Fertilizers For Strawberries And Feeding In The Fall

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

To make your strawberry garden happy with a generous harvest, it will not be enough to feed the soil with nutrients just before planting. Strawberries will need additional seasonal feeding several more times: both at the initial stage of growth, and when laying flower buds. Moreover, they should be carried out not only before harvesting, but also after the berries have already been harvested

Foliar dressing in September

Gardeners who have not previously dealt with strawberries may wonder why fertilizing in the fall, when the plant is already beginning to prepare for wintering. Spraying at the beginning of rosette growth and before flowering, before the crop begins to form, is understandable. Why introduce organic matter in September?

Everything is very simple - from the last decade of August to September, flower buds are laid. Therefore, foliar dressing will be more relevant than ever, especially on poor depleted soils. For this purpose, a 0.3% urea solution is prepared and the plantation is sprayed.

If your suburban area is located on peaty or light sandy soils, the strawberry plantation is treated with a mixture of trace elements. For foliar dressing use:

• potassium permanganate;

• boric acid;

• molybdenum-acid ammonium.

The concentration of trace elements should be 0.2%. Among other things, boric acid will scare off ants from the site. For this, the places of their accumulations are watered with an aqueous solution of the substance.

Autumn preparation of the site for spring harvest

In September, the favorable period for planting strawberries ends. For rosettes that are planted in the second half of September and later, the first harvest will be half or even three times lower than that which will be obtained from summer plantings, which began at the end of July.

Therefore, instead of breeding strawberries in the fall, it is better to spend time usefully to prepare the site for the spring planting of these capricious plants. Thanks to early autumn digging, the soil will just have time to settle by the required date. If this process took place after planting the seedlings, then its roots would inevitably become bare, which is why the plants soon die.

During the autumn digging, the soil is cultivated with a shovel bayonet, while simultaneously filling the soil with the necessary fertilizers. And already on warm spring days, all that remains is to loosen the area allotted for the plantation.

Fertilizers for strawberries

One of the best fertilizers for strawberries is semi-rotten manure. If it is possible to use horse or cow manure, it is better to give preference to the former. This fertilizer attracts less parasites. While cow dung tends to attract a bear to the site. Strawberries also respond well to peat compost. For 1 sq. the area of the plantation for digging is applied at least 6 kg of organic fertilizer.

In the future, peat and humus will be useful during spring and summer care for strawberries. After loosening the beds and moistening the earth, the aisles are mulched with them.

Along with organic, mineral fertilizers will not interfere with strawberries, especially in cases where the gardener has an insufficient amount of matured compost or rotted manure at his disposal. Then the dose of mineral components is increased:

• 1.5 times - on light soils;

• 2 times - on heavy ones.

It is useful to add wood ash directly to the beds - about 300 g per 1 square meter. plantations. This is the amount that will provide plants with the necessary trace elements - potassium, phosphorus, lime.

Ash is one of the means of fighting slugs that damage strawberries. It is recommended to dust the rosettes with it before flowering. In addition, slugs love to visit mulched areas. For such cases, you need to save the traps: spread the leaves, pieces of burlap. Parasites hide under them and it will be easy to evict them from the plantation along with the shelter.

Just as it is not desirable to carry out deep tillage before planting seedlings, so it is not necessary to apply a complex of fertilizers several days before placing strawberries on the plantation. It is better if there are other garden crops here before. However, it is important to remember that potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes are bad predecessors of strawberries. Instead, it is better to sow green manures, root crops, representatives of onion vegetables and flowers - tulips and daffodils here. In extreme cases, a pause of 10-12 weeks should be maintained between the day of planting fertilizers and the time of planting the seedlings. In the future, every four years, you should alternate strawberries with plantings of garlic, tulips, green.