Help my hostas..please

November 11, 2008 11:39 AM

The water supply pipe in front yard has sprung a leak. The water dudes will be out to fix it in the next few days. I have been nurturing some hostas in the vacinity they will be digging. I really do not expect them to treat things with kid gloves and feel it will be on me to save the hostas I will be digging them up tonight and putting them in buckets that I will store over tha winter in the basement. Do you know if this is a good or bad idea? I live on the great lake of erie and the winter is bearing down fast. am i doing the right thing?
posted by citybuddha to Home & Garden (8 answers total)

I'm also on the lake, and I know that nothing kills a hosta. They're a really hardy plant. They'll be fine if you keep them in a cold part of the basement.
posted by kuujjuarapik at 11:58 AM on November 11, 2008

Might be better to re-plant them somewhere else in your garden as soon as you dig them up - or replace them as soon as the water guys are done.
posted by leslies at 12:13 PM on November 11, 2008

Let me tell you a story about some of our hostas. I dug out a sandy bed because I wanted to fill it with some topsoil and grow vegetables there. I had a stack of pretty much bare-root hostas from the previous owners left after - I gave some of them away, transplanted some of them in other parts of our yard. A couple I had left sitting out in the garden got completely dessicated - foliage completely dead and dried out, the roots were like chewed up leather bootlaces. So I threw them in the compost bin, where they enjoyed a typical Minnesota winter. Come spring things thawed out, and they started rooting right into the compost and putting out new leaves. So my wife planted them in another bed and they have been doing fine.

If the roots sit wet they might get moldy. I suspect you could dig them up and pretty much stack them anywhere and they'd still come back when replanted. kuujjuarapik is right, hostas are unkillable.
posted by nanojath at 12:26 PM on November 11, 2008

Yeah, I live off Lake Michigan and our hostas grew to be unmanageable... they're a hard plant to kill off.
posted by IndigoRain at 12:40 PM on November 11, 2008

I'd leave them outdoors and replant them when the work is done. If you keep them indoors, they may try to grow instead of remaining dormant over the winter.
posted by jon1270 at 1:04 PM on November 11, 2008

To quote my wife, who knows lots more than I do about this, "If they dry out they'll be dead. If they get too wet and rot, they'll be dead."

She suggests cutting of the tops and keeping them in a bucket of moist sand outdoors somewhere.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 2:14 PM on November 11, 2008

I wish I could kill my hostas. No luck yet. Also in WNY.
posted by Riverine at 5:44 PM on November 11, 2008

Ditto. You cannot kill hostas. My story: My cesspool collapsed, and a backhoe came in to dig a new hole. It ran over a batch of hostas, completely covering/obliterating them. Not only did they come back the next year as if nothing happened, a portion of one hosta (uprooted, and dropped by the backhoe, I assume) was growing in the middle of the yard in a clump of dirt!

So, yes... Dig them up, plant them in the ground, then move them back. Whenever you want. They'll come back. And use the transfer time to split them up. Or share them with your neighbors.
posted by ObscureReferenceMan at 11:43 AM on November 12, 2008