Although breezy at times, most of Sunday was much calmer than the last few days as the gale force winds eventually abated.
The summerhouse besides being home to our overwintering Crown Prince squashes has four geranium plants doing the same thing, avoiding the worst of the winter weather. They've still got some flowers on but do need a little bit of dead heading which I couldn't bring myself to do.
Even dying flowers are better than no flowers at all as we head towards the middle of January.
This picture set me thinking about our neighbour’s geraniums. They don’t get the relative cosseted attention through winter that our plants receive. From memory his geraniums were planted out in the summer of 2013 and put on a display through the summer months. These were left in the ground last winter and as we had surprisingly little frost they managed to make it through winter.
Above is how they looked back in the middle of January 2014 still doing their best to flower despite the winter weather. Needless to say they survived winter and produced a brilliant display last summer.
So once again it’s a question of will they manage to make it through winter? They don’t look too badly affected by the weather yet as you can see from the picture below taken this weekend. They are sheltered from the worst of the rain under a small bay window so they won’t suffer from cold combined with wet which I think is the real killer. It may only take one really severe and prolonged hard frost to finish them off.
That may well be the case for our geraniums in the summerhouse too. They’re protected from the wet but not the cold. We’ll have to wait and see how things turn out.
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Amazing to see geraniums make it through the winter outside, especially such a wet one as last year. The January flowers are fantastic.
ReplyDeleteI worry about our geraniums in the greenhouse and summerhouse making it through winter even though some manage it outdoors. So far this winter has been mild here - I wonder if that will last into February and March.
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