Sweeten Up Your Herb Garden

There is plenty of information out there on how to grow herbs and home gardening tips for plants. This article is dedicated to the best tips on growing and how to handle your own stevia natural sweetener plants in your garden.




Stevia Herb Image

Demand for Reb-A and stevia sweeteners will spike in the near future and growing Stevia has become a hot new opportunity for those in the agribusiness sector. Farmers are learning they can earn more income growing stevia than crops used for illegal drugs. Commercial growers are now able to join in the fast growing stevia industry with high quality high yielding crops.

Growing stevia in the home is growing in popularity. Whether you grow stevia in your home herb garden or in a garden planter it does not matter. Either way successfully growing stevia in the home herb garden is perfectly possible. Growing stevia plants in your home herb garden is not difficult as long as you follow the basic guidelines that seem to work well for this unique and popular herb.

Growing stevia from seed normally has a very low germination rate; sometimes less than 10%. Growing stevia from seed can also be more complicated due to very poor stevia seed germination and inconsistent quality of the sweetener level (stevioside) in the stevia leaves.

When growing Stevia as a perennial or for early harvests, clip the plants 6 inches from the ground so they will spread and produce more leaves. Long summer days in cooler regions are actually an advantage for growing stevia.

A quick check of online suppliers shows stevia plants available in 3” pots, available for between $3 to $5 each. Seeds are also online.

Treat the herb as an annual in colder areas. Grows to 80cm tall and about 60cm wide. Leaves can range from 2-8cm in length and 5-30mm in width, with soft serrated edges. The leaves form in the upright stems. Small white flowers, similar in looks to heather plant, come in clusters on the tops of the stems in summer and fall.

Flowering usually occurs 54-104 days after planting pots or transplanting seeds. The plant is suited to climates from temperate to sub-tropical where temperatures range between 21-43°C, with an average of 24°C, but it will also grow in the tropics, where it prefers shade and will also grow in cold climates when you bring plants inside.

As soon as the plant flowers, the leaf production slows down, so it is an advantage to snip off the flower buds, to encourage further leaf development. If the plant is left to flower, the tip leaves take on a slightly bitter overtone. Because of its unruly growth, plant several plants together for support. Plants will die if left to flower, so it should be cut back repeatedly to prevent flowering.

These plants can seem dead at times, only to come back to life, so don't give up on them quickly.

Now that you have an idea how to grow them, next time we will cover the subject of harvesting, and what to do with the stevia herb after you harvest it.