I'd say the plant benefited from being given a rest. All plants, I opine, can benefit from being allowed to stop developing new leaves and especially new bloom. Your ? geranium evidently has gained health from being allowed to rest. Now is the time to bring it out to develop new leaves. Pinch back any bloom it might start to develop...it shoudn't be pushed to produce something that it cant possibly feed. If the plant is of size, I suggest you cut it back by 1/3 to 1/2, give it some new fresh potting soil...look to its drainage by putting some shards or other medium under the soil, into a pot of size....6"....8"....10"...then into the brightest window you can find. West or south is ideal...but east will do in a pinch. Water it well...til drainage is seen in the saucer below....allow full drainage, then dump the excess. Don't begin fertilizing until you have serious new growth of leaves...then do so...20/20/20 at half rate every 4th or 5th watering. Always allow the surface to dry to the touch before watering and water always to the point that drainage is seen. Then dump the excess. It shouldn't take more than a few weeks before new growth is seen...up the fertilizer as growth proceeds. You are in zone 7 D.C.....your spring arrives a bit sooner than mine in zone 5 Ontario. Normally this is done by me in mid February, when full growth is allowed to resume. Your plant, if allowed to grow full out at this time, might be too soon for your putting the plant outside so you'd be required to hold off putting it outside and treat it more like a houseplant. If you think you might hold off doing the cutting back until about mid to late January, the plant could be cut back at that time, then allow it to grow full out. Normally, in more southerly zones, you are advised to cut the plant back at the time they are brought in..before they are touched by frost....then again, cutting it back in January when they are allowed to grow their fullest. Its up to you, whether you wish to have the plant grow up too fast. Geraniums will indeed come back as good as ever....better in fact.

Well I think I've finally made my decision for what to buy. (lol - Got about 1 more week before I need order bulbs so a change is always possible, but not likely.) I've been reading up on aquarium lighting. No disrespect to the many knowledgeable people within the gardening online community, but on the whole, the aquarium lighting community is way more sophisticated than the terrestrial plant lighting community. The sales market is pretty much like the plant market, doesn't provide much data and prices of bulbs similar but a little cheaper. But the user community never talks about lumens; they talk in terms of PPFD, which we know is the best photosynthesis related unit of light measurement. I'm going to start a new thread about the great data you can get through the aquarium community and raise the question of why can't the land gardeners do the same. I'll leave my discussion of their data to the new thread so let's meet there if you interested in that. Aquarium folks like high color temps, so for HID, they use metal halides, probe and start. So you can find lots of great info on MH but essentially none on HPS or conversion bulbs. Some aquarium experts have generated spectral data for 900+ bulbs and it can be accessed through a site I'm naming over in the new thread. They have also written bulb comparison articles based on the same data. Based on their data I've decided to get two EVC (brand) 400W 10000K probe start metal halide bulbs ($57 ea), which run optimally on a M59 type ballast. The EVC bulb gets a very good PPFD (205 umol/m2/s) and a broad spectrum on the blue end (remember I'm focusing on vegetative growth). I'm going to get Magnetek M59 ballast kits ($83ea) because that was the one used for the testing of that bulb, although several folks said any ol' m59 should work fine. I'll gut one of my Sun System I housings and install a new ballast kit. Since probe start doesn't require an ignitor, things will be easier for me as a very novice electrical guy. I could have gotten slightly higher PPFD's with a few other bulbs but you had to start getting into HQI ballasts which cost a lot more. The second EVC bulb & ballast I'm going to install in my Sun System II fixture (self-contained). Thought about getting a 250W bulb instead of second 400w but decided against that. If I was going to get a 250w I would have gone with the XM 250w 10000K probe start MH and a M58 ballast. I will be starting seeds all along so by April my plant area might be too big for the two 400'ers to cover. If so, I'll kick in my spare 600W Super Hortilux system to get me to frost free outdoor conditions. Might even do that anyways if some plants look like they would benefit by more red light. If you match up the spectral curves of the EVC MH and the Hortilux Super HPS, you'd see that the combined light makes for a decent full spectrum although a bit weak in the desirable 640 nm peak area. Other HPS bulbs could do better I'm sure. A combo with the Philips Mastercolor 400w CMH HPS-retro might be a really nice full spectrum. I know the MH bulbs have shorter lifes and are less PAR/watt efficient than HPS, but that is just the cost of business to do what I want to do. If in the future suitable 600W HPS S106 compatible bulbs come along, I can put my old ballasts back in. I stopped considering the reg terrestrial plant-light bulbs because I could not get good data on them. I have more comments along that line which I'm going note in the new thread.

Please use latest listing, thank you

Hello, when a new leaf grows, the first part to be seen is the tip of the leaf and it's very thin. After some days/weeks, the "body" of the leaf will emerge and it will be thicker. If your plant hasn't grown for some time, it can also create a new stack of leaves, with the first two or three ones being tiny and finally new normal sized leaves. I saw this on some of the Sans. I receveid by mail, after a month or so in a parcel. Growing was completely stopped and the plant "rebooted" this way. Savantfou.