Backyard Farming the Natural Way

What can I say; I am a sucker for novel and hard to find plants. Anyhow, in the past couple of years, I found myself with an interest in traditional, ceremonial, and ethnobotanical plants and learned about Mitragyna Speciosa – aka the Kratom plant. This is a tropical plant native to Asia that is related to the coffee tree, and as such it favors a warm, sunny, and tropical environment. As such, it is not tolerant of winter temperatures below about 40 deg, and must therefore be protected. With the proper light conditions, it is  grown by some as a fine indoor house plant.

Though Kratom has the potential as a lovely specimen, its main use in Southeast Asia was for its pain numbing and stimulating effects. It is said that workers and manual laborers would chew the leaves (or otherwise make a concoction) in order to alleviate the psychological and physical misery they were experiencing. Kratom contains many alkaloids including mitragynine (once thought to be the primary active), mitraphylline, and 7-hydroxymitragynine (which is currently the most likely candidate for the primary active chemical in the plant).  Kratom also contains alkaloids which are thought to play a beneficial role on the immune system and lower blood pressure, as well as epicatechin, a powerful antioxidant also found in dark chocolate and closely related to the compounds that gives green tea its beneficial effects.

In its native environment, the Kratom plant can quickly grow into a large tree topping 50 feet, and thrives in a rather wet humid environment. It has rather large, lovely leaves that can reach 10 1/2″ in length (The red vein leaves I am holding measured this length!). It is extremely difficult to grow from it’s very tiny seeds, and more so due to the fact that these seeds do not stay viable for long. I tried unsuccessfully on two different occasions to grow from several seed pods which I had ordered – totaling 100′s of seeds sown.

As it turns out, the only practical way to grow this plant was to acquire cuttings.  I ordered one 10″ rooted cutting from one vendor (a more ‘red vein’ variety),  and then another two later on from a different vendor (that had slightly different characteristics).  As you can see from my pictures, after a few months, these plants really took a liking to the Florida heat and weather. I used 10% home-grown worm castings mixed with potting soil and perlite. As you can also see from the pics, I took several cuttings and was able to reproduce the original stock. From the first three cuttings, I ended up with some plants 6′ tall and a total of 10 plants after several months.

I had intended to plant some of my larger plants in the ground, but because of the fact that I had to sell my home, I had to part with about half of my plants. However, I was able to take a couple of larger specimens with me – and some smaller cuttings which I have continued to produce.

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