Hey, guys. Sean and Allison here from spoken garden. Happy Friday to you guys, and thank you so much for being here. We're really happy that you're here with us. It's Friday. Plant chat. So, guys, if you don't know, we're the quarantine gardeners, and this is our daily video log of us getting different projects accomplished around our garden while under quarantine.
So hopefully you're getting some great ideas for your garden and maybe even some inspiration, too. Thank you for watching today. And if this is your first time here, we would love for you to subscribe by that button down below.
And then, you'll know, when we post. Our latest videos on Fridays, as you might already know, maybe you don't, but this is Plant Chat day. We wanted to do a plant chat about our Salvia Hot Lips. It's one of our favorite plants in our backyard.
It's so easy to care for. It literally attracts so many hummingbirds. It's a lot of fun to watch. We're going to tell you a little bit about salvia microphyla. We're going to tell you a little bit about some plant care and some general uses for your landscape.
Hey, here is our Hot Lips plant. Sean and I always laugh when we say Hot Lips. It just sounds funny. It sounds pretty corny, but look at it. It's just huge. And it's gorgeous. You guys, this blooms all summer, and we barely have to do anything to it.
It's so easy. Maintenance loves its full sun location. It gets about six or so hours of full sun in the backyard location here, but it's got well draining and rich soil. And you can see it's got mulch around it.
We just put down some really fresh mulch around it, and it really thrives under these conditions. It really likes this location. So if we zoom in on the beautiful flower here, you can see right. Away that it's two toned, which is cool.
It's red and kind of or. It's almost like a fuchsia and white. So, guys, you can see right here, it's got this flat petal sticking straight out, and then it's got like a modified petal kind of coming straight up.
It's almost like a sideways cup. It's kind of weird. But if I turn the bloom to the side, you can see it's got a really long neck or almost a trumpet shape that goes back down. And all the pollen and nectar is down in here.
So. The hummingbirds will come and they'll stick their beaks and their long tongues down in and they'll get that nectar and pollen right down in there. So these are perfectly set up for. Hummingbirds, especially if you love watching hummingbirds like we do.
They will hang out at this plant for like a good ten minutes. Yeah, and that's really hard to do with hummingbirds because they're so add and they move. So as far as watering needs for this plant, this plant actually can tolerate some mild drought, which is nice.
We do need to go through every spring, very early spring, and go through and cut out a lot of either. Dead or overwood out of this, out of this plant. But there's still some wood that we can still cut out of here.
And here's an example of it right here, this stem. So I'm just going to take my corona hand printers and cut that out. This type of thing can be cut out. It's dead. It's from last year. It didn't make it through the winter, so there's always a little bit of maintenance with any plant.
And so sometimes you see it all and sometimes you don't. But this plant really is so easy to take care of and we just love it. And the great thing is, it being a salvia or sage, it just smells amazing.
Well, I think even better than that, not only does it smell great, like Sean said, but it smells in our climate. In zone eight B, the leaves were fragrant through the whole winter. Sometimes we would come out here to our fire pit or come out to work in our yard, and we would just come by and just grab kind of like a handful of these just to smell them.
And it had fragrance. It was great. This salvia is in the Lamie ACA family, the mint family, which pretty much all herbs are a part of that family, including lavender. We might have mentioned that it balloons for a really long time, pretty much all summer.
Well, it'll bloom until the very first frost comes and then it stops and it'll keep some of its leaves over the winter, but it also will lose some, too. So semi deciduous, but at our climate anyway. But it's a beautiful plant.
So some great uses of this plant can be for borders in containers. Can be for rock gardens or in a single planting like you see it right here in our bed. So that's a wrap for our Salvia Hot Lips Plant Chat.
And again, Hot Lips. We love the name. We're actually going to take some cuttings of this this year. That is kind of a fun project that we have coming up. We're going to do untreated cuttings, and then we're going to do treated cuttings with root hormones.
So that project will be coming up, like Alison said, and we'll get a video out and show you how we do that. And so maybe you want to do that, too. That sounds like fun. Actually, Sean and I are both total science nerds, so we'll run our own little lab and see which one roots and what happens.
That'll be fun. You guys can follow along. Guys, leave your comments and questions down below for us. We love hearing from you and give us that thumbs up. Let us know we're doing a good job and subscribe to our channel so you get updates on our latest videos.
And thank you so much for watching and for being here. And if you have any questions about Salvia Hot Lips or how we maintain ours, let us know in the comments down below. And with that, you guys, we'll be back tomorrow with another new project.
Have a great start to your weekend and thank you for being here. We're all in this together, and busy hands equals busy minds, we like to say. We'll see you tomorrow, you guys. See you tomorrow, everybody.
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