Plant a geranium for spring
I am ready for spring and I know a lot of other gardeners feel the same. The last few days of our so loved Southwest Florida spring weather is back.
I know there is a small cold front coming, again, however they will be shorter and warmer from now on.
I visited a large spring plant sale event in Fort Myers this past weekend – a gardener’s heaven.
I am a lanai gardener, mostly now, and could not indulge in the many trees, bushes and flowers available, but it was sure nice to have to take off the sweater and admire all the wares. There were very healthy-looking tomato and bell pepper plants, my favorite.
I saw the first geraniums for this year. Not a lot of color variety, but they looked so beautiful.
The geranium has been around a long time. In 1879 they were messing around with the classification of the plant and someone decided to separate the Geranium and the Pelargonium into two genera. A few other changes were made and there are some hybrid cultivatars that have gained the Royal Horticultural Society’s Award of Garden Merit.
This type of information is important to some gardeners and I advise you to get on that computer and read and sort out all the family, genus, etc.
I really only need to know that a geranium or the lovely pelargonium is an easy-care, long-season flowering plant. It does well in all kinds of planters with excellent drainage, and placed in the Florida sun most of the day.
The plants do well as a bedding plant, still full sun and good drainage. It does not need to be watered from the top. A good one inch of rain a week is fine.
I hope next summer we will not have as many inches of rain as we had last summer.
Use a mix of a little sand if bedding soil is heavy, or some compost if too sandy. I never did feed my plants a lot. A household 5-10-5 fertilizer will work, about every three weeks. Plant in soil about 6 inches apart at least; they can grow bushy and tall.
There are hanging geraniums also and they do well, but remember, swinging in the wind they may need watering more often and maybe a little more shade.
They can be a houseplant but still need to be kept moist, and it is hard to get a really good sunlight space. A sunny lanai is perfect.
The colors are many and some have beautiful leaves. The standard, smallish, deep green leaves are great but it is great to see a large, green leaf edged in a pale yellow. Some plants are called zonal because they have a larger flower.
The flowers stand upright and are not messy but do need to be deadheaded and maybe the ends pinched to keep the plant in a nice bushy form.
A plant that gets leggy and is not flowering well can be trimmed back about half and it will soon be green and ready to flower again.
Some do better as an annual and you can start a new plant from cutting. I used to shake off soil from the roots and hang some in the garage and just spray the roots off and on during the winter. Here garages are not cool and dark.
These plants look good as an edging around a garden or along a short walkway.
Read any plant care information tags for these plants and do not worry about geranium vs. pelargonium in this area. Almost anything is winter hardy.
Well, maybe not this winter!
It is raining off and on so be watchful to empty any yard containers that are holding water. No mosquito breeding!
Happy gardening till we meet again.
H.I. Jean Shields is Past President of the Garden Club of Cape Coral.