I'm sick of this!
>> Friday, February 12, 2016 –
cuttings,
overwintering
Winter that is. It's not that the cold weather has me down, although if pleasant temperatures would hurry along that would be fine with me.
No, it's the extra work involved in overwintering plants indoors. Poster child for my struggles this year is this peppermint. I had high hopes of fresh mint tea this winter, but an aphid outbreak -- where did they come from exactly? -- combined with the wrong organic insect killer fried the mint.
The spray didn't even take care of the aphids completely:
Mint was supposed to be one of the easy ones to grow this winter!
Besides that I've also got the struggle of too big plants trying to get enough light...
...cuttings that are not rooting as readily as they have in the past...
...plants that just aren't growing, and seem to be creeping toward death...
...with just a bit of that unhealthy color sneaking in giving me a worry.
There are plants that I'm just trying to keep alive too...
...where keeping them looking good is not even considered. Just need them to hang on until they can revive outdoors...
I'm getting pretty sick of it though.
One silver lining: even if these all die this winter they'll soon be forgotten in Spring's flush of new growth...
.
That's too bad about the mint. Aphids are harder to get rid of indoors, it seems. But having too big plants is a good problem to have, I would think. I always like seeing pictures of all the overwintering you do.
Aphids have set up camp in my greenhouse too. Luckily because of the location I can blast them off with a spray from the hose. That's combined with squishing them manually, a bit of dish soap mixed with water, and sometimes even neem oil. The problem is that they reproduce so quickly that you have to keep doing this weekly. It is frustrating to loose plants during the winter captivity but it does create space to acquire more:)
Hi Alan, I haven’t been here for a while – have been so busy moving house and garden the last year! Too bad with your overwintering plants, I don’t have any good suggestions except trying to be more vigilant with only taking clean, healthy plants indoors if you need to bring any inside. I never bring any plants indoors at all if they have grown outside as I am too afraid of infecting my indoor plants with aphids and other bugs, but I am lucky to be able to grow most things outside all year round. Hang in there, spring is just around the corner :-)