European Gardening: What's occuring in the backyard?, 1 by wallaby1

wallaby1 wrote:
Hi zest, yes I do leave them in the ground all winter. Most of them are semi-hardy, I have sandy soil and mulched the ground well with compost, I think it helps keep the soil open and free draining but they didn't have a mulch the first year.

That bed doesn't get any sun in the winter, and only in the afternoon in summer, now it gets dappled shade and sun. They do like fairly poor soils too. If you grow them from seed in a good organic mix with soil they are much healthier and will be more likely to survive than a nursery produced tuber. They are very easy to grow and flower in the first year, the second year they are fully mature.

The hardest frost we have had since they have been in is probably -9C, the ground has been frozen but perhaps not too deeply, and I think they can stand some frost if the soil is friable. They do seem to have placed themselves quite deep, I tried to plant them a little deeper than they were in the pot when I first put them in.

They need no special attention, fertilising will only make them soft, and if you give a mulch of compost they get food anyway. I have only mulched once, they were put in the ground in 2003, although I had grown them the year before and kept them in 6" pots in the shed over the first winter until I was prepared to plant them.

I still had a few in pots that I put in another bed this year, believe it or not they were outside all winter in 6" pots and we had many quite hard frosts (to -9C), and a very long 6 months of winter. They all lived!

I love those purple foliage oxalis, I have one in a tub outside that manages to make a small appearance, perhaps I should put it under cover.

One of the Dahlia species