5 essential tips for geraniums

Understanding how to buy, grow and care for your geraniums will help them look beautiful and last for a long time.

Garden geraniums are grown as tender perennials or annuals, whereas true geraniums are hardy perennials.

• Garden geraniums are great for beds, pots, or window boxes. Many will bloom indoors when potted up and handled as winter houseplants.

Avoid shopping confusion. The geraniums sold in garden centres vary in price because some are grown from seed and others from rooted cuttings.

• Inexpensive, seed-grown geraniums are fine for planting in beds.
• More costly vegetatively propagated strains have bigger flowers, so they are showier plants suitable for growing in containers.

• Single-flowered geraniums and those with darker leaves will grow better than double-flowered varieties in areas that have few sunny days.

Keep a geranium forever.

• Potted up and kept indoors through winter, garden geraniums will start growing again in spring.
• Instead of regrowing an old plant, take stem cuttings and root them to create several healthy new plants.
• Dip the ends of the cuttings in rooting powder and plant in moist seed-starting mix.
• Cover them with a plastic bag to maintain humidity and transplant them into potting soil as soon as you see new growth—usually in about a month.

Don't overwater. It causes root rot, and geraniums would rather be dry than too wet.

• When growing geraniums in containers, add fertilizer to the water, diluting it to half the strength recommended on the label.

Keep your geraniums from looking spent on your return by trimming off all flowers and buds. Water and mulch just before you leave.

• If you're going away for three weeks—the time it takes for new buds and blooms to form—a colourful plant will await your return.