Bringing geraniums into the house or greenhouse in the Fall, means dollars in your pocket. And even after the cold weather in mid October, some geraniums may still be saved.
The gardener can choose whether to bring in parent plants or to just take cuttings. If you choose to take in the parent plants, you can still take cuttings as well.
Changes caused by soft-summer living
When you move plants indoors, you’ll find they drop a lot of leaves. This is caused from good growing conditions: fertilizer and water. The stems are soft and do not adapt to hotter, drier conditions in the house. If you dug the plants and repotted them, you also disturbed their roots. All of these factors affect how the geranium adapts to the leaner conditions inside the house or greenhouse.
Help them adapt
You may have noticed that geraniums really put on a color display just about time we receive our first killing frost. They like cool weather.
To help them adjust to inside temperatures, give them a severe haircut. Parent plants are cut down to just a couple of inches above the soil. The cuttings may be used for new starts. The plant will send out new leaves and be bushier.
Success with your cuttings
The only requirement for starting new starts from the stems, is the need for two sets of leaves along the stem’s length. This allows you to keep one set of leaves above ground and the second set is stripped and place in the soil where roots will grow.
There are two ways to get your cuttings to grow. You may put the cuttings into a container of water and wait for them to root. I suggest you also add the stem of a plant that readily roots -- like creeping Charlie. The plant that roots easily puts off a hormone in the water, which causes the geranium starts to grow too.
Or you can take your cuttings and pot them directly. When you do this, it is best to dip the stems into a rooting hormone like Rootone. Shake off any excess hormone, using a dibble or your finger make a hole in the damp soil in the pot and insert the start. Draw the soil up around it firmly and water it. It should have developed roots in four to six weeks.
Winter hibernation
Growth will be slow this time of the year. The plants know that winter is coming along and their metabolism slows down during this season. As the days begin to lengthen in late January and early February, a more normal amount of growth will come along with the changing season.
Container size
Pots for new cuttings only need to be about three- to four-inches wide, the perfect size for windowsills. Geranium parent plants like their roots to be snug in a pot, almost root-bound.
If you don’t want to handle all of those pots, you might fill a flat with soil and fill it chock-a-block full of hormone-dusted starts. Place it where it is about 60? F. with indirect light. Then in early to mid January, you can pot up those rooted starts.
My preference is to place the starts directly into pots because I don’t have the time to do the work twice.
For ivy geraniums and Martha Washington geraniums, be sure to take lots of starts. These geraniums don’t root as easily as their more common cousins. They are also going to need a more vigilant eye kept on them for water and so on.
