How I overwinter tender plants 🌴

Hey everyone, Erin the Impatient Gardener here. And like it or not, fall is on its way. I don't like it to be clear. I would like it to be summer all the time. Oh well, I don't live in the right place for that here in southeastern Wisconsin, zone 5b6a. So first frost is coming. It's not actually, I don't see anything in the forecast for the next couple of weeks. I do know that almost every year it catches me off guard. It could literally happen any moment now. So what I'm working on today is preparing for all the plants that I need to overwinter in some way or another. So in some cases these are just house plants that I've just brought out for the summer. In some cases this is tender plants that are not hardy in my zone but I'm going to try to save. In other cases these are tropicals that need to go inside for the winter. Actually there's most of those. So there's a lot of that around here and unfortunately I keep falling in love with these kind of interesting plants that need this special care. Now first of all before I go on I highly recommend Marianne Wilburn's book Tropical Plants and How to Love Them which tells you how to take care of all these things. But she also talks about how it is perfectly okay and often a good idea to just grow a plant and then just let it go. You don't have to save every plant that you grow. It's okay to grow a plant for a season. So for instance I have some cannas in the garden. I am not going to bother digging those up or saving those in any way. But there are other plants that I definitely want to have again. But before I get to digging anything out I just want to talk briefly about the house plants. So most of my house plants are over here in the corner. Obviously the biggest one here is this ficus benjamina. Love this plant so much and it it just looks terrible in the house. It does not get enough light. It's it's it barely makes it through winter and then it comes out and it puts on all this new foliage and it looks so good. So the main thing I'm doing for this plant right now is watering it. I just want to get it watered really really well because I do like to, this is not actually how you're supposed to do it, but I do like to let my pots dry out just a touch before we move it in the house just to make it easier to get in there. I've also been spraying off the leaves and I will apply a neem oil product. I think last year I brought in a lot of bugs. So I am going to apply a neem oil product. I would not do that when it's out in the sun like this. Probably once or twice which I think should maybe help a little bit. Then I have other plants. I've got like some geraniums and some other things. Basically those things. I'm just worrying about getting those really well watered. I haven't been great about keeping up on water. So for instance let's just take a look at this guy. This is the staghorn fern which is actually going to come in probably tomorrow. Do not drink that. It's better to bring your plants in when the temperature inside is about the same as the temperature outside so that it's an easier transition for them. Honestly I usually miss that because I like to wait as long as I can before I have to bring the stuff in. I don't really like it in the house. I love this staghorn fern though and it hangs up here above the table off of the pergola here and normally I don't have to worry about watering it much because we get enough rain that the rain just takes care of it. But of course as you've heard me say we didn't get a lot of rain towards the second half of this year. So what I'm doing right so it's looking a little it's looking a little peaked. Those leaves should be a little bit better color. So just for a little bit here a few minutes I'm soaking it in actually some water with some liquid seaweed in it just to get it moist. Then I'm going to take it out of there. I will cut back like you can see that there are some leaves in here. This leaf is not going to make it. So I've cut that leaf back because experience tells me that leaf never comes back. Let it dry out just a touch and then take it in. It's so much easier to water plants thoroughly when they're still outside than it is once they get inside. Okay the first plant I'm going to dig up though is this Aspidistra that's cast iron plant Tokyo Skies which is a southern living plant collection plant that's not out I think until the year after next year now. I think it's kind of slow to produce these. I had one and I divided it in two for the two pots on the deck. That should do very very well as a house plant. A lot of people up north do grow them as house plants. So I'm going to make an attempt to dig that out. I mean these pots are still looking really good so I'm actually going to make an attempt to dig that out without destroying the whole pot but we'll see if that's possible and then I'm going to pop those up together. Oh there we go there we go. All right there's one. Now I'm going to get the second one because I'm going to pot these together. Look at how nice the purple belvine is looking on this container. Hope I don't get this out of here without sacrificing that. All right now we have both let's go pot them up. So I have the wheelbarrow full of a variety of mediums because we're going to need different stuff for different plants. I'm just going to do these in the Organic Mechanics container blend which is you know that's sort of your basic plant without any sort of extra special needs. I like to find a pot. I hope this is going to be big enough. I like a pot that you know some of these will just go into like nursery cans. Other stuff is going to have to go into a pot that I actually want to look at because I will be seeing it. Oh yeah I think this will work. Okay I think that's pretty good. Okay this has just become a house plant now so I will put it by the other house plants. Obviously this is a very protected little corner so it's a great spot for these house plants because even if it gets a little cold I don't have to worry if I would forget or couldn't get out here or didn't realize if the temperature was going to change. But like I said these can probably come in at any point. Next up is the Datura which is my first time growing it and boy did I enjoy having this plant. I had so much fun. I did not expect it to look this good but you can tell that this pot looks like hell and that's because when we got Magnus a couple of weeks ago I cut all the foliage off it for the most part. So it had a ton of seed pods on it which I loved but those seed pods were breaking open and as you know all parts of Datura are poisonous and I just didn't know. I just didn't want to take any chances with him getting into something that could hurt him so I cut it back and cut off all the seed pods and then I cut back the rest of the branches today to where you see it now and have stopped watering it quite obviously. Oh that's right I'm so happy I was smart and put a pot in here. I forgot I had done that because I was worried about getting this out of here. So the plan for this is this is going to go into dormant dark storage. So I'm going to pot this Datura up into something else and then that I'm going to keep it outside for a little bit but then what we'll do is take it down into the basement into the cold dark storage where I keep the bananas, the encentes, and the dahlias. Okay even with a liner pot in there it's hard to get out so I brought this over. This is my container knife. Mr. Muchmorepatient gave me this a few years ago and when he gave this to me for Christmas, this is another Schneeboer tool, when he gave this to me a few years ago I kind of thought like do I really need this thing and all it is is it's a very thin metal flexible but sturdy blade and it's it's not sharp on the edges but it's thin so it sort of seems sharp and what you do is you run this around the inside of your pots to release your plants. I thought okay sounds practical but is there not something else that can do the job and the answer is no there is nothing else that does this because if you go in here with a knife it will just cut a hole through your pot. In fact I have had that happen and had to fix my other pots because that's exactly what we did is we popped a hole through it with the knife. Okay so here's what I did and I'm just completely forgot that I did this so this pot has a big lip on it this is all hollow underneath here and so I knew that if I didn't line it with something all the roots would grow up underneath that and then it's basically impossible to get out but what I did was I cut the bottom out of this pot but I didn't cut it off all the way so what I'm doing is I'm working the knife sort of in just a little bit to kind of get it through that hole because I then filled up the entire thing and these roots I'm sure are going down to the bottom of this pot so we need to cut this a little bit more to try to create a column that will then lift out of here. Yes that did do it. I don't know if you can see this but here is the edge where I cut the pot out and then there's soil all the way down to the bottom. Now there was roots down there but this kept it from growing up underneath the edge. That worked out very very well and I did need that container knife to kind of cut those roots off because as you can see here we've got roots all the way all the way down here. Okay now this guy is just going to go into an ugly nursery can. All right so I knocked off a bunch of the roots off of it. Most of that was probably the annuals that were in there. Remember this doesn't really need to grow it just needs to sort of survive so I put a little bit of container blend in the bottom there. Ideally we would have let that top die off on its own and then done this but obviously that wasn't possible so this will stay outside for a little bit so that it hopefully goes into dormancy naturally. Okay this is my little collection in the driveway here. All right so the other things that are here are two things I've already potted up. The first is the meleanthus. This is what was growing in the urn that is questionably it's not hardy here. I'm going to try to overwinter that in the unheated garage. That's a that's a total crapshoot. We don't know if that'll work and same here with this sunshine ligustrum which was growing in the pot with the banana. Love both of those plants. Would love to have them again next year so we'll give a shot with both of those going into the protected but unheated garage. Now I'm going to grab these bromeliads that are in the corner of the banana planter. I'm not going to save all the bromeliads I grew this year but I am going to save a few of them and I did like these quite a lot. This one was called is called guacamole. They should not be hard to get out because you know they really don't have much in the way of roots. There should be a third one over here. There we go now I'm going to pot those up together. I'm actually going to use this really pretty orchid pot for these and I'm going to use just a regular container blend again because honestly the soil is not really even supposed to be watered with these. You just water them into the cups so you don't really have to worry about the soil and any if anything it'd be better to have you know more air flow along those roots. We do have some potential babies in there like that is a little potential baby. These are the other bromeliads that I had potted up earlier. I think these are the only ones that we're going to save probably. I did find some locally last year so I don't really need to be worrying too much but I did like these. These are the ones that I brought home from Florida. So these will either live right here at this door which is the sunniest spot I can find in the house or I'll put them under lights in the basement. We'll see where I have room as things develop. Next we have annual star fachadera which I love this plant so much. This plant I grew in this same pot last year and I actually overwintered it in the house last year. It did so well in fact it did so well that it got a little too tall in the house last year. So I'm going to cut this back first which is I'm just so sad about it because it's so beautiful but to make it tolerable as a house plant. It can't go in this tall and clearly it had no problem putting on lots of growth. Oh look at that so pretty. So I'm just cutting back to you know a spot above a leaf. I have all my little ties on here. By the way this was the first year that I tried out these guys. These little well they're all made these little magnetized they're actually meant for cords but they're stretchy and I like it that it worked really well for everything that I was needing to tie up. Now I might cut this back even more but this will help me get it out of the pot at least. Okay there she is. Now we have to find a pot for her. All right honestly I don't want to put it in a pot this big but I need something heavy and she does like to grow so she'll probably be happy in here. She also likes water. Did not get happy last year when it wasn't getting out enough water so okay I'm gonna get that up on the deck before it's over. Now comes the moment I have been dreading. I have to dig out these gorgeous mangaves. Obviously these are not hardy here. They are hardier than some agaves I think but obviously they cannot survive the winter here. They are so beautiful and I loved the way this planting worked here this year so much that I would happily repeat this again if I can get these guys to overwinter. So these things are actually kind of huge. They are almost they're basically 36 inches tip to tip and you can't really tell because they're all sort of intermingled with the Euphorbia Ascot Rainbow and the Dahlias and the Bidens. I know the size of them because I actually got a quote from a local nursery to pay for space in the greenhouse which is a service they provide and what a cool service that is. I'm actually shocked anybody would do that because it's the same greenhouse where they have annuals and stuff and if somebody brought some disease in on a plant or a bug in on a plant they must have some way that they make sure that you know to you know I don't know isolate plants for a while before they move them into the main greenhouse. Anyway I got a quote on overwintering them there and it would have been $300 for the three of them and that is a lot of money. So I've come up with a different plan. I've actually found a place to keep these under lights in a not my basement probably the basement at work actually and we're going to do our best and hopefully I can get them through winter because I love them so much. So this is Navajo Princess by the way and my biggest concern here is I don't actually know how to go about digging these up without breaking off any stems so I'm just going to go in at a severe angle and hope for the best and I don't know how much of a root ball there's going to be so I'm going to figure out the pot once I get these out. Interestingly enough they didn't really root in a ton which is great because they came out basically in the shape of the of a container. Now did I save those containers? There you can get a much better feel for how big they are when they're actually out of the ground. Boy they're gorgeous. They're even prettier. Okay I'm going to dig them all out before we move on to the next step I think. Well the bad news is that I if I saved those pots I can't find them or they got used for something else but these are slightly bigger which I don't think is a bad thing in this case. Mangonese like a lot more water than you would think they do so I don't think that more of a very loose soil mix is necessarily a bad idea but I am going to have to make sort of a custom soil blend here because I could not find big bags of potting mix. This one which I got on Amazon is the heaviest succulent and cactus mix I've ever felt in my life. So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to mix together some of the Organic Mechanics container blend which by the way is a really free draining potting mix to begin with and heat free which I like. Then I'm going to mix in some pine bark chips probably about a scoop per I'm just making this up right now maybe even more of those and then we're going to mix in some of this succulent and cactus mix. I have too much in this pot right now that is so par for the course. Oh oh she's top heavy holy sh**. Okay now I just need to work soil in around the edges it's in there with about a half an inch to an inch on either side hey Magnus on either side of the soil ball so soil root ball hello so I'm going to have to just sort of hand put it in there by hand just kind of jam it in. Now you'll see that it's got all kinds of plant bits and dirt and stuff in it. I think I'm going to take the leaf blower and try to blow that all out of there just so that's not sitting on the leaves. I am going to try to get the hose in there but underneath. Now there are some plants that need to be dealt with obviously the bananas that happens later there's a couple of ferns in the hanging baskets that I want to do something with and then of course in the window box I want to grab the Fiona Sunrise jasmines. There's also one in this pot over here but it might be so buried by the banana I might not be able to get it out but that's his own seventh plant so I'm not worried even if we got frost today that plant would still be fine there. So when it comes to overwintering there's you know a like a flow chart you can do which is one is do you want to keep it do you want to get rid of it second of all if you want to keep it how does it like to grow if it likes to grow if it's not going to like a period of dormancy then you need to think about just making it into a houseplant like I did with the Aspidistra and the Fatshadera. Can you put it into a cold dark dormancy that's my favorite way by the way because you don't have to deal with them at all you just put them away and bring them out later or are they borderline hardy and they might be okay with a fair amount of protection and that's where I'll do something where I'll put them in my unheated garage. Do subscribe if you want to be around next spring to find out if it all worked. By the way I don't expect it all to work but sometimes I go in these things with the what do I have to lose a little bit of time a little bit of space perhaps in the garage whatever and if it doesn't work it doesn't work but at least I tried and I learned something and maybe the next year I'll realize it's not really for me to overwinter just enjoy it for the year. All right I hope you found that helpful have a great day in your garden and we'll see you soon.