I made two carts to shuffle the plants in and out of garage, still trying to extend the grow season. But have had some plants moved inside already because there is not enough room for every plants on the carts. Gradually some will be moved in soon, most days the morning temp is the lowest of the day just before I left to work, that when I pull them out of garage.

krisrinemom381, Love your roadside plant stand

tropicofcancer, very creative idea re the tree stump, do you overwinter your coleus?

Al(tapla) , those are very tall castor beans. what is the variegated plant in front of them, brugmansia ?

rockdale: For the last two winters I have been overwintering coleus. I select one of each type (i have 3 types) and put them in one or two pots after severe pruning of roots and branches. They quite well over the winter.

This is the first winter I tried to overwinter coleus, I did not dig the plant though, I took some cuttings and hope they will root for me. We will see:)

Very likely they will root. They root in a blink.

I took some starts of my coleus as well. I just saw a photo in a plant book of making a coleus topiary, it looked really cool.....

I took cuttings of 2 of my coleus, but threw out the other 4...now I wish I had taken cuttings from those too. But really I have too many plants as it is..These are the ones my Mr. got rid of. I still have that lime curly one though..And I took cuttings of that gartenmeister fuschia. And dug up the whole plant of Gryphon Begonia.

Gorgeous, Debra!!

Some of the Coleus in my front yard.

Some in the back.

More in the back.

And more.

And more.

When you guys overwinter coleus using cuttings, is humidity important? I put the pot inside my home made green house (2 transparent rubbermain boxes). but afraid it is too wet. Should I just put the pot somewhere no direct light? Thank you!

-rockdale

I think you will be fine. Coleus roots pretty easily. Just keep it out of direct Sunlight since it may dry out too quickly.

Coleus doesn't seem to be a diva about humidity, as far as I can tell. I don't have problems with abnormally low humidity though. Here's some stems in water. These jars are all over the house. I was able to save about half of them.

I put everything that was in a pot in house & greenhouse today. Some random plant porn...

I can't believe this is my 1st time putting this rhizomatous Begonia in a hanging pot. It really needs a lot of elbow room.

Months ago, I laid a TON of individual succulent leaves on the ground. Here are the babies that grew, in danger of getting covered by falling leaves. I literally pulled them off of the ground a few days ago, potted today. As seems obligatory before taking pics, I watered.

The taller, solid-green ones are Sedum kimnachii, propagated by stem cuttings, not individual leaves. The bigger rosettes to the left edge are stem cuttings.

Many of the rosettes that yielded the leaves to propagate, and more of their babies.

Mostly stem cuttings. All of these plants, having been in the ground since spring, have been completely ignored by me in the intervening months, except to admire their progress.

Tropical vines don't appreciate a brush with frost, Philodendron bipennifolium, Monstera adansonii (swiss cheese vine,) and some Pothos.

The other side. Didn't realize this is out of focus but you get the idea. The "pot" is a 5-gal bucket, the trellis is a 4-foot tomato cage. This is a BIG plant, blown a little sideways when what was left of Irma blew through.

More Pothos & Philo 'Brazil' on a 3-foot tomato cage in slightly smaller pot. Looking a little bleached, had to evict this pot from the front porch after ants invaded it when Irma came.

Kalanchoe pinnata. If I just put a pic of this recently, sorry.

Cool! When the tips do this, suddenly point down, it's preparing to bloom!

Some snake plants are forming inflorescences:

As always Tiffany, I LOVE your mixed pots & All your plants...thanks for sharing.

Kristenmomof381, All the new plants look so healthy. How fun. Your plants are so nicely placed and displayed in your home. I grew coleus under lights last winter, and was thrilled with how compact and colorful they stayed. They are actually more attractive for my zone under lights than they are even in summer and outdoors. I read one article that recommended filling a 10 inch pot with starts and the plant would grow better and be healthier. I don't have room for a huge coleus this year, but will make a big summer pot out of what I keep over the winter. Tiffany, I just got back from Mexico, and San Diego; and thought of you with all the Sansevieria and kalanchoe, etc, growing outside. They are awesome. The plants located where people can step on them was a little tough to take though. Almost everything I saw is just a houseplant in my zone.

We moved this past August, and my plants fortunately survived the neglect most of the summer and into the fall. They've been relocated inside as the weather cools and now I'm trying to deal with the tasks I put off during the summer.

For instance- I have a dwarf jade/elephant bush plant that I want to reshape. Do I prune and pinch it now and deal with the longer internodes that will result, or do I wait for spring? (same question for various ficus plants, etc.)

Honestly, better concerns to have than my initial fears that I would kill all my plants through neglect.

Caity, your plants and their questions deserve the attention they would get in a new discussion. Pruning and etiolation are not related, beyond that pruning can remove etiolated growth. Etiolated = abnormally stretched. To avoid etiolation, more light is needed.

It has warmed back up to windows-open weather here. Giggity!

Neoregelia continues to get MORE pink. Unbelievable!

Dracaena 'Hawaiian Sunshine' has just been moved from it's store pot last weekend. It was in cococoir/coirpeat. I tried to find some @ L's but didn't see any. Maybe next year.

Back-lit birdnest fern (Asplenium nidus.) Also repotted last weekend, it was drying out so fast, too fast for my schedule.

Cooler nights are really bringing the color to Callisia congesta.

Tiffany, I got a piece of that Callisa from Cinta, last summer. It went bananas outside this summer. It came from Cinta, as one stalk, with a dainty little stem like tradescantia so I rooted and then planted that. It did very little over the winter, indoors. Outside it continued to grow as one stalk. I thought it would shoot up starts from the soil, but it never did. It meandered around the soil, getting taller and taller, and bigger around all the time, but the stem was getting too heavy. As I saw it beginning to struggle, I cut it of and am rerooting it. But I am finally being rewarded with little callisa stems popping up all ovr the original pot. I love this plant.

Sounds like fun! I definitely cut the piece in my last pic to keep. It's in a pot with birdnest fern for winter. I'm surprised your plant didn't start making side stems over summer.

Caity - please DO start a new thread. You should do your pruning in mid-spring, like around Memorial Day. From what you offered in your comment, it looks like you already know why, but I'll explain it if you start another thread.

BTW - I'm deep down depressed over 3 portulacaria bonsai I've been working with, one for >20 years. Some chill doesn't bother them much, but a predicted 40* night that ended up being a 27* hard freeze (thanks, Weatherbug) has damaged them severely or perhaps killed them - yet to see. They were the only tender plants I didn't have on nursery carts so I could run them in/out of the garage, night and morning. Two of them have a very few green leaves, one has none. there's no telling what they'll look like when/IF they recover. The sour fruits of being lazy.

I wasn't actually looking for advice >< I was just doing my part to share on the whole fall thing- I brought my plants in and now I'm trying to decide how to proceed. And Tiffany- the etiolation would occur if I pruned now, because regrowth would have lower light. So it would result in longer internodes in parts of the plant I might otherwise want to keep.

and Al: ouch! I've seen some amazing dwarf jade bonsai- just mind blowing how they can be styled.

Al, I am sorry to read about your 3 portulacaria bonsai. I hope the damage is not as bad as you fear. Please let us know how it goes. Tiffany, I was surprised with my Callisa too. Reevaluating my care of it is one more thing I need to do now that winter is here.

We got snow this morning. Months of rain and cold ahead, I feel like packing some flip flops and shorts and running away to the Bahamas

Al, so sorry! Best luck that there's a recovery!

Caity, so sorry, I misunderstood your statements as questions. The struggle to keep plants looking normal over winter is real, for everyone here I think. Best luck to you too!

Finally everything is away that I am keeping. I will be moving things around for the next month but the worst part is over. I put as few as few as I could in the house the rest in the GH.

Frost on the pumpkins last night & will be in the 30's today with a wind advisory.

Wow Al, you had a streak of bad luck. First stolen bonsai and then frozen ones.

All the plants are in. Last night went down to 26F and tonight it is forecasted to be 19F. This is a pic of my plant area before bringing the plants in.

Detached, large, sunny, loft garage now filled with lemons, oranges, limes, grapefruits, kumquats, oleanders, cycads, palms, Araucaria, loquat trees, and gardenias, guava, and bananas. This year, I left a the patio chairs and table in the center so we can escape to a tropical oasis in the dead of winter.

jurasico, that must be a nice little getaway!

I don't have that much space, but I'm in the middle of purging everything that needs to be sold, donated, or thrown away, which is creating quite a bit of storage space for the things I actually want or need, which in turn means MORE LIVING SPACE for me!! So much, in fact, that I might try making a leafy little sitting or dining area by the window in the front part of the front room by moving the lights and most of the plants in there for the winter.

Tropicofcancer, that room is brilliant. Is it connected to the house? I want to know all about that it. Lots of Lights??? Fan. I can't imagine getting the blues when summer ends with a spot like that to spend the next 5 or 6 months in.

Oh I totally agree with Laurie!! Plant room envy!

Geez...it was 10* last night with winds.

Debra

We had 0*F and touch below (-7*F with winds) for couple of nights, and some snow...and right now is sunny and approx. 18*F. Too cold too early!

Tropic

Great plant room! How big is it?

Thanks plantaholics. I will try to be as descriptive as I can. Hopefully it will help in your design too.

That space is our front porch facing south and east and is about 10x15 in size. Our bedrooms are over it and so it is covered on top. Several years back we decided to convert that space and we did bulk of the work ourselves. Worked with a local window supplier/contractor first and we framed the openings for two massive windows and a new entry door. That saved us a lot of money. We then framed and insulated the rest, did all the wood work and tile work. Most of the tiles are from a local recycling center where people donate construction material and they resell them at dirt cheap prices. We worked with a local electrician to wire the room and I also plumbed the room.

It has two pipes coming in - one from the main water line and the second is connected via pump to collected rainwater drums in the basement. About 170 gallons of stored water. The rainwater goes through two automatic fertilizer feeders - first one injecting protekt and the second injecting foliage pro. They can be reconfigured to inject any liquid. Those are modified miracle grow liquid feeders so that I can use my own fertilizer instead of theirs. Works very well. There is also a floor drain to take care of mishaps.

The shelves are just wire racks sitting on simple wooden frames. The rest sit on the floor.

Although it gets quite a bit of sunlight but it is not enough. There are several kind of led lights in there and I am adding more. Two of them are those blurple lights and the rest are regular household leds - mounted on various fixtures from the same recycling center. And then there is this 600W metal halide that is just like blast of Sun. It is not centrally heated but since it is attached it benefits from the house heat and often during the day with Sun out it sometimes becomes hotter than the rest of the house. We keep a window into the living room cracked open to balance the heat. There is a back up electric radiant heater for the very cold nights set to turn on around 45F and turns off around 50F.

There are two fans - one pointing down mounted near the ceiling and one on the opposite side to blow air across the floor. They are on timer and turns on full blast three times for two hrs each time.

I am a tinkerer as you can guess. This winter my project is to convert all timers to be wifi enabled so that I can monitor and control them from my phone.

Forgot to mention: My office is right next to it on the west side of it separated by a wall. And I am campaigning to remove that wall so that I can sit amongst the plants and gain a bit more space for plants - about 50 sq ft more.

Tropic

Some great ideas! I have similar space, about 13x20 that I want to convert into 'plant room'. It is probably not as good layout as yours since there are too many doors and also stairwell to basement, but it will definitely house lots of plants. Needs lots of work (drywall, replace the window, tiles) and is unheated (breezeway between house and garage). It doesn't get lots of sunlight - but maybe next year I'll put in some skylights. And the heat. And water...Many plants are there right now after bringing them inside, and need to be sorted out. I keep heater on timer there right now to make sure temps stay above freezing (just about 35-40*F overnight) - but it would be too expensive to heat it whole winter. I wish I had second set of hands to help, lol...it would be much more useable now...

Thank you for letting us all peek into your plant space, Tropic. It's just lovely. It's a perfect size, with such light etc. I really love that it's a front porch. For me, it would be very good for my plants to have me walk by them when going to and from work etc. Nice planning. Everything looks perfect. Can't wait to see the office incorporated.

Jurasico, yours sounds pretty amazing too.

My plant room evolved to its current state. We did small parts at a time and as we thought and started using the space we put in bits and pieces together. First came the windows obviously and after that it was an incremental process. Otherwise we would have been overwhelmed by this project.

My plants are in a huge rec room, with two grow lights and a north and east window. It is decorated with the same motif as the basement in "That 70's Show" / Brady Bunch. I will be asking for advice when retirement comes and I can redo it finally. You guys have such vision.

My winter plant care has been reduced to sticking my finger in one pot after another, and finding no one is using much water. I have started sticking a label in each plant with the day of the week I last watered, as they are using so much less water I need to keep a careful eye they are not at risk for rot. Humidifiers are going, but my boston fern is looking less lovely. Growth has slowed. After the fun of so much growth in summer, it's kind of a big snore fest.

Love the setup Tropic, We also have barrels of water in our basement full of rain water. Ours is for the plants during the frozen months when the outside barrels are out of commission. Also works for the toilet if we have a power outage(well water).

My sister thinks we are hoarding water in case of zombie apocalypse :)

tropic and kingd

I wonder if you filter rain water in any way? Someone posted before about using a filter in order to use rain water on edibles - because of bird poop etc (you probably don't grow edibles indoors? - I don't either). I have many rain barrels but they are outside - I never thought of storing them in the basement. Needing less water during winter for potted plants, I just bring few 5gal bottles indoors.

Rina~~~At least it's killing the outdoor bugs!!

Rina,

We just just have a coarse screen,no edibles inside except for starting seedlings in the spring. At the moment I have 4 55 gallon barrels in the basement that I plan on connecting together later.

Rina: The rainwater is minimally filtered to take out the sediment. The small RV pump has an inline filter for this. The water remains clear and does not smell through the winter and I do use it for all plants including edibles. After all outside birds and other critters are daily doing their thing directly on the plants too. The main advantage of using rain water is that it does not have any dissolved salts unlike tap water. It reduces the need to flush the soil frequently.

Tropic , you are so right about salts and minerals in some tap water, I live in a town with old metal corroded pipes that deliver so much corrosion, they city has to drain the pipes every few months, which leaves me with brown water for several days. Collecting rain water has made a huge difference for my houseplants. No more brown tips on spiders, etc.

This thread just morphs into the best topics. Thank you for bringing up rain barrels.

Please share insight for choosing the right barrel. I used a rubbermaid christmas tub last year. It cracked my husband up to see me come in soaked to the bone with buckets of water, but It made a huge difference in my plants, and yes, it was embarrassingly tacky to look at. Can you recommend the perfect barrel. I am considering just using a plastic garbage can with a screened hole in the lid and a downspout adaptor. No spigot. Is this an insane notion. Last year I could collect 10 gallons at a time, which led to a concern about rain water having a shelf life. Any thoughts? Again, Thank you for bringing up rain barrels guys.

All my houseplants loved being in the breezeway this year. I didn't even move any outside this summer because they seemed so happy there.

Now it's very cold so I brought mine in the winter. Half are in the basement and half in an upstairs bedroom. The ones in the basement barely hang on, so this year I put up two full Spectrum LED lights on 14 hour timers. I am hoping that the Mandevilla and asparagus ferns that I removed from outdoor planters make it. There are two windows in the room pictured, but this time of year the light seems so weak.

I also have a new cold hardy banana plant that my friend gave me. It was half froze when it arrived yesterday. It will be interesting to see if my plants do well under the lights or if I should have left them go mostly dormant. So far the orchids are putting up a ton of aerial roots and have a few new flower stems. The trays under the plants are like little moats in which the edges are full of water to add a bit of humidity.

Also- today I got to thinking and some of my houseplants are over 10 years old. Time passes so quickly.

Blue: Looking very good. Your banana should be fine.

Laurie: Yours is a perfectly sane idea. Garbage cans will definitely work. Heavier duty ones will be better in the long run. In our parts various kinds of plastic 55 gallon barrels are available at around $15-20. This is is the one I use to collect rainwater.

These are tough barrels. But there are other types too and you can make any of them work. I would look for food grade barrels as the other ones you never know what kind of chemicals were transported in them. Food grade barrels are the ones that exclusively used to transport food/juice etc. Once it has any other substance it loses its food grade status. Otherwise there is no difference in the plastic material, generally speaking.

There are a few ways of diverting downspout water, managing overflow and stringing more than barrels together. Youtube has some good videos. If you need more details let me know and I will describe my setup. If you are worried about pollution/bird poop runoff from roof look into "first flow diverter". It is a clever way to reject the first few gallons of rainwater that contains most of the unwanted stuff. I do not have it in my system.

The water should remain very clear for months easily as long they are not exposed to direct sunlight. Light encourages algae growth. I am always astonished how crystal clear it remains through the winter and smells fresh.

Tropic, kingd

Thank you. I agree with tropic about 'filtering' - I have been using rain water for many years and never worried about it. But that inline filter to get rid of sediment may be good idea.

I have 3 of the same barrels pictured above, 1 about 75 gal, and big, square one that is much bigger (not sure about how many gal). I use a doubled-up window screen to cover top. They all have spigots and overflow opening; I have them connected in pairs right now but easy to separate. I clean them few times during year.

rina: Thanks. Regarding your breezeway project: Zone 5a is a bit tough isn't it? Keeping it above freezing will be a challenge. You could try covering with plastic a part of the way on your house side and see how it works.

I have olive barrels also,got them years ago to store stuff in since they are air tight but switched some for water. My brother worked at a meat place that made lunchmeat so got about 20 of them for free because they just throw them out.

I do see them on craigslist for anywhere from free to $15.

tropic

Yes, it is challenge and I know that it needs to be heated, just enough to keep from freezing. I have done some insulating of walls, but need to do ceilings - that is much bigger project.