Overwintering Geraniums – update
For the past couple of years, I’ve been overwintering geraniums instead of tossing the plants onto the compost pile at the end of the garden season. I’ve always hated wasting them and soon discovered they’re not all that difficult to overwinter. Hooray!
You might recall that I’ve filmed some videos on overwintering geraniums, which have been really popular. I guess that means I wasn’t the only one who wanted to know how to do it!
I will post the videos below but wanted to give you an important update. I recently heard from a reader that he started overwintering his geraniums for the first time ever about a month ago. He dutifully checked on them a few days ago and was horrified to discover many of them had mold on them.
He asked me how that could happen, which got me to thinking about an extra step I had to take this year before storing my geraniums for the winter. And that was to let the plants dry out for 24 to 48 hours before putting them into a box and moving them down to my basement.
As you know, we’ve had an extremely wet fall. It turns out that my reader’s plants were very wet when he put them into a box. And in my case, the plants’ leaves weren’t wet but the soil was incredibly damp. What I did was to knock the potting soil off of their roots and then leave the plants just lying on one of my greenhouse benches for about a day and a half. At that point, the plants’ roots felt nice and dry. If my plants had been wet, I would also have done this.
This information isn’t in my video because, when I filmed it, the potting soil was dry when I knocked it off the roots so I didn’t give it a second thought. If you have had problems with your plants developing mold or rotting, this is likely why, and I definitely wanted to bring this to your attention.
OK, here are my videos for those of you interested in seeing the process you go through. If you are already overwintering your geraniums, don’t forget to check on them once a month!
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