Practical Pointers for Pacifying the Pickiest of Poinsettias
Few plants are so firmly associated with the holiday season as the colorful poinsettia. They are beautiful and much loved by many people, but often lose their luster after only a few weeks, and find themselves headed out the door with the Christmas tree and the shredded wrapping paper at the first of the year. How do you save this lovely plant from coming to such a sad end? It is easy, if you know how to provide the care it needs.
Making sure that you select a quality plant to begin with will make your job of keeping the poinsettia healthy and attractive much easier. Many different types of stores sell poinsettias during the holiday season, but you will often find that the plants sold at grocery and discount stores appear ragged and crowded in their displays.
These plants are usually less expensive than the ones found at a florist, but the chances that you can keep them alive through the holiday season and coax them to rebloom for you again next year are much slimmer. Try to avoid plants that have not had the plastic shipping sleeves removed as these plants will affect the quality of the plant.
Choose a plant with brightly colored bracts, the specialized leaves that surround the tiny flowers. These tiny flowers will bloom and then drop off, you want to choose a plant with tight flowers that are just beginning to open. The color of the bracts should be bright and rich as it will not increase in color after you bring your plant home.
In addition to checking the bracts for health, also check the leaves. They should be crisp and healthy and a uniformly dark green color. The stems should be upright and the leaves should cover the length of the stem. Leaves should not be damaged in any way, including wilted or bruised leaves.
When looking over the plant, you will want to check for any insects and the condition of the soil. The soil should not be wet or extremely dry, you are looking for slightly damp if it has been recently watered and dry to the touch if it has been a couple of days between waterings. It is important to observe the display conditions of the plants since poinsettias are extremely sensitive to temperature changes.
Get it Home Safely!
After you have chosen the perfect healthy plant, you want to make sure you get it home safely. If you live in a cool climate, this will mean not leaving your plant in the car while you run more errands. You will want to wrap your plant up to keep it safe from drafts before you leave the store. A roomy shopping bag tied loosely at the top will protect the plant and help keep it warm. It is essential that you get it inside quickly, to minimize the impact of the chilly winter temperatures on this tropical plant.
Once you arrive home, proper placement of your plant is the next step. Placement of your poinsettia is crucial to its overall health and will make caring for it significantly easier. Choose a spot that will provide it with at least six hours per day of indirect sun.
If you do not have a spot with good indirect light, filtered direct sunlight will do just fine. A sheer curtain will allow your plant to get the light it needs without getting too much direct sunlight. You will also need to make certain that the spot you have chosen is somewhere that is warm but not drafty or overheated.
In particular, though it looks festive, a fireplace hearth is a poor spot for a poinsettia. It will be far too warm if you light a fire, and may experience drafts coming down the chimney when it is not lit. Another common but unwise temporary home for your poinsettia is in a window. If the leaves or bracts touch the chilly glass, it can damage the plant, and even if you are careful to keep it from touching the window itself, the air near the window may still be too cool for its comfort, depending on your climate.
Your goal is to keep your plant somewhere between 68 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, and a bit cooler during the night, but never to allow the plant to experience temperatures lower than around 55 degrees Fahrenheit. The most critical step in caring for a poinsettia is simply to ensure that it does not experience severe temperature fluctuations. Your plant will be happiest with infrequent watering, about every 4 or 5 days except in extremely dry climates.
If your goal is simply to keep your poinsettia thriving through the end of the holiday season, the care outlined above is all you will need. When its blooming season is over, you can simply toss it in your compost pile, or put it out with your trash. However, it is simple to get your poinsettia to rebloom again and again, winter after winter, if you know what it needs.
Keep Your Plant Healthy All Year!
Once the bracts drop off of your poinsettia, and it releases its seeds from the seed pods, you will need to start treating it a bit differently. This will usually happen towards the middle to end of April. Continue watering your plant every few days, allowing it to become dry to the touch in between waterings.
Overwatering is the most common reason for a poinsettia to fail to make it through the summer. It is also time to treat the soil with a general, all purpose fertilizer. At this time, you will also want to trim the plant back to about 8 inches. Once you have done this, your plant will look pretty bare and sparse.
This isn’t the prettiest time for your poinsettia, but it is a necessary part of its growing cycle. However, in about a month you will see plenty of fresh green new growth. You will need to continue to fertilize it about once a month during its “off-season”.
Once any danger of night temperatures dropping below 50 degrees has passed, you may want to let your poinsettia stay outside. It will enjoy the warm summer sunshine, and isn’t nearly as picky about the heat as it would have been when it still had its lovely colored bracts. If you wish to transplant your poinsettia into a larger pot, the best time to do it is mid June.
Select a pot that is approximately two to four inches bigger than the pot that your poinsettia was purchased in. A soil that is rich in organic matter, such as peat moss, will be the best for your poinsettia. Once the plant has been transplanted to its new pot, water it well.
If you wish to have lushly blooming poinsettias that make beautiful Christmas decorations during the holiday season, you will need to start preparing it to bloom around the first of October. Though it can be a bit tricky to convince a poinsettia to rebloom, it really isn’t hard if you know the secret.
Starting on October first, your poinsettia must have fourteen continuous hours of complete and total darkness each night. Even the artificial light from a single light bulb can delay the blooming process. This period in the plant’s cycle must continue for approximately eight to ten weeks, if you hope to have a stunning poinsettia at Christmas time.
Realistically, how can you accomplish this in your normal everyday household? You can move your plants to a closet or other dark room without windows each evening, and bring them back out into the light fourteen hours later. If you use this method, you do have to be extremely confident that they will receive no light at all in the dark room. A spouse or child flipping on the light for even a few seconds can really set the plant back in its blooming preparations.
A great trick to make sure the plant is untouched by any light at all is to use an opaque plastic or heavy fabric bag. Set the plant inside the bottom of the bag, and arrange the bag around the base of the pot. When it is lights out time for your poinsettia, gently draw the bag up over the foliage of the plant to completely cover it, and tie it closed. Leave the plant covered for fourteen hours, and then open the bag again. Voila! It can be just that easy.
Now that you know how to keep a poinsettia alive from one Christmas to the next, your new challenge is really going to be keeping your poinsettia collection down to a reasonable number. Since they don’t go away shortly after the first of the year, the number of plants you have will continue to grow. It is a good thing that there are now a number of different styles and colors of poinsettias. You never need grow bored with the lovely selection!
About the Author: Angela Lytle is a self-employed mother of four and publisher of Christmas Decorations Online, a website featuring holiday decorations from Artificial Christmas Trees to beautify your home to outdoor Christmas lights that will brighten up your holiday display!
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