Bare root potting season

Its that time of year when we start our bare root potting season. Bearded iris are our first bare root plants. These come in wrapped so neatly in newspaper, we tease them apart and hand pot them in our lovey peat free Iris compost. The Iris rhizomes like to be baked in the sun, so we place them on our beds facing south. This helps them produce more flowers next year. Check out our new range in our catalogue which is due out later this year.

Then in a few weeks we start to see the peonies and bulbs arrive. We pot the peonies into 3 litre deep pots, again in our peat free compost. These can sometimes be difficult to fit in the pots and you feel like you are trying to fit a bunch of bananas in a teacup!! These we grow indoors in our unheated tunnels and should be ready to show their first shoots from February.

Our bulbs, which we mainly sell in 1 litre pots for the majority of variety’s and a 2 litre for bulbs like Camassia’s and Leucojum, we pot next. Some of the varieties are not like your typical round bulb. Anemone nemerosa for instance is a like a small twig! It is a rhizome that is planted just beneath the soil.

We also pot plants like bare root rhubarb this time of year. We do two varieties of edible rhubarb, one called Red Champagne and one called Vin. Both produce lovely pink stems in March/April time ready to make your rhubarb crumbles and pies!

In the depths of December we get more bare root plants like geraniums, hosta’s and phlox to name a few. We try to get these potted in the two weeks before our Christmas shutdown. It is often to Christmas music and sometimes a bit of tinsel decorating the potting area! The plants come with varying difficulty. The geraniums are often hard to work out which way up they go! The veronicastrum’s and salvia’s however are much easier to orientate and potting is usually quicker for these.

Our bare root potting season is an exciting time of year as it gives us lots of hope for the new growing season. Check out our catalogue in the new year with all our new varieties and our availability list’s in the spring for when they become available. Don’t forget you can sign up to our availability list on our website, just apply for a trade account and you will get early access to them every Friday.