wrote in message
...
My mother in law has a Christmas Cactus in full bloom.
It flowered really well at Christmas and it is even better now. What has
she
done wrong/right.?
Tom Atkinson


I have a bunch of Christmas cacti, all different colours and they all flower
in November/December, and then again in March/April/May depending on the
weather (and therefore the light conditions). The only things that I do are
feed regularly when the plant starts to bud, and then I stop watering when
the flowers start to fade until the last one has fallen off. Then back to
normal watering with an occasional feed. So I get two flowering seasons and
then there is a leaf producing season in the other 'third' of the year
(summer). The old way of treating these plants was to starve them of food
and water for most of the year, which seems wrong to me as I think that they
are epiphytes (not cactus) and would have plenty of water in the tree
canopies.