At this time of the year I am reminded of the old Protestant hymn, “Bringing in the Sheaves.” It celebrates the celestial and actual harvest with a refrain that goes:
“Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves;…”
The “sheaves” I will bring in later today are not the golden armloads of grain evoked by the hymn lyrics, but bulky pots full of geraniums. They have summered on the back porch, their numbers increased every few weeks by my geranium-crazed daughter. Mild weather and family-related events have kept them outside until now, but with Thanksgiving looming on the horizon, it is time to either bring them in or consign them to death by hard frost.
Consigning them to death would be too much to bear—and not just because of my daughter’s wrath. Most of the geraniums are blooming right now, sporting impressive flowerheads in radiant shades ranging from palest pink to flagrant magenta. Their leaves are bright green and their stems reach out in an effort to expand geranium territory into new frontiers. What gardener could turn her back on plants in such rude good health?
Now, I know what the garden how-to books say about this situation. The authors always warn of the pitfalls of overwintering geraniums, describing a pathetic geranium dotage defined by woody stems and diminished vigor. To avoid this kind of cruel scenario, the authors advise taking cuttings from my back porch beauties, dipping them in rooting hormone powder and planting them in small pots of freely draining potting medium. The parent plants will then m make their way to the compost pile, while the nascent offspring will be positioned in a warmish spot with bright, indirect light. As the parents decay into sweet-smelling compost, the cuttings will root. By spring, if all goes well, the rooted plants will be ready for potting up in larger containers. Eventually they will find themselves on the back porch, blooming vigorously and recalling the glories of their long dead geranium forbearers.
This sounds lovely and I am sure that if I had a well-ordered, sensible horticultural existence, I would follow all those directions. However, all that clipping and dipping and potting and rooting do not exactly fire up my imagination. The sight of bright geraniums blooming in the bay window of my dining room does. The geraniums that migrate into the house today will provide a riot of color through Thanksgiving as the current crop of buds opens up. The leaves may droop–and some may even drop–due to the diminished light intensity, but they will recover, thanks to a bit of extra light provided by the clip-on lamps that I position among the pots. Left to their own devices and provided with supplemental light, warmth and a modicum of water, the geraniums will even produce a few flowers in the depths of February. I can attest to the fact that those flowers make an inspiring sight as you drag yourself into the house, exhausted from shoveling the front walk.
Of course, on the way from the porch to the indoor plant areas, every incoming geranium stops at my own personal horticultural checkpoint. I clean off the pots and saucers, inspect for bugs and clip away dead stalks, flowerheads and leaves. I shorten stems that are out-of-bounds, and generally tidy up the plants. Since my daughter loves to combine her beloved geraniums with complementary annuals, I remove the annuals and consolidate the geraniums, decreasing the total number of pots to be overwintered. This is very necessary, since I would otherwise have to add an extra room onto my house to accommodate everything from the porch.
I also consolidate the healthy annuals and return them to the outdoors. That way, if temperate weather continues until we finally have a blizzard on, say, January tenth, we will still have something colorful to look at as we come and go.
In summer, when the porch starts to list under the weight of all the geranium pots, we distribute some of the larger ones throughout the garden. The effect is wonderful, filling holes left by spent annuals or once-blooming perennials. But it also means that I have to conduct the equivalent of a garden rodeo to corral all the pots of geraniums lolling in the beds and borders. I take my little red wagon into the garden, collect them and haul them into the house to undergo the same inspection procedure as their porch-bound relations.
What about all those woody stems that the garden pundits warn about? They generally go by the wayside in the post-summer clipping process. Woody stems or not, geraniums that truly appear to be on their last legs—for one reason or another—are dispatched promptly and without regret. Their absence makes room for the new ones that my daughter adds every year.
I do not really “come rejoicing” when I bring in the “sheaves” of geraniums, but I do come in with a sense of relief and satisfaction. The geese have migrated southwards and the geraniums have migrated indoors. The season has officially changed.