Beginner Gardening: Hibiscus help needed..., 1 by sheepwrecked

sheepwrecked wrote:
I've been keeping several different cultivars of commonly available hibiscus for the past 5 years by transplanting them into giant pots and moving them inside during the winters. Indoors I aim curly fluorescents 100 watt bulbs in clamp lights at them. Here's some stuff I've noticed that may or may not help you:
1. Hibiscus flowers normally only last a day or a day and a half, like daylily flowers, then they close up and fall off. The calxes fall off a few days later, there's a break-point on the flower stem.
2. I've never seen an ornamental hibiscus set seed even when outside in the summer; they may be sterile cultivars or maybe we don't have the right pollinators here, don't know.
3. Different cultivars have different shaped buds, some more pointed and some more blunt. My double flowered plant has blunt buds. So the shape of buds on your plants is probably normal.
4. All of mine eventually get woody gray-brown stems on older branches.
5. Over watering will cause leaves to yellow and drop off. As recommended, you need a more consistent watering schedule based on the dryness of the soil.
6. I over-winter a lot of plants including really big ones in my house; conditions are hard on them and bug pests ALWAYS show up. Even if you aren't sure what's bugging your plants (pun intended), you can't go wrong with thoroughly spraying them with a soap solution like Safer's Insecticidal Soap. It's not a poison chemical so it's safe to handle; it coats the beasties and smothers some, disrupts the outside shell of some. You especially need to spray the underside of the leaves as well as the tops. I've successfully battled spider mites, aphids, and white flies with Safer's. If the situation was really really bad I would completely defoliate my plants and burn all the infested leaves, then let them start over--they will survive and grow new leaves.
7. Mine invariably take a break in flowering, they do it at different times, and I haven't figured out what triggers flowering yet, they just eventually do. So one of your cultivars may go the better part of a year before it flowers.

It sounds like you've got at least 2 different varieties in one pot. Hibiscus get huge, and the more crowded the pot the harder it is to keep the moisture level right. There's also no such thing as too big of a pot for something that normally grows into at least a 5 foot shrub. I have wheeled pot holders under mine. Once a year I take the plants out, knock off as much old soil as possible and repot with new. I also chop the plants way back. The flower on the young tips, so if you don't chop them, you get a 7 foot tall leggy woody stem with a couple of flowers at the top. After I chop mine back, they go outside for the summer and grow bunches of new young stems ready to come in and bloom in the winter when it's depressing and snowy outside.