Over-wintering Geraniums

Hello!

It's been a while, so I thought I better get back on here and update bit. We've been doing a bit of our fall clean-up around the yard, and I remembered that I told you before that I would tell you all how I saved my geraniums over the winter last year. It totally worked, and this year I had beautiful, big geraniums. I'll definitely do this again and again. A friend of mine told me how, so I won't take the credit myself - but I figured it was info worth passing on!
Step 1: In the fall (any time now), dig the geraniums up, and shake off the dirt. Then set them in a box (not too tight, you want air to be able to get at them). Store the box in a cool, dry place. That's the first step... pretty easy!

Step 2: In February, (sorry, I don't have any pictures of this step), you'll need to cut the roots back. They will be fine (like hair). After that, plant them in pots. If you have a sunny place to put them, that helps... but they need to stay inside. Water them as needed.

Step 3: In March, you need to give the plants a "haircut". They will have grown quite a bit, and you want to cut them down to about 3-4" plants. Don't throw the stalks that you cut off away... those can be set in water, and they will root. The plants in the pots will make big plants, and the stalks will make smaller plants that are perfect for window boxes, planters, etc. Still keep them inside for the most part. I put them outside if we had a sunny warm day, but then took them back in at night. Once the stalks have rooted well, and there's no more frost, they're ready to be planted outside! Enjoy!

Just before the "haircut".

After the haircut.

The stalks are rooting...

And here are a few pictures of what they looked like at the peak of the season:

Murtle Lake - Day Five

I'm finally back to tell you about day five!

It had rained all night and the rain continued off and on until early afternoon. Because of that and the fact that we knew today was a shorter paddle, we decided to give ourselves a bit of a later start. We were back on the water at about 11, and canoed for about an hour. It was the one day we had to have our rain gear on for the trip - which was way less than we were expecting!

The wind started to pick up a bit, but it was going in the right direction for us, so we decided to stop and rig up a sail for the canoe.

Wouldn't you know that it stayed windy for the entire time we were making the sail, but as soon as we got back on the water, the wind died down. We kept it up for quite a while, hoping the wind would pick up again, but that didn't happen, so eventually we took it down (it was a bit hard for Martin to steer, and for us to keep our paddling coordinated with the sail in the way).

We got to the same campsite as the first night at about 2:30. After debating if we should just go home this afternoon already, we decided to set up camp again, and just spent another relaxing afternoon here. The sky actually cleared in the evening again, and we enjoyed our last night on the lake.

****************

There's not a whole lot to say about Day 6, so I'll just include it here. We were up early, because we wanted to get the portage over and done with. At first we tried to carry the canoe while we carried our packs with all our gear, but that didn't go so well, so we still ended up doing it in two trips. The handle system we had figured out on Day 3 worked pretty good, but it was still awkward. We added some straps to it and placed those over our "outside" shoulder - that distributed the weight a bit better, and we managed to do quite well after that. It still took us about 2 hours to get everything back to the truck.

When we were hiking on Day 2, we had gotten pretty excited about what kind of "real" food we were going to eat on our way home. We had decided on eating at Triple-O's for lunch/supper in Kamploops and then having icecream at DQ in Merritt. We had totally looked forward to this, and we were not disappointed! The burgers and ice cream tasted so good!

We arrived home by late afternoon, cleaned everything up, and had a good sleep in a "real bed"!!