The Christmas cactus sits among a select few popular plants bloom in winter.
These attractive and rather bizarre plants are one of three known as the “holiday cacti” because they bloom around specific American holidays.
They also have an unusual design where the stems and leaves are the same (known as cladodes).
As a Christmas cactus only blooms once per year during a specific window, you’ll want to make sure it gets the best possible care/
Thankfully, its beads are pretty basic, and one of the easier yet most important aspects is proper feeding.
Best Fertilizers For Christmas Cactus
While we could just rattle off a few products, it’s more important to get into some detail of what is specifically needed.
Not only does this help people who wish to use homemade fertilizers, but it also allows you to rule out one of the most common reasons a Christmas cactus fails to bloom.
Important: Know Your Holiday Cactus!
The single biggest reason a Christmas cactus fails to bloom isn’t actually related to malnutrition.
In actuality, the three-holiday cacti are often confused for one another, resulting in sellers providing you with the wrong cactus.
So before you accidentally overfeed your plant thinking it’s not getting enough, look at the plant to determine if it is who you think it is.
The good news is that the cladodes of the three-holiday cacti are easy to tell apart once you know what to look for:
- Christmas Cactus (Schlumbergera x buckleyi) can be identified by its flat, scalloped teardrop-shaped leaves.
- Easter cactus (Schlumbergera gaertneri) originally belonged to the genus Hatiora and has curved, scalloped cladodes.
- Thanksgiving cactus (Schlumbergera truncata), meanwhile, lacks the scalloping and instead has spiny edges.
Again, getting the wrong species is the single most common reason for a Christmas cactus to fail to bloom, and it’s not unusual for a grower to overfeed the plant while thinking it isn’t getting enough nutrition when it doesn’t bud on time.
Timing Means Everything
Speaking of timing and feeding, you actually DO NOT want to feed your Christmas cactus when it blooms.
Instead, it should be fertilized from April to late September or early October.
This might sound peculiar, but the cactus blooms based on environmental factors, so you actually NEED to emulate winter for it to bloom.
This means less light, lower temperatures, and (of course) fewer available resources.
The Basic Fertilizer Necessity
Being a cactus, this plant doesn’t require a lot of feeding.
A balanced liquid houseplant fertilizer diluted by half (or according to the package instructions) given once every 2 to 4 weeks works best.
We recommend Miracle-Gro, which is not only one of the best fertilizer brands for those on a budget but also one of the easiest and most efficient to use.
For those who wish to use organic compost, add only 1 to 2 tablespoons and spread it evenly on the soil surface, making sure not to come into contact with the plant.
A safety buffer measuring 2 to 3 inches from the plant is usually advisable if the pot is large enough.
Avoid using slow-release fertilizers, as nutrients dissolve at different rates, resulting in malnourishment.
Nutritional Supplements
As mentioned, your Christmas cactus doesn’t need much to thrive, but magnesium deficiency is the one exception.
Luckily, the solution is something you likely already have in your bathroom: Epsom salts.
Epsom salts are an excellent source of magnesium, dissolve easily, and are quite safe for use around plants.
Simply dissolve 1 teaspoon of Epsom salts per gallon of water and use that mixture in place of the plant’s regular watering.
The only warning is that you should never use them at the same time as fertilizer, meaning you must use the salts between your scheduled fertilizer applications.
As with the fertilizer, don’t use Epsom salts between October and March, as this could harm the plant.
Should You Flush?
Something that doesn’t get addressed nearly enough, flushing is a necessary part of proper fertilizing.
Chemical fertilizers (and tap water) leave harmful mineral salts in the soil, which can eventually choke out your plant’s roots.
If you need a good reason why flushing is important, just picture standing in your toilet every day.
Wouldn’t you want to flush it every once in a while, so you’re not standing in your waste?
Flushing should be done once every couple of months and merely involves watering the plant slowly for a good 20 minutes or so.
This results in the water pushing the salts further down into the soil until it flushes out of the drainage holes.
However, there’s one excellent piece of news regarding this chore: If you use the soak and dry method, you’re actually flushing the soil every time you water.
This means less maintenance in addition to better overall care for your plant.
However, other methods – such as the bottom-up method – won’t be as effective at flushing out waste, so you will still need to do manual flushes occasionally with those methods.
Pro-Tip: A Soak-and-Dry Feeding Schedule For Christmas Cacti
When discussing the best fertilizer, it’s also a good idea to consider how setting up an alternating food schedule works.
Hopefully, you’re already using the soak and dry method to water your plants, so let’s look at how to incorporate that into a liquid fertilizer and Epsom salts diet.
Because you may need to fertilize every two weeks OR every four weeks, we’ll give an example schedule for both.
Also, note that when we say “weeks,” we technically mean “waterings,” as the soak and dry method works off of the finger trick instead of a calendar schedule (which is very bad for your plants).
For a “two-week” schedule:
- Watering 1: Use the liquid fertilizer, followed by the soak and dry watering.
- Watering 2: Use the soak and dry watering method, but substitute your Epsom water for the regular water.
- Watering 3: Fertilizer followed by soak-and-dry watering
- Watering 4: Epsom watering
Rinse (figuratively) and repeat.
Easy, is it not?
Now let’s apply this to a “four-week” feeding.
- Watering 1: Use the liquid fertilizer, followed by soak-and-dry watering.
- Watering 2: Use soak and dry.
- Watering 3: Use soak and dry, substituting Epsom water.
- Watering 4: Use soak and dry.
Again, just rinse and repeat this schedule for a happy, healthy Christmas cactus.