At this time of year, a favorite question that our radio listeners ask again and again is: How do I keep my poinsettia going after the holidays end?
So here is our advice: If you want to save your poinsettia, cut off the dead leaves and colored parts and get rid of the Christmas foil wrapped around the pots. The foil may be colorful, but itโs hard to drain the plants when theyโre wrapped in foil. Then give the poinsettias lots of bright indirect light next to sunny windows. Water them once or twice a week and fertilize every two weeks.
In February or March, you can cut back old flowering stems and branches down to about 4 to 6 inches in height. Leave a few leaves on each of the old branches. Soon you can transplant the plants to bigger pots that are filled with peat moss and vermiculite/perlite potting soil.
Poinsettias prefer moderate temperatures, so that probably means youโre not going to move them outside in the Arizona summers. But they can flourish inside the house, particularly if you originally bought them in a brightly lit facility.
Getting a poinsettia to show its colors again does take extra work. You must keep the plant in darkness from 5 p.m. to 8 a.m. daily from the end of September until color shows in the bracts in early to mid-December. Bracts, by the way, are those showy colored parts of poinsettias that many of us call โflowers.โ
Q: I have an area of about four square yards in my landscape where I once had poppies growing. But now Bermuda grass has sprouted in that space and itโs impossible to plant anything else there. I would like to kill it with an herbicide but I donโt want to damage the quality of the soil. Iโm hoping if I can kill the Bermuda now, I can plant something else in the spring. Will that work?
A: Bermuda grass is extremely difficult to kill. If you want to give herbicides a try, you should really apply it when the weeds or grass are really young and actively growing. If you succeed, the herbicides probably wonโt affect future replanting. But with Bermuda, you will probably have to try many times and methods before you can get rid of it. During the summer, you can also cover the grass with clear plastic and try to solarize it and burn it out.
Q: I have a jacaranda tree with shoots growing at the base of it. I bought it on Motherโs Day last year. It grew a little bit and then it started getting shoots at the bottom. I want to know if I should cut those off. Will removing the shoots get the tree to grow faster.
A: No, you donโt want to remove those shoots. Leaving them on the tree will be good for it. You need to leave everything alone for the first year or so.
Q: I have an interior door in my house that keeps closing by itself. But now we have a newborn baby and want to leave the door open. What can we do to stop this creeping door from closing?
A: This is one of my favorite fixes. If the door has two hinges, simply take out the pin in the bottom hinge; or take out the pin in the middle hinge if there are three hinges. Then take a large hammer and strike the pin about a third of the way down and then reinsert the pin in the hinge. Voila! That should fix it, and this simple solution wonโt cost you a dime.
