I had a friend ask me what it would take to make a Christmas cactus bloom. Their plant was several years old and was a large plant but it never produced a single flower. Christmas cactus, like a poinsettia plant, initiate flower buds when the days get shorter and the nights get cooler in late summer to early fall. This is a natural process of the season change and the plants read it like an instruction manual.
In nature, nothing interrupts this occurrence, so the plants know how to respond. Growing these plants indoors takes them out of their natural environment.
Indoors, we turn on lights at night so we can carry on with our activities; that makes the days long and the nights short. We have furnaces that keep the temperature from getting cooler than we will accept as comfortable. So that poor plant is totally confused because we have tried to make it adapt to our environment. Sept. 15 through Oct. 15 is the bud initiation time for poinsettias. Any light that would interrupt the dark of night during that five-week period would erase that process. The same is true for Christmas cactus.
My advice for him was to set the plant outdoors in filtered sunlight for the next six weeks. Bring it in if frost is predicted but then set it back out when the temperature moderates. By mid to late October, the plant will have read the instructions from nature and should be ready to produce an awesome display. I’ve heard people talk about putting a poinsettia in the closet for those weeks and that will produce a very dead plant. The plant must have sunlight during the day!
Some plants in my perennial garden are looking shabby … hostas among others have finished blooming, so cleaning up the dead flower stems will give the whole garden a fresh look.
I also have a few “spreading” perennials, namely some joe pye weed and monardas, that are getting more aggressive than I’m appreciating. So I’m going to shrink those clumps now while I know exactly how large they are. Spring would work too, but there is so much more to get done in the spring and this must happen, so I’ll have it crossed off the spring to-do list.
Oh yes, I purchased Entrust, an organic spray for controlling spotted wing drosophila in my strawberries and raspberries. It is working so far and I am happy to be harvesting both berries. Precaution here is that the spray is toxic to bees, so I spray at night when the bees are not active … yes, that is a challenge!