How to boost rosemary re-growth with Keiki Paste

This three step tutorial shows you how to use Keiki paste on your rosemary.

Rosemary (Salvia rosmarinus) is a Mediterranean native that can be grown either outdoors or indoors. Given enough sunlight and warmth, it will reward you with fragrant leaves year-round and delicate purple flowers in late spring to early summer.

Rosemary is best known as an endlessly versatile kitchen herb, ideal for seasoning potatoes, poultry, game, lamb and oily fish. If you are regularly snipping leaves off your Rosemary to use in your cooking, you might be left with a lot of sad, bare stems. If you’re wondering whether there’s a way to speed up the plant’s re-growth process, Keiki Paste offers a solution.

Keiki paste contains plant hormones called cytokinin that encourages cell division and makes your plant grow new shoots, stems, and leaves more quickly than it would otherwise. This makes Keiki Paste a useful tool for the kitchen gardener. Even if you grow Rosemary as an ornamental, you can use Keiki paste to make the shrub push out even more gorgeous fragrant leaves.

The best time to apply Keiki paste to your Rosemary is during the spring and summer season. With maximum sunlight and warmth, it is more likely to respond to the paste more quickly. However, since the Rosemary is an evergreen that grows year-round, you can also apply the paste during fall and winter although you might have to wait a longer time for new growth to appear.

Step 1: Find nodes

First, select ‘nodes’ to apply the Keiki paste to. Nodes are parts of the plant where new leaves emerge from. Keiki paste’s growth hormones that encourage cell division at these nodes.

It is very easy to find nodes on the Rosemary because each stem is packed full of them. You can find them just below each of the leaves.

The photo below highlights just three of the nodes on this rosemary plant, although there are plenty more visible.Keiki paste will work much more effectively on nodes along younger, greener sections of the stem (highlighted in the foreground of the picture) rather than more mature woody sections (highlighted in the background of the picture). Green supple stems indicates where the plant is actively growing.

Step 2: Apply Keiki paste to nodes

Score the nodes slightly with a needle, pin, or knife, making sure not to sever the plant or damage it. This will make a slight wound. Scoring the stem will expose the plant better to the hormones contained in the Keiki paste.Rosemary stems are quite thin so make sure you do this very delicately.

Next, dip a cotton bud in the Keiki paste and dab the paste onto the wounds you have made. You only need a tiny amount. You can apply it to as many nodes as you feel like, wherever you feel the plant would benefit from new growth.

Step 3: Wait

The Keiki paste can take up to a month or two to work. After this time, you’ll start to see fresh growth at the nodes where you applied the paste. While you wait for your new shoots to appear, make sure you place the plant in optimal conditions for growth.

Rosemary likes bright light. The best position would be a south-facing spot, whether indoors or outdoors. The temperature should be between 68-86°F with 55 °F as an absolute minimum. The warmer and brighter the conditions, the more quickly your Rosemary will produce new shoots in the places you applied the paste.

Keep watering to a minimum. Only water when the top of the soil has completed dried out. For potted a Rosemary, this means you should be watering around every 14 days. You should be watering around every 7 days during very dry outdoor conditions. Ensure your Rosemary has the sandy, well-draining soil that it loves. This will help regulate moisture levels around the roots and prevent fatal root rot.