When to Fertilize Christmas Cactus?

While most flowering plants need tender love and care, cacti thrive off neglect. Schlumbergera, Christmas or holiday cactus, is a group of a handful of cacti flowering in the winter.

There’s no need to miss flowers in fall or winter. The best thing about Christmas cacti is you can plant them indoors. To ensure maximum flowering, fertilizing them correctly is important.

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More About Christmas Cactus

Before we jump into how to care for and fertilize a Christmas Cactus, it’s important to know a bit more about it.

Unlike most cactus plants, Christmas Cacti come from a tropical rainforest instead of an arid desert.

They are epiphytic or epilithic plants, meaning they grow on trees or rocks instead of in soil. That means that they need more water than ordinary cacti.

Fertilizing a Christmas Cactus

It’s best to use a liquid cactus fertilizer for your Christmas cactus. You can dilute it with water and add it during a watering session.

This practice will ensure the soil absorbs nutrition uniformly, which means that all the roots pick up some nutrients.

The fertilizer should have a one-to-one nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous ratio. Something with a 10-10-10 N-P-K ratio will do.

When to Fertilize Christmas Cactus

There is a growing season and a flowering season. You need to fertilize the plant more often in the growing season and less often during the flowering season.

That sounds counterintuitive, we know. Let’s explain.

The growing season lasts throughout spring and summer, and the flowering season begins in late fall or winter.

When we fertilize the plant more in the growing season, it helps it grow in size and store energy for blooming.

The plant naturally gets less food in the winter, which triggers its flowering.

Fertilizing it too much or at all during fall or winter may trigger the flower buds to fall off.

While plants that flower in their growing season need more fertilizer to support the blooms, Christmas Cacti flower during their dormant season. That means over-fertilization is a huge issue to avoid.

How Much to Fertilize a Christmas Cactus

While the Christmas cactus needs more watering and fertilization than other succulents, we shouldn’t go overboard. Here’s how much you should fertilize it.

During the Growing Season:

The growing season for holiday cacti, including Christmas and Easter cacti, is during the summer. During the growing season, they go all out to ensure they make the most of it.

Ensure they get more indirect sunlight. Direct sunlight will burn its leaves. Check the soil every two to three weeks to see if the top third is dry or the leaves are slightly droopy.

You can fertilize the Christmas cactus every two to three weeks or each watering. This is why liquid fertilizer is the best option, as it can be seamlessly added to your plant care routine.

Flowering Season

Once fall begins, you can opt to fertilize your Christmas cactus once a month or even not at all. It should have accumulated plenty of nutrients if you’ve been caring for your holiday succulent throughout the growing season. It will use these nutrients to form flowers.

It’s alright to fertilize it once every one or two months. However, some wouldn’t risk their flowers being delayed or the flower buds falling off.

How to Make the Most of Fertilizing Your Christmas Cactus?

Fertilizing your Christmas Cactus can help you enjoy brilliant blooms during the holiday season. If done right, you have a festive plant that will last decades.

However, if you don’t fulfill your plant’s other basic needs, you set yourself up for failure.

Here are some things you can do to ensure you make the most of fertilizing your Christmas Cactus.

Don’t Over or Under Water

The roots will not be healthy if you over or underwater your plant. That will waste your attempts to fertilize your Christmas Cactus.

Overwatering causes root rot, which prevents the roots from picking up the nutrients added to the soil. If you underwater the plant and fertilize it anyway, the salts and nutrients will pile up and oversaturate the soil. That will burn the roots.

Light Cycle

Flowering plants need the right amount of daylight and darkness stimulation. That means they need to get a specific amount of uninterrupted indirect sunlight or artificial light and then a particular amount of uninterrupted darkness.

This is known as the light cycle of the Christmas Cactus. For the best chance at flowering, the succulent needs an even twelve hours of light and twelve hours of darkness. If you have short or long days, you can attempt to use a grow light or put your plant in a dark room to achieve this.

If your plant doesn’t experience the correct light cycle, it may not flower robustly. That means all your hard work fertilizing it goes to waste.

Conclusion

To conclude, you can fertilize your once every two or three weeks or at each watering if it is that infrequent during the summer.

However, you can stop or drastically reduce this once fall begins. That is when the plant is dormant, and you risk the flower buds falling off. Good luck fertilizing your Christmas Cactus. They’re a great houseplant and an even better gift.