Planting Stevia in Containers, Part I – Container Gardening with Herbs

This video is part of a series of easy to understand and comprehensive videos on Planting Herbs in Containers narrated by Barb Melera, co-founder of Harvesting History Heirlooms, LLC. This particular video describes how to grow in containers and when to harvest one of the sweetest herbs on earth. It also details the history and original habitat of this plant. Excellent for novice and experienced gardeners.

Brought to you by Harvesting History, LLC an American Heirloom Horticultural Company, https://harvesting-history.com/. You can purchase the bulbs discussed in this video at our website, https://harvesting-history.com/

hi I’m Barb Malera I’m with the company the Horticultural company called harvesting history we specialize in heirloom Horticultural products like plants and seeds and also tools today we are going to be talking about another Herb in our series on planting herbs in containers I highly recommend you go to our YouTube channel because we are creating a series of video specifically on planting herbs in containers and today we are going to be talking about Stevia Stevia is an herb that is a natural sweetener that has no carbohydrates and has no sugar content so it’s very good for diabetics and it’s very good for people who are trying to lose or who are watching their weight the stevia plant is native to South America and has actually been used by the indigenous peoples of South America for what is written uh hundreds of years but I believe that’s probably a low estimate they’ve probably been using it for thousands of years as a sweetener what they would do is they would use the dried leaves um as a sweetener on some of their Foods they would use the fresh leaves as sweeteners on say like a fruit salad and they would uh chew the fresh leaves just to have a sweet flavor in their mouths so this little plant has been used for a long long time and it’s much beloved by some of the peoples in South America and it’s becoming very popular in in North America now the thing about the stevia plant number one is it’s a bush it’s a small Bush but it is a bush and the other thing about the stevia plant is that it does not like to completely dry out it is what they call a tender perennial it will not uh survive Winters in hardiness zones one through eight it’s iffy in nine and then it will survive in hardiness Zone 10 the stevia plant is very very easy to grow in a container and actually loves being in the container if you look at at this plant you can see the container is fairly deep and this particular container is about a 10in container you can easily grow this plant in an 8 to 10 in container so let me let me bring this this plant would grow equally well in this container I hardly encourage you if you’re going to grow one of these plants to keep cutting it trimming it and let it have a bushy effect but don’t let it get so tall because once it gets tall it gets Wiggly in the container all right let’s begin by teaching you how to create your own soil for containers let me give you a little background so you know why uh we think we have some credibility in this area we have been planting we have been doing about 300 to 400 plantings per year for the last 18 ye for the last 18 years and in those 18 years we’ve gained a lot of experience about what soil mixes work and what don’t work the one we recommend for all containers is this soil mix we start with crummy backyard soil or if you don’t have a backyard as one lady once told me her backyard was all concrete if you have um soil used soil from pots that you’ve already planted in and the plants have died any kind of soil like that or you can go you can go to Lowe’s or Home Depot and you can buy their cheapest soil it’s always called top soil it’s not a special mix do not put your money on special mixes just buy this it’s usually about three to $4 for a 40 lb bag of this soil so buy top soil in this bucket we have now placed six scoops of the top soil to that we’re going to add two scoops of manure now this is what I’d call half a scoop into the bag or another half scoop okay so that I would call one scoop of manure we need another scoop we’ve done six scoops of top soil now we’re going to do that’s a pretty good size scoop two scoops of manure dehydrated manure you can buy the chicken poop you can buy the cow poop you can buy the goat poop you can buy the whatever the Llama poop whatever you want manure okay and then finally you’re going to use two scooops let me push this over I’m going to walk around the stevia plant two scoops of Pete MTH one two okay if you don’t want to use Pete Moss for sustainability reasons yes you can use coconut qua um it isn’t quite as good as Pete Moss but it’ll work and it’s sufficient to do the job so either Pete Moss or the coconut quar two two scoops of that two scoops of manure and six scoops of crummy backyard soil old potting old soil from pots or top soil from Home Depot or Lowe’s and then what you’re going to do is just mix it all together in your bucket in preparation for putting it in its own pot once you have the soil mixed in your bucket you can then transfer some of that soil into a pot I’ve chosen an 8 in diameter pot for the plant I’m going to plant now Stevia is sometimes hard to find as a plant I want to caution you never bu High Stevia seed it has a very very low germination rate so always find Stevia as a plant and in a good Garden Center or Nursery they may in the spring have Stevia plants for sale what you’re going to do is and I’m going to use I’m going to use our stevia plant if you can’t find a stevia plant and a friend has their own stevia plant here’s what you can do you can take a cutting now I want you to look carefully at where I’m going to take the cutting I’m going to cut right below a leaf Junction can you see that and then I’m going to cut the leaves off and then what I do is put the cutting in the water I you don’t have to do this but I I like to give the plant a little help with some rooting hormone so once again the leaf Junction was there I cut off all the leaves and now I’ve dunked it in the water and now I want to cover that leaf Junction as much as possible and then I’m just going to stick my finger to make a [Music] hole it’ll take several weeks before the rooting is really complete you need to keep the soil moist but not wet they don’t like to have wet fee and then you’ve got your stevia plant if you’ve purchased a Seedling from the store then just create a hold the size of the seed of the seedling and put it into the same pot and this plant will get as big as this plant in the course of a season of a summer season throughout the summer what you want to do with your stevia plant is keep it trimmed into a bush type habit it likes it better that way when you have stragglers over exuberant stragglers like this again you’re going to cut it and you can plant this cutting um as you can see we’ve taken cuting from this plant just to keep it in a bush type habit this plant came from a single seedling and was planted in early July it’s now the end of August so you can see 8 weeks and we have a handsome stevia plant you really don’t need to fertilize it that much if you’re going to fertilize it fertilize it with a general fertilizer where all three numbers are even 10 10 10 12 12 12 something like that but this is all you need to do for the plant keeping in mind you do not want the plant to sit in heavily dampened soil you want the plant to be a tiny bit on the dry side but also you can’t let it totally dry out because Stevia are very unforgiving you let this plant die out and it’s dead so um you have to walk a little bit of a fine line just keep the soil a little bit moist during the growing season if you have enjoyed this video please come to our website www.h harvesting DH his.com where you can purchase heirloom non GMO vegetables flowers and herbs please like subscribe and share with your friends our channel on the left side of your screen there is our most recent video and on the right side of your screen is one of our playlists we are harvesting history seeding the future