Archive for the 'Solanum' Category

Potato Vine Solanum

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Potato vine solanum is a beautiful landscape bush. This is a recent photograph of our potato vine solanum bush. It needs more pruning than any other plant in our yard, because it grows numerous long spindly branches very quickly. Our solanum bush needs to be pruned about every two months during the growing season to keep it looking neat.

Right now, our bush is full of purple flowers, but it is huge and overgrown. I haven’t pruned it since June. When I do get around to pruning it, it usually takes me about 2 hours to prune it back into its original shape and then clean up the huge mass of branches.

September 20 2009 | Solanum | Comments Off on Potato Vine Solanum

Purple Solanum

This is a picture of our purple solanum (potato flower) bush. It’s a large beautiful shrub. I think it’s decades old, because its biggest trunks are 4 or 5 inches thick. It is filled with purple flowers almost continuously from spring through autumn.

Our solanum grows incredibly fast. If I don’t prune it regularly, it grows like crazy, until it takes up half of our patio area. I usually give it a severe pruning about every 2-3 months to keep it in a box shape. Because it grows so fast and can be trained into different shapes, it makes for a good natural privacy wall.  But without regular pruning, it gets overgrown and out-of-control quickly.

Our solanum is frost sensitive. It loses many of its leaves after a frosty spell. During a freeze about a year and half ago when the temperature here fell into the 20s, our shrub lost all of its leaves. But it began to grow back about a month or two later.

October 07 2008 | Solanum | Comments Off on Purple Solanum