Many gardeners love to grow these beautiful flowers that delight the eye during flowering with their beautiful shape and color. Usually gladioli bloom in the second half of August and can bloom until the first frost. But, so that next year they can please you with their beauty, the corms need to be dug up in time.
Terms of cleaning gladioli
The time when it will be necessary to dig out the corms of gladioli for winter storage is determined depending on when in the area where you live, stable subzero temperatures are usually established. It will be necessary to dig out gladioli a week before the onset of frost. But you should take into account that before this period, the corm must still be 40-45 days in the ground in order to gain nutrients and strength for flowering next summer. And this means that all these 7 weeks the gladiolus must rest, so the peduncles will need to be cut off.
So, if in your climatic zone the cold begins at the end of October, you can allow gladioli to bloom until mid-September, after which all inflorescences will need to be removed. If you leave flowers until the very frost, you risk losing a corm, which simply will not bloom next summer. In the middle lane, it is necessary to dig up the corms of gladioli in the first decade of October, since in the middle of this month it usually becomes quite cold. Therefore, you will need to cut the flower stalks in advance, at the end of August.
For late varieties, 40-45 days is not enough to prepare for winter storage, so first dig up the early and medium varieties, and the later ones need to be held in the garden for another week.
Tips from experienced florists
Those gardeners who have extensive experience in growing gladioli are advised to first of all dig up varieties that have a dark color - burgundy, cherry red, dark purple, as well as those that have lavender-blue shades. This is due to the fact that they quickly lose the immunity they acquired over the summer to fungal diseases, to which gladioli are very susceptible.
In the event that you planted a new variety in the spring, which reproduces by large "children" and will release a peduncle only at the end of summer, to see how it blooms, break the flower arrow, leaving only one, the first bud on it. After making sure, after it blooms, that this is the variety that you need, remove the peduncle.
Digging out the corms and cleaning them from the ground, the upper scales can not be removed, only if they are old, remove one or two.
It is better to dig up the corms of gladioli in dry weather, if you have a large collection, you will have to allocate a day or two for this. Carefully dig each tuber with a shovel and shake it off the ground onto a spread film so that small "children" do not fall back into the garden. Cut the stem with a pruner, leaving 2 cm, remove the old corms, and leave the largest healthy "babies" for reproduction. For those gladioli that were grown from "babies", slightly shorten the roots, but do not cut them off; you need to store the bulbs with roots that are removed only in the spring, before planting.
