****** Hello. I have had the hibiscus since 2009 and it has been wonderful to me, producing more flowers than I could ask for indoor or outdoor. Last fall, I took it inside (after water blasting any bug it might have had) and it kept flowering until about January of 2011. All of a sudden the new buds (about 20 of them!) started turning yellow and fell off to the touch. So, the remaining buds that seemed to be doing well, I cut them off to help the plant fight whatever it was that caused it to lose the buds. The stranger part is that when I was vacuuming underneath the plant, I noticed the floor was sticky and the other plants underneath the hibiscus had sticky residues on the leaves! Is this normal for hibiscus? Thank you and I hope someone out there could help me with this. ******* By the way, I clean the plant every month to get rid of the brown scale critters on there that likes the young, green branches on the plant. I also vacuum it when I see the white fuzzy things on it. I just never noticed the sticky residues on the floor and on the other plants it is next to.
It sounds like aphid/scale droppings to me - I used to have the same problem on my indoor hibiscus. I never did find a good all-round cure, but what you're doing is the same as what I did. I eventually cured the problem by moving somewhere that I could grow hibiscus outdoors in the ground.
I agree. You can help reduce the effects by dragging the plant outside every time you have to water, and spray all the leaves above & below, and all the trunks & stems with a sharp spray of water. A common multi-head spray nozzel on the "flat" setting works good. If you look closely you can use it to spray off the majority of the scale. It's very hard for the scale to come back in force when you do this every week or two when you water. It may not completely cure it of scale, but it can almost get you there. If you have other plants in the area that are important to you, the usual reccomendation for scale is to throw out the plant or attack it full force with systemic poisons. The white fuzzies are probably mealy bugs, and it is possible to fully cure them with this method, over perhaps 6 months to a year.
Thanks, guys. The weather seems deceiving these past few days (High 70s, and one day over 80) here in Kansas City. I almost took my hibiscus out but I noticed the wind picking up rather quickly this afternoon. I looked at the weather forecast and it's about to get pretty cold and nasty in the next few days again. I think my hibiscus will hold out for a few more days... :) Meanwhile, here's a picture I took and edited of a flower getting ready to close and fall off last winter.
Here is a current picture of my red hibiscus. While I'm at it; how should I prune it? I would like to prune this down to about half if it could survive it. It's about 5'5ft tall. If you could tell, it has a few trunks that are wrapped around each other to create a stronger trunk (or for the looks). Thank you in again!
