re: Lowering ph of flower beds

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I actually have some of that miracle grow but I read somewhere to not use fertilizer the first year on transplants. Mine have been in the ground about a month. Any thoughts?

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I only use it for my blueberries but usually don’t fertilizer the first year myself

I had the exact same issue with frostproof gardenias. They were really mature 7gal plants when I transplanted them last year. They really struggled throughout the year and I couldn’t figure out what the deal was. The leaves were yellow, looked like iron chlorosis, and the plants were shedding a ton of leaves. Ultimately, I got a soil test and found that the soil itself was super high in nutrients and iron, but my pH was 7.3. I put down elemental sulfur throughout the gardenia area of the beds about 4 months ago. I followed that up 2 months ago with aluminum sulfate and liquid iron chelate. I got my soil tested again after all of that, and I had dropped the pH to 5.8. The gardenias look excellent now and are growing like weeds, though they’re still kinda leggy because of how many interior leaves they lost over the past year. I plan to prune them after they bloom to help them fill out.

I’m not an expert, but I wouldn’t fertilize until you get the pH right. I tried that last year (with the acid loving miracle gro) and it did a lot more harm than good because the plants were already stressed out and my soil was already high in nutrients. The plants got burned bad. If the pH is out of whack, the plants can’t uptake the nutrients from the soil.