Hi Cyril....Smashing blooms ,just love the blue one. I've just pinched out mine BTW and I nip off the top of the growing tip to encourage side shoots making for a bushier plant:wink:
They are a bit small to be pinching out as yet. I forget how many leaves you need, I'll go and look it up n my Fuschia book in a mo ... but the basica principle is that you let it grow a bit beyond the number of leaves you want - it doens't matter how much beyond but it needs to be 1/2" minimum, otheriwse you won't be able to get your porky fingers in there to nip it out, and if its very long the plant may be set back. And inch or two is normal for me. So ... its grown an inch past N leaves, you then "pinch up" the growing tip just above the N'th leaf pair. This will cause side shoots to appear for the base of each leaf, adn you pinch those out after M leaves too - and so on. Makes a nice bushy plant! I'll go and get the book, and a glass of wine , now ...
Amazingly my book on growing Fuchsias doesn't say :( It does insist that you pot on 1" at a time as soon as the roots have formed around the outside of the root ball. I find potting on by 1" at a time very difficult (I can't get my fingers in the gap!) but the book makes the point that potting on into a much larger pot means that the roots don't use the new soil immediately, and it gets compacted by watering etc before they make the most of it.
These are for my hanging baskets...I pinched out the middle one last week and the new growth can clearly be seen..
:dh: thats me ******ed then cos the guy on QVC said pot into 3" pots and thats where i was going to leave them :skp:
"3" pots and thats where i was going to leave them" No, that definitely won't work. Sorry! Turn the pot upside down, and support the plant stem between Index finger and Middle. Then tap the edge of the pot once, fairly hard, on the edge of a table or somesuch - and the plant + root ball should drop into your hand. Check the roots around the outside of the root ball, if there is quite a bit of root activity then the plant needs potting-on into a bigger pot (my book say 1" bigger, I think that's too difficult to do in practice, and I do 1.5" or 2" bigger). They will be happy in the next-size-larger pot for about 2-3 week, and then will need potting-on again. I get up to about 5" pots before they get unceremoniously "squeezed" into my Tubs and Urns (which I put in the conservatory, plant up [at the early part of May] and then finally move out on 1st June - when all frosts are DONE).
Bit late to the party here, but they say a video is worth a thousand pics, so here's a recent short upload to YT, using Fuchsias. I think even I can do that!! :o
