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Onions and garlic - these crops are especially loved by gardeners for their ease of cultivation and versatility in use. Garlic is traditionally planted before winter - this allows you to save on spring planting work and at the same time get a jump in time. So the crop can ripen much faster than with spring sowing. Although spring garlic (the one sown in the spring) has a great advantage - it is stored much longer.
Onion sets small sizes are also planted in the fall, so that it has time to ripen well by the end of summer. Pre-winter planting of onions is especially common in the southern regions, where winters are not so severe.
After a long and cold winter, the emerging plant seedlings need to be helped to regain strength, which is why it is so important feeding onions and garlic in spring. The further development of plants and, ultimately, the resulting harvest depend on it.
What happens in early spring
Often the first crop in the garden that marks the beginning of spring is winter garlic. After all, its young leaves sometimes germinate even before the snow melts. They appear through the thickness of the mulch with which they cover planting winter garlic in the fall.
One to two weeks after the snow melts, the garlic is ready for the first spring feeding. If the weather is still very unstable and unfavorable for the active growth of garlic, then it would be better to spray the plantings with the immunostimulant “Epin” or “Zircon”. To do this, 1 drop (1 ml) of the drug is diluted in 1 liter of water. With the help of these products, it will be easier for garlic to withstand possible frosts and avoid yellowing of the leaves.
First feeding of garlic
In other cases, garlic must be fertilized with a composition with a predominant nitrogen content. These can be both mineral and organic fertilizers. The following recipes are most often used for the first feeding.
- One tablespoon of urea or ammonium nitrate is added to 10 liters of water. This solution should be poured between the rows of garlic plantings, being careful not to get it on the green leaves. If the solution gets on the foliage, the plants should be thoroughly watered with clean water to avoid burns. For every square meter of bed, about three liters of liquid with fertilizer are consumed.
- Mullein infusion is often used for first feeding of winter garlic and onions. You just need to prepare it in advance, about two weeks before the date of the intended procedure. Manure is diluted in a large container in a ratio of 1:6 with water and left for 12-15 days in a relatively warm place. If it is still cold outside, you can place a container of manure in a greenhouse or in a room where animals are kept.If it is not possible to create such conditions, then it is better to postpone the preparation of organic fertilizer until warmer days, and limit yourself to mineral fertilizing.
- In recent years, the method of feeding garlic with ammonia has become widespread. After all ammonia is an ammonia solution, and therefore differs little from ammonium nitrate, except perhaps in concentration. To prepare a working solution, add 2 tablespoons of ammonia to 10 liters of water and pour the resulting solution over the garlic right to the root. If you want this solution to serve as additional protection against pest larvae that begin to awaken in the soil, then you must immediately spill the plants with twice as much water. In this case, ammonia will be able to reach deep layers of soil.
Later, this mulch can be used to cover the row spacing so that the soil does not dry out in the heat and growth is reduced. weed.
Awakening onions and feeding them
Onion sprouts sown before winter usually appear somewhat later than garlic sprouts. If the spring is very wet, the seedlings need to be completely freed from the winter shelter and the earth should be raked away from them a little so that there is no stagnation of water and they dry slightly in the sun.
When the sprouts reach a height of 15-20 cm, they need to be fed using the same fertilizers as for the first feeding of garlic.
Considering that phosphorus is very important for onions at all stages of its growth, instead of pure nitrogen fertilizers you can use nitrophoska or nitroammophoska.These fertilizers are diluted according to the same scheme as nitrogen fertilizers; they are also watered at the roots, without touching the green leaves of the plants.
It also makes sense to use ammonia to process winter onions. After all, it can serve not only as a fertilizer, but also as a means of protection against onion flies and other pests that overwinter in the soil, since they do not tolerate ammonia. The processing method is exactly the same as described above as applied to garlic. In order to finally solve the problem with onion pests, you can use additional folk remedies.
- A week after treating the onions with ammonia, pour the onion rows with a solution of salt. To do this, a glass of salt is diluted in a bucket of water and this solution is used for irrigation. After completing the onion planting procedure, be sure to water it with clean water.
- After another week, the onion beds are watered in the same way with a bright pink solution of potassium permanganate. Don't forget to rinse them with water after.
Spring garlic and its feeding
Spring garlic is planted one to two weeks after the snow melts, at the earliest possible time, when the ground has just had time to thaw. But this garlic does not withstand frost well, so during early planting, it is advisable to cover the beds with plants for the first few weeks with any protective material: film, lutrasil.
For him, the best option would be to use complex mineral fertilizers in order to provide all the plant’s nutrient needs from the very first days of development.
Basic spring feeding
Spring is a time of active growth for all garden crops, and onions and garlic are no exception.About two to three weeks after the first fertilizing with nitrogen-containing fertilizers, both onions and garlic need to use fertilizers that contain a greater variety of nutrients.
Both onions and garlic will thank you for using organic fertilizers during this period. You can prepare a herbal infusion - after all, to make it you will only need weeds that grow in every garden, and in terms of the richness of their mineral composition, few fertilizers can compete with it.
To do this, prepare any container with a capacity of more than 10 liters, fill it tightly with any weeds, add a few handfuls of wood ash and fill everything with water. If it is possible to add at least a little bird droppings or manure, then great, if not, it’s okay, the liquid will ferment well in any case. All this should sit for 12-15 days and the finished complex fertilizer is ready.
Dilute one glass of this fertilizer in a bucket of water and use it instead of watering onions or garlic every two weeks.
Because this will cause the bulbs to ripen, but they will not be stored well.
If the land for planting onions and garlic is sufficiently fertilized and the plants develop well, then there is no need for further feeding of both crops. If something worries you about the condition of the plants, and the soil where they are planted is quite poor, then it is possible to carry out one or two additional fertilizings in the summer.It is only important that the fertilizer contains mainly phosphorus and potassium.
Thus, exactly spring feeding of onions and garlic are the most important and determining for the further growth and development of plants.
