Tuberous begonias should ideally sprout before you plant them. Sprouting is when small pink or white eyes become visible. You can "force" the sprouts out by placing the bulbs in a warm place (65-75 F) for 1-2 weeks. If no luck, try to soak the bulbs in lukewarm water for 1/2 hour and then put on the bed on moist, warm peatmoss sphagnum. Once sprouting occur plant the tubers.

Keep the pots/baskets in warm location (65-75F) in diffused light. No direct sunlight, but don't keep them in darkness either. The soil temperatures should be warm (as above) not cold. avoid letting the growing media dry out. Keep it consistently moist. I mix in plenty of perlite into the media in which I start the begonias. they prefer good drainage until they are well out of the pot. At that time, I repot in a larger pot using regular potting soil.

A horticulturist told me that california begonias should not be planteduntil they have sprouted but British begonias (B&L) should be planted and covered with soiless mix. I use regular potting soil until I move them to 12 inch pots and then I use pro-mix.

I'm in the same boat. I dug up the corms from the pots to check on them and saw no signs of life. . .I'll try to bring them in and warm them up a bit inside until they sprout then replant them. I've been babying and doting (sp?) over my plants and other babies for about a month now since I started planting seeds and buying plants. The garden is coming along nicely and seedlings are growing strong. I can't wait until September when I can get the fall bulbs bed in order.

I got most of my tuberous begonias from Antonelli's (in California) and followed their instructions for all my tuberous begonias, Antonelli's or not. I inspected each tuber carefully for evidence of even a tiny sprout when I received them in April, then planted all the sprouted ones in a flat filled with moistened (not wet) potting soil, and didn't water again until leaves emerged. I kept the flats/tubers in a back bedroom, probably at about 60 degrees F. All the non-sprouted tubers got held for about a month, and most of those sprouted and got planted, too. Anything left got set on TOP of a flat of moistened potting soil until it sprouted, too.

Once the tubers showed leaf growth, it was warm enough to move the flats outside, and I put them in a shady spot and watered when the top of the soil was dry. I potted the tubers up into their own pots as their leaves got big enough, and they have now been moved into big hanging baskets or big pots-- their final destination.

In March, I put mine in a cloth bag filled with milled peat moss, then place them in a big pot OUT DOORS in a dark and protected area. They only get moisture if it rains on the bag. They generally sprout in about two weeks. I keep mine from year to year by storing them in the basement in the cloth-filled bag of DRY peat moss.

I have two begonia bulbs from Antonelli's that won't sprout. They seemed to sprout a bit, but then died back again. I put them in small pots and have them in the house, but what looks like a sprout will die before becoming a leaf. Should I without water? I have been keeping them damp. I tried both coffee and vinger in water to try and make them grow.

What does the coffee and vinegar do? Or was that supposed to be ginger?

I don't; do well with tuberous begonias but that doesn't stop me from growing a few most years. Last year I stuck a basket of tuberous in the garage and let them dry out completely. I moved them outside a month or so ago and started with just a little water. Once I saw a bud, I knew there was still life in the pot and I started watering a little more and added slow release fertilizer to the surface. Since that time, I have 3 half way decent plants that have come on very strong. Hope springs eternal.

Coffee has acid and nitrogen, vinegar has just acid. If the soil is too alkaline. I used a mix, but it was not an acid loving plants mix. I was trying to kick start them. I had 11 and only two presented with this not sprouting issue, so I did fairly well, but I wanted to save these two if I can.

Interesting. I am surprised that the experts don't recommend a more alkaline mix as a lot of begonias are found around the opening of limestone caves.

I put the pots in plastic bags, then I left them in a warm place and I got sprouts within three days, now I am trying to make the sprouts become leaves. The process is slow. Where are the limestone cave begonias?

I have tried posting twice now just to have it disappear so I composed a reply in wordpad and hope a simple paste works.

Limestone caves are found everywhere. Begonias can be found around the mouths of caves. I have listened to plant explorer Rekha Morris talk about her adventures in Mexico and India and a cave opening is a good place for her to start. Perhaps it is due to the coolness of a cave and a constant source of moisture and humidity?

Here are some examples of our adventures in Belize and Guatemala when we explored some Mayan ruins and caves.
Tikal ruins in Guatemala

begonia and some vine found on a limestone outcropping on the back side of the temples.

Herman's Cave in Belize (tour guide in front, wife in blue cap)

ferns hanging down off the top of the cave entrance

a begonia headed into the cave. Very poor nutrients as the road we saw earlier (limestone gravel) for at least a mile was lined on both sides of the road with one species of begonia.

Here is one of the tour guides sampling a bloom of this begonia in a field on our way to another "private" cave.

Well everything except pictures. I will post this to see if it goes and add pictures when houzz gets their act together.

Nope cannot post photos for now. Maybe later.

I found that this website likes photos that are very small. Some people have posted large photos here, but when I try I get an error. So, I used photoshop to reduce my photos to 640 by 480, and then I set the image to be a medium or low quality. I was able to post several photos of my Sparten blueberry bush in just one post. In photoshop go to go to file and then process mulitple files. Or you can just reduce them one at a time, but its very time consuming. Most sites like twitter and facebook now, reduce the photo for you, but gardenweb is kind of primative about photos. Or you can host them on another site and provide a link to them. Lots of people used photobucket, but they went out of business. I used to use photobucket, and when people did that, you see a big X where the photo used to be, so I think its better to just reduce them and post them here on this site. If you use another program like gimp, which a free program, there is another way, you can look up. Sometimes the command is called batch processing. I just put all the photos I want to post in a folder and make them smaller, then when ever I want to post, I have like a cache of small photos so I don't have to waste time working on making them smaller.

I looked up Herman's Cave in Belize. It looks great, but those may be not non stop tuberous begonia. I once made a pot out of something called hypertuffa which I found here on the garden web. Its concreate powder and you mix it up, but the plants in all died beause of the leeching of the alkalinity from the concreate. I know Florida is mostly made of limestone. That is why they have sink holes, and ferns and begonia grow very well there. I don't know maybe there is some trick to it, such as the rain water balances out the limestone?

Thanks Laurel for all the info. I do resize all my photos and if you glance through the begonia forum alone you will see I have posted hundreds of photos over the years. At one time in GW's past, only the original poster could post a photo and I think it was only one. The only way to get around that was to use HTML to embed a photo you had put in a photo sharing site such as Picasa (another defunct site?) That was a good work around but the powers to be could delete those photos and let broken links on GW. I have also noticed that if your photo is large that GW/Houzz will reduce them for you but will slow down the entire process during the upload. Hence it is a lot better to reduce your photos first to eliminate slow uploading.

Non-stop tuberous are hybrids - not a species. Tuberous are found around the world and are the parents to a lot of the hybrids we buy today. Do an image search for species tuberous in South America or Socotra (Yemen) and see how tuberous plants cling to life during the dry seasons on rocky outcrops. A lot of the new begonias coming out of China and Asia are tuberous in nature so there is no telling what new hybrids will look 10, 20 years from now.

I made some hypertufa too but not experienced any plant death due to leaching of alkaline elements. In fact one of my first containers is fairly broken down now and the plants in them (a juniper and a barberry) live on with the broken container around them.

Typically we use granular or powdered lime to "sweeten" our acid red clay here. Anyway a good mix of limestone and acid soil isn't a bad thing.

Ah, yes Florida has some neat sunken gardens. When Victory Garden was on TV they had some programs in south FL on natural and manmade sunken gardens. I really liked the sunken garden at Fairchild Tropical Garden in Coral Gables. I won't even attempt to add a photo to this post as I don't want to lose all I just typed in.

Sunken garden sign at Fairchild the last time I visited in 2006. Would love to go see it again.

what it looks like when you get around the bend and down to the bottom

A nice large begonia too

a few more begonias

Here is nelumbiifolia growing on limestone walls (manmade)

Maybe this is called a grotto?

lots of begonias in the landscape

a bed of odorata leads the visitor into the greenhouse

the nelumbiifolia in the greenhouse was a monster too

Go back to the Belize/Guatemala post to see the photos I added. Glad to see GW has fixed their photo glitch. Maybe they had a server that hosts the photos was down?

Here is my tuberous from Sam's (last year) that I didn't water a drop this winter. This was May 23rd and the pot is drenched with rain. 3 bulbs came back to life and are looking pretty darn good.

This is it from last year. It was less than $7 and worth a gamble.

The begonias that would not sprout where put in tiny pots so I could watch them. They did not sprout, so I placed the whole pots into a gallon size ziplock bag and zipped them up and placed them in the dark. In three days tiny white sprouts, so I put them indoors near window with no direct sun. The begonia look like they are on the way, but still the growth rate is very slow.

They grow so fast after they sprout though. Here is my basket a day or two ago.

Home Depot has several different types for sale as well.

Here are a few I picked up at HD last month

Oh my god, I am know I am doing something wrong with these. The other 9 and well underway with leaves, but these two are still barely out of the starting gates. I know there was an issue in which squirrels dug them up thinking they were nuts. Then the cats were playing with them, and I buried them back, but I think that stunned thier growth. It is not the fault of Ca begonias, as all of them were in perfect condition when they were mailed to me.

I hope the cats didn't use it for their litter box?

No, I had them in large flower pots, because I had read online that they did not like heat above 85. But, if I had put them in beds, sure the cats like to dig up planting for a litter box. I sometimes place stakes or poles in the ground which discourages them.

I think that is why they are more like annuals here due to our high temps but I still buy a few every year and don't worry about tossing them.

Well I tossed a pot of Bonfire that I presumed dead on the compost heap last spring and later in the summer it did this! I doubt it survived our winter but I will continue to look for signs of it.

Oh, those cats! Whatever you do, don't go away for a weekend and let one of your cats locked into a bedroom without water, food, and a litter box! We had 3 cats at the time and checked everything, closed the bedroom doors and had an extra litter box and a food and water silo in place. Whoops, when we got home we had closed the extra bedroom door with our little female in that room for 2, maybe 3 days. She was fine but the sleeper sofa wasn't.

Well, cats are much easier to take care of than dogs. And dogs in the garden are a lot more destructive too. A squirrel knocking over small pots is nothing compared to a 90 pound dog chasing said squirrel among hundreds of pots or same dog digging a hole to China going after a chipmunk. I won't even talk about the urine damage to our lawn this winter (our oldest dog cannot make it up and down stairs any more so out to the front yard on a leash). Ah, the joys of pet ownership?

My motley crew - Max the old man and Duke the 10 year old puppy aka troublemaker.

That's true, I used to have dogs and some dogs will really dig up everything in the yard, and some won't. Some dogs will remove newly planted shurbs to shake them and play with them. If you are at work and not watching dogs at the time to stop them by the time you get home at 5pm it will be too late to save the plants. I had a landlord who created a separate dog area in the yard. He fenced the dogs into the dog area and only landscaped in the dog free zones.

I tried that with a 10x10 kennel but my wife didn't like that so plan B was to spend probably $2,000 on 3 foot fencing (we have a 5 foot fence for the backyard) to hopefully protect my plants except the meth lab can easily jump 3' but if I caught him behind these temporary fences, he knew he was in deep doo-doo.

An example of the 3 foot fencing protecting azaleas, hydrangeas, and hostas.

and the five foot permanent fence to keep the dogs in and the neighbor dogs out. This does not work for tiny dogs though like my grandson's pipsqueak of a dog.

Wow, that is really lovely. Its hard to have dogs and a garden, but I had this Chow Mix and I was able to teach him not to disturb the garden, because he was very smart. The other issue is if you keep your dog outside while you are at work, the dog gets bored and therefore messed up the plants. There is such a thing now, as doggie day care. In fact, luck for me, there is one located a few blocks from my house. If I had a dog, I could drop him off on the way to work. Senior dogs are less likely to dig things up, but some dogs will never stop the rain of terror, even when they are older dogs. If you are at home and entertaining your dogs they are not going to dig, but they will demand constand attention from you to keep them from being bored.

We used to drop our dogs off at day care but since I retired, I am home most of the time and we are usually only gone 3 hours at the most at a time. In the past when I had a job outside the home (I was a telecommuter too) I could estimate how long I would be gone so if was six hours, I knew they could manage being in the house that long (when we crated them too). The crates are gone, the dogs are seniors, and they still need care - potty breaks, water, food, calming during storms or dogs going down the street. As we age our bladders aren't as durable as they once were, so it is the same with animals. Life with dogs, huh?

If only they stayed small but learn to behave and obey?

Two days ago the Sam's Club special has come on strong after being gone for two weeks (Thailand)

This caterpillar looked serious so I picked it off with a twig.

I saw one begonia in Krabi, Thailand last week growing among the rocks going up a steep hill. At least I think it is a begonia.

The view at the top was worth the climb (1,237 steps)