Friday, November 23, 2007
Find sunny window space for wintering geraniums
John Arbogast
Landscape consultant John Arbogast answers your questions every Thursday. Send questions about your lawn, garden, plants, or insects to:
Dear John
5102 Greenfield St. SW
Roanoke, Va. 24018
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Q: Is it true that geraniums can be pulled out of their pots or from the flower box and stored without soil for the winter in the unheated basement? How does one do this successfully? I have a few pots of geraniums in several windows that were placed around my patio during the summer and I want to keep them without having to water them. Please explain the soil-free way. Also, what is the best way to keep geraniums from year to year?
A: The method that you’re referring to is probably the old way to keep geraniums over winter that worked in bygone days when folks had a damp, relatively dark, chilly but frost-proof root cellar. Geranium plants with some of the soil shaken off their roots could be hung from the ceiling or cellar supports with soft string or pieces of cloth to keep the plants in a dormant condition from fall until the next spring.
Because most of us don’t have a root cellar these days, this method is out of the question now.
My preferred method for overwintering my favorite geraniums is to find sunny window space in heated rooms and use the potted geraniums there as indoor winter flowering plants. Geraniums are one of the few garden plants that will still make flowers in the shorter days of fall and winter if they receive strong sunshine. Indoor flowering geraniums should be watered when the soil feels almost dry and fertilized with a flowering plant soluble product once every 4 weeks.
Other methods for successfully continuing favorite geraniums overwinter are
- Take tip cuttings about 3 to 5 inches long for rooting while the geranium plant is still growing vigorously; pot up the smaller size rooted plants and place them in a sunny window. If your potted geraniums that were on your patio are healthy but aren’t making much new growth now, place them in a sunny window and cut them back to force new growth of tips that can then be used for cuttings to root.
- If you just don’t have enough room in sunny windows for flowering geraniums, cut potted ones back rather severely, leave them in the same pot, and but place each of them in a cool, lighted spot where they’ll take up less room and will need watering only occasionally. There is a risk with this method that overwatering can occur easily with chilly soil causing roots to rot.
Q: My trumpet vine did not bloom this year. It had lots of foliage. Please advise me on what I can do now to keep it over winter so it will do better next year.
A: Due to the vigorous nature of this vine, I’m assuming that your plant is growing in a sunny area in the ground and not growing in a container, such as one that might have looked nice on a sunny deck or patio during the summer but would be at risk of winter freezing due to infiltration of sub-freezing temperatures from the top, bottom, and sides of a container. So, there’s nothing that you can or should do now to make a trumpet vine live over winter in the Roanoke, Virginia, area.
If you have this vine in a location that gets more severe freezes than we do here in Roanoke’s United States Department of Agriculture Hardiness Zone 7, work now to give the plant winter protection so that some or all of the buds do not die because of freezes and will thus be able to produce new shoots in the spring. The trumpet vine makes flowers during the summer on new growth that emerges in the spring.
The absence of flowers on your trumpet vine this past summer started at any time during the spring and was likely caused by anything that killed the old growth, thus causing the vine to put all its energy into making leaves and stems rather than blooms. Our drought during the past growing season was probably not the culprit, since you mentioned lots of foliage produced but didn’t mention watering.
Or, pruning after new growth emerged last spring would have removed the shoots that would have produced buds and flowers in the summer. The suggested pruning time for trumpet vine is in late winter before new growth begins.
