Gadenin日本語Get the appThe whole cycle in one view
A cyclamen has four clearly separated phases and each one has a different job. In autumn it builds leaves. In winter it flowers. In spring it withdraws its reserves into the tuber. In summer it sleeps. The commonest mistakes are all cases of treating the plant as though it were in a different phase from the one it is actually in, so the first thing to establish at any moment is where in this cycle your plant is.
The switch points are not dates and shift by several weeks depending on how cold you keep it and where you live. Read the plant instead: leaves emerging means growth, buds clearing the foliage means flowering, even yellowing from the outside in means winding down, bare compost means rest.
| Phase | What the plant is doing | Water | Feed | Position |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Late summer to early autumn | Waking; first leaf buds on the tuber | Sparingly, every 10 to 14 days | None yet | Cool, bright, airy |
| Autumn | Building a full canopy of leaves | Every 5 to 7 days from below | Half strength high potassium every 2 weeks | Coolest bright windowsill |
| Winter | Flowering continuously | Every 4 to 7 days from below | Continue every 2 weeks | Same cool sill, off the glass at night |
| Spring | Yellowing off, reserves moving into the tuber | Stretch to fortnightly, then stop | Stop at the first yellow leaf | Cool, out of strengthening sun |
| Summer | Dormant tuber, nothing above ground | None | None | Shaded, dry, airy; shed or cupboard |
Late summer to autumn: get the leaves built
Everything the plant will flower with in winter is paid for by the leaf canopy it builds now, so this phase decides the size of the display. Restart a dormant tuber by repotting it into fresh gritty potting mix with its top level with the surface, water once thoroughly from below, and keep it barely damp in a cool bright place until leaf buds show. That takes two to four weeks and it is normal for nothing at all to happen for the first fortnight.
Once leaves are clearly growing, step up to regular watering and start feeding about a month later. Keep the plant as cool as you can even while the weather is still warm, because heat now produces long weak leaf stalks and an open, floppy plant that never firms up.
If instead you have just bought a plant in flower, this is the moment to take it out of any decorative sleeve, check that the inner pot has drainage holes, and find it the coldest bright windowsill in the house before it acclimatizes to a warm room.
Winter: hold the conditions and clear the crown
There is very little to do in the flowering phase beyond not spoiling it. Water from below when the pot feels light, feed fortnightly at half strength, keep the room between 50 and 60F (10 to 16C), give it all the light available, and turn the pot regularly so it does not lean.
The one active job is going over the crown once a week. Twist out every faded flower and every yellowing leaf at the base, and clear fallen petals off the compost surface. This takes under a minute and it is the single most effective thing you can do for both the length of the display and the plant's resistance to gray mold.
If flowering slows in midwinter, check temperature first, light second, and the crown third. Feeding is rarely the answer this early. Remember the three to six week lag between a change in conditions and a change in the number of buds appearing.
- Lift the pot to decide about water Weight, not a schedule. Light pot and dry compost an inch (2.5 cm) down means water; heavy pot means wait, whatever the leaves are doing.
- Bottom water for fifteen to twenty minutes Stand the inner pot in an inch (2.5 cm) of room temperature water, let it drink until the surface darkens, then lift it out and drain it before it goes back in its cover.
- Clear the crown while the pot drains Part the leaves, twist out every spent flower stem and yellow leaf at the tuber, and pick the debris off the compost. Never cut, because the hollow stub left behind rots into the crown.
- Turn the pot a quarter turn Do it every time you water. Cyclamen lean towards the light quickly, and a plant that has grown lopsided over a winter cannot be straightened afterwards.
Spring and summer: let it stop
The hard part of the cyclamen year is doing less. When leaves begin yellowing evenly from the outside in and no new buds appear in the crown, the plant is finishing, and the correct response is to stop feeding, stretch the watering intervals, and let the yellowing leaves stay attached until they detach with a twist. Every day they remain green at the base they are sending reserves down into the tuber.
Once the pot is bare, move it somewhere shaded, dry and airy and give it no water at all for two to three months. Check the tuber by pressing it once a month; it should stay hard. Then restart in late summer as above. A plant that is kept genuinely cool year round may not go fully dormant and may hold some leaves through summer, in which case leave it alone, keep it shaded and just damp, and let it run on.
This is also the point to decide whether to keep the plant at all. A firm tuber is worth another year and will be larger and flower more heavily next winter. A soft one is finished. There is no middle case worth the shelf space.
Set yourself a reminder for the restart before you put the pot away. A dormant cyclamen is an unlabelled pot of dry compost with nothing above the surface, and the commonest way to lose one is simply to forget it exists until midwinter.
The record that makes next year easier
Keep six entries per plant per year and the cycle becomes predictable rather than mysterious: the week you restarted the tuber, the week the first leaf appeared, the week the first flower opened, the week the last flower opened, the week the last leaf came off, and where the pot stood through the winter. None of them takes more than a moment to note.
The pair worth watching is the winter position against the date flowering ended. Two plants in the same house, one on a cool landing and one in a heated room, can differ by two months in how long they flower, and the record makes that difference obvious in a way that no general guidance can.
Add the tuber diameter each summer when you check it. A tuber that grows year on year is proof the whole cycle is working, and after four or five years the plant will carry many more flowers at once than the one you first brought home.