Tropicals & Tender Perennials: Maya, 1 by Clare_CA

Clare_CA wrote:
Hi Goth!

I don't post here much anymore due to lack of time, but I did pop in today and happened to see your question. You are a fellow variegate lover! I've admired your plants here at this forum and at bananas.org.

You can trust the quality of variegated plants from this Florida seller: http://www.floridacolors.com/Thai Cultivars.htm

Also, the Thai variegates are stable. The advent of bud grafting exploded in Thailand as an efficient way to propagate plumerias a few years back. They found that there are variegated nodes on a nonvariegated plants. For example, I sent my friend in Thailand a cutting of my nonvariegated Australian fruit salad. When he propagated that cutting by doing bud grafting, one of his grafted plants was variegated. It was amazing to see. Anyway, that is how so many awesome variegated have been discovered in Thailand. I think if we did more bud grafting here in the states, we too would find more variegates.

The prevalent line of thought from experts that I know and trust is that increasing potassium increases blooms, not phosphorus. Too much phosphorus can be bad for a plant because it doesn't leach from the soil well from what I understand.

I just planted a bunch of variegated bananas, and some are Thai varieties that I am excited about. They are doing well in the ground so far. I've got that variegated ponytail palm too that I love.

I have a couple of variegated plumerias, and they have been slow to bloom, I think, but I have seen others get blooms. Try increasing your potassium and see what happens, but I think a regular fertilizing regimen of balanced number (13-13-13) should help you to achieve blooms eventually.

You know a plumeria can flower when very small if the cutting or grafted plant was taken from a reliable flowering mature tree; however, that sort of makes everyone expect their small plumeria to bloom when young. I do think that maturity has something to do with reliability in blooming. I think that it takes a few years for a plumeria to put on growth and girth from the cutting or just-grafted plant stage in order to have decent blooms. Your plant looks pretty small still so I would just give it some time. HTH.