Oh, I thought you were debating on digging them up with your 'round shovel' : ) Yes, your gardens are beautiful! I have looked at them before and am still very jealous of your hardscape: ) I would start your caladiums as soon as your can in pots inside. As soon as your soil reaches 60* I would pop them in the ground, in the pot or not. Maybe you can use pebbles or some other light 'mulch' where you plant them so in the fall you know everywhere you put this type of mulch you have bulbs to dig up? Or maybe you can use your drawing talent (which is awesome) and plot out where you planted them? Mine still do better in pots up here because it keeps their roots warmer. Do those ideas help? Keriann~

I'm sorry, Rebecca, but IMO there's a lot of unsupportable information and conjecture in the advice you've received on this thread so far. Allowing the plant to dry down is going to cause leaf tip and marginal leaf necrosis (dead tips & leaf edges). The plant needs almost NO fertilizer indoors, so it's dangerous to the plant to fertilize one week with fertilizer 'A' and the next week (even the next month - especially "all through the seasons") with 'B'. With this plant, that type of fertilizing virtually guarantees greater leaf burn unless you are growing in an extremely fast soil. IF you were to adopt that regimen, you could only use a tiny amount of fertilizer in each gallon of water - a drop or two, or you should expect burn. This plant actually tolerates low humidity (to about 15%) IF the plant is fertilized properly and not over-fertilized. It's NOT the lack of humidity that causes leaf tip & marginal necrosis (though when the plant is over-fertilized, it IS a contributor), it's a high level of soluble salts in the soil that makes it difficult for the plant to absorb water that is almost always to blame. Over-fertilizing, as suggested, will simply exacerbate the problem. Alternating fertilizers with a bloom-boosting blend would also be very counter-productive. The plant uses about 6 times as much N as it does P, so there is no way to justify adding fertilizers with unnecessarily high levels of P to the soil that cannot be used by the plant. The added P simply causes more burning. Allowing this plant to go 2-4 weeks w/o water will force it into an 'environmental dormancy' as a drought response. This kills the top growth (leaves) which are making the food for the blooms in the next bloom cycle. I don't think that's what you need to promote blooming. IMO, Superthrive, used as a tonic is useless. (I'll provide a link to some experiments I performed if you're interested). Misting the plant, IMO, is also counter-productive and more apt to cause problems than solve them. It's generally accepted that the presence of 'real soil' in container soils is best avoided. It compacts, slows drainage, and greatly reduces the most important characteristic of container soils - aeration. I'm wondering why, if someone "... learned this trick several years ago. Alternate fertilizers. For instance, fert with an All Purpose one month or week, however often you fertilize, then use a flowering type fertilzer [sic] the next feeding. Continue doing this throughout the seasons." there would be this offering just a little up-thread: "... I rarely fertilizer PL's, though I'm not suggesting others do the same. Last year (2008) mine got one spring feeding, before that, they went two, possibly three years without. Other than once a month Superthrive and fresh soil, (true soil, not soil-less) they were on their own. Yet they bloomed, several times, in the last 3 years." That seems like a complete contradiction to me. May I suggest: A south window behind window treatments that diffuse a good part of the light or an east window. Keep the plant at 65-90* - no lower than 65*, very low doses of any 3:1:2 ratio fertilizer whenever the plant is growing robustly, whenever you water - water thoroughly and flush the soil of salts each time - then allow the plant to dry just to the point you notice the slightest bit of wilting and water again. Watering with deionized (distilled) water when you're not watering with fertilizer solution will go a long way toward curing the burn problem and you wouldn't need to flush the soil at every watering, either. Take care - wishing you well with your plant. Al

Most usually, lunaria is a biennial - flowering the second year and dying. It will set seed and continue the cycle but you will need to sow this annually for the first 2 years until a continuous supply is established. However, there is a perennial one - lunaria rediviva and a hybrid, 'Corfu Blue' which is sold as perennial (mine is in its second year - first year of blooming - so we will see if it returns next year)

Thank you, Judy! You have given me hope. The 'Scarlet Pansy' and 'Wedding Band' are both very robust looking. The 'Catherine Woodbery' is definitely not robust, and 'Fond Hope' is somewhere in between. I just looked at the database at the American Hemerocallis Society, and see that SP and WB are tetraploids, and CW and FH are diploid. So perhaps the tetras will bloom next year and I'll have to wait for the others.