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How to Grow Columbine, Germinate Seed, Care for

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Hey, this is Adam from Yard of paradise. And I’m going to tell you all about Columbine today. I’m going to be focusing on the eastern red columbine, or wild columbine, native to the eastern half of North America. Scientific name is Aquilegia vulgaris.

Growing Condition

Columbine is a flowering perennial that gets around two to three feet tall with a two foot spread, and that’s all subject to conditions. All the information in here should apply to just about every other species of columbine as well, or in a broad sense it definitely will. But these things grow in full shade, full sun, partial shade.

Partial shade is about the best for them, but here’s an example of one in deep shade in Shenandoah National Park. I found a whole lot of columbines there over the years. There were many little red blooms. So this is something that you can use in a rain garden, as long as the soil drains where you put it. So this would be the high end of a rain garden. But the blooms on columbine are what make it so attractive.

Pollination

The blossom’s heavy enough where it makes the stem curl over, and it looks like a lampshade or a bell with those four tubes underneath where the pollen and nectar are.

 It’s mainly pollinated by hummingbirds and bumblebees, and if you are able to attract hummingbirds to your house in the spring when this blooms, they’re more likely to build a nest, so I’ve read. So it might be a way for you to get hummingbirds around your house all year, or for the whole growing season when they migrate north. But it’s a really pretty flower.

The foliage looks cool as well, and it’s really not too hard to grow once you get them established. I mean, and they’re not too bad to establish either, which we’ll get into in a second. The deep lobes on the leaves on this plant are really cool. The shades you get are kind of bluish green or even purple depending on how old the leaves are. So it looks good year-round.

How to Collect Columbine Seed

It’s really easy to collect more seeds from.The seeds kind of just fall right out if you turn them upside down. And if you want to get, if you want to collect the seed on an industrial scale, just go snip a whole bunch of the pods off. Let them dry off so they turn kind of brown. And then put them in a little ziploc bag and just shake the heck out of it. If you shake it for about 30 seconds or a minute, all those pods will release pretty much all of their seed. And then you can, it’s no problem at all to separate out the pods from the baggie. And you’re going to be left with a ton of seeds. And most of them are probably viable as well.

How to Grow Columbine

So if you want to grow these from seed, it’s not too hard to do it. It’s best to do winter sowing though on this one because it needs sunlight to germinate and it needs to be moist. And it needs to go through a cold period. So it’s best just to winter sow this, But you, for planting these, you don’t bury them, you just press them into the soil so they have good contact but they’re exposed to light.

And, you know, be generous with the amount of seeds you use just in case when you’re watering them, you know, they get buried by accident. I use a little pump sprayer with a mister to water my stuff. It works great. But if you want to grow these in the summer, you can as well, but you’re going to have to use a paper towel method. That’s how you can stratify them if you want to germinate them in the summer. 

After they’ve germinated they look just like miniature versions of the mature plant. The leaves are very identifiable, so you won’t have any problem mistaking what you’ve got. But, yeah, they’re pretty easy to grow. Once they’re a few inches tall, you can transplant them out into the garden and they’ll be fine. It’s a really nice plant to grow. It gives you about a month of color in early spring.

My Experience Growing Columbine

My experience Growing columbine

Columbine is a prolific self-seeder. So this patch in the picture you see, I’m not responsible for most of those plants. Most of those are volunteers. I probably put four or six plants in and now there’s probably 20. And this caused me some problems last year, which we’ll get into here in a minute. But, you know, you’re going to have to pull volunteer seedlings, like Exhibit A. You’ll have to pull some volunteer plants, but they’re shallow rooted so it’s not hard.

Columbine will get two to three feet tall and maybe two feet wide at max. But they do produce a lot of small volunteer seedlings, so they’ll fill themselves in. And it’s better having little columbines than dandelions, I think.

Fungus Problem

But anyways, having too many of them, though, I actually ran into a fungus problem last year the first time. Because of that the leaves are all damaged. You will see some white fuzzy stuff on some of the stalks.

Fungus Problem

In the picture you see those are just regular fungus of some kind. And I attribute it to having too dense of a columbine patch. I didn’t have enough airflow through the plants and it was a wet year as well. So those two conditions caused me some problems. I didn’t have any plants that died. All I did was I mixed up a little bit of hydrogen peroxide and water and sprayed every affected part of the plant. Some of the stalks I removed as well to increase the airflow through there. And the problem sorted itself off. All the plants lived.

So I think I did like a teaspoon of hydrogen peroxide at three percent to one cup of water and just missed the areas that are affected. That’s all you had to do. So, if you have plants that are in a shady spot, it’s more apt to happen.

Transplanting

If you want to transplant columbines, you need to do it in late fall or early spring. This is late spring when they’re just starting to pop up. The reason why you do that is the plants are mostly still dormant. So you can move them around easily. Never try to transplant a flower when it’s blooming or just after blooming when it’s making its seeds. You’re likely going to kill it. Also, I don’t think you could divide them if you tried. So it’s better just to wait till you get some volunteer plants to pop up. And that’s how you can propagate more.

Benefits of Anchoring

One other benefit that’s cool about this is that this plant in this giant pot has been there for about three years as you can see in the picture.

Benefits of Anchoring

I always forget to plant it. And by the time I think of it, I just, I don’t know, I get lazy because it’s heavy and I don’t want to do it. But you can grow these in pots and they will survive cold winters. I’m in zone six and it can get 10 or below 0. And that thing’s lived in a pot the whole time. So if you have a balcony or a deck or something, you can put them there if you want. But anyways, yeah, this is a really cool flower to grow. I hope you check it out. from a $2 pack of seeds, you can end up with 200 plants in a few years if you want to.

Conclusion

So early spring bloomers look good, it’s pretty tough. And yeah, if you guys like this article, give me a review and share if you want to see more of this. And thank you guys very much. Have a good day.

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