|
Salvia divinorum Cultivation The Easy Way |
|
|
Written by Dan McDonley
|
|
Monday, 21 December 1998 |
|
Page 2 of 5
With the wicking system outlined above you should never have to water the plant ever again, kind of. You do have to fill up the container of water when it gets low. And if the top of the soil dries out you should mist it until it moistens again. But depending on the size of your container you may not have to add water for weeks at a time. But do keep in mind as the water level gets lower, more rope is exposed to the air, and the less efficient the system becomes. But it can easily sustain a plant for weeks. You can even add your fertilizer right to the water container.
Now that you have watering under control the last thing to do is build a humidity tent. This is important especially if you just received your plant from a greenhouse or made a cutting. At this stage the plant is very used to high humidity and if you don't keep it in a humidity tent at this point it will die. What I do, is get a bunch of 3 foot plastic rods/dowels (wood will work but be careful of mold and rot). I put about 5 in the pot along the sides at the very edge. This will hold up the plastic. Now the best size plastic I have found is the plastic window insulation kits. They are kind of expensive and substituting plastic drop cloths work just as well. The thing I like is that really good double stick tape comes with it. Put a layer of double stick tape to the outside of the clay pot a couple inches from the top. Stick the plastic to the tape and wrap it around the dowels. Take the extra plastic sticking up above the dowels and twist it into a knot.
There you go, you now have a very large pot, a large humidity tent and a teeny weenie little plant. Don't worry, that's exactly how it should be. If the humidity tent is too small mold will grow too quickly and not enough carbon dioxide will get to the plant. Once the plant starts growing at a good steady rate you can untie the tent and just leave it draped closed. Let that sit for about 2 weeks. Then start leaving it draped more and more open over the space of another 2 weeks. Finally let the top be completely open and let it grow like that for another 2 weeks. After that take out the dowels and roll the plastic down. You can either take the plastic off completely or leave it attached for when you go on vacation. When the plant no longer has a humidity tent on it make sure you mist it 1-2 times a day for a week. Then you can start to not mist quite as often. Once a day is still the best but even if its only once every 3 days it will be O.K., you may just have slight browning of the tips of the leaves. Nothing major though. Depending on where you live and your relative humidity you may need to go slower adapting it or mist more often.
So there it is, the no-brainer Salvia divinorum setup. If you need to go on vacation just put the humidity tent back up, seal it and fill up your container of water that feeds the wicking system. When you get back adapt her back to regular humidity. It won't take as long as that first time but it still may take a bit of time. You also may want to give it a good watering at least once a month to refresh the system and wash out any accumulating salts.
The next part of this article will deal with common problems and solutions for growing Salvia divinorum, and a bit of extra info on growing it efficiently. Most of these are my approaches to problems I have experienced and have worked for me. They aren't guaranteed to work for everyone but they should, very well in fact.
|
