Contents
You might have read a lot about aloe vera plant care tips at many websites and even watched videos on aloe vera plant care tips. Ever wondered, how to grow thick and fleshy aloe vera plant at home? Worried about your Aloe Vera Leaves? Growing thin and leggy? Well, In Today’s post, let’s look into 3 useful tips on how to grow thick and fleshy Aloe Vera leaves.
Introduction
In today’s post, we will quickly tell you 10 organic secrets to increase flowering in hibiscus trees whether you are growing them in pots or in the ground. These tips are really easy to follow, and you can maintain blooms in your hibiscus plant throughout the year.
Before we start, I always emphasize “organic gardening,” which uses natural and organic sources of fertilizers and pesticides. Please avoid using chemical fertilizers and pesticides to protect our mother earth from the hazards of chemicals. Now, let’s list out the 10 organic secrets and tips to boost flowering in hibiscus bushes.
10. Repotting
Most of us think repotting is the first and foremost task as soon as you bring your plant home from a nursery or a garden store. No! This is not true. Do not repot immediately. Allow your plant to settle down for at least one week in its new place and then consider repotting. During repotting, you need to mix some important ingredients into the potting mix. For a 12-inch pot, add roughly about 1 tablespoon of steamed bone meal powder, which is a great source of phosphorous. Phosphorous strengthens the root system, which is indispensable for flowering and plant growth. The vegan alternative to bone meal is organic rock phosphate. Optionally, you can also mix mycorrhizae fungi – the beneficial fungi or even pseudomonas and Trichoderma powder. You can check my detailed posts on these topics from HERE.
9. Container Size
A simple concept to remember while choosing your pot size is: if you choose a deeper container, the plant will start focusing more on root development due to increased soil space and less on flower production. Though this may be useful in the long run, to get faster results and boost flowering, the best choice is a container that is wider than the usual nursery pot, but still not too deep. For instance, if your plant came in a 6-inch container, go for an 8-inch container. If you choose this method, you might need to repot it every year in a graded manner, like increasing 2 inches every time you repot.
8. Location
Keep your plants away from traffic and pollution. Dust accumulating on the leaves can impair photosynthesis – that’s plant food production, which in turn reduces plant growth and flowering. It can also reduce flower size. To get big-sized flowers, mist the plant with water and clean the leaves with a soft cloth if you cannot shift the plant to a better location. If you have many plants, using your watering hose in shower mode to gently pressure wash your plants while watering is an effective solution.
7. Sunlight
Place your plant in a location where it gets adequate direct sunlight. Hibiscus needs at least 6 to 8 hours of direct sunlight for proper flowering. Without direct sun, you cannot expect hibiscus to flower. If it’s too hot in the summer, install a 50% green shade net to protect it from the noon sunlight, which can sometimes cause leaf burning and drying.
6. Watering
If you are growing in containers, daily watering is a must, especially in the summer. Here, you don’t need to check using a moisture meter or the finger dip method; just water daily and deeply. In the winter, it may need less frequent watering depending on the zone you live in. One important thing to check is the drainage hole of your container. Ensure water flows out of it after you thoroughly water your plant. Water stagnation can result in root rot and death of your plant. Do not worry about overwatering if you have a patent drainage hole and use a well-draining soil mix. We will discuss the potting mix shortly.
5. Pest Control
Controlling pests is a very important step to keep the plant healthy and blooming. Examine the plant closely for pests and insects, including the underside of the leaves. Common pests like whiteflies, aphids, and mealybugs can be easily eliminated using an organic neem oil + liquid soap spray weekly. Depending on the ppm concentration of your neem oil brand, add 5 to 10 ml of neem oil per liter of water and a few drops of liquid soap. Shake well and spray this once every week to treat pests and once every 15 days as a preventive measure.
4. Raking or Tilling the Soil
This is just loosening your topsoil using a raking or tilling tool. This is an important step everyone must follow before applying any fertilizer or manure to your plant. Raking or tilling the soil is recommended once every 15 days, which improves soil aeration and has many benefits. Make it a habit to rake the soil and then apply your fertilizer every 15 days.
3. Potting Soil
Here, you should remember a few important factors like:
a) Soil pH
b) Things to mix in potting soil to get more flowers
c) Keeping the soil well-draining.
Hibiscus prefers slightly acidic soil, around 6.0 +/-0.5. If you have a pH testing meter, you can alter the soil pH to acidic by using the alum powder hack. Even if you do not have this meter and your plant is not performing well, you can roughly add about 5 gms of alum powder in one liter of water once every 15 days to maintain this acidic level, which is very important for nutrient absorption in the soil. The other alternative to alum is to use 1–2 teaspoons of white vinegar per liter of water weekly to make your soil acidic.
Now the potting mix recipe. To get adequate flowering, follow a simple formula: 30% garden soil, 30% compost like cow dung or vermicompost, and 30% cocopeat or peat moss. Add 10% additional stuff like bone meal powder, neem cake powder, mycorrhizae, Trichoderma, etc., as discussed earlier.
2. Fertilizer
In this video, I will be talking only about organic fertilizers and not chemicals like NPK or DAP.
Add a handful of decomposed cow dung or horse dung or even goat dung or vermicompost to the top layer of the soil once every 15 days after nicely raking or tilling the topsoil. This should be the minimum fertilizer use and frequency to get big-sized flowers as well as increase flowering. For even better results, you can also use compost tea sprays or mustard cake tea sprays or watering and other foliar feeds once a month. You can also prepare a Cocktail Fertilizer Powder containing most of the useful organic fertilizers available. You can check a detailed post on how to prepare this mixed fertilizer powder.
1. Pruning
Yes, this is another important step that many of us neglect. Some newbie gardeners actually hesitate to trim the plants, but this should not be the case. Pruning or trimming the plant branches encourages the formation of more branches and hence more flowering. You can soft prune or trim the plant all year round. Perform hard pruning once a year. Check out a detailed post on pruning tutorials, including when to prune, how to prune, and what pruning tools you need. Additionally, perform deadheading of the flowers from time to time. Deadheading means removing the dead and dried flower along with its twig or branch, which diverts the energy to plant growth and more flowering rather than seed formation.
If you want to know the complete care tips for aloe vera plant like fertilizer, pot selection and other useful points, you can check my detailed post on aloe vera care tips.
Please Watch this video on Aloe Vera plant care tips to grow thick leaves in aloe vera.
