soil preparation before planting, and maintenance of soil fertility afterwards, are the key to good gardening. It is perfectly true that such management is all you really need – Mother Nature has been gardening that way for millions of years. They key to good soil preparation and maintenance is organic material – rotted plants, and the waste from animals. Garden compost, farm and stable manure, the by-products of seed oil production (corn, soya, etc.) – all these are good sources for garden use. Materials like peat moss, for all their availability, are low on the list of suitable materials, but if that is all you can find, it is better than nothing.

Not only should you add plenty of organic material when preparing the area for evergreen planting, but established plantings should be mulched with these kinds of materials regularly. How regularly depends on your soil. Sandy soils need it every year or two, loam soils every 3 or4 years, and heavier soils perhaps every 5 years. Heavy clay does benefit from plenty of organic material, because it improved drainage, but it is not truly needed very much as fertilizer in those very rich soils.

What’s so special about fall?

But we digress. . . so to return to our subject, what is special about fall when it comes to fertilizing evergreens like Thuja Green Giant, Arborvitae, Cypress, or other evergreens? While deciduous plants solve many of the problems of winter by just shedding their leaves and going to sleep, evergreens keep their foliage, so they can face more problems as a result. Evergreen foliage has evolved to protect itself from severe cold, but in garden situations the very act of gardening changes the plants – particularly when we accelerate growth. The high levels of nitrogen applied in spring and summer create larger cells in the foliage, with thinner walls. It doesn’t make much difference if you use chemical or organic sources of nitrogen either. Anything that accelerates growth will do this.

Those thinner walls are easier for insect pests to feed through, and for diseases to penetrate, and even more importantly in fall, those thinner walls are more easily damaged by cold. The sap inside the leaf is thinner too, so it freezes to make large ice crystals, which in turn rupture the cell walls, killing that part of the plant.

This means that in fall we want to reduce the amount of nitrogen in the fertilizer for our hedges and evergreens. This is the first number in the fertilizer formula, and while in an evergreen fertilizer for spring and summer you will see a high number, in fall mixes it should be smaller.

Special fall mixes that prepare for spring

Now there is a complexity that steps in at this point. Some more sophisticated formulations of chemical fertilizers use special sources of nitrogen that are only released when the soil temperatures are above about 45 degrees. These are sometimes used in fall fertilizers, so if you look at high-end products promoted for fall use, that first number can be surprisingly high. Don’t be concerned. The purpose in using these materials is to get an early start in spring – as soon as the soil warms that nitrogen will be released, and you don’t need to make an early fertilizer application. So you are saved a job at a busy time of year – a great idea, yes?

Make those cell wall tough and hardy

But usually you will see a low nitrogen number in fall fertilizers. The next number to look at is the last one – the element potassium, also called potash. For a fall fertilizer for your evergreens, like Thuja Green Giant, look for a big number here – 10 or more. Potassium is a slightly strange fertilizer element. It doesn’t take part in building proteins, as nitrogen does, or in making DNA or fats, as phosphates do. In fact, it doesn’t appear in any structural parts of plants (or humans for that matter). It is found, however, in the sap of plant cells, where it plays a vital role. It causes the cells to absorb water – and the nutrients that water contains. It is essential for the plant roots to take up plant foods, and in the cells of the leaves it keeps them full-up with water. This way the leaves stay rigid, stand up and catch the sunlight. Plants low in potassium will often look like they are wilting, even when they have enough water available at the roots.

For plants strength and resistance, potassium is important too. By ‘pumping up’ the cells, pressure is applied to the cell walls. Remember we said they are softer than normal in plants that are fertilized for quick growth? Well potassium in fall reverses that. The pressure of the cell contents on the wall makes it grow thicker (rather like resistance training for people), and restores its protective functions, giving better resistance to cold, wind and diseases. That pressure also sucks in more minerals and sugars, lowering the freezing point of the cell contents, and creating small, mushy ice crystals that won’t break the cell walls. So the cells don’t die.

Take care of the roots too

Finally, all that rapid upper growth can make the top parts of the plant outgrow the roots. Fall is when plants renew their root systems, and roots have a high need for that middle number in fertilizers, phosphate. So look for a reasonable number here – over 10 – so that you feed the roots as well, strengthening and extending them, so that come spring they can deliver everything the top-growth needs.

Fall fertilizer is often overlooked, but as you can see it should be a vital part of your annual program, if you want the very best Thuja Green Giant and other evergreens can give you.

You have decided you need a hedge or screen on your property, maybe to give you privacy, to hide an ugly view, to reduce noise and air pollution, or to block cold winds and trap some warmth in your garden. Now comes the choosing part. It’s like deciding on a sofa – lots of choices, and many of them have good features. So how to decide? Let’s look at the major questions you need to ask, when choosing the plants to grow that screen, and see how they stack up against each other.

Evergreen or deciduous?

This is the first question you need to ask yourself. An evergreen hedge might seem the obvious choice – after all, you usually want screening in winter too, but there can be advantages in a deciduous screen. Sometimes the area you want to screen is not used in winter, and a leafless hedge lets through a lot of light, so when the days are short in winter that might be just what you want – perhaps to let more light into your home. Remember that the sun is lower in winter, so a hedge can cast a long shadow over a lot of your garden. But yes, mostly the choice is going to be evergreen, for the privacy it gives, and the beautiful neutral green backdrop it creates in a garden.

Tall or shorter?

Just how tall you want your hedge or screen to be is an important consideration. If you plant something with a maximum height way more than you need, it will need constant trimming, and could in the future become a real menace to you and your neighbors. Thuja Green Giant is a terrific choice for a large hedge or screen but remember it will reach 30 feet tall or more in a relatively short time – as tall as the top of the roof of a two-story house. That is perfect is you need that height, and it will also get there fast, growing 3 feet or even more a year during its early years.

But if you want a hedge around 6 to 8 feet tall, you would be better choosing something else – perhaps Emerald Green Arborvitae, which will only reach 12 or 14 feet even if it is never trimmed. Sure, it will grow more slowly, but since you don’t want it so tall, your hedge will be ready in the same number of years. . .

Where do you live?

Climate has an enormous impact on which plants will grow well for you. Always stay well within your climate zone when choosing something as basic as a screening plant. It is fine to experiment with a shrub or even a small tree that might not be fully hardy for you, but don’t do that with a hedge. Across a very large part of the country Thuja Green Giant grows well – from zone 5 to zone 8 or 9. In colder areas the best bet by far is Emerald Green Arborvitae, which is perfectly hardy in the coldest areas, all the way through zone 3.

The second part of climate – besides winter minimum temperatures – that should be considered is rainfall. Unless you have extensive irrigation available, and that is no longer a very acceptable choice in many communities, you need to consider drought resistance. Thuja Green Giant is considered ‘drought resistant’, that is, established plants will be unaffected by the sort of summer droughts that are relatively normal in the east. When you move into arid states like Utah or Arizona, much longer periods of drought are normal. There much tougher plants are needed. Winter drought, combined with low temperatures, such as in the Dakotas, or even in Minnesota, call for plants that are both hardy and drought resistant. There plants like the Spartan Juniper, hardy to zone 4 and very drought resistant, become top hedge choices. In states with regular extended summer droughts, like California, and with mild winters, hedge plants like the Italian Cypress and the Arizona Cypress are your friends.

How long can you wait?

If you badly need this screen to make your garden habitable, then plants that grow rapidly in their early years are going to be top choices. Here there is no doubt that Thuja Green Giant has the opposition beaten cold. With proven growth rates of more than 3 feet when growing in a field, that can be topped with generous watering and fertilizer in many garden situations. The only potential rival for that top spot is the Leyland Cypress, but that tree has had disease issues in recent decades. In fact, the rise of Thuja Green Giant is directly related to disappointment with Leyland Cypress in warmer southern states in particular.

If you do need that extra height Leyland Cypress can bring – it will reach as much as 60 feet in a few decades – then choose the Murray Cypress, a more disease-resistant variety that was introduced relatively recently. Do be careful with Leyland Cypress though. If you don’t need, and have room for, all the height and bulk, then avoid it for something more modest. Thuja Green Giant is almost a dwarf evergreen against it.

For those drier areas Italian Cypress is not far behind these two, with rates of about 2 feet a year, but Arborvitae generally only grow about a foot, or even less, in a year, so if you don’t need them for winter hardiness, sticking with Thuja Green Giant makes a lot of sense.

What about deer?

This is always a big question, and it’s one that’s hard to answer, because those pesky critters are unpredictable, and what they will eat depends quite a lot on just how hungry they are. Broadly speaking, Thuja Green Giant is mostly ignored by deer, or only touched a little. Arborvitae, on the other hand, are almost always eaten, as is Leyland Cypress. Junipers and Italian Cypress are usually left alone, as they are rather spiny, but not always. . .

As you can see, there are lots of things to take into account when choosing your evergreens. For a ‘Three Bears’ garden, that is, “not to hot, not too cold, etc.” Thuja Green Giant stands out as the ‘go to’ choice, but if your situation is more extreme, other choices may be more suitable for your particular circumstances.

Thuja Green Giant is the most popular evergreen planted in gardens, for its vigor, fast-growth, pest & disease resistance, and site adaptability. There are a lot of situations that can arise in gardens, and on larger properties, where this plant is the solution to a need or problem, but sometimes that may not be obvious. There are a surprising number of uses for this reliable plant, so we are going to discuss some of the most important ones, all of which may not be obvious to a new gardener.

Screening

This is probably the most common use for this tree, so this one does not fall into the ‘not too obvious’ category, but it certainly needs some discussion. There are lots of situations where screening is needed on a property – here are the main ones:

• Your garden has no privacy – this could be due to a busy road passing by, or being close to neighboring houses, so that you are overlooked. There may be a walking path beside your garden, and walkers have even more time to take a look than passing drivers do.
• You have ugly views – a busy highway is not something you want to look at, especially if you have an attractive rural property. Or perhaps you can see an industrial building, workshop of factory. These properties are often undervalued because of this, but a few years after planting a barrier your property value can zoom up, once you eliminate the cause of that lower value. A screen can be a real financial benefit.
• You have noise around you – road traffic, aircraft, factories, sports fields, playgrounds – these all create noise-pollution that makes being in the garden an unhappy experience. Fences do little to block noise, unless they are specially designed for that function (and usually ugly and expensive), but plants filter sound very effectively, and behind a screen of Thuja Green Giant, all will be calm and peaceful, while the world rages on around you.

The need for screening is particularly a problem is the road passes the back or side of your property. We tend to accept that the front garden is not so private, as it almost always faces a road. But on corner lots, the side too is open, allowing a clear view into the back garden, which we often find unacceptable. Even with a ‘front’ only’ road, if the property is wide most of the garden may be visible. Worst of all is having a road running along the back, leaving you totally visible. There are lots of ways to screen, but plants provide the most cost-effective solution in almost all cases. They don’t begin to deteriorate the moment you put them in, as fences do – instead they become better and better. The only problem is the time taken to develop, and this is where Thuja Green Giant has the edge over every other evergreen available. It will grow 3 feet plus a year in its early years, and sooner than you can imagine you will have good screening – that only gets denser and better with every passing year.

Even if you move into a new development that has wooden fences already in place, remember that those fences will never screen higher up, and they will require maintenance and deteriorate over time. Planting a row of Thuja Green Giant along the fence will develop a screen to replace it, as the fence deteriorates. By the time it becomes an eye-sore, that collapsing fence won’t be visible to you at all, and it can be removed. The perfect solution.

As well, because fences are short, they provide only limited screening from things at ground level, not from upper story windows, multi-story buildings, or tall structures like billboards or power transformers. Thuja Green Giant will grow 20 or 30 feet tall – tall enough to screen most things from view, and certainly block the lower levels of even the tallest building. A 20 feet screening row of evergreens, say 30 feet from your viewing point, will block the lower 60 feet of something 100 feet away. It’s true!

Shelter

In some places, such as open countryside, or at the beach, strong winds can blow, and these make being in the garden unpleasant on many days. Windbreaks made from a variety of trees and shrubs can stop this.

• Your garden is windy and exposed – it is very hard to grow a wide variety of plants, and create a beautiful garden, if the site is constantly swept by strong winds, that bring cold, rain and snow. Plants remain small, their foliage is damaged, and flowering is reduced or absent. Fruit trees drop their fruit – the list goes on and on. In exposed locations providing shelter from the prevailing winds is an essential first step to making a real garden, that you can enjoy, and love.
• You want to encourage birds and wildlife – shelter belts made from a variety of trees and shrubs, both evergreen and deciduous, filter wind, trap noise, and provide refuges and nesting places for birds and other small animals. Birds are often excellent pest-control in a garden, and so you help your plants too, while encouraging a rich local ecology.

Air Pollution

Plants are the most effective way to trap air pollution, both particles and gases. That stink of a highway will largely disappear if the air must flow through evergreens like Thuja Green Giant to reach your garden. Dust is trapped, and settles around the base of plants, leaving the air clean and pure. Asthma and bronchitis will probably be reduced too, and these health benefits are real, and especially effective in urban areas.

Creating Internal Gardens

Making separate gardens within your garden is a great way to enrich your experience of it. Especially in a larger garden, you can create a series of ‘rooms’ for different purposes – a vegetable garden; a fruit garden; an ornamental flower garden to stroll in; a garden for your children to play in; the list goes on and it can be tailored to your personal preferences. Clipped hedges of Thuja Green Giant – they can be clipped regularly for a formal look or left more casual and clipped once a year or less – are a simple and effective way to create these internal rooms, and series of functional areas. Hedges can be the conventional straight line, but they can also be curved and even grown in circles, depending on your needs or creativity. Entrances can be created by overlapping the ends of the hedge, so that you can’t even see there are other areas, or the openings can be lined up to create long vistas through one garden after another. Sounds ambitious? Perhaps, but you can do more than you perhaps realize with a creative approach.

Specimens

For one last suggestion, you don’t have to grow Thuja Green Giant in rows. Single plants, or groups of two, three, five, or more, clustered in corners, or on a lawn, create elegant and easy-to-grow accent points, and permanent garden features that give structure to your garden, making it peaceful and graceful. When creating clusters, always use odd numbers, (except for two) – it looks a whole lot more natural.

Fall is just around the corner – indeed in northern areas Labor Day weekend often sees the first cooler weather arrive, and with it the first hints of fall color. As that color intensifies, our evergreens become more prominent, as their permanent green forms a backdrop to the kaleidoscope of golds and reds that takes over our trees. Once simply background, an evergreen screen or hedge is suddenly thrown into contrast – and its defects can become much more prominent. Just when we want them to look perfect, they may not be. So before the full arrival of fall, and the distractions and other garden work that arrives with it, now is an excellent time to give your hedges and evergreens some attention, so that they will be lush and green, and also so that they will pass through the coming winter unscathed.

Recommendations for Fall Care of Thuja Green Giant

• Fertilizer with a high potassium feed – it toughens your plants for winter
• Use a fertilizer with iron and magnesium – it will enrich the green coloring
• Water deeply right up to freeze up – the best prevention for ‘winter burn’
• Give a last trim in early fall – the perfect backdrop to fall color, and reduced winter damage too

Fall Fertilizer Guidelines for Thuja Green Giant

Through spring and summer, the emphasis in feeding evergreens is on the element nitrogen. This is the element that encourages vigorous, lush growth, and so evergreens need plenty of it to fulfil their promise. Strong, rapid growers like Thuja Green Giant in particular, have enormous potential for spring and summer growth, and three feet a year during its early life is easily achieved. But to do that your plants need plenty of nitrogen. So summer fertilizers for evergreens are packed with it, and N-P-K formulas like 10-8-6 in granular feeds, or 20-5-10 in liquid fertilizers are common.

In fall and through winter your evergreens have different needs, so a shift in formulation is needed. Roots respond to the moisture from fall rain, especially since the ground is still warm, and roots need lots of phosphorus – the ‘P’ in that formula. An increase in that number, or even an application of a high-phosphorus fertilizer for transplanting, is called for. Especially if you have new trees, planted back in spring, and you didn’t add phosphorus at that time, early fall is an ideal moment to use a ‘transplant’ fertilizer. Phosphorus is notorious for not penetrating into the soil, so a granular form needs to be forked into the top layers of soil. Alternatively, use a liquid formulation, where the nutrients will be carried deeper by the water they are dissolved in.

In colder area in particular, winter damage is always a concern. The nutrient potassium – that’s the ‘K’ in the formula – has been repeatedly proven to enhance cold resistance, as well as resistance to sucking insects and fungal diseases. A visit to your local hardware or garden center at this time will usually give you a high-potassium evergreen food for fall, with a lower first number too (that’s the nitrogen, remember). Reducing nitrogen and increasing potassium ‘hardens off’ that summer growth, slowing down your plants so they enter winter tough and resistant. As well, look for supplementary iron and magnesium, which will quickly put a rich green into your foliage, intensifying that beautiful color contrast with the golds of fall.

Fall Watering Recommendations for Thuja Green Giant

The stresses of summer can leave the subsoil dry, and unless you have several days of steady rainfall, your trees can go into winter in soil with a moisture deficit. This in turn will leave your plants more prone to stress, so through fall take steps to prevent that. Deep watering in early September will stimulate root growth, and those soakings should continue through the season, making sure to give one last one before the ground begins to freeze (if it does in your zone). Not only does this keep the roots healthy, and the foliage sturdy and full of moisture, but it gives important winter protection too, especially in colder areas, with young plants, and in exposed locations. Thuja Green Giant is one tough plant, but if the foliage is dry it can burn in cold winter winds and bright sun, when water is drawn from the foliage by the solar heat and cold, dry air. If that happens then that green color will turn to brown, disfiguring your hedge, and spoiling that wonderful green winter color. If the ground freezes then it is harder for the trees to draw up water, and the foliage is more susceptible to this kind of damage. Plenty of water at the roots is your secret weapon against this ‘winter burn’, because moist soil freezes more slowly, or not at all, so water uptake is easier for your trees.

Early fall is an ideal time for the last trim

Since your evergreens are about to become a whole lot more noticeable, it is time to smarten them up for the party. A light trim in early fall will smooth out any defects, and make your hedges and screens look perfect. But it’s not just a matter of visuals. Every time you trim you develop denser growth and a tighter surface on your hedges. With every trimming they become denser and denser, which is what gives hedges that mature look we all strive for. As well though, as is often the case with good gardening habits, it isn’t just a case of visuals. If snow and ice storms are a feature of your winters, then a smooth, dense and clipped surface on a hedge is much less likely to accumulate snow and ice and break apart. Make sure too that you round off the top if you are in a high-snowfall area, or subject to blizzards. The round top will shed snow better, and it is much less likely to collapse under the weight of accumulated snow.

If you follow these simple recommendations, you will be making your plants of Thuja Green Giant – and other similar evergreens too – even more beautiful, as well as giving them the best care possible. They will thank you with beauty and rich green coloring as the perfect backdrop to the colorful activities in your garden that make fall most beautiful of all the seasons.