GROWING CROSSANDRA SUNDANCE FIRECRACKER PLANT

A beautiful houseplant that produces bright orange or red flowers Let's look at growing the Crossandra plant, also known as the firecracker plant Now there are several variations of the Crossandra plant And the two most commonly available varieties are the Sundance Crossandra which is commonly available at your local gardening stores You can head over to Home Depot to find this Sundance Crossandra plant It is sold as an internal houseplant which means that it grows in bright, direct house light What you would find inside your rooms But I have also planted it outside and it grows pretty well So let's look at the planting technique The Crossandra plant comes packaged in this beautiful little package that you see here And it comes in a small pot We're gonna be using this 16 inch container that you see here And the soil that we're using for planting our Crossandra plant is this mix of peat moss, perlite and compost I'm reusing some of my existing container soil But if you want to make new container soils, I do have a lot of guides on how you can make your own potting mix And this is one of the most commonly used mixes that at least I use in my garden And it does a great job So all you do is remove the plant from its container See how rootbound this plant is And then plant it inside this container that you just prepared And you can loosen the roots a little bit on the bottom just to stimulate the root system And then just fill around the plant with the rest of the container soil So that you have the soil towards the top Now you can grow this plant in indirect light like shade Or some place you do not get direct sunlight This plant cannot tolerate direct sunlight It will die, it will burn off and die And it also doesnt tolerate frost So it will grow very well during the spring and summer months But then in the winter season it will go dormant And then come back up in the spring time Now I am using a drip irrigation system to irrigate this plant And I have kept it in almost complete shade here as you can see I have demonstrated a lot of drip irrigation techniques in my other videos And I pretty much use the same technique whenever I add a new container So I am using this fan bubbler spray here as you can see And once the drip irrigation assembly is in place, you must test it out So this is the fan bubbler It is one of the most commonly used drip emitters I love using this drip emitter Simply because it does provide very good coverage for 16'' containers or larger And you can always adjust the spray intensity So just make sure that its not spraying outside the container And you're good to go Now this plant produces abundantly It produces these orange flowers that you can see They're extremely beautiful And the Sundance Crossandra plant also has these shiny leaves that you see here Which is why they are very delicate to direct sunlight And they will bloom throughout the spring and the summer season And produce these lovely flowers which will then turn into seed as you can see here Now the Sundance Crossandra plant doesnt actually produce seeds This variety just produces flowers which turn into the fake seeds you can say And this plant produces abundantly as you can see here Plenty of flowers here and they look absolutely gorgeous in your garden So this was the variety that produce these bright orange flowers We will now look at the next Crossandra plant variety The next variety is actually the plant that produces the red flowers And this plant is also called the firecracker plant And I will shortly get to why its called the firecracker plant Now one of my friends actually provided me a plant for this one And you can easily grow these from seeds as well Because this variety does produce these true seeds after the flowers have died And you can see here, we are using a similar sized container This is actually a 12'' container which is also quite sufficient for growing the red variety of the firecracker plant. And this is also a Crossandra plant variety, it just produces different colored flowers And it also produces these seeds which is why its known as the firecracker plant Now I've placed this plant in my front yard And this variety can actually tolerate a little bit of sunlight It still prefers shade But it will tolerate sunlight unlike the sundance variety which does not tolerate a lot of sunlight so as you can see here, these flowers are also very beautiful they are a little darker orange or almost leaning towards red and this is why its called the firecracker plant as you can see it actually bursts like a fire cracker throwing its seeds around and its actually activated by water so once you water it... so there we have it folks that was our episode on growing the Crossandra plant we saw two varieties, the sundance plant as well as the firecracker plant if you grow this plant at home, do let me know int he comments box below Let us know your feedback on the flora series where we feature flowering plants we'll see you again soon happy gardening