Re: container plants

In a message dated 8/10/02 10:27:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
Justcrabby@aol.com writes:

<< Interesting-- but the cost of storing them... wouldn't it be cheaper to 
just buy a new plant every year?
 
 I would love to do some tropical's here... just no where to store them for 
the winter... and a GH is out of the question! >>


Some yes, some no.  If it is a small woody and you are training it to size, 
you cannot start over.  Some bulbs build up a great display over a a few 
years in a pot and are too expensive to repurchase.  Some other plants are 
collected or found or gifted and not to found again easily.  

We don't talk much about bulbs here but there are a great many not too common 
that need holding on to and not hardy in the north.  I have a pot full of a 
small red flowered bulb called Bessera which has taken four years to fill the 
pot and look good.  I don't know where I could buy that many Bessera bulbs 
today.  I started with five tiny ones.  A lot of these bulbs "sleep" all 
summer, some all winter and need no care.  They stay in a clay pot, dry.   
Watering starts them when the time is right. 

Some other things are just hard to replace.  I have a miniature woody based 
fuchsia that lives in a hanger and blooms all year, summer and winter.  It 
does not get huge so is easy to keep in a plant space.  Fuchsia, indoors is a 
magnet for all kinds of plagues so all plants here are sprayed around Labor 
Day and put indoors or the plant house. Any plant that is a winter bloomer is 
usually kept.  Most of them are hard to replace or when you can get a new one 
it is just a rooted cutting.  An ivy grown to a huge size cannot be replaced 
in a that size.

So keeping over pots is for more than one reason.  Some Oxalis are impossible 
to replace and bloom all winter.  There is only one well know grower of these 
plants that I can find and dwarf and species pelargoniums, also winter 
bloomers are not grown in the US.  The one grower is not selling now and you 
have to order and pay for Canadian shipping and inspection. There are some 
plants here and there but a specialist in these plants will be Canadian.

Some of the reasons.   If they are easy to keep over they stay, if they need 
too much special treatment, they don't.  I used to put some of these plants 
into cold frames but less and less as the frames are invaded by voles all 
winter and in the spring there are no plants.

Claire Peplowski
NYS z4

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