The Old Vicarage B&B, Little Ouse

I bought four of pots of canna lilies about two years ago and place two in the garden and left two in pots on the stable courtyard. The local wildlife enjoyed the ones in the ground and they never managed to establish, even though they made it through the mild winter with a good mulch on them. The ones left in the pots have quadrupled in size and have needed to be potted on twice. Although they are not looking too dead in the centre, they are again starting to stretch the sides of the pots, again! Rather than pot into a larger pot, I have decided to split them, making sure there are some growing points in each pot. They split quite easily, I use an old plasterboard saw to get started and then just prise them apart. I don’t worry too much about making mixes of compost with perlite for drainage. I just use a peat-free compost. If I want drainage I just use fine gravel from the carpark (griddled and washed), a much cheaper option.

Keeping over winter. I don’t bother with all the usual practise of lifting and drying like a dahlia or leaving in the pots and chopping back the foliage. I don’t bother cutting back, I just simply put a couple of trestles in the old stable block that has a good sized window and seldom goes below 10c and leave the pots in there to go dormant. I remove any leaves that die to avoid rot and remove any mould that forms on the surface of the compost, by just breaking the surface (the airflow is usually good enough to prevent this, but when I pack lots of plants in the old stable block, sometimes you do get a bit) water sparingly, maybe two or three times during the November through March period and start to water more when new shoots appear in the spring and start to feed with a general purpose feed, moving to a tomato feed when they start to put up the flower spikes. I don’t worry too much about seaweed feeds etc. I just get the most economical for the flower beds. Whatever is on offer usually. I keep the good stuff (organic) for the vegetable plot.