 Good afternoon again, Mary Christmas again. This is going to be part two of Point Set of Care and Culture for you growers who want to continue growing these guys after the holidays. If you're the kind of person that just buys them, uses them for decoration and throws them out, I just made a video on seasonal care for them. It gives you sort of the household care and culture, but what happens after the season is over? We get through winter. This is still sitting on your your table or on your window. And it is a plant so of course it's going to be growing. It's got roots and everything else. It's not a cutting. So what do we do with this after the holidays are over? Well, believe it or not, Point Set is although they are a Christmas plant, they're native to Mexico. So they are a tropical plant. Not necessarily the deep hot, swell tree jungles you would think of as a tropical plant, but they are native to warmer climates. And of course now they are found throughout the world. And I've actually seen these guys growing as well. When I was in Indonesia, these guys were growing wild on the side of the road. So they've been introduced over there as well. They look very, very different as a wild plant. And I noticed, and I'm just going to remove this now, when camera was off, I had a broken piece. So it's starting to wilt. It must have broken in shipping or on the way home, but anyways, I think what I'll do is I'm going to do a part three and we're going to make a cutting of this after. So if you want to learn how to propagate Point Set is stay tuned for part three of Point Set of Care. So we are going to go into the full care for the whole year. Now I'm no expert on Point Set is I've had them lots for the holidays. I managed to keep them just fine. So I'm going to try to grow these in the greenhouse all year now. We'll see how they go and we'll see we'll do some updates on them as well. But come springtime if you are a house grower and you don't have a greenhouse like I do. Then if you live in zones nine or warmer, you can probably put these directly in the ground. As long as there is no chance of frost, they're going to be fine outside. So keep that in mind. They are fairly hardy and they will tolerate a big temperature range. The other thing is come spring. You can either keep it in the pot or put it in the ground. And we're going to kind of parallel both methods of care. They're both going to be very similar. But so we're going to throw this outside and we want to put it in a spot come spring where it receives intense morning sun and then is shaded by afternoon sun, especially as we get further into the season and get closer to summer as the heat intensity amplifies. We want to keep these guys a little bit more shaded from that very hot hot sun. When I seen them growing in the wild, they were growing on slopes and they were semi shaded. There was lots of other trees around. I don't remember if it was a north slope or a south slope or what kind of slope it was. But I do remember seeing lots of them. Fortunately, I was on vacation and I wasn't taking any culture notes on these guys. Another thing to note, unless you trim them back after, the ones that grow wild look very spindly. They do form into big, large bushes. I'm sure that some of them, if I remember incorrectly, were 10, 12 feet tall. But there wasn't a whole lot to them. They weren't a nice bushy plant like this. As they grow, we're going to let them grow all summer long and get them as big as we possibly can. They just grow in a normal soil. This is sort of a PT mix. It doesn't look like it's very nutrient rich. This is to maintain them for the holiday season. It is not necessarily to grow them in the summertime. So you're going to want to get them out of this mix or at least put some slow release fertilizer in the pot as well as make sure you're doing a weekly, weekly fertilization method to get some nutrients to these guys to make sure they're growing. We are going to have them grow outside all summer long. They're going to love it and they're going to get nice and big. From here, we're going to start thinking about how the heck do we get these to re-bloom to look like this or like this? I don't know if you noticed this one over here. Here's my red with white. I'm just holding the red one because I tend to like the red better. That's why I'm holding the red one. I'm hoping it's going to double or triple in size by that point. Then we are going to have to start thinking about how to actually induce brachs that are colorful before the bloom start. What's good is by this time in the summer, these brachs are going to be gone. There's going to be no red on this. It's going to be a green plant. Solid green plant, you'll barely recognize that it is what it is now. You're not going to recognize it as a point set of, not very easily. Here's where I have read about it, but I haven't actually done it myself. We're going to hopefully do this together. After they're growing outside, come fall, come September, come up tober. When it starts to get cooler weather, in my area, I'm going to dig it up if it's in the ground or if it's in a pot and it's outside, I'm going to bring it back in. It's going to get a little bit of a chill because it doesn't like to be hot all the time. It needs that fall winter chill. And in the cool days of fall is when you want to start inducing the colorful brachs on this. And here's a tricky part and I am not sure how we're going to pull it off yet or how you guys are going to pull it off. We need to give these guys about eight hours of bright sunshine a day and then the rest of the time need to be pitch black. So from five o'clock in the evening to eight o'clock in the morning, these guys need to be in total darkness. What I've read, even just the light coming in from under the door, is enough to not make these guys change color. So we basically need to put them in a closet. We need to put them in a box, something that gives them 100% pitch black. And we're going to do that for 16 hours a day. Pitch black. And after a few weeks, a few months of that, we are going to start to see this. Now keep in mind, it's not pitch black all the time. The eight hours of day is cool and bright. So it works out perfect that we're doing this in the fall because we have cool weather, depending on where you live, a sunny window may be enough if you're bright or here on the west coast, it may not be enough. They mean they may need a sunny window with some light over them to make sure they're cool and bright. Kind of like growing a symbiotium in the fall, you want to give them nice cool bright temperatures, but unlike a symbiotium, in the fall, these guys need it to be pitch black after eight hours. So that's going to be the tricky part. Then we pull them out after let's say October, November, we pull them up for December, and hopefully they are going to have colorful bracks and buds starting to form. I don't know the full details of that because I have not got to that point, but that is how it is. Now if it has grown massive and it's much bigger than you would like it to be, ideally what you can do at that point is do some trimming before you put it away for the winter. What that's going to do is stimulate some offshoots and the offshoots are going to be the bracks that become colorful. So unless you have a nice bushy plant as it is, I would give it a trim before you start doing that that night-day cycle. Temperatures should be for the night time. In the winter time while you're trying to form these colorful bracks, about 55 Fahrenheit or 13 Celsius up to about 60 Fahrenheit or 15 Celsius. But yeah, so give them that good trim, good hard trim, cut them back, make them nice and bushy again and hopefully they grow back. Nice and colorful for you. Or if you don't want to do all that work, these guys are 699 at Walmart. So it really depends on what's important to you. I think I would try it just for the challenge and to be able to say that I have done it once. I can't say the term I would want to grow these forever like that. It sounds like it could be a whole lot of work for a plant that's not worth a whole lot of money. But still as gardeners, we like the challenge right, we think it's fun. We do different little projects and so this might be this year's project. I'm getting this point set up to re-bloom in a nice color for Christmas next year. But anyways, I think what we're going to do now is I am going to stop the camera in a minute and do a part 3 video and I'm going to work with this little one here. Now I it's not the exactly the time of year to be making cuttings. The perfect time would be in the late summer, early fall, just before you put that away, you're going to trim it all up and that's when you're going to make your cuttings because then you're going to have a whole bunch of little pieces like this anyways and I'm going to teach you how to root one and we'll go from there. So anyways, I hope you like this video and if you want to see more videos like this, make sure you subscribe to my channel and make sure you check out part 3 of how to grow point setters over the course of, well this was part 2 how to grow point setters over the course of the year. Part 3 is going to be how to propagate point setters. So the other thing I'm going to do just while we're off camera there is make sure that these guys get holes cut in the bottom of here so that when I water them, they can drain out properly. But anyways, that is it for this video and we will see you for part 3. Bye guys!