Posted by Tom Broome on 4/25/2006, 8:44 pm, in reply to "The Cycad Jungle"" --Previous Message--
205.188.116.8
: We bought a Sago palm last summer it
: was big and healthy just beautiful.
: NOW it is very ugly! We put it in
: under a grow light over the winter,
: because it lost its leaves and grew
: these long (about 3 feet long) thin
: little vines all over it. Do I cut
: them off? What is it doing? I was so
: happy to find your site because I am
: ready to end it's suffering. But
: those little vines are growing
: longer.Please if you could help I
: would be so gratful. I can get you
: pictures but I don't have a URL I
: could email a picture to an email
: address.
: Thanks Connie
:
You don't need to send a picture, I get about 30 people from up north each spring asking me the same question and their plants look just like yours. Any hardcore cycad person knows that you really don't have a bad problem. Cycas revoluta is a full sun plant. Full sun is about 10,000 foot candles. Your plant was doing fine outside, so for the winter you bring it inside. You probably are not, or were not watering it as much as it probably was outside, or you were using heat that frys up plants. This makes the leaves dry up and get brown, because the plant can't pump enough water into the leaves to keep them green. Then you try to make it grow during the winter with a grow light. You would think a grow light gives off a lot of light, but it is terrible. You gave it a long amount of light but low level light, It was enough to force out new leaves during the winter, which you don't need to do anyway, and the leaves came out what is called 'sun stretched' The light level is so low, the leaves elongate way too much, and you see what is coming out of your plant. To explain grow lights would take me an hour to type. But as an example, light intensity goes down exponentially every extra foot away the plant is from the light source. There is so much more, but just something to play with, take a meter reading of the sun in a camera, then take a reading from your grow light, the same distance away the plant is and see the difference. Each f-stop is either twice the amount of light as the one before, or half the amount of light, depending on which way you are going. If there are 3 f-stops difference between the two situations, that makes the inside light only 1250 foot candles which isn't very good for most full sun plants.
You probably didn't want to hear all this, what you really want to know if what do you do now? Cut off these bad leaves, take the plant outside when it is alright to take out, fertilize it with something like Cycad Special and water it well, and it will flush a good set of leaves again, but it might take another 3 months from now, because you got this early flush, and the plant needs to set itself again for another flush.
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