Freepik
Mother Nature is thumbing her nose and laughing at me. First, she gave us much-warmer-than-normal temperatures, followed by 4 days of hard freezes, and will follow this up starting Friday with highs in the 60s and 70s. I might handle this with a bit more grace if my plants’ lives weren’t in the balance.
In the course of these 4 freezes, I’m losing ALL of the rest of my flowers and my elephant ears.
Example:
I read where I’m ‘supposed’ to dig up the bulbs and store them in peat moss in the garage until spring. I did that two years in a row, once in our garage and the next year in our shop, and both were complete disasters. I ended up each spring with ‘blobs’ instead of bulbs, and had to pitch them.
For the past two years, I just left the bulbs in this planter, cut the stems off as close to the soil -or just beneath the soil- as possible and then filled the planter with as many leaves as possible.
This past year was the best year EVER for my elephant ears, with them almost covering the window and shutters of the garage, reaching WAY above my head and being extremely happy plants.
SO – I’ll do my new procedure of cutting them off (probably this weekend) and will make sure to stuff as many leaves from the yard in there as possible and then hope for the best for the spring.
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