3 common but insidious mistakes in caring for Strawberries after fruiting. They are depriving a good part of the harvest next year
Do you want to harvest a decent strawberry harvest every year? Then a fiery salute, fellow gardeners! Today on the agenda is a debriefing of short-sighted gardeners who spoil strawberry bushes, the quantity and quality of berries in the next season - by action or inaction. Let's go through the points!
Why do strawberries need care after fruiting at all? What did she think of herself?
From our, Dachnikovskaya bell tower, it would be very arrogant to think that the main task of strawberries is to give us berries, and after harvesting the bushes begin to "rest". No, comrade! Now the strawberries will work for themselves.
In the second half of summer, the plant forms buds, from which new flowers will appear next year. You don't need to be a professor of agronomy to understand: flowering (read - fruiting!) For the next year depends on leaving during this period. And your harvest!
Mistake 1: leaving strawberries as they are
As you already understood, the most interesting period for strawberries begins in the life of a strawberry. The summer resident will greatly help the plant if, instead of idly wandering along the beds, he removes 2 things from all the bushes:
- Mustache. They take away nutrients, evaporate moisture, in general for a plant - a parasitic appendage. With the condition that the gardener did not plan to propagate strawberries. And in this case, leave the right amount of layers in the best bushes.
- Old and spotted leaves. The second is a manifestation of an infectious disease of strawberries: spots of all stripes. And they do not bring benefits to the plant, and spread the disease to healthy neighbors. We cut, burn, pour the fungicide over the bushes.
Make way for the young and healthy!
Mistake 2: Dull thickets
Comrade! Remember everything that you did with the strawberries BEFORE flowering, hoping to get a bigger and better harvest. Diligently weeded, loosened and watered. Understand that next year's harvest depends on care and AFTER fruiting: keep doing exactly the samewithout giving the faint-hearted slack. Well, if only a little.
For reasons I don't understand, some summer residents deliberately ignore regular weeding. Their calculation is simple - the grass does not allow the earth to dry out quickly, and I would rather water the tomatoes.
Not realizing that they will receive a disease as a bonus - strawberry spotting, which takes health away from the plant. For every self-respecting pathogenic fungus just loves the humid and poorly ventilated corners, courtesy of the weeds between the untreated strawberry rows.
Friendly tip: If you don't want to water your strawberries often, mulch the garden. Just please don't leave the weeds!
Mistake 3: Forgetting to feed strawberries or feeding "natural" organic matter
It’s not for nothing that I wrote that boring paragraph about what happens to strawberries after flowering. Comrade! Strawberries need nutrition to fully lay the buds and ripen them before winter (which is equally important!). And nitrogen, and phosphorus, and potassium.
But here's the bad luck: phosphorus and potassium are almost not contained in "organic" fertilizers in the form of herbal kvass, vigorous mullein and fragrant infusion of chicken droppings. It contains horse doses of nitrogen, which strawberries are now neither to the village nor to the city.
Buy a complex mineral fertilizer "Autumn" (there is more potassium and phosphorus) or, at worst, a universal "Nitroammofoska" and use according to the instructions. I confess: I just put the pellets in the top layer of the earth "by eye" and generously spill the strawberries with water. Done - it works!
Strawberries would be grateful! And if the thought of scattering the godless "chemistry" on the garden bed disgusts you - get by at least with wood ash.
Growing strawberries and was this article helpful? Press, comrade, "Thumbs up!"Sincerely yours, Fyodor Tyapkin-Sklyankin, idly staggering between the beds.