What are the methods of making sweet potato bonsai?
Method for make sweet potato bonsai
1. Choose a sweet potato root block without rotten skin, wash it, dry it, clean it with 1 times of alcohol or white wine, put it in a plastic bag, hang it in a sunny place (keep it at 26℃ in winter), and wait for germination.
2. After10 days, take out the sprouted potato pieces and roll them into spiral rings with iron wires or copper wires (bamboo sticks, fine sand grains, etc.). Can also be used), and put it into a glass basin or flowerpot for bracket fixation, with the potato stem facing upward and the potato body immersed in water 1 cm.
Third, put it in a ventilated place, and then trim the shape according to its characteristics. In this way, a strange sweet potato bonsai is ready.
Change the water every four or six days 1 time, keep warm in cold season, pay attention to rat prevention, and prune regularly for three months.
Method for planting sweet potato
Buy sweet potato seedlings with intact roots
Choose a piece of land in the yard. Sweet potatoes mainly grow underground and don't need much space on the ground. But they like a warm environment, so try to choose a place with plenty of sunshine (especially living in the north) and good drainage.
Loose soil. Sweet potato is a tuber plant, which grows in soil. To make them grow well, it is necessary to deeply cultivate about 30 cm of land, loosen the soil and add gardening soil if necessary.
Treat soil. Fertile soil is very important for a good harvest. Cover the surface with a layer of nutrient soil and pick up the big stones. Measure the Ph value of the soil. By adding peat soil or plant ash, the acidity or alkalinity can be adjusted to reach neutral pH value. This is called soil improvement.
You can buy pH testing devices in gardening centers or shops.
Determine the planting time. Because sweet potatoes like heat, they need warm soil to thrive. So we can't sow until spring at the earliest, that is, one month after the last frost.
Dig a hole. Sweet potatoes need more space than other gardening vegetables. Each hole is 30-60 cm apart. The depth from the base of the plant to the root of the tuber is 3 cm.
Planting. Put the sweet potato seedlings into the pre-dug pit one by one, and cover the stems with about 1.5cm soil. The leaves of sweet potato will grow vines, while the roots will grow tubers at the depth of 15-30 cm in the soil.
Cover with film. In cold weather, cover the sweet potatoes with plastic film to protect them. This will also help to prevent the growth of weeds, prevent the excessive growth of sweet potato vines and rob the tubers of nutrients.
Water it. Sweet potatoes need a lot of water when they are first planted. As time goes on, you should water them less until you only water them once a week. Start watering every day, and then reduce the number of watering times every week.
Wait for the tubers to grow. Sweet potatoes need a relatively long growth period and will not mature until early autumn (just in time for Thanksgiving). Continue watering and weeding every week to make plants grow healthily.
Harvest sweet potatoes. After 120 days of planting, sweet potato should have reached full maturity. If possible, delay the harvest time of sweet potato (before first frost) as much as possible, because it will grow bigger and more delicious tubers.
Morphological characteristics of sweet potato
root
Panicum miliaceum, the underground part has round, oval or spindle-shaped roots. The shape, skin color and flesh color of tuberous roots vary with varieties or soils. Stems procumbent or ascending, occasionally twining, multi-branched, cylindrical or rectangular, green or purple, sparse or hairless, and stems are prone to adventitious roots.
(1) Fiber roots, also known as fine roots, are fibrous, thin and long, with many branches and root hairs on them, and have the function of absorbing water and nutrients. Fiber roots grow rapidly and are distributed shallowly in the initial stage of growth; Later, it grows slowly and develops in depth. Fiber roots are mainly distributed in the soil layer with a depth of 30 cm, and a few are as deep as 1 m.
(2) Chaigen, also known as thick root, stem root and burdock root, has a root length of 0.3- 1m and a root thickness of 0.2-2m. Under the influence of bad climatic conditions (such as low temperature and rainy weather) and soil conditions (such as too much nitrogen fertilizer and too little phosphorus and potassium fertilizer), the root tissue changes. Formed by stopping thickening halfway. Chaigen only consumes nutrition and has no use value, so it should be prevented.
(3) The root tuber, also called storage root, is a deformed root. It is a potato block for people to eat and process. Sweet potato tuber is not only an organ for storing nutrients, but also an important reproductive organ. Tuberous roots are relatively thick adventitious roots on vines, which grow in good soil, suitable fertilizer, water and temperature conditions. Sweet potato tuberous roots mostly grow in the soil layer 5-25 cm deep, and rarely appear in the soil layer below 30 cm. The application amount of potato per plant and the size of potato pieces are related to variety characteristics and cultivation conditions. The root tuber usually has several shapes, such as spindle, circle, cylinder and block. Although the shape of root tuber belongs to variety characteristics, it also changes with soil and cultivation conditions. There are several basic skin colors, such as white, yellow, red and purple, which are determined by the pigments in the periderm. The basic color of potato meat is white, yellow, red or purple halo. The content of carotene in potato meat affects the color of meat. There is milk in the root tuber, commonly known as white pulp.
prevent
The stems of sweet potatoes are often called vines or vines. The long branches on the main vine are called lateral vines. The appearance of vines, that is, the plant type, is generally divided into two types: dot type and semi-erect type. The length of vines varies greatly with different varieties, the shortest is only 0.7 meters, and the longest can reach more than 7 meters. Soil fertility, planting period and density also have great influence on stem length. Short vine varieties have many branches, which are clustered first and then semi-erect or creeping; Long vine varieties have fewer branches, more creeping in the growing period, and more roots in the stem nodes. The diameter of the stem is generally 0.4-0.8 cm. The colors of stems are pure green, brown green, purple green and all purple, and some green stems have purple spots. There are hairs on the stem surface and knots on the stem. Stem nodes have buds and root primordia, which can grow branches and roots. The cortex of the stem has milk ducts, which can secrete white milk. If there is more milk when picking seedlings, it shows that potato seedlings are rich in nutrition and strong in vitality, which can be used as one of the indicators to diagnose the quality of potato seedlings.
leaf
Sweet potato is a dicotyledonous plant. The seedling first exposes two leaflets, and then the true leaves occur on them. A leaf is attached to each node of the stem, which is arranged alternately in the order of 22/5 leaves. Leaves with petioles, leaves without stipules.
There are hairs on both sides of the leaves, and the hairs on the young leaves are dense. The blade length is 7- 15cm, and the width is 5- 15cm. The length and width vary greatly due to different cultivation conditions. There are two glands at the junction of leaves and petioles. The petiole is 6-23 cm long. There are many shapes of leaves, which can be roughly divided into heart shape, kidney shape, triangle shape, palm shape and so on. Leaf margin can be divided into whole margin and notches with different depths. There are many variations in the leaf shape of sweet potato, not only among varieties, but also in different growth stages and different growth parts of the same plant. The colors of leaves, top leaves, veins (veins on the back of leaves) and petiole base can be roughly divided into green, green with purple, purple and so on, which is one of the characteristics of varieties and the basis for distinguishing varieties.
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