GERANIUMS ARE A GREAT SUMMER PLANT, BUT DON’T ASSUME THAT THEY ARE EASY!

By Clodagh and Dick Handscombe

Throughout Spain April and May are the real start of the Geranium season although many plants will have continued to flower during the winter months in warmer corners. Now is the time to stock up your own gardens and apartment terraces and plan to visit this years Cordoba Patio Festival during May when patios with up to almost a thousand geraniums in wall pots will be on display. When we first visited such colourful patios our first reactions were ‘Where have the geranium moths gone?’ and ‘Who does all the watering and dead heading?’
The answers were nor hard to find and made the mind boggle. Such displays were not for the amateur gardener.

By the time we had visited most of the sixty plus patios  open to the public – a long hot day on foot -  we realised that perhaps only a quarter were dedicated to geraniums and that these were generally only prepared and fully maintained for the period of the fiesta. Others were genuine residential patios full of a wide variety of evergreen plants, succulents, pots of bulbous plants with just a few seasonal petunias and geraniums. The sort of patio garden that would be cool and colourful throughout the year.  
Half way through the day  we wandered from one geranium temple into a more natural patio tended by a group of elderly neighbours. Their geraniums were not as virulent as the last patio. We asked why.’ We try and keep our geraniums from year to year and take cuttings from those that survive the summer oven of Cordoba. It reached 50 degrees in the shade last year. We don’t get any subsidy from the Town Hall and can’t afford to buy hundreds of new plants every year.’ We  then walked through an arch into an adjacent patio .Eight hundred fresh plants festooned the walls. Not a dead head or poor plant to be seen. We chatted to the owners. ‘No we don’t keep this up all summer. We water and dead head in preparation for and during the festival but then cut back on the watering and hours of daily care. We can only water with a small half litre tilting can on the end of a 4 or 5 metre pole. It takes us 4 hours a day to just water each plant every other day. In two months most will have succumbed to the sun and geranium moth. It would be difficult to spray chemicals within these four high walls. Yes, we buy 800 new plants every March!  It’s worth all the effort if we win a prize the year’ In practice only fifteen of the sixty patios we visited were in the competition . The others were kindly opening their cherished homes to the public for ten days to demonstrate that living in an old town house can be delightful.

So when you visit your local garden centre or the Alicante Homes and Gardens Show from the 4th to 6th of April recognise that many of the geraniums for sale will be from the controlled environment insect free hot houses of Holland, Italy, Germany etc as well as Spain. Without care not all will make through the summer in the real world of Andalusia particularly as  upright zonal varieties are the most susceptible to attack by the dreaded geranium moth. Interestingly 95 percent of geraniums in Cordoba were of the ivy leaved trailing varieties or crinkly leafed pelargoniums that are more resistant.

So whether you have space for one or ten or more geraniums in pots, window boxes or flower beds:

1. Only purchase strong healthy plants.
2. Recognise that there are several types of geraniums for sale namely Geranium – geranio:  Pelargonium – pelargonium:  Trailing geranium –pelargonium peltatum:

Crispy leafed geranium – pelargonium grandiflora. Upright geraniums – pelargonium zonal.

3.Assume the worst and spray new plants against the geranium moth the day you get them home from the garden centre. Ensure you then re-spray weekly. Recognise that although you may kill off the existing population of moths in your garden there are many more about to hop over the wall from unsprayed gardens, especially if adjacent properties are rarely occupied.
4.Watch out for the small holes surrounded by a black circle that indicates that a geranium moth has been around in spite of your spraying. Prune out affected stems. 
5.Water to just keep damp. Probably every other day during hot weather.
6.Feed container planted geraniums with a dilute geranium fertilizer once a fortnight.
7.Dead head, and remove dead leaves weekly. Also remove any rubbish that builds up on the top of the soil in pots.
8.Take cuttings now or in the autumn to produce  your own new plants for an even better and economic display.
9. Grow some new varieties from seeds.

Hopefully one day the banks of geraniums of the early 1980’s will be back to brighten up Andalusia.