2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
The large supply of nutrients in the gladiolus bulb does not relieve flower growers from feeding the plant with fertilizers and watering the soil. After all, gladioli are big lovers of moisture, who can more easily tolerate its excess than lack of it
Geophytes
Geophytes include plants that wait out unfavorable seasonal periods for them, hiding their endings of shoots and buds of renewal in the soil. During the growing season, they accumulate nutrient stores in the roots, rhizomes, tubers or bulbs.
So gladiolus, being a geophyte, has a bulb - a storehouse of nutrients. But even the largest bulbs do not have enough reserves to show the leaves and inflorescences to the world, be able to feed them and form a replacement bulb and renewal buds.
Additional power supplies
For additional nutrition, gladioli are extracted from the soil, absorbing the mineral elements contained in the soil by the roots. Nourishes the plant and photosynthesis in the leaves. But even such additional nutrition is not enough for every plant, and therefore a caring florist will certainly make his own contribution to this matter.
First feeding
Already during the development of the first true leaf, the florist carries out top dressing, the composition of which depends on the fertility of the soil and the quality of the planted bulbs.
On humus-rich soils, mineral fertilizing is replaced by foliar spraying with copper, molybdenum, manganese, boron (adding 0, 2; 0, 05; 0, 15; 0.25 grams of a chemical element, respectively, per liter of water), but you should forget about nitrogen fertilization.
A different picture emerges on poor soils, where nitrogen fertilizer is added along with potassium and phosphorus in the first top dressing.
Juvenile corms need mineral fertilization even on fertile soils.
Second feeding
The second feeding is carried out in the phase of the second or third leaf. In this case, it is desirable to combine mineral and organic fertilizers.
Subsequent feeding
In the phase of 4-5-6th leaves, the role of phosphorus-potassium fertilizers increases, and nitrogen fertilizers, although they do not completely exclude them, decrease quantitatively.
Potassium-phosphorus feeding is stopped a couple of weeks before the bulbs are dug.
Watering
The highest quality flowers can only be obtained on moisture-consuming soils. For the development of gladioli, excess moisture is more favorable than its deficiency. Therefore, in areas with a dry climate, watering the plant takes an important place in the care of gladioli.
In summer, in areas with a hot climate, watering is carried out every ten days, determining the amount of moisture required by the moisture content of the soil. With less water, but more often, light sandy loam is watered.
Gladioli especially need moisture in the 5-6 leaf phase, when the inflorescence begins to grow, as well as during flowering. Sprinkling, refreshing the air, is very useful for gladioli. But sprinkling should not be carried out during flowering, since moisture on the flower can lead to its deterioration. Therefore, sprinkling is appropriate only for non-flowering gladioli.
After the flowers have ceased to exist, watering continues to be carried out, since moisture is needed to form a daughter bulb. If irrigation interruptions occur, the bulb grows unevenly, which leads to cracking of its bottom. This can cause fungal infections. Yes, and an unevenly overgrown bulb takes on a non-marketable appearance.
After watering, liquid dressing, rains from the heavens, it is necessary to loosen the row spacing to a depth of 12 cm, reducing the depth of loosening closer to the plant stem. The loosened soil surface is mulched with straw or shavings of deciduous trees.
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