By Sharon Parker
The gardener inside me is beginning to break dormancy and I think it must be the lengthening daylight hours--11 as of today, according to my Weatherguide calendar. It’s also fueled by the swelling buds of the geraniums I brought indoors last fall, and other indoor signs of spring, such as renewed growth on houseplants that have been languishing the last few months.

One of the coleus cuttings given to me by a neighbor last fall is forming tiny flower buds as well. I have only three left of the colorful bouquet that looked so grandly Victorian in a vase in my entryway for a couple of weeks in October, but since I managed to kill all the ones he gave me the previous year, I am pleased that these three have survived. After they rooted in the small vase where I had kept the survivors of the original bouquet, I planted them in soil in a pot small enough to keep on my kitchen window sill, where it was easy to keep it watered whenever the soil dried out.

From November through January and often for most of February, my only goal for the plants in my house is to kill as few of them as possible. This year I was quite diligent about watering them every week, and it has paid off. Although some of them would look much cheerier if I would get around to removing all the dead leaves and stems, I don’t believe I have lost a single plant, and there is plenty that is still green and growing and that I know will thrive once I start paying more than minimal attention to them again.

This benign neglect isn’t such a bad thing. Even plants that grow year round indoors need to go through a period of dormancy when the days grow short, and by not feeding them and only watering enough to save them from withering during this time, I am simply honoring the natural cycle of the season, which even applies to the regulated temperature of the indoors because of the change in daylight hours.

Besides cutting them back to encourage new growth and bushier plants, I’ll also start feeding them with a natural plant food, and repot into fresh soil and slightly bigger pots those plants whose roots have become crowded. The cuttings of ivy and vinca can be rooted in water to make more plants, which are always nice to have come spring to add fullness and trailing greenery to outdoor pots. Others, such as asparagus fern, will be divided to make more plants once it is warm enough to do that messy job outdoors on the patio.

Next I’ll start preparing to start some seeds indoors, but that’s a topic for another week.