Since you have three, why not try a different method with each basket and see which does best?

If you haven't done so already, I would definitely repot them ASAP. If they are very rootbound, then keeping them alive will be twice as hard.

Jeanette
Texas
zone 8b

Million bells was something new at the nurseries this year, I bought every color, red, coral, bright pink and purple...
and most of them have died...The tag reads "full sun"...I planted them in full sun...and they started dying...
I think they are for hanging baskets...look pretty cascading down...experimenting is just one of the good things about gardening.

My neighbor bought one of these in a hanging basket and it quickly got straggly and quit blooming. She gave it to me as she says I have a green thumb. So I cut it down to 1" stems, fertilized and watered every day. That was three weeks ago and it is now full of new growth and budding out. In another week it should be covered with blooms. Give it a try! Water every day as they dry out in a nanno second when hanging in the sun. In fact I water, let it sit for 10 minutes and rewater. Seems to help. Good luck!
TrowelGal

Million bells will definitely get straggly, but they'll come back. I had one in a 12" clay pot for three years before it finally got too much rain and died.

They can't be grown from seed, but cuttings root very easily.

bruggirl-how do you root them? oneduck55

You just stick them in the soil with some rooting hormone. They root pretty easily. If you have a long straggly piece, you can pin it down to another pot and cover up a couple of nodes. This way, it will make roots while still getting nourishment from the mother plant. I've never had much luck rooting them in water.

A local grower gave me some useful advice for the million bells that I too got for free b/c they looked near death --
She claimed that million bells dislike excessive water, but adore frequent fertilizing -- she said that it was, in fact, difficult to fertilize them enough during wet weather -- i.e. hard to give them enough food but not too much water.

I followed her advice and had good results, but I did find it difficult to get the right amount of water. My plants would certainly survive terrible droughts, but come out looking very straggly. They'd come back with a trim and regular fertilizer though. I might have done better with larger pots that didn't require daily waterings.

Plants of different colors had very different habits -- the terra cotta color was far more finicky than the blue color I had. The "proven winners" website implies that they are slightly different subtypes with different needs -- so I feel better -- for awhile I thought maybe I was imagining things.

Is million bells the same thing as baby tears?

No, baby tears is just a green plant, million bells is blooming.