Gardening Tips & Flowers - How to grow cockscomb - Celosia

Hi, this is Yolanda Vanveen, and in this segment, we're going to learn all about how to grow celosia, and the cockscomb variety. Now, I always identify the cockscomb variety, or they call it they call it the cristata group, because they look like brain flowers. When I was a little girl we used to call em' "that's the brain flower", cause' it's kind of fuzzy, and it has little shapes that look like a brain, but they come in gorgeous hot pinks, and purples, and yellows. They're just a gorgeous plant in the garden. But, there's a few rules, and to figure out how to grow them we gotta' figure out where they're native to. So, the celosia, the cockscomb variety is native to the southern part of Asia, so India all the way through Malaysia; any of the southern part of Asia, so they like warm, tropical, humid, very, very tropical conditions. So, when you're growing em' in a colder climate you have to make sure to never let em' dry out. So, when you start a celosia make sure and start it from seed in the spring, so make sure it's at least seventy degrees outside, cause' they can only handle temperatures in zones ten to twelve, so that's not even freezing. They don't want to even get below forty, even forty-five, fifty degrees. They want to stay warm all the time. And they're an annual, so they'll come back by seed, so even if you bring em' inside you might lose em'. But if you just start the seeds inside in April, May if you live in a cold climate, put em' outside by June you'll have blooms through the fall. They're a great dry flower too. They're one of my favorite plants in the whole world.