Coleus in October in Arizona

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Coleus are beautiful and amazing plants. Unfortunately, they usually look their best on the day that you buy them, and then proceed to look worse and worse in the garden. I call this depressing phenomenon "watching a plant die slowly". Not pleasant.

But the plants in the picture, which have been in the ground since early spring, are looking good in October. Of course, when the real cold nights hit in December and January, they will die, but in the meantime I am getting a nice show. This is how I did it -

I started with one small plant that I got at Summer Winds Nursery up on Bell Road. There is no sense in buying coleus - if they grow, they will grow fast. If they don't grow, well, you've just wasted more money. As soon as it was established, I noticed that it started doing what all coleus plants do, getting "leggy", that is losing the fullness and showing too much of the stems. So I created clones.

Each time I trimmed off some growth that was getting spindly, I trimmed off most of the leaves, dipped the bottom of the stem in rooting hormone, and planted it right nearby. Used an ordinary pencil to create the planting hole. After a couple of days the new little plants would either get growing, or die. I would say that the survival rate of the clones was about 80%, but I am always optimistic.

So what you are seeing here is a whole bunch of small plants that were cuttings taken from the original. So instead of just watching a plant die, I was able to fill in the space very nicely with lots of new plants - all free. This is a good trick, and it only took me twenty years to figure it out! I will have to do this again next season.

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