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Today, strawberries (garden strawberries) are grown in many summer cottages and garden plots. The plant requires fertilizing. Only in this case can you hope for a good harvest of healthy and tasty berries. There are many different mineral fertilizers in stores intended for garden strawberries. But modern gardeners strive to obtain environmentally friendly products, so they refuse any chemicals.
Our ancestors also grew strawberries, but they fed the crops with organic matter. Fertilizing strawberries ash and other folk remedies are widely used in strawberry beds. How can you fertilize garden strawberries?? This is discussed in our article.
You need to know this
Before feeding strawberries in the spring, you need to prepare the beds:
- remove the cover, layer of hay or straw;
- remove old leaves;
- conduct a thorough inspection of the plantings: remove suspicious strawberry bushes;
- Sprinkle the beds with water and loosen the soil.
If such measures are not carried out, then no amount of fertilizing will provide you with a rich harvest. The plants are fed with various fertilizers. In recent years, gardeners prefer organic fertilizers or folk remedies to mineral fertilizers. Although one of the mineral fertilizers, urea, is always in the arsenal of experienced gardeners.
Fertilizers for strawberries
Wood ash
The ash contains a lot of potassium, without which good fruiting of strawberries is impossible. Gardeners all over the world, feeding plants not only nourish them, but also improve the structure of the soil. Ash is especially important in the garden if the soil is acidic. You can use dry fertilizer, sprinkling strawberries under each bush and then watering the beds, or prepare an ash solution.
Ash fertilizers do not cause difficulties even for novice gardeners. Let's find out how to prepare a nutritional composition from ash.
One glass of wood ash is poured into a bucket and 1 liter of boiling water is poured. After 24 hours the stock solution is ready. To obtain a working solution, add up to 10 liters and water the strawberries during fruiting. 1 liter of working solution is enough for one square.
This solution can be used for root and foliar feeding. It has long been established that nutrients are absorbed faster and to a greater extent through leaves. Watering or spraying with an ash solution helps to defeat strawberry diseases and repel pests.
Iodine
Gardeners who have been growing strawberries for many years claim that iodine is necessary for plants.
What role does a pharmaceutical drug play? Everyone knows that this drug is an excellent antiseptic. Feeding strawberries with iodine helps prevent fungal diseases and various types of rot.
Strawberries can be watered with an iodine solution at the root or fed by the leaves during plant awakening.
There are different options:
- To prepare a composition for feeding strawberries, pour 10 liters of clean water into a container and add 15 drops of iodine for watering under the root. For a foliar half-edge of strawberry, seven drops are enough. Strawberries treated with iodine solution have less sick, grows green mass faster.
- Some gardeners prepare the following composition for spraying: add 1 liter of milk (not store-bought!) or skim milk to 10 liters of water and pour in 10 drops of iodine. Milk softens the solution and provides additional nutrition for strawberries. You need to spray this mixture three times with an interval of 10 days.
- During the budding period, more nutritious feeding is prepared. For a 10-liter bucket of water you will need: iodine (30 drops), boric acid (teaspoon) and wood ash (1 cup). The solution is used immediately after preparation. Half a liter of solution is poured under one plant.
On how to feed strawberries with iodine in early spring:
Urea
Strawberries, like other garden crops, need nitrogen. It is present in the soil, but it is difficult for plants to absorb soil nitrogen. Therefore, in early spring it is necessary to add nitrogen-containing fertilizers to the soil. One option is urea or carbamide. The fertilizer contains up to 50% easily digestible nitrogen.
Fertilizing strawberries with urea is an important point in growing strawberries:
- To feed in the spring, two tablespoons of the substance are dissolved in a ten-liter container.The resulting composition is enough for 20 plants.
- During flowering and fruit formation, foliar fertilizing with urea is carried out. For a bucket of water - 1 tablespoon.
- Once again, garden strawberries are fed with urea when preparing the plants for wintering. Nitrogen is necessary for plants to strengthen viability and form the next year's harvest. 30 grams of fertilizer are poured onto a bucket of water.
About the benefits of urea:
Boric acid
Experienced gardeners do not always use boric acid to feed strawberries, only when the plants lack boron. This can be recognized by twisted and dying leaves.
- Spring root feeding of strawberries with urea is carried out after the snow melts. You will need one gram of boric acid and potassium permanganate per watering can.
- Foliar feeding is carried out until buds form, dissolving 1 gram of the substance in 10 liters of water.
- When the buds begin to form, prepare a multi-solution consisting of boric acid (2 g), potassium permanganate (2 g) and a glass of wood ash. 500 ml of solution is poured under each bush.
Chicken droppings
Chicken manure contains a lot of nitrogen, so it can easily replace store-bought urea. What are the benefits of this natural fertilizer? Firstly, strawberry fruiting increases. Secondly, the fruits become tastier.
Fertilizing strawberries with chicken droppings performed early in the spring, before the snow melts. Natural fertilizer contains a lot of urea. In the cold season, it is simply scattered in the snow.
You can prepare a nutrient solution: you need 1 liter of litter per bucket of water.After three days, the working composition will be ready; it can be used to treat the soil to saturate it with nitrogen.
Instead of chicken droppings, you can fertilize strawberries with manure. Fresh cake is filled with water and left for 3 days. It is diluted in a ratio of 1:10, the same as chicken manure.
Folk remedies
In the old days, our grandmothers did not use mineral fertilizers, and iodine and boric acid were not available to them. And here weeds have always been. Every housewife always had green infusions in containers with which they watered their plantings.
What does this feeding give? This is, in fact, a manure substitute, since through fermentation (fermentation) the grass releases its nutrients and trace elements.
The most commonly used are nettles, shepherd's purse, clover, healthy leaves of tomatoes, potatoes and other plants growing in the garden. The grass is crushed, filled with water and left to ferment for 5-7 days. The readiness of the solution is determined by the appearance of bubbles and an unpleasant odor. If you have dry hay, add it to the container too. Thanks to it, the solution is enriched with useful hay bacilli. The container is placed in the sun, kept under a closed lid so that the nitrogen does not evaporate. The solution must be mixed.
A liter of mother liquor is poured into a bucket and topped up to 10 liters. Some gardeners enhance the properties of green feeding with bread, yeast, ash.
Strawberries are fed with this solution at the time of budding. It can be watered at the root (1 liter of working solution per plant) or used as foliar feeding.
Let's sum it up
Feeding strawberries at different stages of vegetative development is an important part of agricultural technology. We talked about several options.It is clear that every gardener will choose the most suitable fertilizer for him. Some will use mineral supplements, while others will prefer an environmentally friendly strawberry harvest. Everything is decided on an individual basis. We wish you healthy plants and a rich harvest of berries.
