Does anyone have any tuberous begonias? Please let me know. My email is crosbyphyllis@yahoo.com

I uses to live in San Francisco and had no problems with begonias growing under a porch. They always bloomed profusely and tubers always got bigger each year. Even the seeds i started in march of 2011 made tubers the size of a baseball. Albeit, we have a long growing season and the right temps. I gave them all up and moved to MA and boy is gardening different. I started with Blackmore and Langdon seeds feb of 2013 indoors in Boston. Those that survived the move outside all created tubers the size of a peanut to the size of a golf all. Out of about 100 seedlings, I culled out about half that did not have double blooms and the next spring, only about 20 made it. I kept them too cool in the basement. None bloomed summer of 2014. Mainly because I used regular topsoil with some weird mulch incorporated. They did all survive and their tubers were slightly bigger. I have started more Blackmore and Langdon seeds.mi started a batch dec 15 2014 and about 100 have been reported into 50 cell trays. I just started another batch last week just for backup. They grew really well when I had them under a 4foot shoplight on a shelf above the stove but started dying and damping off when i moved them to the basement with no bottom heat. My advice is to start very early if you want tubers and enough time to evaluate flowers to cull, being feb a the latestThey generally create tubers in the fall when day length decreases so they need enough leaves and a big enough root system to do that by September. Also give them bottom heat and use a looserepackaged potting mix. I made the mistake of potting them up in whatever was around only to find the the pH of the black mulch I used was close to 7.5

Sounds good to me. Go ahead and plant them.

I don't know how they stand the mid-thirties. I start letting mine dry out about Labor Day.Some growing instructions used to say 'lay the pot on its side', I could never figure that out, thought it might be some form of tropism. . .However I finally ran across some instructions which said 'lay the pot on its side so the fall rains can't get in and start regrowth', Oh that was so funny, I never would have figured that out because we don't have much fall rain. Well, we all have different environments which is why figuring out how to do things can be frustrating.