What are the cultivation methods for medicinal honeysuckle

Honeysuckle is a perennial evergreen climbing plant, and every part of it has multiple medicinal values. To cultivate medicinal honeysuckle, the following points should be done well:

1. Choose good varieties. For medicinal use, the requirements are thick and strong branches, a reasonable structure, many flowering cycles, a large number of flowers, high quality, and high yield. For example, Jizhua flower and Damao flower are relatively good medicinal cultivation varieties.

2. Choose soil and build the garden. Choose a plot with open ground, loose soil, convenient drainage and irrigation, and humus-rich sandy loam soil as the planting garden. You can also use scattered plots in front of and behind the house, beside ditches, and beside ponds, carry out deep plowing and soil improvement, apply 50 loads of farmyard manure per mu, and make beds 1.2 m wide.

3. Cultivate strong seedlings. Honeysuckle is mainly propagated by cuttings. Before budding in early spring, choose cuttings with 1-4 buds, remove the lower leaves, and insert them into a prepared seedbed as they are cut. Shade them and water them. In dry seasons, spray water once in the morning and once in the evening. During the day, water as appropriate according to the soil condition. After the cuttings take root and grow leaves, gradually remove the shade material, and water with 1-2% diluted organic fertilizer every half month. As the seedlings grow, the fertilizer concentration should be increased. After half a year, they can be transplanted to the field.

4. Scientific management and fertilization. Fertilize before the plants sprout in early spring or before the cold wave in early winter. Open a strip ditch or ring ditch beside the plant, and apply 10 kg of decomposed organic fertilizer, 0.1 kg of ammonium sulfate, and 0.1 kg of superphosphate per plant. From May to June, apply decomposed dilute organic fertilizer water 2-3 times to accelerate seedling growth. For mature plants, in order to increase the number of flower harvests and improve flower quality and yield, 0.5-1% potassium dihydrogen phosphate can also be sprayed on the leaves during the flower bud differentiation stage of each flowering cycle. The ideal plant shape of medicinal honeysuckle is a small umbrella-shaped shrub that is short, upright, and has many branching levels. This must be achieved through pruning. The specific method is to cut off the upper half at a trunk height of 30 cm to promote the buds below the cut to sprout into branches, retain 4-5 branches that are evenly distributed and similar in thickness, and then cut off the upper half of branches at all levels. Before sprouting every spring, a comprehensive garden cleanup should also be carried out, cutting off dead old branches, rotten and residual branches, thin and weak branches, shade branches, and root sprout seedlings, and destroying them in a centralized way to reduce disease sources and the insect population base. The main pests of honeysuckle are aphids and coffee tiger longhorn beetles. The former harms leaves and flower buds and should be controlled in time. The latter uses larvae to bore into and feed on the xylem of the vine trunk, causing hollow trunks. The control method is manual hooking and killing during the larval stage. Cotton balls soaked in dichlorvos solution can also be used to plug the holes, then sealed with mud. The main disease is honeysuckle brown spot disease, which generally occurs severely in summer and causes brown necrotic leaf spots. Spray with jinggangmycin at the early stage of the disease.

5. Harvesting and processing. The main medicinal part of honeysuckle is the flower. When harvesting, both the flowers and the weather should be observed so as to pick at the right time. When the base of the flower shows blue-green, the top is milky white, the flower is about to bloom, the color is bright, and it has a glossy luster, this is the best sign for picking flowers. Pick on a sunny day when the dew has not yet dried, pick gently and place gently, and do not press with hands. To ensure the medicinal quality and performance of the flowers, the flowers picked that day should be dried in time. On sunny days, spread the flowers evenly and thinly on a drying mat and let them dry naturally in the sun. On cloudy and rainy days, heat and dry them. Build a square drying room indoors, place a heating device at the bottom, and set up layered drying racks in the room with 25 cm between each layer. Spread the flowers evenly on the drying tools with a spreading thickness of no more than 1 cm, and move them onto the layered racks. The initial drying temperature is 30-35 degC. After 2 hours, raise it to 40 degC. Keep it at 45-50 degC for 5-10 hours. After about another 10 hours, most of the moisture in the fresh flowers is released, and the drying temperature is raised to 55 degC. When the dried flowers make a sound when pinched, break immediately when grasped, have pure color, and a rich aroma, they are ready. The drying process must be continuous, dried in one go, and cannot be stopped midway or turned randomly. Because the drying method has many advantages and can better ensure the medicinal value of the flowers, it is used more often.