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Iris germanica, the big rhizomes with huge June flowers, often bloom sparsely the first year after being divided and transplanted. Late August is a good time to move them, but they shouldn't be moved later than the end of September.
Be sure to set the rhizomes parallel to the soil surface and close to the top of the garden bed, no more than an inch beneath the soil. Planting too deeply make cause bloom failures. Choose a very sunny spot. Once the plants settle in, they will bloom more heavily the second and third year after transplanting.
After your fuchsias have experienced a light frost or two, they should be pruned back hard, say to the edge of their containers, leaving 6 to 8 inches of branch. Upright growing stems can be cut back to about 6 inches.
Store them in a dark place where they won't freeze, but where they can be kept cool and in a state of dormancy (not growing.) During storage, be certain they don't dry out. Check every two or three weeks and water as necessary. Probably more fuchsias are lost over the winter due to drought than to freezing. A sheltered location, such as an unheated garage, works quite well.
Some gardeners bury fuchsias after cutting them back, setting them in trenches and then filling in the trench with earth or mulching material. Winter rainfall keeps them from drying out.
In early February, bring fuchsias into light and trim off any dead branches. Water them and fertilize lightly. Keep them inside shelter until all danger of freezing is over and the plants can be set outside in early May.
Geraniums, like fuchsias, can be wintered over successfully so long as they are protected from freezing. A cool location is probably best where frost can't get to them, but where they can be kept more or less dormant. They don't need to be watered much during the winter, but check to be sure they aren't drying out completely.
Geraniums are sometimes kept indoors in warmer, brightly-lit conditions where they remain actively growing and are essentially treated as house plants and watered on a regular schedule. In the past geraniums were often overwintered hanging upside down after having been removed from their pots, with soil shaken off the roots. To do this the storage location must of course be protected from frost, but at the same time should be cool with high relative humidity. An unheated garage, shed or crawl space should do nicely. In spring the tops and roots are pruned back before they are repotted and growth begins again. Some stem and root tissue naturally dehydrates and dies during this hanging, bare root storage process, and these are the parts to remove in spring. Most homes don't now have a cool, damp, dark unheated location for this process to work.
As with fuchsias, bring the plants into light, water and get a good fertilization routine established in spring when light begins to strengthen.
In the milder areas of the maritime Northwest, roses are generally pruned the end of February. President's Day weekend is a rather traditional time for this. Farther north, or in higher and colder spots, gardeners often wait until mid-March or even later. As the spring days advance, prune roses when danger of deep cold freeze is over. Older wood on roses helps to protect the plants from cold damage.
Pruning techniques differ with the type of rose. Roses bloom on "new wood," wood produced during the current growing season. Hybrid teas, and "modern" roses are pruned radically back to strong canes about 12 inches to 18 inches tall.
Climbing roses are allowed to grow a framework of long permanent canes. From this framework, new shoots emerge to carry blooms. Sometimes gardeners cut climbing roses all the way back to the ground, and then find there's no bloom for the current season.
"Antique" roses, those forming large shrubs and blooming once a year, are often left unpruned for the first 3 years after planting. The resulting shrub is then trimmed after bloom, shaping lightly and leaving much of the old wood. Anyone who's become fascinated by old roses can benefit from looking up the books of Graham Stuart Thomas, a wonderfully capable British writer on roses.
Freesias, the elegant bulb flowers with unforgettable fragrance, are a bit difficult to grow here. These plants aren't hardy in cold weather, so they must be started outdoors after all danger of frost is over. The sunniest possible location outdoors is best. They also grow well in containers.
Plant about two inches deep and 3 inches apart. When growth appears, fertilize with a liquid fertilizer (such as a fish fertilizer containing trace elements). They do best in temperatures about 65° F. with lots of sun.
Dahlias are usually planted outside in about between mid-April and mid-May. If soil is very soggy and cold, they will not sprout and may rot. The plant needs deeply dug sort with a pH of about 6.0-6.5. Plant where they will get full sun and where they have room to become large plants. Some dahlias can grow to 6 or 8 feet tall with branches filling in to about 4 feet around.
Keep them well fed and watered throughout the growing season. Dahlias which are allowed to go
dry will slow or cease their blooming.
Your problem may be nasty little insects called thrips. They feed in the leaves, flowers, and other plant parts. Their feeding rasps the plant tissue and then they suck up the plant juices that come out of the broken plant fibers. This kind of feeding causes silver or white streaking, deformation and stunting of flowers, and a general loss of plant vigor. Gladiolus affected by thrips have flowers that resemble crumpled brown tissue and never fully opened up. Pull apart a bud and look for a slender, blackish brown winged insect about 1/16 inch long.
Gladiolus are particularly affected by this pest which also is a serious problem in onion crops, field flowers, and many vegetables and fruits. They often go through several generations in a summer. There are lots of natural predators that go after thrips, including lacewings, lady beetles, and some parasitic wasps. However, they often can't stay ahead of the problem. Since your plants have already bloomed, you have a couple of choices. Allow the foliage to begin to die back, then cut it off and discard it, without putting it into your compost or letting it lie around the yard.
If you want to keep the corms to plant again next year, they need to be treated with an insecticide dust --check the labels for one that is registered for use on gladiolus and follow all the directions exactly. Since gladiolus are relatively inexpensive, certainly more inexpensive than the insecticide is, you may want to discard the whole planting and start over next spring. If you do not plan to try keeping these corms, for next spring, then pull them up now and discard them. In a very mild winter thrips can overwinter in soil, so rotating the gladiolus plantings may help.
Books have been written and fortunes made and lost on tulips. These elegant, hardy spring-bloomers dress up gardens in rainbow colors, and come in many sizes from diminutive yellow and white tulip "Tarda" at about 4" to the graceful Darwins such as "Elizabeth Arden" that may reach 36 inches in height. The Pacific Northwest climate offers good conditions for their growth, as any visitor to the Skagit Valley in spring can observe!
While not difficult to grow, tulips are exact about their requirements. They must have sun, at least 5 to 6 hours a day, and good drainage. A tulip planted in soggy clay under dark evergreens will simply melt away and rot without flowering. Buy the best-quality, largest bulbs you can find to get the finest flowers. Most big hybrid tulips do not persist, but give about two years of bloom and then dwindle.
The smaller, species tulips often bloom well for years, if planted where they get plenty of sun and NO extra summer water while they are dormant.
Tulips, blooming in March and April in our gardens, must be planted in fall, during the months from October through December. If bulbs are forgotten and planted from January or later, bloom will be small, sparse, and late.
When we buy hardy fall bulbs for our gardens, we buy "mother bulbs", or large bulbs with big flowering possibilities. The next few years after planting, the bulbs tend to split into many smaller bulbs. If we were commercial growers, we'd dig the smaller ones and spread them out into good soil to let them grow on to flowering size. (This process takes several years, often up to 5 years).
One of the problems with smaller gardens is that we often don't have space to replant the small bulb offsets, and what we wind up with is a cluster of smallish leaves but no bulbs big enough to flower. This is a natural problem; replace tulip bulbs yearly for best bloom.
Another possibility is that you have planted the bulbs in too much shade. A hardy bulb planted in shade may bloom the first year, because the flower was set during its field growing conditions. In shade, however, the next year's bloom won't be properly set. Or you may have the bulbs in too damp or heavy a soil. They require perfect drainage, and loose, friable soil. Also, be sure to fertilize the bulbs when they are about 1 inch out of the ground to enable them to grow strong in future years. And be sure to allow the foliage to brown completely before removing the spent leaves. Tidy gardeners often get impatient with the browning tulip foliage; that foliage is working hard to supply the bulb with next year's food. If it's removed too soon, the bulb and flower quality will suffer.
Prune back stringy growth and remove spent flowers that have gone to seed. (These will resemble berries, soft and dark purple in color. Keep it well watered. Take the pot down and check to be sure the water is penetrating the root ball, not just rolling uselessly down the inside of the container. Your plant may have become root-bound from spending the summer in a small container; if you find that it's dry, immerse the pot in a large bucket of water and wet the soil thoroughly.
Use a liquid fertilizer on container plants every two or three weeks, because all the water you apply washes the fertilizer nutrients out of the pot. Your hanging fuchsia can still set bloom and look relatively good up until frost, but it will not have the glorious profusion of blooms it had earlier in the summer. (These suggestions apply to all hanging baskets at this time of year.)
And what if you want to keep the fuchsia plant over winter and start it up again in the spring? As cooler, darker days approach, the plant will stop blooming, and most tender fuchsias will be killed when a heavy frost arrives. The preservation method is to cut all the branches back to about 6 inches long (this will seem quite drastic but it is necessary.) Store the dormant plant in a cool, frost-free dark place through winter. An unheated garage is fine if it doesn't get below freezing, or a cool basement. Leave the plant in the same container, and keep it slightly watered. Check it about every three weeks. The idea is not to let it dry out completely and not to give it so much water that it begins to grow. A dried-out fuchsia is a dead fuchsia.
In about February, re-pot the plant in fresh potting soil, cutting off some of the roots and untangling others. Bring it into a light, warm place and give it regular fertilizer and water. The overwintered fuchsia will bloom later than those bought from nurseries but will give good color from about July on.
Cosmos, an excellent annual flower for color and cutting, requires about 7 weeks to come into first bloom from seed, and will then continue producing flowers until frost. Perhaps your plants aren't quite mature enough for bloom. Check to see if the tips are beginning to form buds.
Another possibility is that the plants are getting too much nitrogen fertilizer. Nitrogen, a necessary plant nutrient, helps to establish healthy green growth. However, if plants are fed too much when it's time to set buds, flowering will be set back. Lots of green leaves but no flowers is often a symptom of over fertilization.
One gardener who had this problem, was fertilizing with a dilute solution of a fertilizer containing 20-20-20 percentages, fertilizing each time the plants were watered. This means that the formula offers 20% nitrogen, 20% phosphorous, and 20% potassium. Lack of flowering in this case can probably be traced to over-application of nitrogen. Fertilizers with names like "bloom-more" are formulated to contain less or no nitrogen, but simply phosphorous and potassium. These can help if fertilizer is needed.
Often, in a good garden soil, cosmos and many other annual flowers will prosper with a balanced fertilizer when planted, a compost mulch, and no additional fertilizer during the growing season. Plants in pots need fertilizing more often than plants in garden soil. Fertilizing every three weeks with something like a 5-10-10 formula, or with an non-chemical fertilizer such as those derived from fish, will keep container annuals and perennials in good health if they are also regularly watered. Fertilizing more often isn't necessary and may actually reduce flowering.
It's quite possible to love or coddle plants too much, and adding too much nitrogen fertilizer is one way to do that. Over-fertilized plants also attract more aphids, can develop more powdery mildew problems, and are affected by frost kill on tender new growth more than those grown "thrifty" with less fertilizer.
Perennial flowers, true lilies (in the family Lilium) are commonly planted here in fall at the same time as tulips, daffodils, and crocus. Order lily bulbs from local suppliers --we have some world renowned lily growers in the Pacific Northwest. Plants establish well for summer bloom if planted in fall. Some of the great lilies of the 20th century originated in the Northwest, including the Jan de Graff hybrids developed in Oregon.
Choose a well-drained site --- lilies can't tolerate soggy soils. And provide ample organic material such as aged compost dug into the area before planting. Mark the spot with a small stake, label, or stone --lilies emerge later than spring-blooming bulbs and it's all too easy to mistake the empty spot for an available space and shove another plant in on top of the lily shoot or pierce it with a shove.
Lilies are also available in spring and can be planted then, but fall-planting gives a longer establishment time. These regal plants contribute spectacular interest to summer perennial gardens and can do well tucked into shrub borders.
Preparing roses for winter in the milder sections of the maritime Northwest means getting ready for the unknown. Often, winters pass without significant cold spells, just light freezes that graze gardens. And in some quite unpredictable years, temperatures can drop below 20° F. and affect gardens severely.
Roses, like many shrubby and perennial plants, must go dormant (stop growing) to provide some protection from winter temperatures. It's possible to pick a rose or two at Christmas time in the Pacific Northwest, but it's not good for the roses to be kept in continuous bloom because of the danger of freezes. If some of the blooms are allowed to go to seed and form "hips," decorative red seed heads, the plant will also move more naturally into dormancy.
The plant has to stop growing in the fall. Take drastic action--- after the first light freezes, remove all the leaves from the plant. This seems like a peculiar thing to do but it is necessary. The rose then moves into dormancy and stops growing. Discard the leaves and rake all fallen leaves away from the plant's roots. The leaves can contain fungal disease organisms that persist through winter and infect the emerging spring leaves.
Do not prune the plant before late February; if pruned too early, plants are susceptible to winter damage. Shorten very long canes that might whip about in the wind, or tie them up, but postpone all major pruning for spring.
Piling mulch over the bud union can help the plants cope with temperature extremes. The bud union is the swollen area on the stem just above the roots. It's where the plant variety was originally grafted to the rootstock. Place any organic mulch over this bud union, piling it up about 6 inches. Use leaves, compost, sawdust, or even earth.
Tree roses require even more winter protection. Cover the bud union and wrap the trunk in an insulating material such as straw and burlap. A handy material is preformed pipe insulation --cut it to size and wrap and tie the trunk, leaving no exposed bark.
Roses growing in containers must be moved into shelter. An unheated garage or unheated greenhouse will work; if the plants are small, such as miniatures, sink their pots into the ground and mulch over their tops. Variable winter temperatures have been fatal to far too many roses in western Washington.
