Beautiful and healing salvia officinalis: growing through seedlings
Flower growers who are adherents of traditional medicine often combine flowers and medicinal herbs... Take, for example, medicinal sage, cultivation through seedlings of which is practiced everywhere. Sage is both annual and perennial, but in the middle lane and to the north, it freezes out in winter. For this reason, it is most often planted as an annual. The seedling method of growing allows you to accelerate the development of the plant and bring its flowering closer. Accordingly, more healing stems can be harvested.
Description of the plant
Quite high, sometimes up to 75 cm, and strongly branching stems of medicinal sage are not inferior in beauty to flowers in a flower bed. Strong shoots are densely covered with elongated leaves, soft to the touch. But the real beauty of sage comes in late spring when it blooms. At the tips of the shoots, small flowers bloom, collected in racemose inflorescences. They can be white, pink, bluish, or purple. Sage blooms until the second half of summer.
It is best to harvest medicinal raw materials before flowering, cutting off the shoots entirely. In folk medicine, both leaves and flowers are used, both fresh and dried. Decoctions and tinctures are prepared from them, and also added to dishes due to their specific aroma. Sage treats colds well, has sedative and antispasmodic properties.
Sage officinalis: growing through seedlings
It is better to start sowing seeds for seedlings from the second half of March. The remaining time is quite enough for the bushes to get stronger. But if you sow earlier, the seedlings can stretch out and be frail. The soil must be prepared loose and nutritious. A universal substrate with the addition of perlite is suitable.
The sage seeds are large enough that there will be no problems with planting. You just need to spread them evenly over the soil surface and cover them on top with a layer of soil with a thickness of 2 cm. Until the emergence of seedlings, crops must be kept under a film that will create a greenhouse effect.
Large seeds can be planted immediately in separate cups. Then there will be no need for a pick.
Seedlings growing in a common pot should be dived after the appearance of a pair of real leaves. Growing seedlings should take place in a sunny place, since they quickly stretch out from a lack of light. In the open ground, the medicinal sage grown through seedlings can be transplanted in mid-May.