How to Kill Poinsettia Plants

Green Gardening with Betty Earl

Archive for the 'poinsettia' Category

How to Kill Poinsettia Plants

Tuesday, September 19^th, 2006

Every year when I do my Christmas shopping I see there's way too many poinsettia around and I'm getting really, really tired of them.

You can't seem to move in any store for all these darn points, their red bracts 
providing a flame of bah-humbug Christmas cheer.No doubt many of you will be given 
one by some misguided friend, in the mistaken belief that this is a nice plant for a 
Christmas gardener.  Some of you might even purchase one in the belief that plants  belong in our homes.

What folly.

What follows is a few suggestions for killing the plant in a way that can leave you blameless and your reputation as a summer gardener intact.

To begin with, put this scarlet plant in a draft or other really cold place. After all, its a tropical shrub and cold temperatures are a great way to make it drop its leaves. Anything less than 62 degrees will do nicely, especially if you can arrange for it to get drafts from an open door. Once the leaves begin dropping, they will continue to do so until none remain; the plant can be thrown away without guilt at any time after half the leaves have fallen.

If you don't have a really cold place, try overwatering the poinsettia. As a native of Mexico, this plat is not a swamp lover so if you water it almost every day and keep the soil really wet, you'll find it will begin dropping its leaves within a week or so. It might take up to a month to totally die using this system of overwatering, so make sure you don't feed the plant any houseplant food in the water.

Feeding will only keep the plant alive a few weeks longer. Houseplant food is to be avoided at all costs as it will assist the plant to keep the bracts growing and flowers expanding. If you always feed your summer garden plants you don't want to get a reputation for ignoring or disliking the poinsettia, try overfeeding or underfeeding your poinsettia.

Use the plant food at either half strength of at full strength plus a bit, in this way, the plant will either be starved to death slowly or poisoned with too much feed. Underfeeding will keep your plant alive for a bit longer while overfeeding is a sure way to fast death. It all depends on how quickly you want to get rid of this over used harbinger of Christmas gardening.

If you don't like over-watering plants because it takes too much time, try ignoring this plant and allow it to dry out completely. This is a sure way to knock the leaves off in a hurry. You see, in a greenhouse the plant is kept damp but not dry or over-watered; as soon as the soil is just dry to the touch, the plant is given water. If you don't give it water when it needs it, you can get rid of it a lot sooner.

Also try putting the pot over a heat register where the hot, dry air from the furnace will really speed up the drying out process. Combining a lack of water with a heat register is a sure way to success and to increasing the size of your compost pile.

Often poinsettia are found all bundled up in the store in their plant sleeves. These plastic or paper funnels are put on in the shipping greenhouse to prevent stalk breakage while the plant is being moved about. If the plant stays in this sleeve for over 24 hours, the ethylene gas produced by the plant will cause the leaves to begin falling off. This means you should purchase plants with sleeves that have been sitting on a shelf in a store; they'll last much less time in your house.

Alternately, if you get them home safely, let them sit overnight in the sleeve to ensure they get a good dose of ethylene.

The clever gardener won't really need all the above directions because they'll manage to start the plant on the slippery road to the compost pile while on the way home from the store. In this way, they can't be blamed for its death, rather the responsibility for death can be passed backwards to the retailer.

Just take your poinsettia plant out to a cold, unheated car sitting in a parking lot, the plant will definitely get chilled with the resulting leaf drop only a few hours away.

Alternately, if you can pick up the poinsettia and then manage to make a few more shopping stops, leaving the poinsettia in the car to cool down several times during the course of the day, you'll also get the desired leaf drop within hours of getting home.

Its really not hard to get rid of poinsettia plants, it simply takes a bit of attention to the details. I hope you'll join me this December or January and together we can kill as many of these pot bound spring pretenders as possible.