Or you can do what Bonnie Slinkosky does, which is pretty much nothing. The poinsettia plant that Slinkosky keeps in the window of her workplace, Riffle's Hair Nook No. 5 in Springfield Township, has thrived and re-bloomed each of the last two Christmases without any particular help from its keeper. Sure, she waters and fertilizes it and has repotted it a couple of times, but that's about the extent of her care. She's thinking she may need to cut the plant back. Slinkosky says the plant retains its red bracts nearly year-round until dropping them in November.
New blooms appear about a month later, just in time for the holiday.
All of this happens without any particular pampering. She even knocked the poinsettia off the window sill once and caused most of the dirt to fall out of the pot, but the plant survived. Dale Bradshaw, greenhouse superintendent at Ohio State University's Agricultural Technical Institute in Wooster, says newer poinsettia cultivars that bloom earlier in the year are making it easier for people to succeed at saving their plants and getting them to re-bloom. Still, he doesn't bother. Find sunny window Saving a poinsettia isn't especially difficult, Bradshaw says, but the problem is the plant requires a certain amount of both daylight and darkness in the fall to develop colored bracts, or blooms.