Azalea repot in August?

[One First Matter All]

My wife and I bought a house this past spring, and with the house came an azalea shrub planted in the backyard in a very shady spot. The plant was not doing well. I transplanted it from the ground to a large pot. It's now doing great--lots of new growth. When transplanting, I used what soil I had on hand: standard potting mix.

I recently purchased some kanuma soil and want to repot it again, this time to a smaller pot (though not yet a bonsai pot). Is it safe to do so in the next week? Thanks!

 

[penumbra]

Wait until late winter to early spring. Two repots in a year is excessive. Not impossible, but certainly risky with summer at an end. You are really talking about September potting.

 

[Forsoothe!]

Why the hurry? Spring is much safer.

 

[One First Matter All]

Eh, not in a hurry, really. I just figured in Indiana we have about a month and a half (maybe more) of warmer weather, and a repot to kanuma soil might give the plant a nicer home to finish out the season. I know that bonsai pots put a lot of stress on plants, but I didn't know if the same applied to a non-bonsai pots. So, the negative: the stress of two repots in one season. The positive: better soil composition and a chance to establish itself in the new pot before the start of next spring, when I hope it puts on some serious growth. But I'm open to suggestion, and it sounds as though patience might be the best policy here.

 

[Deep Sea Diver]

Yep, there's two sides of your decision.

First... Repot now, possibly risk damage to the new roots and the new growth, give good aftercare and hope things will turn out right next spring.

Other side. Let roots grow on in the potting soil and gain energy until the azalea goes dormant for the winter, ensure good drainage during the winter. Then repot in the spring time, with a complete root wash and plant in kanuma etc, and know that you'll have a healthy plant to work on next spring.

The conservative side would say grow now wait to repot later. The gutsy side would say to just go for it and take the consequences.

I'd repot again only if the azalea wasn't doing well in the present soil.... but didn't you say it was flourishing?

btw: do you know what type azalea you have? Can you add photos to this thread. Could be helpful down the road....

Cheers
DSD sends

 

[One First Matter All]

I'd repot again only if the azalea wasn't doing well in the present soil.... but didn't you say it was flourishing?

Cheers
DSD sends

Yes, it is doing much better than it was in the ground. When we bought the house, it was pretty pathetic-looking due to its poor location.

My plant identifier app tells me this is an evergreen Satsuki Azalea. Does that look right? Photos below. Sorry for the poor quality--it's getting dark here now.

 

[Deep Sea Diver]

In no expert, but there are several here that are. I look for slightly hairy leaves and two buds/terminal. See photo’s of leaves of two Satsuki.

If it’s-a Satsuki, it will likely be a pretty hardy one as you are in 6A.

Take a couple good images in the AM. Likely someone will be able to put you in the ballpark,

Cheers
DSD sends

 

[One First Matter All]

In no expert, but there are several here that are. I look for slightly hairy leaves and two buds/terminal. See photo’s of leaves of two Satsuki.

Cheers
DSD sends
View attachment 325130View attachment 325131

I do see some tiny hairs on the leaves; they seem to be protruding off the sides. More hairs might exist on the leaf face itself, but it's too hard to tell. Thanks for your help.

 

[Cadillactaste]

This was a collected tree yes? Personally I would not mess with the roots but allow it to fully recover. If its not showing stress and is thriving. I'm not sure I would rush to do anything next year. That's my take Personally...take with a grain of salt. The collected few I did...didn't go into bonsai soil. Maple and a Tamarix. Both were allowed to recover a few years before a repot into bonsai substrate. Though this was early years. They never sulked...so I left them until I seen a lot of health and strong growth a few years.

 

[Harunobu]

I don't see why you need to repot this now. One reason you list is that you have kanuma now. But azaleas grow fine in potting soil, as those are almost always based on peat and have a low pH. The second reason is that you want it to be in a smaller pot. It seems this pot is a bit too large, but we don't know how much roots it had. I think the diameter is fine, just that a shallower one would have been more ideal.

 

[Dolly]

If you really want the azalea, wait until late winter early spring. Follow the advice the people above. WAIT!!!

 

[Forsoothe!]

Would an expert please advise how these software ID systems can call any Azalea leaf this or that species or variety? I have several purchased Satsuki as such from reputable dealers and they are all over the map. Maybe, just maybe, it could recognize the flower but then there's several nuts (thousands worldwide?) breeding this with that so the flowers are all over the map, too. Not tag, no nada. My limited understanding is they have smaller leaves and flowers and "Satsuki" has become more a resultant small individual varietal than a species, for all practical purposes. Please enlighten me.

 

[Harunobu]

Well, the software will almost always fail because it is giving species names when almost no azalea, except a few in botanical gardens, are species.
I tested PlantNet and it gave the most dominant species in the hybrids I took pictures from as a top5 candidate. But never no.1. I don't know how the software works. You would think it is a deep learning algorithm. But that needs to be trained with a high quality dataset. I don't think the users are providing that, generally speaking. And in the case of azalea, it is not clear which species to label the cultivar as.

But you are right that many azalea hybrids have identical leaves while different flowers. For satsuki Kozan, Nikko, Nyohozan, they all have identical leaves. But not identical flowers. So if the software would perform 100% perfectly, it would give a 100% match for Kozan, a 100% match for Nikko, and the same for Nyohozan, Goko, Tensho, etc. But it would give a 98% match for Hakurei, for example. So they may not be 100% identical, but they look identical even to experts. And then many look superficially similar.

But the added value of such a software is still clear to me. You can take a picture of just leaves and then really narrow down what it could be. If you have no idea, you at least get a few names of which one is very near to correct.

How deep learning works? That's a big topic. How a trained network is able to recognize features in the pictures, that is way harder to figure out than it is to get a deep learning network to function. But important because of a famous example of a deep learning network being able to recognize if a picture was a wolf or a dog. But after training it with wolf and dog pictures, it turned out that all it did was look for snow/white background, because all the wolf pictures used to train the network had snow in it, while the dog pictures didn't.

But back to 10 000 cultivar and training a deep learning neural network. You can't train it with species as outcomes, because all your input are hybrids. But you can also not have all the 10 000 hybrids as output. So what you could do instead is give percentages. Which is a bit iffy. So in a sense, putting out a species is maybe still the way to go.