Living indoors

I wrote recently about our cyclamen hederifolia and how they are aiming for garden domination. I also mentioned that I had grown a couple of cyclamen varieties from seed and mentioned an outdoor one cyclamen coum.

I also grew an indoor variety of cyclamen - Lazer which proved to be really successful. The plants sat on a windowsill all autumn/winter and flowered their socks off. 

I had expected that the plants would die down through spring and summer and that the tubers would go dormant but this didn't happen and the plants continued to produce a few flowers all year.

In June they looked like this. The smaller plants are the outdoor cyclamen coum.

I wonder whether the really cool summer has caused the plants to think that it was still winter or early spring. I just hope they don't wear themselves out.

Recently the plant leaves were looking a little worse for wear having been nibbled by what I assumed were slugs and snails. This was proved a correct assumption when I found a couple of snails sleeping on the sides of the pots. I also found some tiny baby snails on some of the leaves. Before bringing the plants inside the house I obviously needed to eliminate as many freeloaders as I could and clean up the plants and pots. I removed each plant from the pot and whilst scraping off old compost found several baby slugs and snails as well as their eggs in the compost. There were also some tiny woodlice. All unwelcome guests were removed and each plant was repotted using some fresh compost but keeping to the same size pots. I maybe should have potted them into a larger pot but then I wouldn't have had room for them all in the house!

During my potting activities I caught a faint perfume coming from one of the flowers - strange I haven't noticed this before. Some of the flowers have produced seed capsules so I have decided to leave one capsule on each plant and allow it to swell. I'm hoping that this way the plant won't suffer too much and if the seeds mature I can try germinating them to see what happens. One seed capsule is already well on the way to maturity. Notice that unlike cyclamen hederifolia the stems supporting the seed capsules don't coil into a spring they just lazily hang down in an untidy fashion.

The tidy plants are now back inside on a windowsill. I'd really like some small pottery trough-shaped containers to pop them in but until I find some they will have to snuggle together in the plant trays they lived in last year.