Spare the heroics: just compost poinsettia
Well, it’s two days after Christmas and here we are faced with the age-old conundrum — what do we do with those poinsettias?
Those of you who have been reading my columns for long already know my answer — compost. After all, the three most important things you need for a good garden are compost, compost and more compost! But that’s heresy, you say, putting those beautiful things on the compost heap.
“Their beauty must be preserved regardless of what horticultural heroics are needed!” Well, OK, keep ’em around until they start lookin’ nasty and then compost ’em.
Seriously, here’s the problem, poinsettias naturally grow as tall cane-like plants in the tropics. They require a lot of moisture and a lot of heat to look good and even then are tall and leggy. So to get one to grow you need a warm, sunny spot that doesn’t get hit by any heater air.
But once you’ve got that far it’s only half the battle because the plant will get tall and rangy, quite unlike the plant you were given. “Points” that are grown for the floral trade are “put to bed early” so they get very limited light to try to keep them low and compact and are often given chemicals to stunt their growth as well. Then several plants are often put into one pot to make the finished product big and bushy.
That compost pile is lookin’ better and better, huh?
My Dad, bless him, insisted he could grow a poinsettia in Southern California. He had one growing by the leaky faucet behind the garage. His theory was that the drippy faucet provided lots of moisture while it was hot where the two walls came together. Well, he did succeed, but, man, that plant was UGLEEE! A long, skinny thing that eked out a pathetic flower once a year. Nonetheless he persevered and that thing grew until one year the city mercifully repaved the alley behind the house.
So when is a flower not a flower? When it’s a poinsettia! The flowers on a poinsettia are actually little yellow fuzzies in the middle of the big “flower” that is actually a set of colored leaves called a bract.
Many showy flowers are actually bracts. The blooms on dogwood trees are bracts, the dazzling display put on by bougainvilleas are bracts — the actual flowers are tiny, white tubes. Perhaps the most famous bract is the calla lilly. The tiny flowers grow along the long central stem, whereas the large, white “flower” is a bract. The same is true of those waxy red anthuriums and Jack-in-the-pulpit.
A housekeeping note: A reader pointed out that she bought a small potted “stone pine” and that it has done well. She’s right. Some growers substitute Aleppo pines (Pinus halepensis) for Italian stone pines, and these trees are hardy here. They have shorter (about two-inch) needles and tend to be smallish, shrubby trees.
If you have time, now is a good time to dormant spray to prevent overwintering fungal diseases like peach leaf curl and apple scab. These are less of a problem in our dry climate than in more humid areas, but still worthwhile to keep trees clean. Most dormant sprays incorporate a light oil mixed with either sulfur, lime or copper. I prefer the copper sprays as they seem to last longer.
When using any of these follow the mixing directions very carefully and be sure the tree is fully dormant like now when the buds are tight and hard. Do it in the next couple of weeks and do not wait until February when some trees start to break dormancy. Using the wrong dilution or spraying when the tree isn’t fully dormant can kill it.
NEXT: I will do several articles on pruning.