Overwintering

As you know from my posts in previous years, I grow lots of plants that are not cold-hardy and won't survive our typical winters here in St. Louis. I can either treat these plants as annuals, let them die each winter and buy them all again in the spring, or I can work to overwinter as many of them as possible.

I don't really have the budget or desire to buy the same plants every year, plus I hate killing plants. So for me there's really no choice: I overwinter them.

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There are essentially three different overwintering choices:

1. actively growing under lights in the basement
2. semi-dormant stored as plants in the garage
3. stored as roots or tubers in garage

The first option is reserved for special plants that are small, take more than a single season to reach a reasonable size, are plants I want to propagate, or just something that I want to have growing all winter long. There is very limited space on the growing table, so I choose carefully.

The garage though, well, I can jam lots of pots and plants in there as long as I don't mind not being able to use it for vehicles all winter long. So this is my main overwintering strategy: move the pot into the garage! It's surprising how many plants can survive on just a little fluorescent light and a drink of water every month or so.

Most of my late fall gardening involves moving pots and digging up tubers. Elephant ear tubers are the main focus this year, as I had a couple dozen plantings. Most of the varieties get the majority of their stem/leaves removed:

Some get left more intact:

Others will get left in pots because I'm not sure if they'd prefer to be stored as tubers or left intact:

In the cases of special varieties which I may not have too much of, I may grow a small division under the lights all winter. I like having backup plans for the unproven methods.

There are also cannas, which I haven't finished digging yet. They get similar treatment as the elephant ears: some get stored as rhizomes, some stay in pots.

They could all store as rhizomes, but I'd like to have a few with intact root systems to get a jump start next year and produce bigger plants.

Papyrus is another plant I take some effort to overwinter:

I have so many divisions of this wonderful plant -- and it's so simple to overwinter. Just put the divisions into a bucket of water in the garage:

As long as it stays wet it will survive and start growing in the spring. I've tried keeping it growing under the lights and that didn't really work -- this plant is too large and the stems were too floppy. I suppose it would work if I had a room with big, south-facing windows though.

There are also the bananas which I posted about before:

I'll also bring a few of the marginally-hardy potted bamboos into the garage, just in case. Then there are a few cactus, a sago palm, an oleander, my two potted plumerias, eucalyptus, Echium wildpretii, jasmine, mexican petunia...

The garage starts filling up pretty quickly.

But this is what I go through each year to ensure I have plenty of tropical lushness when the growing season starts. It's very much worth the effort in my opinion!

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