Rinse and repeat again every 2-3 years as needed. You can make a lot of them this way if you wish.

I love alstro, it is so easy to grow (except that voles and mice like to eat the roots) and has such a long blooming season -- June to early Oct. here in Michigan.

Have you grown any of the (supposedly) hardy Alstroemerias? or are you just getting plants and treating them as annuals?

What (if any) varieties have you tried and where are you getting them?

I had a few in pots and managed to keep them growing well for 2 years, but lost them the year before last. I got mine from Flowers and Greens (link below)

~Chills

What if I dug them up in the fall & overwintered them ~ might that work? I live in the northern suburbs of Chicago.

thanks,

I have 'Sweet Laura' which is rated zone 5. All of the rest of them are the zone 7 rated florist/cut flower types. I've just picked them up when I saw them at garden centers, grocery stores, or even at Lowes. They used to be kind of hard to come by, but are becoming more and more common as the years go by.

I've never lost one to winter kill. In the fall after the tops die back, I just put a piece of styrofoam over the crown (I save discarded packing foam pieces and boxes for this), and then dump about 8-12 inches of oak leaves over the foam. I have lost a few totally to voles under the foam, and quite a few have been vole damaged but had enough viable tissue to recover.

I started experimenting with alstro close to 10 years ago now, and I feel fully confident in saying that they are completely hardy here in SE Michigan under deep mulch. I don't know how fussy they might be about winter drainage, as all of mine are in sandy to loamy soil on a relatively upland part of my yard. I've never tried them in heavy clay or the low spots prone to winter flooding, but I'd be cautious about this, because I have read they are sensitive to excess moisture.

However, for those that don't want to go the deep mulching route, the dumb things are also incredibly easy to overwinter indoors in pots -- I've got about a dozen I grow in planters on my patio, and these I just chuck down in the basement in the dark in October. I do nothing with them at all until April, when I put them back out in a spot I can protect the new growth from frost. They start blooming again by early to mid June, and bloom all summer until frost if kept fertilized and watered.

As far as I can tell, basically with the exception of the vole issue, alstro is as easy to grow as a daylily.

I generally don't have problems with water issues in the front of my house, though my back yard frequently gets standing water from the ground freezing part of the winter (though I can't recall losing a single plant from it).

I heard sweet laura is fragrant. Is it stick your nose in and imagine kind of fragrant or hey what is that smell as you walk in the yard kind of fragrant?

Life got interesting for a while there, and honestly isn't over itself yet, but I am itching for spring, so here I am...

one last question...how tall do your Alstroemerias get?

Thanks

Chills

The height varies. Laura is the tallest one I've got, gets up to about 24" inches/knee high basically in the best of years. I have a pink one of unknown variety that came from the floral department at Nino Salvagio's in Rochester about 5-6 years ago that gets almost as tall. The rest vary from about 10-12 inches to about 18". Quite a few of the colors I have are dwarf ones that seemed to have been bred specifically for pot culture -- I picked up 4 or 5 different colors at Lowes about 3 years ago in the spring out in their perennials, and I got some from a vendor at the Oakland County Farmer's Market who has a pretty good range of colors.