Dear Jim, 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