Where to begin: buying your first plant
When I started growing geraniums, I bought small plants from garden sales; when country houses are open to the public, they often sell scented geraniums. It was hard to find them in everyday garden nurseries, but nowadays you can go online and there are lots of places that sell them. To begin with, it’s easiest to buy small plants that are ready to go – plug plants, as they’re called. When you get more experienced, you can start growing them from cuttings, but there’s no need to rush into that.
Getting them potted
What you do is find a flower pot a size up from the pot the plant arrives in. Fill it with a mix of potting compost and light gravel to make it not too heavy. Stir your soil up, pop your plant in, don’t press it down too hard, then give it a good soak of water and go from there.
Over the years I’ve tried very many different things with soil, and I’ve learned not to just use potting compost on its own, because it tends to sink down and get quite heavy, and geraniums like quite light soil. I also put a little stone or a piece of broken pot in the bottom to allow the water to drain away. If their roots get too soggy, they really don’t like it. And obviously the pot must have a hole in the bottom to drain. Light soil, nice mix – that’s the thing.
Watering: less is more
Once you have the plant in, you want to make sure you don’t give it any water again until it’s really dry and thirsty. The easiest way to kill a geranium is to overwater it. And in winter, they want even less water than usual.
Where to put them
Place them on a sunny windowsill or outside in the summer. They’re very happy once the frosts are gone. After mid-May or so, you’re usually pretty safe to have them outdoors in a nice sunny patch. Or, if you’re lucky, in a greenhouse all year round.
You want to be careful not to choose something like a climbing variety that would obviously take over by the kitchen sink. When you go onto a website looking at buying geraniums, like any plant, it always says it grows to 50 centimetres, 80 centimetres or whatever. Some geraniums grow really enormous and others stay quite compact, so you just want to check what your preference is.
Feeding
During the summer months, geraniums like a bit of feed with their water. You can buy a seaweed fertiliser, or it can be tomato feed, or just plant food. Be careful not to give too strong a dose to begin with. I’ve had a problem with that. I doubled the amount thinking my plants would grow twice as fast, and I killed them. Just give them the right amount that it says on the bottle, the occasional water rather than too much, and a bit of sunshine. Honestly, once they take off, they’re incredible.
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