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It’s Almost February, Do You Know Where Your Geraniums Are?

© Mary Henry

Are you one of the scads of people who winter their geraniums to use them again next year? How do you do it? Do you have a three season porch where you can keep them cool? Do you hang them upside down as dried plants? Do you put them in the basement? or Do you treat them as house plants for the winter, giving them sunlight, water and TLC? If your methods have not proved as successful as you would like, maybe we can give you some hints that will make the experience better next year.

First off, the type of geraniums we are talking about are really Pelargoniums. They are the bedding plants we use in gardens and pots for their large flower heads and elegantly marked leaves. In our climate they are definitely treated as annuals though they are perennial in warmer parts of the world.

Folk tales of keeping geraniums are always popping up around me as everyone seems to want to do it. The truth of the matter is that many will work, BUT... the result may not be what you want in your garden the next summer. If you have yours in the basement, attic or a closet waiting to be brought out again next summer, they need to be brought out into the light in the next few weeks if you are going to have blooms early in the season. I hope you pruned the plants before you brought them in last fall. If not, then you will have to trim off (they'll be too dry to pinch) the old growth tips to encourage growth to begin lower on the stems for a fuller plant. If the geraniums are unpotted, pot them up again in a suitably-sized pot. Use a good quality coarse potting soil. Water them well, but don't let them stand in water and keep them out of direct sun as they begin to wake up.

The biggest drawback to keeping dormant geraniums is the length of the winter in the upper Midwest. In the upper South, where these techniques work best, the frost-bound time is two months shorter than it is here in Minneapolis. That means that the plants will be growing for roughly six months and dormant for six months. They might be able to store enough energy to make that work if we didn't also expect them to bloom their heads off while they do it. In other words, we are asking more than they can be expected to do successfully. Also, people no longer have a humid cool area like the old cold cellars. Most basements now are finished and heated to the temperatures of the rest of the house. Keeping dormant geraniums in a bag, or hanging upside down or any of the other out-of-soil methods are the least likely to work for that reason. The most successful technique is the three season porch method. These geraniums are basically in suspended animation, not dormancy. They have sunlight for photosynthesis, but the low temperatures (near, but not below, freezing) keep their life processes at a near standstill.