I have a brom I have had 4 years.....It stopped flowering about a year and a half ago and started to produce pups I cut them off replanted them and they are fine....then the mother shot off more pups. Needless to say I now have 8 broms in total from the mother.....but how and when will they start to flower? Also I was at someones house and saw that they had there brom covered in a clear plastic bag can anyone answer what that is for will it help or hurt.....I never thought to ask the person that I saw do this.
Maybe they had an apple in there with it, were trying to force it to bloom. Or thought it wouldn't dry out as readily if covered. Have to wonder how long it will tolerate the lack of air circulation, many of these grow up high in breezy tree canopies in the wild. Similarly niched plants epiphytic orchids and Vireya rhododendrons may sometimes actually require ventilation by fans when grown indoors. You will just have to wait for yours to get big enough to bloom, probably not more than several years. The additional shoots coming off the original rootstock shows that really it may not be usual for the entire plant to die after flowering, just the individual leaf rosette(s) that flowered. This has been claimed to function as a means for the plant to mulch itself. However, the roots of epiphytic bromeliads tend to serve mostly as holdfasts, plant debris and animal excretions falling into the living leaf rosettes being the basis for activity that would otherwise be conducted by the roots.
