I have mentioned that having moved and lost our garden and greenhouse etc. I now have to do things in a different way. One thing that changed was having my begonias in pots in the greenhouse further down you can see I had them last year in containers but then I had nowhere to dry them off, so they have been in the shed with a fair amount of the old compost still attached. Normally I would have started them into growth by now but with no greenhouse this could not be so. Today March 18th I have cleaned them up ready to put them into trays and I thought you might be interested to see the amount of roots I get by covering the corms with compost rather than leaving them on the surface as we used to. The whole corm can produce roots if in contact with compost and when we used to leave them on the surface this was not possible. You should not worry about water collecting in the top of the corm as the compost will draw this out.