Right next to me is one of THE most popular plants of all time for the holidays,
the humble poinsettia. But what's funny about it is,
if you knew where it evolved,
you wouldn't really associate it with the holidays.
We just do that because of the red and green coloration.
Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening,
where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb.
I got my first Christmas tree in the new Epic Homestead.
There'll be a video on that later on how to use that for the garden after you're
done with it for the holidays.
But let's turn our attention here to this poinsettia,
a classic classic holiday plant. In fact,
I've seen this produced at a commercial nursery and it is
mindblowing the scale and then the intensity of how to get it to
turn this beautiful color. These actually aren't the flowers.
These are the bracts. So in today's video,
we're going to look at how to care for it through the holiday season,
make sure it keeps this amazing color, how to pick the right one.
But then at the end of the video,
I'm also going to show you how to turn this into a year round plant.
And if you're lucky and you want to put in the effort,
how to make it do this again next year. So without further ado,
cultivate that Like button and I will bless you with everlasting red bracts
on your beautiful poinsettias. And let's get into the video.
The botanical name of the poinsettia is Euphorbia pulcherrima.
It's native to Mexico and Central America.
So it is not typically used to many of the climates that we would grow it
in for the holidays. In fact,
the most shocking thing about poinsettias is that in their native environment
they are a shrub or tree.
So it gets to at least two feet tall and sometimes up to about 13 feet tall.
Of course we never let them get to that point in our indoor gardens because that
would be a little bit unwieldy.
We love them for their beautiful red and green foliage.
Now I've got a beautiful classic one with bracts that are bright red.
Although there are some,
somewhere around a hundred different varieties of poinsettia,
so you can certainly do your shopping. And speaking of shopping,
how do you know the right poinsettia to buy? First of all,
you want to look for this red coloration.
You want to make sure that all of the bracts up top are fully red.
There's not little bits of green, et cetera.
That means that they're just not quite ready,
it's not going to last you all the way through the holiday season more often
than not. So you're buying it for the holidays.
You're buying it for the look most of the time.
So make sure you get one that looks the way you want it to look.
Another thing is, again native to Mexico, Central America,
they aren't really used to these drafty cold temperatures.
So when you go into a nursery and you see them stored like right next to an area
where a lot of wind will flow through,
any of that kind of stuff where doors are opened and closed,
don't get those ones. It's probably not going to last as long.
I might even swap to a different nursery if that's what you're seeing.
Another thing you'll notice is the fact that most poinsettias come wrapped like
this, and that's perfectly fine.
Sometimes the wrap is slightly decorative like this.
Later on in the video we'll be repotting this one because personally,
I don't really enjoy that look. But you may want to have your poinsettia wrapped
if you're going to take it out from the big box store,
wherever you're buying it, the nursery,
and bring it out into the cold before you bring it into your home.
Because again, they really hate the cold.
They will not perform well if they're exposed to cold for even short periods of
time. And this is something that you want to last throughout the entire holiday
season, at least four, six, sometimes even eight weeks.
And so make sure that they have you wrap it up or you can protect it as you're
bringing it home.
The final little tip I will give you for selecting a poinsettia is that you
would want the blooms, which most people actually think these are the blooms,
but the blooms are in the center here. You want them to be well formed.
You don't want any to be loose, falling off, weak. Again,
just pick the absolute best one you can find.
I tried to choose one that had nice coloration throughout the entire plant.
Obviously this is the showstopper side. This side is a little bit weaker,
but nevertheless, there are colored bracts throughout. Which for me,
nice and bushy, it looks absolutely amazing.
And now let's get into how to care for it once you get it home.
Like I mentioned many,
many times it does not want cold temperatures.
So make sure if you're indoors,
hopefully you're living in these temperature ranges anyways,
because it's quite comfortable to live, but 60 to 75 degrees.
Don't put it too close to anything that would get too hot or too cold.
I'm thinking a window,
don't press it right up against the window where the window is going to cool
down over the course of the night.
And that temperature drop is going to affect the leaves that are up on this
side, which is going to cause the lifespan to shorten.
But you still do want to give it an area that gets at least six,
seven hours of bright, indirect light indoors.
So just back it off of a window. If you're using a grow light,
that might be a good option. If you're in a particularly poorly lit area,
sometimes going with a grow light is one of the better options.
And then with watering, what you want to do is water when the top is dry.
To about a couple inches or so.
Sometimes it may need a little more water than normal depending on the way that
your air is indoors. If you have low humidity,
it's going to dry out a little bit quicker. If you have dry air,
you may need to water a little bit more. However, on the watering note,
there's also the humidity note and it would prefer a little more humidity than
the average wintry plant. Again,
it is from an area that's more tropical or subtropical.
So if you have a humidifier, turning on a humidifier might be a good option.
I've done a full video on Humidifiers that you can check out if you want to.
Otherwise you may want to water it a little bit more often.
Or you could also group it next to a bunch of other plants so that local
humidity zone around those plants is just at least a little bit higher.
Fertilization-wise, when it's doing this,
as in when it's colored up and it is flowering,
you don't want to fertilize it at all.
Your standard care during the holiday portion of its life,
where you want it to just look really amazing and stay looking amazing,
is mostly what I just talked about.
The water and the lighting and the temperature and the humidity care.
That will keep it doing what it's doing, provided you pick the right plant. Now,
if you do want to fertilize after the holiday season,
then a standard all-purpose organic plant fertilizer will do.
This is a liquid fertilizer. It's the Espoma Organic Grow. I really like it.
They are the sponsors of this video. I've been using Espoma for a long,
long time. So I would highly recommend this one.
You can dilute it down a little bit if you want to,
but a single strength dose will do just fine.
But remember just don't do that while you're actually wanting to enjoy the
flowering period.
It doesn't really need it and it will disrupt and/or shorten that flowering
period. One last note on the watering. It doesn't want, well,
this is kind of every single plant on earth, besides a few.
It doesn't want to be sitting in standing water.
You can see what we have here is the wrapper.
The wrapper would keep water in here, which is why I typically remove it.
So what I'll do in this video is I will just peel it back and I will
lift out the actual pot itself and see what we're working with.
We're just working with a standard green nursery pot that does have drainage
holes. The drainage holes wouldn't have mattered if I left it in this.
So I'm going to put this in a new pot. And as I do that,
we'll talk about how you can care for it after the holiday season and how you
can even bring it back to this phase, probably in a much bigger format,
the following holiday season. All right, we are in the repotting zone now.
I swapped the tabletop out because I'm very messy when I repot.
I'm going to take away this wrapping paper of sorts here.
We've got our standard nursery pot.
I've selected a pot that I bought at one of the Cheap Pot episodes that we did,
and drilled some drainage holes in with the Drainage Hole episode that we did
here on the channel. So I think this will look really nice.
A nice dark contrast against the beautiful red.
Let's just see what happens if I try to pop this directly out.
What do I got here? Yeah, that's looking pretty good actually.
Not too rootbound. We might need to tease it out just a little bit,
but it's really not that bad. I'll set this guy over here right now.
Looking very nice! Okay.
So what do you do when you want to grow your poinsettia past the
holidays? What do you actually have to do to care for it? Remember,
it can get to two to 13 feet tall if you plant it outside.
So what I would say is you're going to want to keep just watering it as normal
until it stops its flowering phase. Keep it going as long as you can.
As soon as it stops doing that,
then you can start fertilizing it like I mentioned.
At that point you may want to,
this would be somewhere around middle to late spring,
you may want to give it a really nice cut back.
When I say really nice cut back I mean like,
we're going to cut this thing back to at least a half of its height.
You can maybe cut it back two thirds or so.
I wouldn't go too much more than that.
General rule of thumb is you don't want to cut most plants back more than two
thirds. But we want to control its growth, shape its growth a little bit,
before we repot it.
Of course now I'm repotting it a little bit early here just because I want to.
I want it to look a little bit nicer here in my home. But at that point,
around that I would say late May-ish zone,
repotting it, putting it in a cooler spot is going to be a good idea.
So go up by maybe an inch or two or so, don't go too crazy on your repot.
And then throughout the summer, you can keep on fertilizing and letting it grow.
As far as when to actually grow it outdoors, if you want to grow it outdoors,
when your nighttime temperatures are above 50 degrees, 55 degrees or so.
That's a good time to transition it to outdoor growing only.
You don't have to do that. You could grow it indoors all year long if you want.
But if you want to have a really nice and sizable one,
it fits perfectly right there. Okay,
let me just tease out these roots a little bit.
But if you want to have a nice and sizable one,
I would say giving it a little bit more sun access is nice.
It's not going to want super bright light and so morning light with maybe some
afternoon shade, especially if you're in one of those hotter zones like myself,
that's going to be a really good idea.
You can see why I like to lay down some fabric here because it gets quite messy
and I don't want to do this all over my living room. Anyways,
around August I would say you can start to pinch back the tips. Of course,
it won't look quite like this. The bracts won't be red.
You'll want to pinch it back maybe an inch or two.
Pinch it in such a way that it would encourage bushing.
If you want to see a good tip on how to do that,
I've got a video on Pruning Basil.
You can apply most of the techniques in that video to poinsettias as well.
And then it gets into the weird part.
So let me just pot this actually up right now.
And we'll do a little bit of a backfill, which I always like to do.
But there is a weird part about growing poinsettias.
And that is what I experienced when I was at a commercial nursery.
Because remember, I would say about 70 something million,
millions and millions of poinsettias are sold every single year.
And they're sold by massive nurseries who sell them wholesale to these big box
stores, who then sell them to us. Right?
And so they have to be looking like this exactly when they're sold and bought by
us.
And so you have to perfectly time what's called the forcing of the flowering
phase. So if you're going to do this yourself,
and I will admit it's a little bit of a tedious process,
it is not usually something that a home gardener would do.
But what you need to do, and it's kind of similar with a Christmas cactus,
is you want to force darkness.
You need to force maybe 12 to 15 hours of darkness for at least a few weeks or
so in order to make it flower, or what's called forcing flowering.
So to do that, and I'm talking complete darkness,
you want 12 to 15 hours anywhere from around late September to early October
is a good point in time to do that. Hold on, let me just shake this real quick.
This is a good tip when you're repotting something that almost already fits the
pot that you're putting it into,
is give it a shake and just let it settle down in. We've got one,
two leaves fell. I mean, it means I need to water it, but that's okay.
That's a good little tip there. But yeah,
what you want to do is you're going to either have to put it in a completely
dark area for 12 to 15 hours,
or just like cover it up with something that is completely blocking the light
for a couple of weeks or so. At that point,
go back to your normal care routine and you'll start to see it flower out
when you want it to, which is the holiday season again. So as I water this in,
it really is such a unique plant.
If you wanted to you could even plant it outside in the ground if you want.
And it might actually do well for you provided you're in a zone that could
support it growing as a perennial plant. Anyways, the poinsettia,
a holiday favorite sitting here in the Epic Homestead.
I hope you really enjoyed this video. I certainly did.
And I'm going to have a little bit of a mess to clean up here after I'm done
watering this bad boy. So I will leave you guys here. Good luck in the garden.
And keep on growing.