It's Time to Plan for the Slump Months

What are "Slump Months" you ask? Well for me it's January and February. It's the time after Christmas and the merry making and excitement of the holidays but before the warmer weather comes and we can get outside to garden. It's so hard for me in those months not to have flowers to look at, that I've developed a few sure-fire ways to ensure that I can have flowering plants right on my window sills to hold me over until I can get back out in the dirt.

If you want to have some of your favorites growing on your windowsill during the grey winter months, then you need to do a few simple things now. Then you too will be able to enjoy the bounty of color during the slump months. 

The mother plant, a happy chocolate coleus.

There are lots of plants that grow happily in our summer gardens that will transition nicely to your indoor window sill during the winter. One of my favorites is coleus. (When I was a little girl living in Montreal, where winters are very long and the slump months are many, my grandmother always had coleus growing in a very large terrarium in her kitchen). Coleus can be grown from seed, or you can pick up a nice healthy one from your favorite nursery. In Sacramento, coleus will grown outdoors all summer if provided with adequate shade. This year I grew chocolate coleus from seed and was thrilled with the deep, dark (almost brown) leaves and fabulous blue spikes of flowers.

The best way to transition these plants to indoors, is to take cuttings from the plant now.

Cut a section that is approximately 6-8 inches long. Use sharp scissors so as not to crush the stem. Snip off the leaves from the bottom 4 inches of your cutting and place it directly in a cup of water. Don't worry that you're hurting the mother plant, because everywhere that you take a cutting, the mother will now produce two new branches, thereby helping the plant fill out nicely.

Put your cuttings in a clear glass cup and place the cup in a sunny window. Be sure to check your water level often, as evaporation happens quite fast. It shouldn't take more than

just a few weeks for you to see the thin roots growing from the stem. My cuttings were so happy in their warm water bath, that they even flowered for me.

Once you have a good strong root system, transplant into a  household, all purpose potting soil. The more cuttings you  place in the pot, the fuller your new plant will be. 

Once transplanted into soil, be sure to keep the plant in the window where it will get the light it requires to grow. Also be sure to keep the soil evenly moist and don't allow it to dry out completely.  With regular watering and care, these beautiful coleus plants will offer colorful foliage all winter long. And come next spring, you can complete the cycle and transplant them outdoors where they will happily grow in the shade all summer again.

You can do this trick with lots of plants that are labeled annuals in our region. Next I'll tell you about geraniums which are another of my all time favorites and which make excellent houseplants.