Growing Your Own Salvia Divinorum
Salvia plants can grow to be over 3 meters in height with broad leafs extending well over 35cm. Salvia Divinorum is one of several vision-inducing growing salvia plants employed by the Mazatec Indians. Extract is fast becoming the most popular and highly prized source of Salvinorin A, the active chemical in sage leaves. However no understanding to the plants psychotropic effects were reached before salvia extract was first created in 1982 when a substance called salvinorin was extracted from the salvia plant by Alfredo Ortega. There are so many kinds of salvia plants that I’ve always found precise identification of them difficult.
Salvia divinorum leaves can be very rewarding to the experienced user. The divinorum plant rarely produces seed and most attempts to grow salvia divinorum from seed fail. Remember that salvia plants will begin to grow quite slowly at first, and every time you move a divinorum plant from one pot to another there will be a slow down in the salvia plants growth until it has time to recover and adjust to the new growing environment.
It is very difficult to obtain viable salvia seeds so most people start their plants by either buying stem clippings with the intention of planting them as root bases or whole plants to cultivate and propagate. Even when there are seeds from a plant, rarely do they grow; the average viability rate is about 5 percent, and they do not remain viable very long either. Either way, if you are intent on getting seeds for this sacred plant, rather than trying to acquire a cutting, you have to be sure of the source.
We have found more than one online store offering what they claim are Salvia seeds, but when we have purchased them and tried to grow them, the one plant we got to grow from the handful of seeds was not a Salvia plant at all. What is interesting about the plant, is that it rarely sets seed, and those seeds rarely germinate, even under controlled conditions.
Growing salvia divinorum is an interesting challenge due to the many unique features of this sacred and magical plant. The plant flowers often and it is not hard to induce salvia specimens to flower in greenhouses, but the trouble comes in trying to hand pollinate the otherwise sterile flowers and generate viable seed that can be used in growing salvia. Growing salvia should be in a well lit area kept at a temperature between 75 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit with humidity of at least 50%.
The best range of temperatures for growing salvia plants is about 60-80 degrees fahrenheit, they can tolerate much colder (almost freezing temperatures) but plant growth slows at the extremes of its preferred range. Remember that salvia plants will begin to grow quite slowly at first, and every time you move a divinorum plant from one pot to another there will be a slow down in the salvia plants growth until it has time to recover and adjust to the new growing environment.
If you would like to learn more about salvia or would like to order salvia extract online, visit our website at: http://www.sweetsalvia.com
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