I have vivid memories of Poinsettias as a kid. Here in Zone 10 they grow like wildfire and can reach 15 feet tall and then some. People used to grow them in their yards and harvest the blooms to bring indoors for the holidays.
Back then (in the '60's) they didn't mass produce/grow them in the quantity they do now.
For years my mother was the head of the Altar Society at our church. She would put out an appeal to the parishioners to "donate" any blooms they had to offer...then we would drive to peoples houses to harvest them.
This all sounds well and good except for the fact that we had to pack the station wagon (remember THOSE ? LOL ) full of stock pots full of boiling water (hard to do if ya think about it...) and then rush to peoples houses, cut the blooms and plunge them into the boiling water so they wouldn't wilt. We had water boiling in huge stock pots on our stove for days on end. (When we would watch tv and some woman was in the throes of labor, some character in the story would always yell "Mother is in labor. Go boil LOTS of water". I naturally assumed that poinsettias and childbirth were intricately linked.
Yours truly had the honor/priveledge of getting to stand on ladders, cut the blooms, get that white milky sap dripping all over me, in my hair, in my eyes, all over my clothes, etc. and then into the station wagon they'd go. Then we'd go back to our house, boil MORE water and start the entire process all over again for Round 2 at the east end of the city. Forgot to mention that my 60 lb. Black Lab got to come along for the fun....ok, maybe that wasn't such a good idea.
Invariably, a stock pot or two (or 5 or 6) would tip over on the way home and we'd have water all over the inside of the car and sap everywhere as well.
This "ritual" was an ALL DAY ordeal but was actually the "new and improved" method of harvesting the *%&# things...prior to the boiling water method we would hold EACH stem over a flame to seal the ends of the stems to keep them from wilting. Talk about time consuming !
This is when it really became "fun" (term used in the loosest sense): After the numerous vessels of water cooled off, we got to shlepp them up to the church so the ladies could arrange them in vases. There were always X number of blooms that wilted regardless, so they had to be re-cut, placed in a NEW container of boiling water, and hopefully they'd recover. It always amazed me how you could take a wilted poinsettia bloom, put it in boiling water, and it would REVIVE. Nuclear physics is easier to comprehend than that.
Because I was such an obedient and naive kid, I was then assigned the task of cutting up wire coat hangers (hundreds of them) so they could be used to keep the stems erect and in place so the women could do their thing with their flower arrangments. Clearly this was exploitation of child labor. I realize the statute of limitations for crimes of this nature has expired, but.............
So.......in answer to the question of this thread, NO. I never get within a mile of a poinsettia...potted or not. LOL
Yes, they're pretty, but.......I'm all for the fake ones at this point in my life.
