How To Plant Geraniums

Right, so now, I'm going to show you how to plant geraniums. I've got several different varieties here, and although they're commonly known as geraniums, they're actually pelargoniums. There's this ivy leaf variety, which is lovely in a hanging basket because it will trail over.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to plant these in the hanging basket. I'm going to use a regular variegated leaf geranium as a centerpiece and then put the trailing geranium in front of it. So, I'm going to make a hole in the middle for the larger geranium, ensuring that it's deep enough for the plant.

Now, when you take your plants out of the pot, you can buy these ready-grown at the garden centers and you can even grow them from seed or take cutting, turn the plant upside down, gently squeeze the pot so as not to disturb the roots. You can see these lovely white roots. These are the feeding roots.

Place your geranium in the center of the pot, backfill around, firming the soil down. Now, geraniums are a Mediterranean plant, so they don't mind a poor soil at all. In actual fact, they quite like it, and they don't really need much watering, although you do still need to water, but it's a good idea to let them almost dry out before you water them again.

Again, protecting the root ball with your fingers, just slide that pot off. Pop your geranium in there, backfill around, and then you will need to give your basket good water initially. And then you can give the basket a good feed of liquid tomato feed every couple of weeks or so and that will encourage the plants to flower.

But not too much feed. If you put too much feed in, they'll put on too much growth in the leaf and not enough flower. And that's how you plant geraniums! .