Summer's For Foliage, Winter's For Flowers
It's Thanksgiving cactus season!
I love flowers, but I prefer foliage. I have a Click & Grow full of petunias, and a front garden full of wildflowers, but indoors it’s basically just leaves. Except for the orchid, which I bought for an article and then fell in love with.
Foliage is just easier. Plants need leaves, but they expect us to do the work when it comes to flowers. They either want bright light for 25 hours a day, a specific mix of fertiliser, or to be so stressed they think they’re gonna die (but not actually die).
It’s hard enough keeping them watered, I’m not prepared to go to the trouble of working out what every single one of my 100+ plants wants in exchange for a bloom.
Especially if it’s just gonna give me something like this:
This is a Monstera flower. No ta. It looks like it could eat and digest me fully in half an hour.
ANYWAY
Despite this, I still fall under the spell of the humble Thanksgiving cactus.
They’re STUNNING and, crucially, being sold in every garden centre and supermarket in the UK for about a fiver. Nice.
They are, by the way, Thanksgiving cacti. They’re just labelled as Christmas cacti because we don’t have Thanksgiving here.
Proper Christmas cacti have pretty much been hunted to extinction and there are very few left.
So, whilst all my foliage plants look a bit sad and cold this time of year, my Thanksgiving cactus is looking incredible:
I won’t lie, for every bloom I have there are two dropped buds, BUT you can only seem to buy them in October, already covered in buds. Schlumbergera famously hate being moved when they have buds, so every flower that opens was a bonus in my book.
Looook:
Stunning. They’re shaped that way so that hummingbirds can pollinate them. Sadly lacking in the UK, I’m afraid.
If you treat Thanksgiving cacti well they bloom year after year. And I mean year after year - they’re one of those plants that people pass down from generation to generation and 100-year-old specimens pop up all the time.
You can’t treat them like a regular cactus - I kind of treat them more like a Hoya when it comes to things like watering and soil mix. They’re both epiphytes with succulent leaves, so it works pretty well.
However, whereas Hoya like a couple of months of firm neglect to promote blooming, Schlumbergera like the dark. 14 hours of darkness per day is perfect.
Each to their own! They also like a drop in temperature, like other cacti and orchids, but I’ve found that the UK climate can take care of that aspect for me. To be honest, the light/dark thing doesn’t need much help from me - only the brightest spots in my house get more than 8 hours of daylight this time of year.
Just be aware that Thanksgiving Cacti will drop their buds at the slightest provocation. I get that they’re sold when they’re in bud because that’s when people want to buy them but it’s literally the worst time to move them. I wrapped mine in paper and ran to the car.
If you would like more information on Thanksgiving Cacti, I’ve recently updated my article on them:
Black Friday Deals
I don’t have any. I hate it. The deals are mediocre and it takes SO LONG to check out online. I cba.
Black Friday is pretty new to the UK (because, again, we don’t have Thanksgiving) and we managed to ruin it in about five years. To 99% of us, it’s just a normal day aside from the fact you can’t buy anything online without it taking an hour to check out.
This Week’s Video
The results of the latest polls suggested that you wanted more peace lily content, and more watering content. So I did a video on watering peace lilies. There’s upcoming vids on watering tips for beginners and Thanksgiving cactus care, so subscribe to my YouTube channel so you don’t miss them.
Or, you know, click through from these emails.
I love filming videos, but I’m terrible at it. I keep on keeping on though! I’m an incredibly slow learner, but i’ll get there in the end.
If you have any specific video content you’d like to see, leave me a comment.
This AI website
If you weren’t aware, Google has had a massive shake-up, and a lot of websites got hit, including Planet Houseplant. At the same time as my bathroom leaked and needed completely gutting. It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine. I don’t even need a bathroom (cry cry cry).
I’m not jut after sympathy - there’s a funny story to come.
My mum also runs a website (my dad’s an artist, so she makes greeting cards from his pictures) and she was doing some research and came across this website.
It’s all AI. Including the images.
This is NOT what a Spiritus Sancti looks like.
They also have a whole set of care guides of ‘mini’, ‘dwarf’, and ‘compacta’ varieties, which it ranks high for because people love small plants. They fail to mention that these plants don’t exist.
Solid marketing technique, but…come on.
Well, I think that’s it for this week! Have an awesome one, and I’ll see you soon.
Caroline