There is nothing more pleasant than harvesting a strawberry from your own garden . But in order for this crop to be high-quality and abundant, strawberries need to be properly patted beforehand: remove the leaves that died out during the winter and plant, fluff the soil, water thoroughly and, of course, fertilize. About the subtleties of top dressing strawberries in early spring, we'll talk today.
What to fertilize strawberries in early spring?
What kind of fertilizer can you make in the spring for strawberries? There are a lot of options for solving this problem, because in the spring as a fertilizer for strawberries you can use ready-made mixtures, and prepared with your own hand-feeding from yeast, chicken manure or manure, urea, wood ash and much, much more. But it should be remembered that the strawberry plant is rather capricious, so it is important not only to feed it in time, but how to do it correctly, optimally selecting the composition of the feeding.
To date, a lot of scientific works devoted to the spring fertilizing of strawberries have been written, in which the necessary proportions of microelements necessary for the plant are given, and also the consequences of a shortage and an overabundance of each of them are described. But not everyone wants to go deeper into the scientific jungle, so we just give the basic rules for adding strawberries under the strawberry in the spring.
Helpful Tips
- Fertilize strawberries in the spring begin for the second year after planting. Firstly, in the first year of life the bush will be quite sufficient for fertilizers introduced into the soil during planting. Secondly, an inefficient plant with an overabundance of trace elements will go only to the detriment, promoting the development of various diseases. During the planting on the bed, the strawberry seedlings are fertilized as follows: a mixture of humus, potassium salt, superphosphate and urea is poured into the planting pit and then watered abundantly (10 liters of water per square meter of the garden bed). The mixture for fertilizer is prepared in the following proportion: 25 grams of urea and potassium salt and 40 grams of superphosphate go to the bucket of humus.
- Strawberry of the second year of life is fertilized in the early spring, as soon as the snow comes down and the soil warms up a bit. Before applying fertilizers, the strawberry bed is cleared, removing dead bushes and parts of plants. The soil in the garden is mulched with sawdust or humus. Then, for each bush, pour out a liter of ammonium sulfate dissolved in water in a mixture with cow dung (one spoonful of ammonium sulfate and two cups of cow manure are taken per bucket of water). The same top dressing is suitable for strawberry bushes of the fourth year of life.
- To feed strawberries the third year of life, use the same composition as when planting, reducing the amount of urea in it to 10 grams.
- Strawberry of the second or fourth years of life can also be fertilized with chicken litter, preparing a solution from it as follows: the capacity is filled with a drop by 1/3 and filled with water to the top. The resulting mixture is set aside for 36 hours, then diluted with water four times more, then brought to the aisles to a depth of 8-10 cm, abundantly watering from above with water. On 1 square meter of a bed it is required approximately 1 kg of similar fertilizer.
- In addition to fertilizing directly into the soil, it is possible to produce foliar top dressing of strawberries in the spring. This feeding is usually repeated three times per season: on young leaves, when flowering and on young ovaries. For foliar dressings it is better to use specially made mixtures in which the balance of all substances necessary for the plant is properly balanced.
- When fertilizing strawberries in the spring, do not forget that an overabundance of mineral fertilizers can lead to a deterioration and even total death of the entire strawberry crop. Therefore, the golden rule in this matter is better a little under-than over-fertilize.