Let’s explore common Mistakes that Stop a Christmas Cactus from Blooming and find solutions to help your flowering succulent revive and thrive!
This winter stunner with cascading foliage and fragrant white-to-red blooms sometimes underperforms without proper care. Let’s examine the mistakes that stop a Christmas Cactus from blooming and fix them so you have lovely flowers by the holidays!
Mistakes that Stop Christmas Cactus from Blooming
1. Precise Amount of Light
Here’s the most common mistake that stops your Christmas cactus from blooming! Too much sunshine and the flower buds will die; too little, and you’ll have a leggy cactus with no blooms. So, exactly how much light does your Schlumbergera need to produce blooms?
The Christmas cactus needs 6-7 hours of dappled sunshine in spring and summer and about 8-10 hours in fall so that you can enjoy its much-awaited scented blooms in winter!
Keep the plant ideally by an east-facing window that receives nice morning light or even a bright north or west-facing window is fine. However, avoid south-facing windows that receive direct light for long hours unless you keep it a few feet away from the constant sun! You should also keep it in the dark!
2. Keep it in the Dark
Another reason your plant may not bloom is that it hasn’t had its dose of darkness! This short-day plant needs a good dormancy phase—about 12-14 hours of darkness daily for 6-8 weeks—to relax and trigger flowering.
Keep it in absolute darkness from 6 pm to at least 6 am, and blacken out the room with blinds so there isn’t even a trickle of light! Ideally done between September and November, the plant needs less water, no fertilizers, and lots of coolness in this phase.
And once the buds form, you can move it to a brighter location!
3. Pruning the Wrong Way
No heavy pruning and no fall pruning! Remember this, and your Christmas cactus will be fine. Cut where the flattened, leaf-like segments meet, and stick to the tender, green bits, avoiding where it’s woody.
And timing is everything! Prune during spring and summer to get your plant ready for holiday time. If you prune too late, you might remove or harm potential buds, which in turn will lead to fewer or no blooms. And here are a few steps to take a month after it blooms.
4. Fluctuating Temperatures
Native to Brazil’s humid rainforests, this epiphytic succulent loves stability and consistency, unlike its typical desert-dwelling cacti cousins that thrive in extremes! Sudden cold drafts, extreme highs or dips, or shocking fluctuations are a big no for blooms.
This mistake of sudden temperature drops or hikes can fully stress the plant into producing no blooms! So, maintain a balanced range of 65-75 F (18-24 C) during the day and about 50-65 F (10-18 C) at night, and your Christmas cactus will flower abundantly.
5. Poor Watering Habit
A consistent watering schedule that keeps the soil slightly moist but never soggy is perfect for the Christmas cactus. The plant needs ample hydration during its growing season, around spring and summer, but it should never be consistently moist.
Cut back on watering in autumn as the plant is prepping for dormancy. If your Christmas cactus is exposed to overly wet soil during this rest phase, it can lead to root rot and affect flowering and overall health.
6. Keep it Humid
While your Christmas cactus will not appreciate wet feet, it does need ample humidity, especially to survive dry winter months. To successfully mimic the conditions of its native muggy rainforest habitat, place the pot in a tray of water and pebbles.
If you can’t be bothered with all that, you can also use a humidifier. Either of these will help create humidity around the plant as water evaporates. You could also create a cozy microclimate by placing plants with similar needs around your Christmas cactus.
7. Wrong Soil Mix
The next mistake that stops your Christmas cactus from blooming is the wrong medium! Avoid using a heavy potting mix, garden, or clay soil while growing it in pots. The weight and moisture of these types of soil can suffocate the roots and affect your plant’s blooms.
Instead, go for a loose, free-draining mix perfect for succulents, such as these recipes. You can also improve soil drainage and aeration by adding sand or perlite.
8. Lack of Proper Feeding
This plant needs no feed after the buds appear from mid-fall until winter. However, a half-strength, water-soluble, phosphorous-rich fertilizer every 3-4 weeks from early spring can be started and continued until summer and early fall. This will help it produce better blooms in winter!
Here are Christmas cactus fertilizers you can check out, along with instructions on how to feed them. And remember, if you feed it at the wrong time—when it’s dormant—salt will build up in the soil, leading to root burn and scarce flowering.
9. Growing in an Overly Large Pot
The final mistake is the wrong pot size. An overly large pot does more harm than you can imagine. It causes water to collect in the soil, keeping the medium cold and damp, leading to root rot. In all this flooded chaos, you can forget all about blooms!
And we know this plant has shallow roots and doesn’t need the added work of meandering through layers in search of moisture and nutrients! It likes to be slightly pot-bound, so the ideal pot should be 1-2 inches larger than the root ball. And repot only when the roots outgrow the current container.
