Vr 'Red Chestnut' looks great. I don't think the fcbs photo does it justice at all. Thanks for sharing.

Lisa, I meant to ask. What is the best way to grow Ring of Fire to achive the best possible colours and form of this young plant of mine? I plan to give it slow release fertiliser by Phostrogen. It is a osmo-coat type of fertiliser. There's no 90, 180, 360 number on the pachet, but it says one application will last 6 months, so I presume it is a 180. And the composition is 15-7-15. This is the only one available here with us. And shall I give the plant as much sun as possible, being winter here with us now, and move it to very bright, morning sun, afternoon shade position when the sun gets hotter? And how long befor I will start to see some colour on the plant?
HDD so, I got my Ring of Fire. This particular one left Michael's place about a month ago!

Mike, It also baffles me, but this is Vr GREEN Chestnut! Why, I do not know. Perhaps it is because if you look at the plant from the top, it is green, but from the side, more red than Red Chestnut. The plant also looks much better than the FCBS one - whixh is really green.

oops . . brain fart . .

Japie, the more you fertilize it the less color you will get. If your goal is to get the maximum coloration in the shortest period of time, the best way to do that is to not fertilize it at all and give it bright light.

Thanks Lisa. I will withhold the fertiliser. I was just thinking of that example of the three Debbies that you posted a while ago, and the one with the 'no fertiliser' was that sickley yellow green and not nice red colouring and started to form brown leaves at the bottom. But the plant look healthy enough to give me nice colour soon. BTW, the green colour on the fully coloured plant, is that kind of temperature banding? Other words, can I expect more green in between the red?

If it starts to look sickly and yellow, then give it a little fertilizer, but take whatever recommended rate they tell you and divide that by four (more or less), or you'll get a sudden spurt of growth that will throw the symmetry of the plant all off.

'Ring of Fire' is a 'Lambert's Pride' hybrid, so it should hold some degree of banding even if it gets very warm. It will probably be more pronounced in cooler climates, though. If your nighttime temp drops below @ 60° F for any length of time (sorry, don't know what that is in C), I'd expect to see big zones of green on RoF and many other marmorated hybrids.

'Debbie' and the other Groves hybrids (as well as other varieties with similar bloodlines) are a bit trickier to get good color on than most Neos because that kind of super-saturated color that they have tends to be very tempermental (at least for me). If you under-feed them they just look like "regular" Neos, i.e. colored but not intensely so, and if you over-feed them they're just green.

I'm not a believer of withholding all fertilizer as a general rule, but if your problem is that the plant's too green, then that's the first thing I'd do to try and correct it. You can't really remove fertilizer once it's been added, but it's easy enough to add some later if it seems to need it.

I would say our average summer night temps are around 70 and the days go up to around 90. Late summer the average daytime can reach 100. Winters usually between 50 and 65 but can go down to 40. Absolute min that I experienced here was 34.

If I can take Neo Bob and Grace as an example, I have it sine January, midsummer, and all growth it gave me this far, was deep burgungy - no green bands at all. It started cooling down about a month ago and if I look down in the centre, I can see some green forming again. My Neo Break of Day, hower, is very nicely banded. Colorparade on the other hand, has absolutely NO bands at all! Lambert's Pride obviously, looks stunning. Our main problem with the temperatures though, it is very variable. As in from day to day. Early summer especially. We got a prevailing South-eastern (cold) wind blowing for most of spring and early summer. Will blows for a week or two and then stops for a couple of days and then temperatures rises as much as 15-20F during the day and niight, just to fall down again next week when the wind starts again!

Japie very nice looking babies. Im glad you got 'Ring of fire' :)