Growing bulbs out of synch

We had a topic of the week in October where we discussed a little some of
the bulbs that people had managed to convert to growing in a cycle that is
different from their normal cycle in their native
habitat. http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbslist/old.php/…
will find some of those posts.

Except for the Ornithogalums many of the other South African genera you
mentioned: Freesia, Babiana, Sparaxis, Ixia, Homeria are irids with corms
that are mostly from the winter rainfall areas of South Africa. They start
to sprout when the temperatures get cooler in the fall and grow during the
rainy winters, flower in spring and then die down as soon as the
temperatures get hot. When you buy them from Holland and plant them in the
spring they often do not grow long enough before the temperatures get warm
to produce the size of corm they need to flower the next year. Perhaps the
people who sell these hope you'll just treat them like annuals and enjoy
them once and buy them again the following year.

One year Diana Chapman wrote advice for many of us who were trying to turn
around some bulbs in the Northern Hemisphere we had received from Bill Dijk
in New Zealand. Her advice was very helpful as well as being hilarious and
she told us to grow the plants in the coolest spot we could and if the
nights were warm to put them in the refrigerator at night and take them out
in the morning. I don't know if you could keep yours going longer that way.
It does seem like a lot of trouble and wouldn't work for things like
Homeria which can get tall.

I found in turning around some of the South African corms I did better to
keep them warm until fall and plant them then instead of trying to plant
them late spring -- early summer and hope to get enough growth out of them
to produce a good sized corm to survive dormancy. I found the critical
factor was temperature and I think that is what Lauw was referring to. We
may not be able to control temperatures in the same way as the Dutch can
do. But if you were to try to replicate what they do, you'd want to keep
those Irids growing as long as you could (not exactly easy since most want
sunshine to do well) and then when they went dormant keep them dry and warm
as long as possible so they would not think it was fall and time to start
growing again.

Alan Horstmann in South Africa was going to try to experiment with
something like this with some of his plants that look a bit the worse for
wear after a long period of rain. In their normal habitat they would have
much less rain. So he was going to try to keep them dry longer and start
them later. I was interested in this because I have the same problem with
some of the same things. The Ixia leaves of many I grow look terrible by
the time they bloom in May.

Until you try some of these things you can't really know however which is
something Tony Avent seems to be finding out. I have found some of the
Namaqualand species I grow (they may get a couple of inches of rain in the
winter growing season compared to my average of 50-60 inches) adjust quite
happily to my surprise. Others really do need to be sheltered from the rain.

I hope this helps.

Mary Sue