I’m just going to own this: I do way too much of this kind of thing. That represents a lot of work up there at the end of the season when I am simultaneously packing up and bringing in new plants and dividing and it winds up somewhat exhausting.
Also this post got overly wordy. Ah well.
So: the incoming plants need to be hosed down, hosed down again, often repotted, sprayed for bugs, picked over, picked over again, and interrogated under bright light and then you bring them in and then you’re chasing spider mites and scale insects until the following late spring and you are SO HAPPY TO GET THESE ASSHOLES OUT OF THE HOUSE.
But for a little while, roughly November to early January, we have a lush green jungle in the living room with the fireplace, and by the next year I’ve forgotten how I feel about them by March and I do the whole thing again.
Briefly:
Cannas and dahlias get dug up and dried briefly. The dahlias are wrapped in paper bags and overwintered in a 50 degree basement in the kind of thick heavy boxes Amazon delivers dog food in. I usually split them in the spring but did in the fall this year. It made it easier to remove diseased tubers, and I let them dry completely after. Hopefully I will not loose them to rot. The cannas I brought out, allowed to dry, and then put into dry garden soil in pots in the garage. This has worked well for them in the past.
Lemongrass does not seem to attract pests far from its native Thailand, so I flush the soil in the pot out with a hose just so I don’t have too say I have done absolutely nothing, but basically I wipe off the algae off the sides of the pot and take it into the house where, like some of the other tropicals, it lives in a regular clay pot in a bowl of a few inches of water. It is a very nice houseplant – there aren’t a lot of truly easy houseplants that have that upright grassy look, and one of the things I like about these types of plants is that in the winter, they are such a satisfying contrast to the desolate New England winter.
Alocasia and colocasias mostly overwinter as houseplants in regular pots set in pie plates kept filled with water. The colocasia I have that forms a single large tuber big enough to overwinter without desication overwinters wrapped in paper in a thick cardboard box in Jeff’s closet.
Amaryllis summer outdoors. I don’t fully have the timing right but pull them and let them dry outdoors for storage (as with the dahlias, like you would do with garlic) and bring them out in late December. On good years, they bloom in March, which is late for most people but it is kind of nice to have a big tropical plant at the point in the winter when there is the faint hope of spring but the reality is a lot of gray muck and freezing rain.
Orchids summer outdoors. I have 5 out of 7 phals in spike right now, as I did last year, and I’m convinced it’s the whiplash temperatures in late september/early October that inspire this because the same thing happened last year. I leave them out until first frost is posted. Do the leaves look great? Nah. They get some sunscald and insect damage and phals aren’t generally pretty most of the time but orchid flowers at Christmas are magical.
The ficus is one where I am questioning whether or not to continue summering it outdoors. It is constantly in the throws of some minor scale infestation, but it is sturdy, it never becomes that much of a concern, and I think the summer sun has done a lot for the height. It is thirty years old and I feel like it should be more impressive but I don’t want to give it a complex so I don’t mention it.
I don’t think the draecana really gets that much out of summering outdoors, nor do the pothos, which seem to enjoy being trained up a wall indoors much more:
