Hello STS community this is my first time on a forum and I am really excited to be here. My interest is in ethnobotanicals as well as edible plants and medicinal herbs. I began growing kratom a few months ago and have had tremendous success especially living in southern california in the dead of winter. Just so i can get to the good stuff (the pictures) I will copy and past a grow guide I did of my experience that I typed up for another fellow youtuber who was interested in growing kratom.
Kratom Grow Guide
(Mainly Experiments That Have Created Major Success)
How are you, my name is TigerBeard. I’ll give you a little back-story of myself real quick before we get started on all the info. Like you I am a nature-loving botanist hobbyist that has a fascination for entheogens. I first found kratom a few years ago when I was looking into growing San Pedro cacti and didn’t get back into growing kratom plants until recently. This was primarily due to an email I got from an old plant vendor about the DEA ban in September so thinking this would be my only chance to really grow these I bought a Rifat and a Bumblebee cutting, shortly after I purchased two RVT AOE cuttings from the same vendor. In my life I had only tried eating a few leaves fresh off a plant I had years ago and I honestly never really tried kratom until a few days ago ironically. So here I am toward the end of this September with four plants in my possession and armed with no information on how to grow let alone root these things. I had success the first time rooting a kratom cutting a few years back with just putting the cutting in a clear cup of perlite inside of a ziplock bag humidity dome that I placed in the window. However, being that it was the beginning of October and not the middle of summer like the first time, this technique was not working at all. A week passed by with not a sign of growth except I began to notice that the rifat strain, which had been sitting in the bag and was a week older then the RVT AOE’s, began to start turning a pale yellow. So I began to do extensive research and found a guy on youtube who has really helped me out in the rooting process. So lets get down to techniques and steps I used chronologically after this first incident of the leaf color occurred.
The Setup
1. I went to Lowes and bought PVC and PVC connectors and whatnot and built a frame with the dimensions of L x W x H of 2’ x 2’ x 2.5’
2. I put it over a towel that I laid on the floor to add as a cushion and insulator for a heat mat (make sure the heat mat is one that stays on 24/7 and has various heat settings)
* ← means it only applies to cuttings
3. * following a similar setup to speciosaspace cutting grow guide I got a small see-through container roughly 12” x 14” x 16” or something like that (make sure the lid is see-through as well)
4. * use a plastic carton (the ones markets use when restocking sodas) make sure it fits in the container or cut it down so it does this will raise your cuttings above the water below
5. * use a gallon of distilled water (the pH is going to be 7.0 you need to lower that using a pH down solution you can get when you buy a water test kit from Petco) pH is on of the most important things when growing!!!
6. * at this point you should have your cuttings already in see-through cups filled with just perlite. You should have also sprayed down your cuttings with 6.0 pH water and dipped them in a rooting hormone solution, I used the powdered one
7. * place the cuttings in the cups on the plastic soda crate that should keep them about at least an inch from the top of the distilled 6.0 pH water
8. * at Petco also buy an aerator pump and clear air tubing about 6’-8’ should be more than enough that connects to the pump (this tube will go into your distilled 6.0 pH water and oxygenate the water and keep it from getting rotten) also adding air to the humidity chamber that you essensially made
So that is the setup for getting cuttings started be sure to check the pH every two days maybe every day as it can change randomly, the next few steps include lighting and temperature and a few other things that will be important and this also pertains to already rooted plants as well as cuttings
9. ok so you already have the 2.5’ tall pvc frame set up. It is a rectangle, although on the top part of this rectangular frame you need to build a pvc brace that goes across the middle of the top (this is where you are going to put the lights), don’t worry I will send you pictures of my setup lol
10. ok so for the light fixtures I went and bought 4 of those lizard light looking light fixtures from Lowes and I took off the dome-like part so I was literally a little light fixture where you put the bulb itself and the electrical cord that is attached to it.
11. The lights that I used are 2 x 100W CFL 5000K (ultraviolet spectrum) and 2 x 100W CFL 2700K (infrared spectrum) bulbs, totaling four bulbs.
12. Attach these four lights staggered at the top, two on the middle brace you installed, and two on the front facing pvc that is part of the frame. This puts the lights at about 1.5’-2’ away from the plants. These lights do not emit heat so you can literally touch the leaves to these lights and it will not harm them at all, however because they are pushing 100W each if they are close enough they will get burned by the light radiation, not the heat (this is how my plants got all those little red dots because when I was experimenting with light distance I had them way too close at first and boom, a ton of red dots showed up on the leaves. The red dots can also be from too much nitrogen, shock, and season changes, however that was caused by light burn that time)
13. After you have this entire thing set up:
- pvc frame
- heat mat
- *clear see-through humidity chamber w/ 6.0 pH distilled water, plastic soda crate
- *cuttings inside clear cup w/ perlite and drain holes
- *aerator pump w/ tube
- lights and light fixtures
- magnetic thermometer
you will need to wrap the entire thing with space blankets (two will work) I got mine at Walmart for like $1.50 a piece (dimensions are like 4’ x 6’ I think) doing this will keep the heat trapped inside around 75-80 degrees F which is exactly what you want, it will also keep more light inside and on your plants which is why mine seem to be growing so fast.
14. For plants that are already rooted I used an amazing potting soil called Black Gold it is amazing and they love it!
15. I potted them in 1gal black pots (I made a water collection reservoir using the bottom half of a clear see-through gallon water bottle) you can also use the top piece as a humidity dome when first acclimating newly rooted cuttings to a more arid air environment after you remove them from the humidity chamber to pot them.
16. As they grow new leaves and you see them beginning to emerge be sure to mist them generously with a misty spray bottle with 6.0 pH water
Ok I think that covers just about everything, I am exhausted and I haven’t proofread this so I may have left some things out but it should be good. The main things to take away are these things:
Temperature: 70F - 88F: with the sweet spot between 76F-82F
Water pH: 5.5 - 6.5: with the sweet spot around 6.0
Light cycle: 12on/12off – 24on/0off: with the sweet spot 16on/8off
Also don’t over water these plants, but make sure they get enough water. Do a nice good soaking once until the water comes out of the holes at the bottom and dump out the excess water that ends up in the collection reservoir. After that just make sure the soil is moist (will still be dark and cool to the touch) as soon as you start seeing the top drying out lift up the pot, if it is noticeably lighter then the other pots that you recently watered then add some more water to them, will probably happen once a week or less at first but when they get bigger it will happen more frequently.
Alright I hope that answered some of your questions feel free to email me and stay in contact for growing tips and help, if I don’t know the answer I will find it for you because that will help me too and goodluck! Oh one thing that really really helped me in the very beginning, is that I prayed over my plants and sincerely asked God to help them grow, and I know he has helped me as I have never heard of kratom growing .5-1 inch a day!!!
These are just a few recent images of my setup and plants in the back row i have a psychotria viridis, salvia divinorum wasson & hoffman, and a salvia divinorum blosser
if the images didnt open up i sent them as attachments as well. let me know what you think!
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Topic: Personal Intro and Kratom Cultivation (Read 3333 times)