In February, it's time to wake up the winter-stored geraniums, and this weekend it has again been below thirty degrees Celsius, so it was a good time to tackle this when there wasn't much to do outside anyway.
I usually put away my geraniums when it starts to get cold at night, usually sometime in October, and then they get to stand cool and almost completely without care. They get a little water, but nothing else. In February, I bring them out and prune them.
Unfortunately, I'm not a pro at geraniums, but I have a relative in Jokkmokk who is exceptionally good at geraniums and she usually provides me with cuttings of fine varieties. Thanks Susanne!
My feeling is still that it is easier to get these fine varieties to survive winter storage than the kind you can buy cheaply in the store in the spring, but it may also be because I'm not a pro at geraniums.
I prune mine down to about 10cm or possibly a little longer if the plant is nice.
They usually look so terrible that I doubt they will survive, the same thing every year, but somehow they always recover.
Another thing I do is wash the pots with soap and a brush. I do it so that any pests don't come along for the summer and so that the pots are fresh. I use a dish brush that I consider to have done its job in the kitchen, I reserve it for use only for pots. I use the kitchen soap which is unscented, geraniums don't need any perfume, but if you only have the pine or apple soap at home, that works just as well.
I wash the pots off a little quickly, I don't scrub them completely clean. It's not like anyone is going to eat out of them, it's just to give my geraniums a good start and because it's nicer to have clean, nice pots inside.
Before, it looks pretty rough.
After, it feels much better.
After the pot is cleaned, the plant gets some new soil and then I actually give them a tiny, tiny bit of nutrition too. Goodness, you can see that they are starved. I know that many say that the best thing is to start with just a little water when you wake up the geraniums, but I'm perhaps not quite heartless enough to starve them and so I think that the extremely long winter we have up here requires a little extra nutrition. ;)
That's how I also reason when it comes to the number of semlas that we humans in the Västerbotten inland need to survive until spring.
And imagine that after just a few days, it's sprouting in the pots again.
