Last year, I bought monarda - a red one and a ‘native’ light purple one for my new medicinal herb garden. Both got powdery mildew (which we talked about - copper spray), but I noticed yesterday they are coming back beautifully and much larger than last year.
I offered them to my SIL and she was hemming/hawing about it, so I am trying to figure out what to do with them. Mom and I talked this morning & I was looking things up .... they do beautifully in large pots on patios & balconies where they have full sun and air movement. Mom has been wanting to put pots of something on the patio and it looks like the bee balm might be our plants! She just loves red and purple, probably her favorite color combo. She’s got some very large pots (the dirt in them is not good) that we could use. I’m going to dump the dirt & take dirt from the herb bed where the monarda are growing. so they will feel like they’re still ‘at home’.
It’s sort of exciting to think about taking something from here and moving it to the new place. Any suggestions? One thing I read (aside from watering instructions) is that they don’t like heavy fertilizer - if you add compost to the pots, that gives them the nutrition they need. I have my compost pile from fall before last so I could mix some of that in with the soil from the bed. The dirt in that bed is ‘new’, topsoil I amended with sand & added some organic fertilizer. I think if I added compost to it, it would help ‘lighten’ it up (the sand helped some) and provide some good nutrition for growing. No problem with full sun - our patio gets sun from mid morning to sunset.
I would dig them up and get them potted up (in something temporary) as soon as you can. Monarda is hard to kill, but a general rule of thumb for perennials is: Move/Transplant Spring Bloomers in the Fall and Summer/Fall Bloomers in the Spring.
Always try to move things OPPOSITE of their bloom cycle.
Monarda is one that should be easy to dig up and move with you. Your new Hummingbird Friends will like it, too!