The gardener’s season has quite definite peak points, and one of the most anticipated is called the ripening of strawberries. Royal berry can be found in almost any suburban area, despite the rather high complexity of care for this culture. We will talk about the undoubted advantages of growing strawberries on a mulched bed.
In fact, strawberries are an independent Botanical genus. You’ll be sticking up sturdy stalks and dense small berry. Cultivated varieties of strawberries are very small, and its hybrids do not hold out to strawberry varieties.
Why strawberries mulch
Americans 100 years ago began to mulch plantations with something like roofing felt- “cardboard impregnated with tar”.
Mulching has long been known as a common, well-known method of care. And harvests were record, and reviews entirely enthusiastic: mulch and moisture holds, and the soil loosens, and the mustache does not take root, and the leaf is healthy, and most importantly-the fruits do not rot, and the yield of standard berries is almost twice as large…
When working on bare soil, a third is lost, and in wet years — half of the berries only because of the lack of mulch. In the South, the best mulch is the one that is not heated: straw and grass from lawnmowers, and the time of roofing material has passed. Rice husks are also light, but, as it turned out, the sharp tips stick into the berries and increase the rot. Northerners are easier: they can grow strawberries on black mulching film, geotextile or other similar material. Excess heat from the mulch here will only help — accelerate the vegetation.
How to plant in the mulch
Consider the main points of planting mulch.
- Preparing a bed, do not spare the compost. That’s three years.
- Along the rows push the bar small grooves. Mulch not pull, and relax, to a bit copied this terrain. Will rain or irrigation water in the furrows will go in holes, under bushes.
- Tightly, almost hermetically sprinkle all the edges of the bed.
Here is a clever way: every half a meter to attach to the material “ears” for sticking studs, such as large nails. There are many options. You can clamp the edge of the fabric with two squares of fiberboard or thin plywood, which should be sewn with a stapler, and then drill holes in them under the nail.
- On the covered bed can not walk anymore. If you want to walk, put a wide Board.
- Planting bushes, you should not make large, especially rounded holes! Cut only a small cross or make a T-shaped incision to just stick the seedlings. As soon as the weeds see a hint of light, they will slide down, come out through the holes, and have to weed like a normal bed. And most importantly, you will be forced to water a lot: through the holes the soil dries almost as bare.
- Planting seedlings is simple: stuck a peg deeper into the cross, swung the hole, set the roots there, covered with sand, compacted with fingers, poured from a mug-ready.
How to grow
Where strawberries for the winter shelter, for example, harvested branches of coniferous trees, mulch beds do the same. In three years the mulched bed needs to be changed. To do this, remove the mulch and plant cover crops — canola, mustard or other cruciferous plants, to sanitize and refresh the soil.
The trouble with spring strawberries — frozen by colors. There is a brilliant solution to this problem: a bed covered with white lutrasil, which is perfectly kept on sticking out powerful garlic. Most gardeners still plant it through half a meter on the tooth to protect strawberries from diseases. So more no reliance shelter not need to! It would be good to develop this idea for other combined plantings in the garden.
From fertilizing strawberries loves trace elements and organics. The best medicine for her is a clever tank mixture of organic infusion with mullein and microfertilizer.
Some have the habit of mowing the whole leaf to renew the bushes. And this is done when the beds already look sick-almost in July. Why? Who knew? The main thrill of the “harvest festival”: no more work is necessary. Gathered berries-and forgot. But the care of strawberries after the harvest is just beginning!
In fact, cutting a leaf makes sense only in one case: if you do it immediately after harvesting. It is necessary to:
- to leave all healthy Central leaves, to remove only old and sick;
- after trimming to give the shrubs to eat-something to drink: an infusion or compost, mulch, good watering.
When time is lost-it is preferable not to touch: if the new leaf is cut off, in the winter the bushes will not be prepared. It is better to dilute the infusion of grass with mullein, add drugs with effective microorganisms, boxes of granular nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium fertilizer on a bucket of solution and spill directly on the bushes. Germs will deal with diseases as they can.
Methods of reproduction of strawberries
Ideally — only the strongest, the first and second from the Bush rosettes (“mustache”). And they need a special bed-a nursery. Get them not on the plantation, but on a special bed with annual bushes-Queen. Everywhere drip irrigation, care and labels on varieties … a Tedious option.
For those who do not bother with mulch, the easiest way to change the rows and aisles. Two years is increasing, and whiskers are rooted between the rows where I want only cut the weeds with a cultivator. Then he took a shovel and dug through the rows, adding compost at the same time — now it’s aisles. And the young bushes in the former aisles became new rows. Through couple of years — the same castling.
Need seedlings in cups? Easy. Went moustache-dig leaky cups with soil near the right outlets. Pin the sockets to them with wire brackets, sprinkle with sand or sawdust. It remains only to water more often. By the way, for watering strawberries and other berries, spray hoses of fine sprinkling such as Golden spray are perfect. Only it is desirable to put holes down to the soil.
And how to root a mustache on a mulch bed? It’s simple. Now everywhere are sold long containers for seedlings on 2 rows of cells. You need to fill them with soil, put mulch directly into the material along the rows and pinned them in sockets a moustache. Suitable and conventional trays of boards. Here it is necessary only not to forget daily watering. A couple of weeks of vigilant watering, and the rooted mustache can be transplanted into the garden.
Features of remontant varieties
Such varieties are now increasingly becoming fashionable. Fresh berries until the frost-a miracle! One thing is bad: it is necessary to look after too to frosts. Summer berry is very small: hot. Southerners, as a rule, too lazy to cut off excess flowers. And even as something reluctance strawberries after June. And here is on the North thus varieties well. Covered with film, and until the frost berries are happy.
Strawberries are propagated by seeds, this is especially true for beardless remontant varieties.
For information: many remontant varieties, fruiting continuously all summer, whiskers are formed only in the first year. On the second summer their doubled less, and on third-almost zero. Tested on experience.
There are varieties that give two crops. It’s sort of neutral day, like ‘Tristar’ and ‘Selva’. If you remove their spring flowers, they will give a full harvest in August. And again the southerners in tension: here it is possible only with drip irrigation, and even better and under the grid, saving from the peak August heat.
And here is the joke: still see advertising in magazines luxury cascades trudging strawberries. Near necessarily pretty blonde. And after all order! Not funny anymore. Look at the photo: there are replays of the same berries and bushes. Not in the nature of “trudging strawberry”, and varieties there! There are remontant, giving more peduncles and early blooming on the mustache. If you plant such a Bush in a vase — and on the Bush, and on the hanging mustache will be berries. Of course, on order less, than not those the most pictures!
And another anecdote. In the United States and other countries, strawberries grow very intensively on hydroponics and in trays, on mineral solutions. And sold as: next to a huge bright berries of the bag… with flavor. Otherwise you will not understand that it is strawberries!
Fact: strawberries won’t grow on their own. To get a decent return from your berry, you need to work hard.
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