Perennials: glad id?, 1 by wallaby1

wallaby1 wrote:
brainerd, I hope you enjoy your time here. One small note about leaving them in their pots, which is what I did until they had completely died back and that was very late here as last year was a record hot year.

Mine also grew very tall then and did very well in a pot in the greenhouse, and I left them there until March I think when I dug them up and took off the small cormlets. They were all fine except for one out of seven which had started to rot on one edge, I had left them dry and if the weather had been better they probalby would have all grown well.

We don't have the heat most of you have even if you are in a much colder zone. Our temperatures may not get so low, but neither do they get so high! They like the sun, something we are usually seriously lacking, our summer this year was anything from 12C (54F) in July, often 14-16C (57-61F), occasionally a little above that and rarely over 20C (68F) for the whole of summer! Even April was giving us winter temps of 6C (43F).

Now the thing is it's fine to leave them in their pots, I usually prefer to do this as it's more like they would be in nature, but they make LOTS of cormlets, and if they are not separated you will have some serious overcrowding. They also renew their corm after flowering until they die back, leaving an old shrivelled one on the base which is best removed.

This was not all of the cormlets from this one corm, there were more in the compost, that was in March and I replanted them soon after.