There is no limit to the diversity of the beautiful world of our blossoming and fragrant brethren. Some of them are so small that they fit on the palm of the baby, others are so large that even in a spacious garden they occupy a good part of its area. Those play with bright colors, these intoxicates with unsurpassed flavors. They pull their tender coronets to the sun or hang down from the supports with bizarre vines. They conquer the most secluded places in our hearts and become the most eloquent expression of feelings. In a word, flowers are truly a miracle of nature and the best invention of God. And the passionflower, growing out of seeds and caring for which we will consider today, is a vivid illustration of this.
Passionflower - cavalry star
But before talking about the care and growing of passionflowers from seeds, let's get acquainted with this charming and rather capricious plant. The homeland of this exotic flower is the American tropics. He himself belongs to the group of climbing bushes, he likes to grow next to various supports, clinging to which rises swiftly to the sun.
If you put the passionflower in a box suspended outside a window or balcony, it will turn into a luxurious ampel plant densely covered with bright 12 cm flowers with a pleasant aroma. Due to the fact that the latter have the right star-shaped form resembling the order of cavalrymen, passionflower is often called a cavalry star. To tell the truth, growing this plant is not for beginners, because it has its whims and whims.
How to grow a passionflower from seeds?
Find the seeds of passionflower these days, you can almost in any flower shop, but to grow from them a beautiful, healthy and eye-pleasing plant must still be able to. And the whole complexity of this process is not at all about leaving, but in the complexity of germination and low seed germination. Here are a few options that will help achieve the desired result:
- Softening and removal of the shell and scarification. Scarification - it's easy rubbing the seeds of passionflowers on each side with a small nazhdachkoy or nail file. This operation breaks the integrity of the dense shell, as a result of which the seed sprouts faster. For more softening, the scarified seeds are placed in fresh lemon or orange juice for a day and then planted one by one into peat tablets. If the juice of citrus at home was not, you can use the same for the same purpose. And peat tablets can easily be replaced with a homemade mixture of equal parts of sand, peat, humus and leafy earth. Before planting, such a primer is calcined in an oven at a temperature of 200 ° C for 10 minutes. Plant sprouted seeds should not be deeper than 2 cm.
- Germination of seeds in hydrogen peroxide. This method allows you to monitor the entire process, but requires an almost surgical sterility of instruments and hands. We take a half-liter glass jar, fill it with destined water and lower the seeds there. After a day, we remove those that surfaced, and we drown the drowned with sterile tweezers in a glass with 3% hydrogen peroxide. Under the influence of peroxide, the seed coat bursts and the planting material is disinfected. Once this happened, put the seeds in a glass jar with a solution of 100 ml of water and 50 drops of peroxide. Tightly clog and carry the jar in a dark warm place for 1-2 weeks. In this case, do not open the lid for any reason. When the seeds proklyutsya, we get them again with a sterile tweezers and planted in cooked cups with the above described earth mixture.
Passion flower: care after planting
Seedlings planted in the ground cover with a film and rearranged to a lighted place. Daily for 5 minutes they are ventilated and, if the soil is dry, sprayed with water at room temperature. When young plants have 2 true leaves, they are dived, settling in
Favorite temperature for passionflower - 25-26 ° C in summer and not below 15 ° C in winter. Water them as the earth dries out. Fertilize these flowers quite simply 3 times a season with any complex mineral fertilizer for curling flowers. Next to the passionflowers, wooden supports should be placed and 2-3 main whips fixed on them. The remaining shoots are cut every year, because flower buds develop on annual shoots. If you want to decorate the balcony with a passion or a wall outside the window, then you can not put up the prop. But remember, the flower should be provided with a warm residence in the cold season.