Overwintering in the high desert

Hi Charlie,

I've had a few blooms recently on plants under the skylites and on some recently that I've put back outside in the greenhouse. Many of the collection have been prunned back so it's too early for buds. I should post a few pics from the last few weeks.

I overwintered my collection in two areas: All the larger plants in the 10" pots went thru a nearly daily shuffle between the unheated greenhouse and unheated laundry room. Somehow I managed to get that part of the collection thru the major freeze in early February when we got down to 3 degrees which is the coldest I've seen in 28 years here. I posted some of the weird blooms that occurred during the shuffling, but that freeze ended any further blooming. It got down to 35 degrees in the laundry room. The rest of the collection as usual was overwintered inside the house and I had some nice blooms on the plants right near the windows that got sun. I just never got around to posting any pics. I moved most of the collection back into the greenhouse a couple of weeks ago since the roof overhangs are now blocking all direct sunlight to my south facing windows, and a few of the plants in the greenhouse have started getting some nice buds. The larger ones moved into the landscape aren't doing anything yet.

Unfortunately I had to bring the whole collection back inside the house this weekend as we had two mornings near freezing following another dry very windy storm. Today I just finished moving most of them back to where they were last Friday. I don't know if all of this moving will have any negative effects on the newly forming buds. I'm beginning to wonder about the wisdom of having such a large collection (73 plants with 13 more on the way) and basically a hodge podge setup. I really need a decent sized greenhouse, large sunroom, or a much larger house with lots of windows.

Sorry this got so long. I've been meaning to put something in the overwintering thread but never seem to get to it. If you feel this belongs there feel free to move it and I'll try to expand on it.

dave