Cannas create a sea of color
Plants with big, bold tropical leaves are all the rage in gardening now. Even in zones far below their comfort range, plants like hardy banana, cannas, elephant ear and taro can be found and planted as annuals out in the garden or in containers. Just a few of these dramatic plants can add flair to any garden.
For one Spokane Valley man, “just a few” wasn’t enough.
Levi Strauss filled his entire front yard with huge green cannas that at this moment are topped with brilliant red flowers. They stop traffic in front of his North Walnut Road house in Spokane Valley.
Strauss got interested in cannas several years ago when the Master Gardeners he works with at the WSU Extension Plant Clinic started talking about them. He bought a few tubers from a garden center to try. Unfortunately, the tubers were small and did nothing.
Undaunted, he got a whole gunny sack full from a friend. “They were large, fat tubers, much larger than the ones I bought,” said Strauss. That did the trick, and his first planting yielded a beautiful crop of colorful plants and a couple of wheelbarrow loads of tubers.
“Most people grow them because they like the flowers. I like them because of the tubers. They are huge. When I dig them, it’s like digging gold,” says Strauss
Strauss waits until the first hard frost blackens the foliage and then digs them almost immediately. “I lost half the crop by not digging them in time several years ago,” he said. “By the time I dug them a couple of weeks later, half of them had turned to mush. They weren’t that deep in the ground.”
After he digs the tuber clumps, he takes them into his basement and dries them for a week or so to seal the skin. “I tried drying them in the garage, but the humidity was too high.”
Strauss then packs the tubers into boxes filled with peat moss and puts them in a cool, dark room. Cannas planted in containers can be left in their pots and brought into the basement or somewhere where they won’t freeze.
In the spring, Strauss plants them around the second week of May, after the danger of a serious frost has past. He fertilizes the cannas with a high-nitrogen fertilizer shortly after planting, and then as they really begin growing in late June. They begin blooming around the middle of July.
If you want the cannas to bloom earlier, they can be planted in pots around the first of April indoors and put out in mid-May.
“Cannas are bulletproof,” says Strauss. He finds they do well in soil rich in organic matter and average watering. Beyond slugs, they are not prone to bug and disease problems. They come in dozens of leaf and flower color combinations, including some spectacular orange and green striped leaves with bright orange, red or yellow flowers. Hummingbirds find them irresistible.
Besides the joy of digging tubers and selling them at Garden Expo in the spring, Strauss realized another very important benefit from his project. He split the profits from his booth sales with his kids, Sydney and Cameron. They figured out very quickly it was to their advantage to help out with Dad’s project. “They started asking me if the plants needed water, fertilizer or weeding,” Strauss said with a smile.