My wife and I love buying potted mums each autumn! These beautiful plants, also known as chrysanthemums, help give our Central Florida home a feel of fall, even when temperatures are sometimes still hovering in the 80s.

I’ll tell you though, we haven’t had much long-term luck with potted seasonal houseplants.

Let’s take poinsettias for example. They look great in the house for those few weeks leading up to Christmas. Then, after the holiday season has waned and my wife and I are packing up all of our Christmassy decorations, we try keeping the poinsettias alive outdoors in our yard. But that has never really worked for us. So, one year, we kept them indoors — to the same unfortunate effect. Turns out, poinsettias are extra finicky about light conditions, and our Central Florida climate is both too cold (at times) and too hot and sunny to really keep them alive and well.

Same goes for Easter lilies. And goodness, do we love our Easter lilies! They look excellent for those days leading up to the Easter holidays during the spring. But they require moderate to cool temperatures both during the day and at night to be grown in the garden. They’re conditions that our natural climate simply can’t provide. And we aren’t putting the thermostat down into the 50s at night to keep our Easter lilies growing indoors.

And that brings me back to those potted mums my wife and I buy each autumn. Many of the kinds we buy at the local grocery store are annual mums anyway, so that means they aren’t going to come back year after year like perennial mums do.

How Long Can You Grow Potted Mums?

In my seasonal experience, the potted florist mums my wife and I buy at the local grocery store each autumn don’t seem to last too long before they look tired. We tend to get three to six weeks from them in their pots before they start losing their blooms and looking wilty.

One year we kept our mums going a few months outside. Mind you, they weren’t flowering as tightly as they did in the days after we bought them from the grocery store. But the plant was still green and lively.

Another reason my wife and I are having tough luck with mums? They really do better in cooler climates than ours, which is deemed to be USDA Hardiness Zone 9B. While most chrysanthemums are rated for Zones 5-9, they require much more care when grown in warmer climes like ours.

I believe that even in Zone 9B, my wife and I would have more luck if we tried growing a variety or three of perennial garden mums. But we haven’t tried this yet, so I’ll reserve further comment on this until I have the personal knowledge and experience to share my thoughts and tips on growing garden mums.

How To Make Mums Last Longer In Pots

We’ve had success at keeping our potted mums looking happier longer by keeping the blooms coming for weeks at a time. Here’s how we make mums last longer in pots:

• Keep your mums in the sun — Place your potted mums in a location that receives six or more hours of sunlight each day. But be careful! If it’s too hot where you live (like it can be in our neck of the woods during the early fall), your mums may become heat stressed.
• Deadhead your mums — What does this mean? It means you should remove spent flowers, brown leaves, or dead branches. This provides multiple benefits to your mums, including removing brown foliage from your plant, helping the plant focus nutrients on the healthy parts of the plant, and encouraging new growth.
• Keep your potted mums watered — A common problem with any potted plant is that they tend to dry out quickly. Potted mums are no exception! Be sure to keep your mums watered, but don’t overwater them. Potted mums typically need about 1″ to 2″ of water per week.
• Protect your potted mums from frost — While mums tend to like cooler weather, they aren’t necessarily a fan of frost. On those chilly night when frost is a danger, move your potted mums to the garage or cover them with old bedsheets or towels.
• Don’t let wind get to your mums — High or constant wind can damage your potted mums. Wind can also dry them out more quickly. So, try and keep them in a location sheltered from strong winds for the best results.

What To Look For When Buying Potted Mums

There are a few things you need to keep in mind when looking for the best potted mums for your home. They include:

• NOT buying the mum with the most blooms — Believe it or not, you don’t want to buy potted mums that have tons of blooms. Many of those bloomed flowers will have started dying back within a few days of getting your plant home.
• Picking mums with lots of buds — Instead, insist on looking for mums that have lots of buds coming up. These are the ones that will soon be flowering after you bring your potted mums home.
• Choosing plants with strong limbs and sturdy, green leaves — These are signs of a healthy, vigorous plant that will look great longer and help bring flair to your home throughout the season.