How to Feed Strawberries Garden: Signs of Deficiency of Nutrients

When we talk about damage to the leaves of strawberries, we usually mean holes that leave insects, or spots from the feast of pathogens. True, the foliage is still damaged by frost, and the sins of improperly organized nutrition strawberries look at them as manifestations of the disease. Although this is only hunger.

It can be compared with scurvy sailors (in the already quite distant times) from the lack of vitamins in the diet.

How to understand that strawberries are missing something

We do not have laboratories, which include two dozen collected leaves from one bed to diagnose nutrient deficiencies. And for the year to do the analysis of the soil from the proposed site for the future plantation is also not possible. Not only because of the high cost of tests, but because of the lack of Express laboratories that would work for the summer resident. What remains? To determine the eye to this deficit, examining the damaged leaves and the berries.

Consider the changes in the leaves of strawberries, which occur with a lack of different plant nutrients, and their severity.

Nitrogen deficiency

Usually, when nitrogen starvation leaves lose color brightness, become pale, and sometimes yellow, do not grow to normal size, die early. The leaves of strawberries also change: they turn yellow all the tissues of the leaf blade (except those that are located next to the veins), the veins remain green.

However, with a lack of nitrogen leaves can acquire and red-purple shades of different intensity.

Severely affected leaves middle-aged, and the young grow green. Just beginners assign themselves all the nitrogen that the plant was able to produce.

However, the leaves may turn yellow and for natural reasons (because there is no problem when it dries faded flower due date – it just removed). Strawberry leaves can live for almost three months. If the changes start by the end of this period, there is no reason to worry. Under nitrogen starvation processes are from the beginning of the growing season.

How to make up for the lack of nitrogen

It is easy to solve the problem, because nitrogen fertilizers are always at hand: you can insist leaves, grass stems, and water these bushes. You can feed the plants with urea.

Phosphorus deficiency

The first signs appear during fruiting. Berries are almost normal, but tasteless and soft.

With a shortage of phosphorus in the leaves shrinking. They also become purple-red, but otherwise: first acquire a very dark saturated color; if the problem is not eliminated, the aggravation of the deficit leads to the appearance on the upper surface of the leaves of metallic luster, and the underside begins to turn red.

If leaf tissue became dark brown – this is necrosis (worsens in cold dry weather).

Potassium deficiency

The first signs appear on the upper sides of the older leaves, which are located below the others. The change in color begins with the tips of the leaf notches, then redden the tissue between the veins, and gradually changes the color of the entire leaf blade.

The photo clearly shows the sequence of leaf changes with increasing scarcity.

How to make up for the lack of potassium

You can eliminate the cause by making:

1. potassium nitrate – during flowering and fruiting;
2. of sulphate of potash before planting.

Calcium deficiency

Manifests itself on young growing leaves. They can not expand their folds, the tips of the plates turn black.

Leaves lose their regular shape, become wrinkled, rounded. Petioles die (tissue necrosis), because the leaves are destroyed.

On the tips of the leaves may appear droplets of “syrup”. The berries are shrinking, the seeds they are very tight when compared with the normal berries (not suffering from a calcium deficiency) plants.

How to make up for the lack of calcium

Calcium nitrate solves the problem. On poor soils before planting need to make dolomite flour.

Magnesium deficiency

Chlorosis begins at the edges of the sheet; if the deficit is strong, these parts die. An aura is formed, as if someone circled the sheet along the outer contour with a marker.

Problems can be prevented if you make before planting dolomite, and during growth to use complex fertilizers for strawberries containing magnesium.

Boron deficiency

With a lack of boron leaves first deformed (look like shriveled and burnt), and then completely dry up. On the plate are visible changes in the structure and color of the tissues around the veins, they make the sheet corrugated.

Changes the size of the flower.

With a lack of boron grow deformed berries.

However, these berries can be a plant that fell under the frost. But in the repair of strawberries in mid-July, this is exactly the lack of boron, because the minus temperatures are no longer, except that it was too hot during flowering.

How to compensate for the deficiency of boron

Boric acid will help solve the problem.

Zinc deficiency

And the halo around the leaf, which discolours the jagged edges of the plates, and the stretching of the growing leaves, and the green vein, and the chlorosis of the tissues between the veins are signs of zinc deficiency.

How to fill the deficit of zinc

Complex fertilizers, if they contain zinc, will help to solve the problem.

Iron deficiency

Without iron-in any way… it makes the leaf blade thicker, darker, which allows the plant to increase the flow of nutrients and actively use solar energy. With iron deficiency, the leaf blades turn yellow, but the veins do not change color.

The harder the situation, the stronger the bleaching, and the leaves themselves become small.

How to make up for iron deficiency

Chelated forms of iron will help. It is necessary to check the acidity of the soil: if the pH level is high, then make ammonium sulfate.

Manganese, sulfur and copper deficiency

With a deficit of manganese on the leaves appear multiple dense yellow areas of tissue, slightly rise up the edge of the leaf blade.

When copper deficiency are young leaves: the veins may remain green, but may become brown-black. Leaves droop, as if the soil is dry, although there is enough moisture in it.

Lack of sulfur is similar to nitrogen starvation, but the leaves do not fall off.

We generalize information about the signs of lack of batteries strawberries:

1. If the leaves turn yellow evenly, it indicates a shortage of nitrogen or sulfur, and yet – too wet soil and poor drainage area.
2. If the leaves turn yellow and veins remain green, it is a deficiency of zinc, manganese or iron.
3. If the foliage is dark green, it is phosphorus deficiency.
4. If the leaves burn, the plant suffers from a deficiency of potassium or magnesium.
5. If the sheet can not grow normal shapes and sizes, calcium or boron deficiency.
6. If the leaf veins are brown-black, then there is a shortage of copper or boron.

Test your knowledge!

It so happens that the photos to the articles are often taken from special resources, where the authors put up for sale or free use of their creations. But photographers – not agriculturists, they do not understand the diseases of plants. Therefore there were such “masterpieces”, very necessary to us. They have plants that lack some nutrients. Can you identify the problem?

What’s missing from this specimen?

Strawberry fast… But what was she missing?

Do not let the starvation of strawberries, and she will thank you with a good harvest of delicious berries.

Related posts:

Why Strawberries Do Not Bloom: the Reasons for the Lack of Flowers (Part 1) Why Strawberries Do Not Bloom: the Reasons for the Lack of Flowers (Part 2) Compost: How to Turn Harm Into Benefit Top 10 Trends in Gardening