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| Photo Credit: Megan Bame |
| With proper lighting, the green bracts around the plant’s tiny, yellow flowers will turn that familiar red for the holidays. |
Poinsettias fill our homes with holiday cheer, but when the Christmas decorations get packed away, the plants sadly tend to go, too. Some folks have no problem sending the festive beauty directly to the compost bin. Others treat it like a regular houseplant until the colorful leaves drop off in spring. But a select few will hold onto their poinsettias with visions of reblooming the pretty plants for next Christmas. It isn’t an easy thing to do, and those who try it should be commended for their efforts.
If you’d like to try keeping your poinsettia alive and well long after this year’s holiday season, there are a few things you need to know. Here’s the problem that most homeowners have difficulty overcoming: Poinsettias are short-day plants. That means they start the blooming process when the hours of darkness exceed the hours of daylight. In my area (North Carolina), the magic day when it’s naturally dark longer than it’s light is around Sept. 23. To rebloom your existing poinsettia by Christmas, you need to expose it to natural day lengths from that point on. That means no extra light – because excess light delays blooming (and the turning of green bracts to red). Avoiding extra light might sound easy, but remember, it starts to get dark earlier and earlier come fall, and you probably don’t want to turn the lights off in your house at 5:30 p.m. You might try keeping the plant in a separate room that gets adequate daylight but can be darkened as night falls. If that’s not an option, you can move your plant in and out of a closet daily or cover your poinsettia with a box when the sun sets and you turn the lights on. Just don’t forget to bring your plant back into the light come morning! (Poinsettias need at least six to eight hours of bright sunlight.)
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