I suggest that you plant them in temporary beds or else pot them and allow them to root through the drainage holes into the ground. Keep the pots outside. Remember pots are prone to flooding in rain, so ensure that the soil in the pots is in contact with the ground below, via the drainage holes, in order to provide a capillary action. If in pots, the plants may be transferred to the new beds an any time, if in the ground they can be moved again when they die back. Digging up Fritillarias while they are on growth is not a good idea because the damaged roots do not continue to grow. If you manage to keep the bulbs dormant until April (Northern Hemisphere) and then plant, they will almost certainly start to grow as soon as they are planted. They will put out roots and shoots, and then wither as the weather would be too hot and probably too dry. If you were to water them -they would rot in the warmer temperatures. Such a very short growing season would cause the bulbs to expend energy with no opportunity to photosynthesise and recoup their expenditure. The bulbs would be much smaller or dead for the following season. If you were successful in keeping Fritillaria bulbs dormant and healthy over winter, I suggest that you continue to keep them that way until the first cool nights of Autumn before planting. Then they may grow in the season they are designed for. Different strains of plants do behave differently and have different tolerances, cuttings are clonal. With seed you will be seeing genetic diversity whether it is with bulbs or woody plants, and some of the seedlings of a species will perform better than others in the conditions you give them Peter (UK) On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 12:11 AM, Richard <richrd@nas.com> wrote: > > I'm cleaning out a bed and was hoping to find a protocol to hold them > till spring when new area will be ready. I think I'll take some of them > and put into clean fine sand and hold at a cool temp in my strat cooler. > And observe how it goes. > > I've noticed major differences between seed sources of shrubs I propagate > and their performance in Western Washington. I wonder if same is true for > these bulbs >