A Detailed Guide to the Planting Methods and Key Techniques for Love Pea (Abrus precatorius)
The love pea is an ornamental-fruited landscape tree. The famous poet Wang Wei wrote the lines: "Red beans grow in the southland, how many branches sprout when spring comes; I hope you will gather many of them, for this thing inspires the deepest longing." This refers to the jequirity bean. This famous poem has been passed down to this day and is still widely recited, truly a masterpiece for the ages. There are lovebirds among birds, acacia trees among trees, and love peas among beans. Legend has it that in ancient times a young woman, longing for her husband who had died in battle at the frontier, wept bitterly day and night beneath the tree by her gate; when her tears ran dry, blood flowed from her eyes, and the blood and tears dyed the tree roots red, and thus the red seeds symbolizing longing were borne.
How to Grow Love Pea: Planting Methods
1. Seed selection:
For how to grow love pea, before sowing you must first select the seeds; it is best to use seeds harvested in the current year. The longer the seeds are stored, the lower their germination rate. Choose plump seeds free of damage or deformity. Choose seeds free of pests and diseases.
2. Disinfection:
For how to grow love pea, disinfection involves two concepts: one is disinfecting the seeds, and the other is disinfecting the sowing substrate. For home seed disinfection, it is common to soak the seeds in hot water at about 60°C for a quarter of an hour, then use warm water to speed germination for 12-24 hours. For disinfecting the sowing substrate, the best method is to put it in a pot and heat it by stirring.
3. Speeding germination:
For how to grow love pea, first soak the seeds in warm water for 12-24 hours, until the seeds absorb water and swell up. This excludes the common seeds that germinate easily.
Sowing:
For how to grow love pea, for tiny seeds, you can moisten one end of a toothpick with water, stick the seeds one by one onto the surface of the substrate, cover with substrate 1 cm thick, then place the sowing pot into water, with the water depth at 1/2-2/3 of the pot's height, letting the water slowly soak upward.
For larger seeds, place the seeds directly into the substrate, dibbling them at a spacing of 3 x 5 cm. After sowing, cover with substrate to a thickness of 2-3 times the size of the seeds. After sowing, use a sprayer or a fine-holed watering can to moisten the sowing substrate; later, when the potting soil is slightly dry, water again, still taking care that the force of watering is not too strong, so as to avoid washing the seeds out.
Love Pea Planting Management
1. Watering: according to weather conditions, water less on overcast and rainy days and more on dry days; before the shoots reach 5 cm, water less, just moistening the love pea seeds and the gauze; after 5 cm, water more, 2-3 times a day, so that no water accumulates in the tray and no water drips from it.
2. Fertilizing: carry out topdressing together with loosening the soil and weeding, applying 5-10 kg of barnyard manure per love pea plant, using ring-shaped fertilization.
3. Planting time: the time to plant love pea is after the second rice harvest, roughly from the end of September to the beginning of October, which is the sowing period for red beans. Farmers make use of the day before the rice harvest to fill the paddy field with water, then scatter the red beans into the field, or else sow them by machine. But because sowing by machine is still at the trial stage, the area planted with love pea by this method is not very large. The maturity period of love pea is about eighty-odd days, and it needs nearly three months of growing before it can be harvested; the harvesting method is the same as for rice, also using machines to harvest. In the early days it was first done by hand, then harvested by manual labor, and only at the end was it changed to machine harvesting. The harvest time is from the end of December to the beginning of January, after which rice is planted again.
4. Weeding: during the growth period of love pea, weed once each in summer and autumn. You can also combine this with interplanting short-statured crops, so that there are no weeds in the field.
Points to Note When Planting Love Pea
Temperature: because it originates from tropical regions and likes a high-temperature, high-humidity environment, it has very strict temperature requirements for winter, and cannot overwinter safely in areas where frost occurs.
Light: it is not strict about light, liking full sunlight and also tolerating partial shade.
Fertilizer and water: for potted plants, in addition to adding organic fertilizer when potting up, appropriate fertilizer and water management should also be carried out during routine care.
Pruning: winter pruning, when in winter the plant enters dormancy or semi-dormancy, cut off weak, pest-damaged, dead, and overly dense branches.