 Hi, I'm Sheridan Hanson with USU Extension and I'm going to talk to you today about point set of plants. The point set is native to Central America and it wasn't until the 1820s that it was actually brought to the United States. And it was brought here by a gentleman named Joel Poinsett. He was the first US ambassador to Mexico and he went to Mexico and fell in love with this plant and sent propagation cuttings and small pieces of the plant back to a greenhouse in South Carolina where he propagated it. And spread it all over the United States. So the point set is a very easy plant to care for at Christmas and it's one of the most popular potted plants that we grow in the United States. How to care for it is it doesn't like a tremendous amount of water. So this one I just picked up and it had it was completely full of water in the bottom. So when you water these you want to wait until the soil dries down and then you're going to want to take this cover off. So usually come with these foil covers. Take that off. Put it in the sink or in the bathtub and give it a good soaking and allow it to completely drain down. You can keep these plants for years actually if you if you have a little bit of dedication and time. So after the holidays after this beautiful plant has bloomed you are going to take this plant and you're going to continue to water it until about April. And then you're going to let it get a little bit dry give it a kind of dormant period let it dry down just a little bit but not to where it will. And you can cut the stems down to about four inches in height. You're going to cut all of this all of this leaf material off and then you're going to give it some fertilizer and it will start to regrow. As it regrow you'll see some new shoots come off of it. So you'll want to pinch those so that you only have about three to four leaves on each one of those new stems that are shooting off. In September late September or early October you can take the plant and you want to put it in a dark closet and you'll do that from 8 p.m. No 5 p.m. to 8 a.m. You'll want to keep it in that closet for at least 12 to 14 hours at night. And any kind of light that it gets during that time will interrupt the bloom. So these beautiful leaves that you see on the plant that turn red or turn white they're not actually the flower they are the leaves. And the flower is this little yellow part inside the center of those leaves and these leaves are called bracks. After you start to see some new buds form on this plant after it has been in that closet for several weeks about six weeks so you can take it out, put it in normal light. And it will bloom again for you. So consider keeping these points that is year after year and if you're up for a challenge so if you can get them to re bloom. So happy holidays and thanks for watching.