the life of a pelargonium freak...

i love my pelargoniums. (surprise, surprise...) and i love to water them, speak with them and re-pot them.
last week i realised that since autumn is here and winter will be soon, i had better prepare them.
all of them...
i put all my left over terracotta pots in buckets of water with a drop of bleach and let them soak for a few hours.
i mixed earth, small leca, sand and peat (sorry, not very sustainable, i know) in a gargantuan tub.
i made new nameplates for every recent, growing baby.
i cleared my kitchen tables.
then i took a deep breath and began...
i started with miniatures, cuttings and growing babies.
i recently bought 8 tiny but kind of tall, very old pots at a flea market. they now serve as new homes for my miniatures. still not too much space around them but more beneath so that they can stretch their roots, i think they're happy. and so am i, they are very pretty and more visible now.
i then proceeded to give small pots (max 6 cm) to the too many cuttings i've made this summer. well, i actually didn't have enough pots so some of them still has to suffer plastic or living in a coop as long as they haven't found a new home or i've given up on them.
after that i was already exhausted from carrying dirt around and trying to figure out which plant goes in which pot, so i had to take a nap ;-)
the sepia photo shows the miniatures in their fancy new pots and my ready-for-napping couch.

afterwards - and after more coffee - i started the real chaos.
dirt, wet pots, nameplates, wet'n'dirty plants lists and the poor pelargoniums all over the kitchen tables. the kitchen floor. the living room floor. as the evening approached i wondered how i was ever going to make it to bed... as the evening passed i didn't much like the idea of having to sleep next to an ocean of plants - they were now also covering the bedroom floor... i guess aesthetically it is appealing but as far as i know it's not very healthy. hm. the joys of being a balcony gardener?
next morning i found the joy again. it was so much fun to see my apartment having a sun dappled pelargonium ocean for a floor. but then the chaos started again. where to put all of them? in what order? after moving them all around a trizillion times i was satisfied, knackered and laughing at the life of a pelargonium freak. i do love my pelargoniums. i do. but to spend an entire weekend replanting & reorganising seems a wee bit crazy :-D
these days i make sure to enjoy the colours.................. before everything will fade to black and white.