You can easily over-winter geraniums, and likely most every thing else you mention. I over-wintered 4 large pots of geraniums in a garage w/o much sunlight at all for several years, open the doors and let the sun hit them on warm days. When we built a greenhouse/ room with skylights, it was much easier. Your indoor skylight garden will be excellent.

The biggest difference is that suddenly, they're houseplants, and you have to be very careful not to over-water them - an exception is Boston fern. Another issue is bugs - aphids, spider-mites, earwigs that they've picked up outside. So I'd hose them down pretty well with an insecticidal soapy water before bringing them in.

This past week, I finally threw out my huge geranium pots that had been going steady for 14 years, migrating indoors and out. My neighbor, who works at the local Walmart, had brought home a couple of hundred hanging geraniums that the store had told him to 'get rid of' and I got a selection of new colors, which I repotted in the old pots with fresh soil. The old stuff was white with salts, the plants mostly some dead clump with a few green sprigs. It was time.

Finally, what have you got to lose? If they don't make it, you can throw them out later.

We have a spot in our garage for overwintering the pots, this year ~6-7 will overwinter.

Dan

HI Charlene.

We helped a church with revamping all its lighting several years ago. Along the way we bumped into several interesting people with insights on lighting.

The attached article pretty much says what we learnd about lighting for indoor gardening. (high power CFL's, 75Watts or more, with Daylight, Sun light, full spectrum or Grow light ratings is what you want with a CRI of 75 or better.
They will last for years and are really nice also for seedling early starts.

Some folks use the aluminum shop light bowls for spot coverage.

http://www.1000bulbs.com/pages/color-measurement.html
is another good reference

You might have to skip the Big box stores for the bulbs you want, and go to a specialty light bulb store-
In Colorado springs its Bulbs Plus; but check the big box first, the price differnce can be significant.

Here is a link that might be useful: Indoor garden Lights

Hi Charlene,

I overwinter lots of stuff inside every year. I pot them all up and label them (they tend to stop blooming in the winter due to lack of light, being cut back, etc and if you have multiple colors/varieties, you are going to want to label them) and then I feed them some systemic insecticide about a week before I bring them inside. Yup, the systemic insecticide isn't organic and it is chemical smelling for a few days but I don't want to bring the bugs inside the house if possible.

I would also say to clip back the plants at this time if possible. I am mostly interested in make certain I have good venilation around the plants so I thin out the geraniums a little, clip back the trailing plants and pinch back the tall coleus.

Then they go into the basement. I actually have a strange built in cold frame space in my basement. There is no direct sunlight but there is bright indirect sunlight and it stays above freezing - but sometimes not by much.

They do not get fertilized at all and only watered once a week at most. I do keep an eye out for bugs and spray with safer soap if necessary.

Around Xmas time, I cut back the geraniums hard (like to a couple of inches tall) and use the cut off bits to start new geraniums. Don't forget about the labels. All the starts won't be in bloom when you plant them out so you are going to want to know which ones are red and which ones are orange. I generally get about 80% of the cuttings to take.

I also take cuttings of stuff like coleus.
The cuttings are put under grow lights (I use the industrial shop light fixtures with full spectrum grow lights from Home Depot.) I suspend the fixtures on chains from the basement ceiling so I can raise them as the plants grow.

NOTE: I have never tried to winter over impatiens so I have no knowledge there. I have chopped big purple fountain grasses into small pieces, repotted and grown them on. I had to water the chopped up pieces more often than once a week in the beginning.

Anyway, after I cut everything back heavily around Christmas, I start fertilizing and watering more frequently if necessary. Everything looks terrible for a month or two and then it starts growing again as the days become longer.

Some of the other plants that I pot up include spikes, blue and black salvia, fuschias, cordyline and small rose bushes. And I have 2 huge potted rosemary bushes.

One final thought - I don't believe that I have overwintered sweet potato vines either but I think you can overwinter them as tubers. But our low humidity might be an issue. Your best bet would be to google for instructions.

Nancy

Add me to the list of people who grow those sorts of things indoors.

Geraniums and coleus will do well, for sure. You can also take cuttings when you trim the parent plants back. That way, even if the parent plants get leggy, you'll have some new ones to take their place. (Some varieties succeed with cuttings more easily than others.)

I usually put my plants in a sunny window, so I can't help you too much there.

Here's a link to another discussion on GardenWeb about overwintering ornament sweet potatoes. The summary: You can cut them back if they get too leggy and thus keep them going over the winter. You can take cuttings. Some people are able to store the tubers over the winter and start them up again in the spring.

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/ohioval/msg1012444526093.html

I've never overwintered impatiens or purple fountain grass, so no help there. It's worth a try, though. I have overwintered petunias. They get leggy unless they're trimmed back but keep on blooming anyway.

Good luck! I had meant to ask you for a few cuttings at the plant swap but forgot. Your container plants are quite beautiful!

So temps are suppose to really drop in the Denver area Tues night thru Thurs, so starting to think about overwintering. I have geraniums and portulaca in my window boxes, so wondering if I should bring them in before Tues. night, since it's suppose to drop down to the upper 20's (and the next couple of nights to be the same).

So debating on the method to use - I don't have a root cellar. Our basement is heated, and DH keeps a space heater in the garage 'cause he has a desk and a computer out there (his man cave). So only other place that might serve as cold storage is our shed, but it has no windows. So maybe I'll experiment and put some out there, and then others in a couple of other places and see which fair best! I read there is also a bare root approach for geraniums - you take all the dirt off and put them in a brown paper bag upside down, and then hang them in a cool, dark, dry place. Anyone ever tried that?

Not sure how the portulaca (moss rose) will do. I usually buy perinenials, but I think Portulaca is a "hardy to semi-hardy annual". I didn't harvest any seeds from them, so maybe they self-seeded themselves in the window box and will come up next year. I'll have to do some more research on them, but anyone here have any tips/thoughts on how/if I should try cuttings and or potting some up to overwinter?
It'd be great if I could keep them going so next spring I'll have a ready supply to replant in the boxes - I really loved the combination as they did very well and bloomed a long time (they are still blooming, actually!).

Marj

Marj, I don't have any answers for you about portulaca & geraniums. There's a nice geranium out in my corner post planter that would be great to save for '12. It is just the "right" red for a geranium!

Overwintering is tuff with what I have to deal with: rosemary. There are a good number of plants most winters. (Also, a lemon verbena but I just cut that to nearly the soil line and it shows up like it should come late winter. :o) The rosemary suffers under my care.

I tried it on the floor of the basement for several winters - about half the plants died the last time! I think it is just too warm & dry there near the furnace but that is where they can get an hour or 2 of sun every afternoon. Some dark corner or in basement room with the tubers would probably be a guaranteed death sentence.

The rosemary has had 100% survival on the floor of the unheated greenhouse over the winter but NOT always. I use 15F outdoors as my cue to cover them with a heavy blanket. If the thermometer is going to drop that low outdoors, they are covered. They may be covered for days during subzero weather.

Maybe, portulaca and geraniums would be easier!

Steve

Like you, I am also going to overwinter a coleus cutting and a purple sweet potato vine. Joining these will be some spike (Dracaena) plants from my window boxes.

I have read of different approaches to keeping the sweet potato vine. Some say dig the tubers, some say not. In our dry climate, you will need to protect them from shriveling. The flip side is that the tubers could rot if you "protect" them too well. So I have decided to just keep the plant in its pot. Hopefully, it will do alright.

Hi Misty,

I don't have any problem at all overwintering geraniums inside in a window with at least a couple hours of direct sun. I just treat them like any other houseplant. (When I was a kid, geraniums as houseplants was a pretty common thing, and at the greenhouse where I worked before Paulino's, we sold them as houseplants all winter long.) My basement has no light at all and is way too warm to try to keep them in a semi-dormant state, and my garage has no light at all and gets way, way too cold at times to keep them out there. If you don't have room in the windows in the house, it sounds like you have the perfect place for them in the heated garage if you can hang a florescent shop lite somewhere and just grow them under the lite. I used to use cheap cool white florescent bulbs, and they work great! You don't need any expensive grow lites! And with the florescent, even if the foliage grows right up into the bulbs, it still won't burn! Warm white or the other types of florescent bulbs would probably work just fine too---cool white just happened to be what I had. I had the shop lites on chains so I could easily change the height, and I usually kept them just a few inches above the plants. Geraniums can take cold temps very well, and as long as it's staying above freezing, they should be fine. (The basement would work with a lite or lites too!)

As with anything you bring in from outside, be really careful about bringing in insects or diseases that could infest/infect your other houseplants. A good soap water bath would be a really good idea--especially getting the underside of the leaves, and then watch them very carefully so you catch anything that might develop quickly. It seems to me that geraniums were pretty susceptible to while fly, tho I've never had a problem with that. A granular systemic insecticide would protect against any kind of sucking/chewing insects, but it takes a while for that stuff to get up into the plant, so the "bath" would still be necessary when you first bring them in---SOON if you decide to do it.

Geraniums can go almost all the way dry, so be sure you don't overwater them if you decide to grow them inside.

Portulaca normally reseeds PROLIFICALLY, and as long as you're not going to completely change out the soil in your window boxes, I'd just wait for them to come up all by themselves next spring. Otherwise it would be VERY easy to start from seed in small pots inside about a month before you plan to put them outside, which might give them a little bit of a head start, but since they grow so fast when it gets warm out, I'm not sure that would give you much of an advantage. I've never heard of overwintering them inside, and I think they'd look really, really bad by spring if they survived, and I suspect you'd decide to start new ones anyway.

And, you didn't ask about this, but while I'm here I'm gonna link to the thread that has the info I posted about overwintering 'Blackie" sweet potato vine, which a lot of people tend to think about in fall too--and possibly somebody reading this will be wondering about that one too! If you go down to my 03.19.08 post, the second picture shows the geranium I had inside that year--along with a Perilla magilla (the one that looks like a coleus!), and a very small purple fountain grass---ALL of which I'm doing again this year along with the 'Blackie'! (I'm not sure why, but the pictures aren't clickable anymore! Must be because of one of Picasa's General Overhauls!)

I was surprised to see I hadn't responded when Charlene started this thread last year, but, based on the dates, I was on vacation at the time, and when I got home I must not have had time to do it. If you or anybody has any questions about exactly what I do with any of these things, just let me know! Vacation is all over for this year!

Skybird

Here is a link that might be useful: Overwintering sweet potato vine - Ipomoea

Thanks Skybird. I brought all of the geraniums inside - when I planted them in the spring, I had left them in their original pots and placed those inside of the window box (as I knew I'd be overwintering them), so it made digging them up very easy!! I plopped them, pot and all, inside of a larger pot so they be clean enough for being indoors. Oh, and I sprayed them with insecticide/fungicide soap before bringing them in. I have 6 in all. I'll probably spread them around the house a bit, but for now, they are all on my coffee table - they all just fit.

I took a few clippings off of the portulaca - I'll see if I can get some of the seeds off of them as well as try getting some to root (just for the heck of it). The rest I've left in the window boxes - will see what happens next spring with those and (hopefully) their seeds.

Ran around in the rain putting some bark mulch over some of the other plants in the flower beds, so guess we're good as we're going to get for this storm!!

Marj

My geranium leaves are turning yellow! Perhaps they went into shock a bit? I've watered them maybe once since I brought them in, checking first to see if the soil was dry. So it can't be too much water causing it (but they used to get very dry when they were outside, so maybe to them, this is too much water!). Perhaps the change in temps, since they were outside when temps were getting down low (but not freezing). Or perhaps the insecticide/fungicide spray I used prior to bringing them in.

Sure hope they perk up again! I'll pick off the yellow leaves and hope for the best. Think I'll snap off a few stems and see if I can get them to root, just in case.

Marj

All of mine are doing that as well - I think its just the natural diminishing of sunlight, the lower leaves / those just not getting enough light turn yellow and fall off.

At some point, if you end up with long leggy stems from leaf drop, you *might* want to cut them back - but its not crucial.

At some point??

Not knowing what I was doing with my one geranium (of the gorgeous red blooms :o), I cut the stems back to the 1st leaf & removed the leaf as well! I wasn't suppose to do something like that?

It isn't coming into the house unless someone convinces me that it must. I've got it on the floor of the greenhouse with the rosemary & lemon verbena. The lemon verbena is cut like that every winter. They all will be covered whenever the thermometer drops to 15F outside. That was my policy last year with the others and it works okay.

If this is too much for the poor stubbed-off geranium, I'll bring it in the house. But, I'm not doing this for winter blooms.

Steve

Steve, my herd of potted geraniums began their career over-wintering in a dark garage, and on sunny days, if I remembered and it was warm enough, I left the door open a few hours. Thinking back now, I only repotted/rejuvenated them once in 15 years. Some years, I whack them back to nubs when I bring them in, and some years, I don't. This year I didn't, I lined them all up on the south-facing windows in the greenhouse - I can see the blooms when I walk by on the way to the car. But the inward facing side is already looking a bit leggy and dropping leaves.

Well, it's good to know my geraniums are most likely doing what I should expect them to! I trimmed off the yellowed leaves, so they look a bit refreshed now. I have them in my front room, which faces south. They don't get direct light, but the room gets pretty well lit up by indirect sun - so hopefully, they'll be happy over the winter there. The pop of red/orange blooms is really cheery :^)