Gladiola Question

After digging up my Gladiolla's for the winter I noticed both double bulbs and lots of tiny little "bulbetts" attached together.

Q: Should I separate and keep the tiny "bulbetts"?
Q: Should I separate the larger bulbs?

Please advise

Thanks

Brian


This message was edited Oct 16, 2004 2:15 PM

Kayaker

You can keep the cormlets with the main bulb, the whole lot will come up like grass in the spring but I find the flowering size plant blooms better when the cormlets are removed. Not being one to throw plants away if I can possibly help it, we put the cormlets into another pot and let them grow on, we don't have great success getting them to flowering size but that's probably because the big corms only just scrape through our wet winters in pots so the small ones have less of a chance.

Separate the bulbs from the babies but keep both. Throw the bulblets back in the ground next year so that they can grow and mature. I'm not sure how long they will take to mature because I don't have to lift my glads. Whenever I harvest my glad bulbs to either move a clump or share I usually just leave some of the bulblets in the ground to mature. I never really paid attention to how long it took before they actually were large enough to be blooming sized bulbs but I sure do multiply my glads quickly.

Hope this helps,

Julia