Leaf Curl Occurence - A Garden Sage Lesson

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Sometimes on young plants, we see an odd situation to new growers. We will see circumstances where the leaf curls up into a tube or it rolls over, showing the underside of the leaf to the light.

Why is it doing this? Essentially the petal is shading itself, right? When the petal rolls over, it shades itself, reducing the amount of light that is striking the photosynthesis area. By reducing the amount of light striking the photosynthesis area, we see a reduced need for water.

Why does this occur? The plant is protecting itself from the transpiration rate that is being induced by the lighting. So under what circumstances does this happen? Sometimes we have a young plant that we have just transplanted. We’ve taken it away from its gentle fluorescent lighting. We’ve now put it under HID lighting, which is more intense, demanding a greater rate of transpiration, and the plant is young. It hasn’t established an aggressive root mass yet.

The root zone is unable to take up enough water to meet the transpiration rate that the above ground atmosphere is inducing, so there’s not a huge amount of things you can do about this. You could spray a cloning wax like an anti-transpirant to reduce transpiration that would make it a little bit easier for that young plant to handle the rate of photosynthesis that’s being induced by the lighting. You could back the lights off, so it’s not as intense. You could raise the humidity a bit, but at the end of the day, this is not a serious problem.

New growers look at this and they say, “Oh, my goodness! What’s happening?” But this is really one of the easiest problems you could deal with. All you need to do is let that root mass dry out. In other words, don’t overwater it because as the root mass dries out, the roots are really going to rip through that medium and establish their size. Then the next time you water that medium like if you use a root stimulator, you’re going to have much more root growth in that medium to take up the water that you’re giving it, which will then match the above ground rate of transpiration. They will definitely grow out of this minor problem.

Don’t be too concerned. Sometimes this can happen with plants that are growing super fast. If the above ground growth is so fast, then it’s outpacing the root development, you can see the same problem. Just remember: it’s not super serious. You can back off your lighting and generally plants will grow out of this problem.

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