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With all the wealth of choice of fertilizers today, many gardeners often prefer to use folk remedies for feeding vegetables on their site. This is due, first of all, to the fact that folk remedies, as a rule, are safe for health and do not tend to accumulate in fruits in the form of nitrates and other compounds unsafe for humans. In addition, they are relatively inexpensive and widely available compared to many specialized fertilizers, which are sometimes found only in large populated areas. A person eats bread every day, and its remains can easily be dried or frozen for future use.
Cucumbers are a crop that requires regular and fairly abundant feeding, especially during the fruiting period. Therefore, feeding cucumbers with bread can be an ideal solution for a gardener who wants to save his time, effort and material resources, so as not to waste it on searching for and purchasing suitable fertilizer.
Why do you need grain feeding?
What could be so beneficial in ordinary bread, and even for plants? Everyone knows that bread is carbohydrates, but when it interacts with water, it produces an analogue of sourdough bread, that is, the yeast component of bread comes to the fore, which also plays an important role.When you mix bread sourdough with soil, the primary role is played by the fact that millions of fungi and bacteria living in different layers of the soil begin to intensively absorb all this wealth. There are special microbes - nitrogen fixers, which are capable of converting nitrogen from the air into salts available to plants using carbohydrates.
All this together has a very beneficial effect on the condition and development of plants, in this case, cucumbers.
To summarize, we can highlight several areas of influence of bread feeding on cucumbers:
- The vegetative process is accelerated - this allows you to get an earlier harvest.
- Increases the quality and quantity of ripening greens - the number of empty flowers decreases, and cucumbers grow without empty spaces.
- The vital activity of beneficial microflora in the soil is activated, and, therefore, its quality improves.
- The decomposition of previously introduced organic matter accelerates and, accordingly, the soil is enriched with nutrients.
- Weak plants that are lagging behind in development are strengthened and restored.
Basic cooking technology
You can prepare bread dressing for cucumbers in different ways, but the most traditional is the following method.
To begin with, collect any grain residues in the amount that you need for feeding. If you don’t have many plants, then it is enough to collect about one kilogram of grain products. If you want to feed the entire garden in addition to the cucumbers, then it is better to start preserving the bread in advance.Since bread is quite easy to dry and even freeze, you can collect a sufficient amount of unused bread, if only you have a place to store it.
You can use any type of bread, even moldy pieces will do. It is believed that black bread ferments better, but if you only have white bread, then you should not be upset - you can only keep it for one or two days longer.
It is better to chop the collected pieces to a size of 2-3 cm, but this is not important. Prepare a container, the size of which will depend on the volume of collected bread. Typically a 10 liter bucket or smaller pan is used. Place the remaining bread in about two-thirds of the pan and add water so that it completely covers the bread. A lid of smaller diameter is placed on top, on which the load is placed. The bread should be immersed in water at all times.
The liquid with bread is placed in a warm place for a week to infuse. It must be taken into account that the smell will increase as the infusion sours and can cause unpleasant emotions. Therefore, it will be better if you choose in advance a suitable place to infuse the fertilizer.
After a week, the bread fertilizer is completely ready. It is advisable to strain it before use. Place the bread grounds in a compost heap, and use the resulting liquid as fertilizer for irrigation in a ratio of 1:10.
Other manufacturing options
No matter how good bread fertilizer is in itself, gardeners often use recipes that contain several more components, which allows them to enhance the effect of the resulting fertilizer on cucumbers.
The following recipe is very popular, which can be used to feed cucumbers every two weeks from the moment the first inflorescences appear until the end of fruiting.
A barrel with a volume of 50 to 100 liters is prepared, into which one bucket of green grass is tightly packed, about 1 kg of bread crusts is added on top and 0.5 kg of fresh yeast is added. Several glasses of wood ash are also placed there. All this is filled with water and covered with a lid. Instead of a lid, you can use a piece of polyethylene tied with a rope around the perimeter of the barrel. The barrel is installed in a warm place. About a week after the end of the fermentation process, the resulting liquid is used as a fertilizer for cucumbers. It can be diluted in a ratio of 1:5.
Reviews from those who have used
It’s interesting that gardeners have been familiar with fertilizing with bread for a long time; family recipes are often passed down from generation to generation.
Let's sum it up
It is not for nothing that feeding with bread is so popular among many generations of gardeners. Try to apply it on your plot and you may be surprised what kind of yield you can get from your usual garden crops.
can anyone tell me how often you can feed with sourdough?
Good afternoon, Alexander!
Grain feeding is truly a storehouse of minerals and nutrients necessary for growth. However, like any tool, it has limitations.
1. This fertilizer can be used no more than 2-3 times throughout the season with a break of 3-4 weeks. It is advisable to adhere to the specified watering norms.
2. Bread contains yeast. And its too frequent use can cause a decrease in the soil composition of elements such as potassium and calcium.Therefore, to replenish these elements, it is advisable to pour the cucumbers with an ash solution 2-3 days after applying the grain fertilizer.
Wishing you high harvests!