Hi, folks! I volunteer at the local Botanical Gardens' nursery. A couple of weeks ago, someone was moving away, and gave us a number of terribly overgrown Crown of Thorns plants. One of the plants in a small pot was over six feet long, one stem laying on the ground!! I don't know how it was grown, maybe on a deck or patio. It had maybe six leaves at the top, and some nice red flowers more than an inch across.
Well,,,,,, when I was not there, others decided to make cuttings. Chopped all the plants into six-to-eight inch pieces. Laid them out side by side in trays, lots of cuttings. Maybe 60 or 70 cuttings I shifted them into pots, no soil, just the cuttings. Didn't seem right to me, but then I've never owned a Crown of Thorns.
Yesterday, two volunteers were potting them individually, in clay-dirt with sand added to it. (UGH!!!) I went over to meddle, and started cutting a cutting into bits, it was rotted. More and more were rotten. The lady doing the potting couldn't tell a mushy rotted cutting! She was packing the dirt, then watering the pot well. Oh, my. Such a nice lady, but not she didn't seem to be awake,,, or something.
I did say I know nothing about this kind of plant, but I knew somehow that something was terribly wrong. I went back to what I was doing, but they called me to tell them which cuttings weren't rotted. sigh
Can I get a few short comments about how to go about handling these plants-- in the future!
Thanks in advance, signed, an Adenium lover
