Blowsy Begonias!
Every gardener has at least one guilty secret: mine is begonias. My mother insists they are vulgar and she wouldn’t give them house room. A gardening friend turned up her nose at my begonia baskets last year, but I won’t hear a word against them. They are the cheerful, cockney barrow boys of the plant world and I love them.
They are pretty easy to grow once you know how, and you can start them off any time now if you have a warm windowsill or a propagator.
One of the reasons I find them so satisfying to grow is that they start life as a rather unprepossessing tuber, which my husband once described as looking like dried dog poo - he isn’t a gardener. The tubers should feel rock hard when you squeeze them. If they feel spongy, put them back.
There is also a right way up and a wrong way up. Take your tuber and examine it. There should be a concave surface - like a little dip - and a convex surface. The dip is the upper surface from which the shoots will grow and the convex surface sprouts the roots.
Fill some 12cm/5inch pots with soil-less potting compost so that the surface of the compost is 2.5cm /1 inch below the rim of the pot. This eventually allows for watering, but at this time of year the top of the tuber should be kept dry.
Push the tubers – remember concave side up - into the compost so that the top of each tuber is still visible. Do not bury them.
Keep the pots at somewhere between 15-18C / 60-75F in the propagator, in a greenhouse, or on a bright windowsill, though not in direct sunlight.
Water with care, and when the first flowers appear make sure they are well ventilated. High humidity and erratic watering can cause the buds to drop off.
Finally, begonias have both male and female flowers. The male ones are far bigger and more showy, so pinch off the female ones, which can be spotted because they possess an embryonic seed pod behind the bud. Doing this will mean that the male flowers last much longer. You may need to stake them to support the heads.
When summer arrives, you will be able to plant up pots and baskets and bask in the flamboyant blowsy beauty of the begonia: Who could resist?
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