Growing in your summer cottage beautiful flowers gladioli only by virtue of who owns the secret, how to store their bulbs in winter at home. After all, it is during this period that the most problems occur with the preservation of tender tubers, which are very sensitive to ambient temperature and humidity.
Preparation
A very important role in how to store bulbs of gladioli in the winter in the apartment is played by their proper autumn preparation. It is important to dig them out of the ground in a timely manner (about a month after the end of flowering), so that they do not start to rot. After all, it is rot at any stage of storage that can destroy all plants in a short time.
Dug bulbs should be dried very quickly. It's not shameful to use a hair dryer with a cool air flow. After drying, the excess land is carefully cleaned by hand, without removing, however, the scales and placed on a further drying for four weeks in a ventilated dark room at room temperature.
Where to store gladioli at home?
Of course, the most ideal option for maintaining healthy tubers is a cold and dry cellar. But if there is no such thing, then the plants that have fallen into hibernation will survive, and in the apartment, if they prepare a wintering place for them in advance. Very good, if there is a glazed loggia or balcony, where the temperature in winter does not exceed 7-10 ° C.
For bulbs, build containers, insulate them, and then stack the collected floral crop in such a way that each of the corms does not touch the other. Lay the layers with cotton or other porous material. In the days of severe frosts, boxes are additionally covered with old blankets, and with the onset of heat they open again.
If the loggia is not lucky, do not despair. The viability of tubers can be maintained even at 20 ° C. For this, the bulbs, again, are laid out in flat cardboard boxes, but they are not insulated by them, but on the contrary, holes are made in the walls and bottom for airing. These containers are placed in the coldest place of the apartment, and with the onset of summer, they are soaked in water and planted in the ground.