welcome to Hort tube where we talk all things gardening my name is Jim Putnam and this is a shoal creek vitex this is a shoal creek vitex a deciduous flowering ornamental tree or large growing shrub that blooms persistently through the summer with these amazing lilac colored flowers shoal creek can reach 12 to 15 feet in height and probably five to six or five to eight foot and width up at the top it's a small ornamental tree and so it's going to miss crape myrtle like in its growth hat but it's going to be wider at the top and narrower at the bottom and it's basically just a small tree so your even though it's six or eight feet up at the top the limbs really aren't going to be in your face they're very upright vertical branches and like I said you can plant pretty much right around the base of this thing shoal creek vitex would be best in zones six to nine this plant does require winter it does require a winter dormancy that's why it won't grow any further south than that and then just like a crape myrtle it is cold sensitive the further you go north so if you're in zone six I think the best place to use this plant would probably be on the corner of your foundation so make a beautiful small ornamental tree in a space where you might think about putting a Japanese maple or something like that is a tree that you only wanted to keep about twelve feet tall and then of course in zones seven eight and nine it can pretty much go wherever you want in out in open space and the winter wouldn't bother it Shoal Creek is a moderately fast-growing plant that can probably put on two feet of growth in a single season if it had adequate water and fertilizer in terms of Sun or shade on Shoal Creek vitex or any vitex really more Sun the better it's going to be a much fuller plant if it's allowed to be in a lot of the midday Sun it could take you know half a day would be fine three or four hours of the midday Sun I just wouldn't put this plant in a whole lot of shade I think it would probably live it would probably grow you just wouldn't get a lot of flowers and it would be very thin or even stretched out trying to get to the sunlight in terms of usage of shoal creek vitex like I said in zones horticultural zone 6 you're probably going to want to use this as a foundation plant just to prevent any kind of sub-zero night from harming it and use it as a corner plant where you need some height but you can't use a whole lot of width wherever that space is because it is kind of upright and narrow in zone 7 8 and 9 this plant could be used anywhere you'd want it this plant is perfect if you're on a small lot a lot of the homes are getting bigger and the Lots are getting smaller and it doesn't leave us a lot of room to put in trees of any kind so this is a great little ornamental tree if you're on a small lot and it will offer you color throughout the summer Shoal Creek vitex has these persistent lavender purple flowers pretty much all summer long they'll start sometime around mid June about the same time the crepe myrtles begin to bloom and they'll do it pretty much throughout the season it's actually almost October here as I'm recording this and these are still pretty covered in flowers here I think they would have probably stopped in the ground by now but in the container just with some moderately warm temperatures it's still in flower let's talk about planting your show Creek vitex this thing is going to be root bound when it comes out of the pot this one has roots coming out of the bottom that were actually attached to the fabric it was growing on it's not a great container plant really I see it listed on some websites as a container plant this thing just roots itself out of a container so fast and it goes from looking absolutely perfect for us in a container to very quickly declining in the container and it just needs space it needs to go in the ground as quickly as you can get it there once it's in the ground low maintenance drought tolerant all the things that I would say about this plant but in a container it's none of those so when you buy it it's almost certainly going to be very root bound so when you pull it out of the container you're going to need to vigorously pull it those roots to try to get them broken up so they start going outward instead of wrapping around one another also if you're planting it in an area with clay soils you're going to want to mix in some pine bark soil conditioner 50/50 with the clay so dig your hole now you got your little pile of clay mix in that pine bark soil conditioner in with that 50/50 and then use some of use that planting mix to replant it dig the hole the depth of the root ball and then put some of that 50/50 mix back in the bottom of it and then pull your plant out break up the roots set it into that hole now it's sticking up about this much that's perfect we'll use the rest of our 50/50 mix to pull up to the edge of it okay don't bury anything that's not buried so then we're going to lightly mulch with whatever mulch you use red mulch brown mulch regular hardwood mulch pine straw I don't care what it is just don't put any of it on the trunk of the plant that will not be very helpful to this plant to be buried in mulch and I see that all over the place now it's just become the new normal - it's like we're all related to fire ants or something we're building a little fire ant mounds on our plants it's not good for them at all if you have sandier soils and you think it's going to dry out between waterings I would definitely mix in some compost or some cow manure or peat moss and use that 5050 wood you're saying to your soil easy really eat super easy plant once your vitex is in the ground you're going to want to water it regularly for the first six months or so but let it become dry in between those waterings don't water it every day that drying process is what allows your plants to actually kind of chase water a little bit we want them to look for water in the surrounding soil and root out we don't want to if you keep watering it right in the center over and over and over again that it has no reason to root out and it just won't so this is not a plant that really is going to need a lot of ongoing watering this is a plant you're going to water when it's dry and so if we go a week or two in the summertime you might want to water it the flowers are on the new growth you can see them right out on the tips of this plant so if it got too dry during the summer the growth would stop the flowering would stop so water to plant when it's dry to keep it flowering don't water it just because it's Tuesday know that it needs water and I always say that Tuesday thing or whatever whatever days of the week your town allows you to water or whatever don't just water this plant on that day just because that's the only day a week you can but if it doesn't need water that Tuesday then wait till the next Tuesday and check it with your finger make sure it actually needs it and then really really water it well I would definitely fertilize your chaste tree in the spring this is an acid loving plant and I would definitely use an azalea camellia rhododendron fertilizer or Holly tone probably could get away with any slow release fertilizer but I would definitely put a small amount of fertilizer out on this in the spring same as the watering the new growth is where the flowers are so fertilizing it will create new growth and therefore more flowers in terms of pruning your vitex over time you're going to want to limb this up you're going to want to take out there's a dead branch right here I just pruned off you're going to want to limb up the lowest branches on this as it grows to create that little small tree look so these lowest horizontal branches the ones that are going up that way I would definitely take those off probably sooner the better really because you're not going to keep it in the future if so there's kind of no reason to keep it now once it gets up to the height you want it I'd probably cut it maybe two foot shorter then you want to keep it because it will come out in the spring put on about two feet of growth and then flower so it'll be flowering at the height you need it to flower any pruning you do during the summer on this plant if I take this one tip off right here and I cut it I'm going to produce two additional branches and each of those branches are going to have flowers on it we had pruned these earlier in the season there's a cut right here and now there are two flowers where there was one right here so you know a little bit of pruning during the summer will increase the flowering on these in terms of insect or disease problems there really aren't any the leaves are about to drop off of this one so they're a little bit spotted on the interior foliage but it's been holding those leaves the entire season so if that's the worst that happened to them all year that's a pretty good deal really nothing comes along and chews on this and that includes deer I would put this in the deer resistant or almost deer proof plants it has the foliage and the flowers have a very unique fragrance to them and I think it deters the deer from wanting to sample them so what are you waiting for even you can grow the low maintenance easy to grow small ornamental three shoal creek vitex thank you for watching this video and if it was helpful please hit the like button and also subscribe to my channel for future videos also comment below with any questions you might have about vitex thanks again for watching