How To Multiply & Extend Your Poinsettia

Thousands of homemakers received poinsettia plants this Christmas. These colorful plants, so fitting in holiday home decorations, sometimes become a problem after Christmas when blooming ends and many times they are thrown out.

If you love filling your home with Poinsettias during the holiday season, here’s how you can get another blooming season from them.

The poinsettia is not a particularly long-lived houseplant but you can perpetuate it by harvesting cuttings.

How To Prepare Poinsettias For A Second Season

• After it flowers, the plant should be rested. Take it to a cool dark corner of the basement and keep it almost dry, although not so dry the wood shrivels.
• Near the end of April the plant should be brought back into light and warmth, cut back to half its height, and watered generously. It will soon begin to grow again.
• When nights have become warm (no cooler than 58°) the plant may be set pot and all in the ground outdoors. It should have full sun and should be watered regularly.
• Liquid fertilizer may be used occasionally. The poinsettia must be cut back before it begins to grow in the Spring–if not, it will become tall and stringy, and unproductive of bloom.
• After a summer’s growth it is too late to cut the plant back.
• As nights get cooler in later summer or fall, the plant should be brought indoors and put where the air is moderately warm and humid, where it gets full sun, and where sudden drafts of cool air will not hit it.

How To Harvest Poinsettia Cuttings

• The time to take cuttings is soon after the new growth starts, in June or July.
• Cut a six-inch slip at a node or with a small heel of old wood from the parent stem.
• Trim off all but two top leaves, and stick the cutting into fine moist sand.
• Roots should form in about a month, and the cutting may then be transferred to soil in a small pot.
• Increase the pot size gradually as the plant grows.
• Use a soil mixture of two parts loam to one part sand and one part rotted manure.

More Tips For Poinsettia Care

• The plant may not bloom if it is where artificial lighting prolongs its day–poinsettias like short days for their flowering period. Protect it from all forms of light after regular daylight hours.
• Water it regularly but do not waterlog.
• Yellow or dropping leaves may be caused by too much water, or by chilling.

Source: Adapted from The WorkBasket (1953)

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