Back in November I wrote with pride about my lovely red geraniums and how they were still flowering. Then in December I wrote again about how they were suffering from a combination of geranium rust and extreme cold. In short most of them looked dead.

I’ve been putting off the job of looking at them properly, but about a week ago I decided to bite the bullet.

Things were just as bad as I’d feared. Of the 40+ plants I had potted up for the winter, only 1 was alive and looking OK. About 6 were barely clinging to life and looked far from OK. The rest just looked dead.

The shoots and stems were brown and rotten and a powder came off them when touched. What to do? I didn’t want the dust, which I assumed was fungus spores infecting anything else, or preventing the ‘live’ plants from recovering. On the other hand I couldn’t quite bring myself to just dump the lot, and like Peter said they weren’t “eating anything”.

Although I love my garden, and love gardening, I don’t class myself as a gardener. I don’t spend a long time in books, I just tend to do what feels right.

So in the end I took each plant in turn and started to cut off the dead stems. If I eventually came to a bit with a green centre, I stopped cutting, gave it a drink, and moved on to the next. If there was no green bits the plant was just dumped.

I ‘dumped’ 6 in total, mostly small plants that I’d grown from cuttings last year. The one ‘good’ plant came into the house to gather it’s strength and hopefully produce some cuttings for the Spring.

As regards the rest only time will tell, but to be honest, I’m not hopeful.