Save Your Coleus by Cutting It

If you are like me, you love to plant coleus in your garden each year. It’s such a beautiful plant that comes in so many different colors and works well in shade. This plant is known for its leaves, but it will flower. When it flowers it actually takes away from the beauty of the leaves, so keep it in check by snipping off the flowers as soon as they appear. They are not hardy in our zone, so at the end of each season it’s sad to see them go. This year you can try this technique to save them all winter, and you can plant them outside again in the spring.

Coleus at the end of the season before cutting it

Use a pair of scissors and snip off a few nice pieces of each coleus that you want to save. I suggest picking the hardiest plants to use. You want to have a piece that is about 5-8″ long. Just approximate, there really is no wrong way to do this.

Coleus pile

Use vintage vases for interest

Fill up your vases with water. I used a bunch from my milk glass collection. Note that you will want to replace the water every few days to keep it fresh.

Cut the bottom couple inches of the leaves off, the roots will grow out of these spots

Cut the bottom couple inches of the leaves off the stem, as shown above.

Coleus ready to be prepared

Then just place them in water and voila. That’s it. You can treat them like fresh flowers and make arrangements out of them.

You can make beautiful arrangements from the cut coleus

One stem per bud vase works perfectly!

Another option is to bring in the whole pot and overwinter the entire plant, but who has space for that? Taking cuttings works best for me, because it takes up a lot less space and I can decorate with them!

After a few weeks or a couple of months, you can also plant them if they seem to need more nourishment. I’ll be doing this over the winter and will have another DIY. If you’re plant savy, you can pretty much can figure it out on your own. Get a planter, add dirt, and add the coleus, which by that time will have nice roots.

Let me know if you plan to do this, or have done it in the past with this plant or any other. There are a lot of plants that this technique will work for.