Ungernia befuddlement
Lee Poulsen (Tue, 04 Aug 2009 10:37:21 PDT)

With all this talk of Lycoris, I thought I'd ask if anyone knows what
the growing cycle for Ungernias in captivity should be. I'm pretty
sure now that I have 3-4 year old seedlings of U. oligostroma (syn.
minor), U. severzowii, and U. sp. from seeds I got from J. J. Halda.
They come from pretty high elevations in Central Asia, but all the
weather records I've looked at for that region bear a passing
resemblance (other than the freezing cold snow-covered winters!) to
the climate here in Calif., so I thought I would try them. (Hot dry
rainless summers, rain and growth in the spring only after the snow
melts, cool dry autumns.)

So I thought I should leave them exposed to the temperatures outside
in the winter but protect them completely from the rain during early
and mid-winter. Then expose them to the rain starting in late winter
(Feb.) and water them during the spring when they should sprout and
grow. When they start to die down as it's getting hot when summer
comes, I would stop all water and let them stay outdoors still, but
completely dry, leaving them that way during autumn and then covering
them before the first rains came again.

Well, they seem to want to grow whenever they feel like it, even
whether I start watering them or not. One year, one of them leafed out
in the autumn and grew until mid-winter before finally dying down. (I
always stop water from getting to them for a few months when they
finally die down and go dormant regardless of season.) The next year a
couple of them leafed out in spring as I expected and died down in
early summer. Now this year, none of them leafed out during spring.
But just as it was starting to warm up at the beginning of summer and
I was going to check to see if the bulbs were still there, two of them
leafed out, so I kept watering them and watered the third one as well.
About a month later (which was a month ago) the third one leafed out.
And now, here it is the hottest part of the summer and they're all
leafed out and apparently doing fine. (I do have them on the east side
of my house where they only get the cooler morning sun.)

And they do seem to be getting marginally larger leaved each time they
leaf out. So do any of the experts (Are there such things as Ungernia
experts?) have any good suggestions about how I can be a little more
certain I'm not going to cause them to rot to death by applying water
at the wrong season? Because I can't figure them out. I've got them
growing in small but relatively long deep pots (10 cm x 10 cm x 20 cm
deep) in sandy gravelly soil with lots of drainage and they seem to
like it, and I feed them with a slow release fertilizer shortly after
the leaves first appear.

--Lee Poulsen
Pasadena, California, USA - USDA Zone 10a