Beginner Gardening: Coral porterweed not blooming, 1 by ecrane3

ecrane3 wrote:
If it's been raining a lot, that could also hurt the blooming, some plants like it hotter and sunnier before they'll bloom, so if you've been having lots of rain for a long time, then they may not be 100% happy with their conditions and so haven't bloomed yet. But if things dry out and the sun comes back out, they may decide to bloom later.


All plants have some range of water amounts that they can be happy with. If you're on the lower end of the range that they like, they'll grow slower, and if you're on the higher end, they'll grow faster. Of course if you go outside of the range on either end, then the plant won't be happy, but within the range they'll do fine. Some plants have wider ranges of tolerance than others. And many plants can tolerate something outside of their range for short periods, but if it goes on for a really long time then they'll die (so total huge downpours for a week may not kill them, but if it keeps raining for a month then they'll rot)

As an example of how water amount can affect growth, I have 3 Salvia clevelandii plants that I planted last fall, they were all the same size when I started. Two of them are located so that they get some runoff from my neighbor's lawn sprinklers, and one of them doesn't, all it gets is my stingy watering every 7-10 days. The two that get the extra water are literally 2 or 3 times the size of the drier one, they're all perfectly healthy, only difference is the size. Here's a picture, it doesn't show the smaller one really well, but if you look in the bottom of the picture towards the left you'll see part of it, compare that to the two giants in the middle of the picture.