Application Of The Microbiological Preparation RADIANCE When Growing Vegetables

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

The experiment continues

On the pages of the magazine www.floraprice.ru you can often see the publications of the head of the Organic Farming Club Sergey Rumyantsev, in which he urges gardeners to switch to the natural farming system under the motto "Less work, higher yield". This motto is very appealing to me.

The fact is that we have a large plot with an orchard, a lot of flower beds. I am growing a stock of vegetables for the whole winter for a family of five. Naturally, I try to get a high-quality, healthy harvest, and therefore I hardly use mineral fertilizers. I focus on organic matter: I prepare composts, liquid top dressing from weeds, mulch some plantings, sow green manure after harvesting potatoes and vegetables.

To grow heat-loving vegetables, I use warm beds, which are based on fruit and vegetable peelings dried over the winter, hay and foliage harvested in the summer, spilling all this with a diluted mullein. All this allows you to get pretty good harvests of vegetables and fruits, but you also have to work a lot. And the years go by, my back starts to bother me, my legs fail, so the appeal “Work less …” is very attractive.

Last winter I attended lectures on organic farming, bought the recommended Radiance preparations, and since spring I tried to work according to the recommended method. But, alas, it was not immediately possible to carry out spring tillage with a concentrated solution of this drug. More precisely, we did not begin to do it, since, according to the recommendations, after treatment with the solution, planting and sowing are carried out only after 2-3 weeks, and the land was already ready, and we did not want to postpone sowing for so long.

I decided to start the experiment with one bed near the stone foundation of our greenhouse, on the southern side of it. I made a fence made of boards 40 cm high, chose all the land and filled the ridge with organic matter from hay, leaves and other waste, treated it with a preparation and closed the 3x0.45 m bed with foil for two and a half weeks. After this period, I made five holes there, filled them with compost and planted eggplant seedlings grown at home in accordance with all the rules of natural farming using "Shining". I installed the arcs and closed the landings with a thin lutrasil in two layers. A week earlier, the same seedlings - three plants - were planted in a control bed prepared in the old way and without the drug. I planted peppers in the same ridge. They were under a low film cover (70 cm).

Started observing. The first two weeks did not notice much difference in the development of plants, but later I noticed that five eggplants on the experimental ridge looked much stronger, they had a color earlier and the ovaries formed immediately.

According to the technology of organic farming, plantings should be sprayed weekly with the "Shining" preparation and mulched. I did not do this every week - it is difficult to get used to the new rules, and there was still not enough cochineine from my many lawns, since I primarily mulch strawberries and grapes, which I grow in a high place. Mulch is needed both to retain moisture and to feed plants.

For spraying in order to save money (the preparation "Shining" is not cheap, but for my large garden it takes a lot) I prepared an infusion in a 100-liter barrel - from weeds, old jam and the preparation. With this solution, I sprayed eggplants, mulch - for its rapid decomposition, as well as planting potatoes and tomatoes - to prevent late blight. Everyone remembers that last summer was rainy. It was difficult to choose the time to spray the plantings: you will carry out the treatment with the drug, and in an hour it will suddenly rain, I think there is little benefit from it. As a result, the tops of the potatoes began to turn yellow, and later turn black - from July. The situation was better with tomatoes because they grew in a greenhouse.

I consider the experiment with eggplants to be successful, since on each of the five strong bushes there were 4-5 eggplants weighing from 300 to 500 grams each! Moreover, when I cut them, new fruits were tied on the bushes. By the way, eggplants like to grow under lutrasil, they stayed there until the end of October, having survived several frosts. The second harvest even managed to ripen there. On the control bed, 1-2 eggplants per bush ripened, and they were not at all large.

Since the filling of the ridge with organic matter using "Shining" gave a positive result, we decided to prepare a tomato greenhouse in the same way for the next season. And when we started this work, we realized what a hard work it was. Indeed, in the greenhouse we have three high ridges 6 m long and 0.5 m wide. We had to select all the land to a depth of 40 cm and fill the beds by 90% with organic matter. First of all, we used clippings of one-year-old grapes. Using a power cutter attached to the edge of the compost bin, I chopped up all of the cut grapes along with the leaves and then placed them in the bottom layer of the beds. The husband was asked to mow the sides of roads and ditches and used the cut grass to fill the ridges in the greenhouse. They also dragged foliage from the forest, and the tops of beets and carrots went into business. They added stale sawdust there, but everything is not enough,not enough … We hardly collected organic matter to fill one 6-meter ridge, and on the second ridge we simply dug a deep groove 25 cm wide and filled it with organic matter, and we left the third one until spring. And if you take into account the fact that it is necessary to change the soil using this technology every autumn, then pensioners cannot afford it! It turns out that the slogan - "Less work …", alas, is not yet very relevant.

I consider mulching to be a positive aspect of this technology. Of course, if you spread the dried cochineine with a layer of at least 5 cm, and not loose, but pressing it to the ground, then there will be no weeds for two weeks, and those that still break through are very easily pulled out. It's good if you manage to do this 4-5 times a summer, but where can you get so much mulch? And mulching once or twice a summer, and even with a thin layer, will not work. And then exhausting weeding awaits you again.

This is how my experiment on the use of the "Shining" microbiological preparation ended. The result is positive, but so far it has been obtained on a small area, and in order to master large areas, you need to work hard, I don't think less than usual. And yet, next season, I will continue my experiment on one tomato bed in a greenhouse, and if there is enough organic matter, then in the open field.