Lush chrysanthemums make any yard or flower garden incredibly cozy and elegant. Knowing this, we buy them in large quantities, because the temptation to make your home more beautiful is so difficult to resist ...
Unfortunately, they do not bloom for so long, and often no one knows how to save a chrysanthemum in winter. Many try to find out the secrets of growing from sellers, but often they either don’t want to share such valuable information, or they don’t know much about it ...
Save in the cellar!
The easiest way to store faded plants in the cellar. Before the onset of steady frost, they are dug out together with a lump of land and transferred to the "winter apartments". It is best to lay them on an earthen floor, trying to put the bushes as close to each other as possible.
In this case, the conditions are optimal, since the root system will receive the necessary amount of moisture from the floor. The air temperature in the room should not exceed four degrees of heat.
Plants are in a kind of suspended animation, and therefore their growth is completely stopped. It is much worse when the temperature is above normal: in this case, the young shoots in the middle of winter starts growing, draining the bush.
But how to preserve chrysanthemum in winter if you do not have a cellar?
Trenches
The second method involves their storage in special trenches. To do this, dig a ditch with a depth and width of 0.7 m. The length is selected by the number of bushes. They are dug from the beds, and then tightly laid in a ditch, filling the gaps between the roots of the soil mixture.
Having learned how to preserve chrysanthemum in winter, you need to pre-prepare the required amount of covering material. Old slate, ruberoid and even pieces of tin will do. Until the first frosts, chrysanthemums are stored in open form.
Note that with the very first frosts, bushes do not need to be covered: frost will destroy most of the pathogenic fungi. But as soon as the frosts become strong and constant, trenches are covered with prepared materials. Peat, dry leaves or sawdust are laid on top. On top of this "sandwich", the layer of which should be at least 50 cm, a plastic film is put on.
But how to save a chrysanthemum in winter if you don’t have time to mess with the ditches?
Wintering in the open ground
To do this, you need to pre-harvest a lot of dry fallen leaves. After the onset of stable frosts, faded bushes cover them with a layer (30-50 cm). A plastic film is applied to the leaves, which should be fixed as securely as possible. If the flower garden is very large and you do not have such an amount of polyethylene, you can cover the leaves with fir spruce branches.
In general, all experienced gardeners, talking about how to preserve chrysanthemums in winter, mention covering and open methods. If your region simply does not have cold winters, there is no need to invent something. The maximum that can be done is to cover the weakest plants with a small layer of dry leaves.
In the spring (after freezing), the foliage is removed, and to protect against sudden night frosts, it is better to throw a thick plastic film.
Here's how to save chrysanthemums even in the coldest time of the year!