The Results Of The Past Season - Visiting The Romanov Gardeners

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

According to the tradition that has developed in recent years, we share with the readers of the magazine the results of the past summer season. This time the summing up was delayed a little: too many cases accumulated on the site and at home. But we believe that it is still necessary to talk, because there is something - the past season is worth it. Moreover, now every year there are some kind of natural anomalies, and we, gardeners, have to adapt to them.

So, what was the past summer like for us? What achievements and losses did it bring? It has been established that summer in our zone lasts about 70 days. It can be shortened or lengthened, depending on weather conditions, by about two weeks. And we all want to successfully fit into this short summer period in order to get a good harvest of vegetables and fruits. We have noticed that climate change over the past five years is disrupting the vegetation processes of many cultivated plants. And it is not always possible to subordinate them to some kind of stable calendar.

Last summer was no exception. Stable frosts, severe snowy winters gave way to sunless spring days. For the third year now, there have been no heavy rains during the flowering of bird cherry. These spring rains, interspersed with sunny days, drive the cold out of the earth. But then April passed, May came … And although we did not have frost during this period, the earth remained cold. The calendar summer has arrived. But June did not give us warmth either. All gardeners and gardeners have a question: how to plant heat-loving plants in cold ground? And I had to somehow solve this problem. But in July, unexpectedly, an unprecedented heat hit us. This climatic anomaly could not but affect the plants, and they reacted to this each in their own way.

At the beginning of the season, we delayed planting seedlings of annual plants in the ground, since it was dangerous to plant them in cold ground. And they took out the seedlings of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, watermelons and melons to the site late. True, they still managed to temper and illuminate it under the rays of the rarely peeping sun. The ground in the greenhouses was also warmed up with a great delay.

We managed to prepare the beds for growing cucumbers, melons, watermelons in the open field on time, and, most importantly, the ground in them was well warmed up. And from the end of the first ten days until the end of May, we were in full swing of hard work on planting seedlings in greenhouses and on warm street ridges.

Last season we were late with planting vegetables: carrots, beets, potatoes. And only by mid-June did they manage to plant flowers. And then the care of the plants began. But, of course, the lack of sun affected their development.

Starting the season, we tuned in to our usual summer - with rains, with an alternating change of cloudy sunny days. And then suddenly unprecedented heat and heat! For fifty days we had a southern summer in the North-West, which forced everyone, and us too, to urgently change the technology of caring for plants. It was necessary to increase the number of abundant watering, followed by loosening of the soil. The changes in the designs of our greenhouses were very useful this summer. Film canvases of roofs in all greenhouses were now rolled into a roll, and this helped out - for two months our shelters simply remained without a top, and as a result, the heat could not ruin all the plantings of vegetables in them. But the plants did not develop according to the usual scenario. Abundant watering, heat and sun led to the fact that our plants drove out huge, fast-growing tops. I had to regularly clean the plantings of tomatoes,eggplants, peppers, cucumbers, melons and watermelons in greenhouses from excess leaves and stems.

Last season we had many new projects planned. The most important and main project on our site, which has been going on for 26 years, is improving soil fertility, "growing" it. Indeed, doing organic farming, we have significantly improved the structure of the soil over the years. This is always noted by the guests who visit us. We have it really, like fluff, loose, nutritious, but not all over the site, of course. And even where the soil is already very good, it is necessary to constantly maintain the humus layer.

The project with vertical beds in the greenhouse also turned out and gave a result. A new project of a "medicinal" garden turned out to be interesting, where more than ten interesting medicinal plants were planted, but there is a separate story about them.

However, not everything went so well for us. For example, there was a failure with seedlings. On May 1, we sowed seedlings of vegetables, spicy plants and flowers, grown at home, from bowls under plastic wrap onto a 7 square meter ridge. The plants were supposed to grow on the ridge, and in June we were going to plant them in open ground. For a while, the seedlings developed on the ridge as planned. But one day the unexpected happened. It seems that the sun in May was not so scorching as well, but as soon as we slightly weakened control over the seedling ridge, all the plants on it “burned out” one day and died. At first we had shock, numbness. So much has been invested in the seedlings of labor, time, money! Many planned projects collapsed like a house of cards. But apparentlyAt some point, God gave us prudence not to blame each other for what happened, but helped us to get together, think about the situation and continue working, adjust it taking into account the new realities. We took this incident as an alarm bell, as a warning not to relax.

Having planted the seedlings of thermophilic crops in greenhouses and on warm ridges, in the third decade of May we urgently took up vegetables: beets and carrots. We usually plant carrots at the end of April. This year they sowed it a month later and immediately covered the bed with covering material. The crop of carrots was harvested in early October, it turned out to be standard, the roots were medium in size, there were no particularly large and small carrots, however, in the past season, I had to devote a lot of time to watering.

The beetroot hybrids Pablo and Bon-Bon were sown on the ridge on 24 May. The rosette of leaves in these hybrids is small, the roots are beautiful, with a smooth surface, weighing from 100 to 200 grams, their flesh turned out to be juicy, and the taste is good.

Against the background of a general poor harvest of potatoes, we can say that we have harvested a good harvest of this crop. Seven varieties of potatoes were planted. We always plant this crop on beds lined with boxes, in well-warmed furrows; we use ash when planting. We plant each variety separately, so that later you can control the yield and quality of tubers of this or that variety, because almost every year we try new potatoes. They planted them in two terms - on May 12 and 24. In the first planting group, Timo was the best. This is a super early Finnish variety. We dug it into food at the beginning of July. By August, this variety matured well, and a fairly decent potato crop was harvested. The tubers are large and tasty. Boiled - good potatoes!

The Snegir variety developed very well in the second group. We harvested a significant crop of leveled, medium-sized tubers of this variety, there were no small and massive ones. It is interesting that the tops of plants of this variety were still powerful and green by the beginning of the autumn rains, but with the onset of wet weather they had to be cut off.

Potatoes have been yielded enough, we think that the watering of the rows has affected. But not all varieties were productive last summer - some suffered from the heat (overheating of the soil). There is an interesting observation: the eyes on large tubers of some varieties suddenly hatched and began to germinate, but, having reached a length of 1 cm, they stopped vegetating, we dug out tubers of other varieties with eyes. The potato crop was decent, but the quality of tubers was not good for all varieties, some bushes produced tubers with late blight, scab was seen on some tubers.

Summer garlic this summer sprouted very long and unevenly, and its ripening was delayed, but by the fall a good harvest of this crop was collected. The onions on the turnip turned out to be medium in size, they were removed on time, before the rains. The only thing that upset was the dark red Carmen onion: some of its plants went into the arrow. We think that the reason lies in the improper storage of the set.

The turnip was born well. For some reason, many gardeners refused to grow this vegetable, once the most beloved by Russians. We tested four varieties at once last season. We especially liked the varieties Dunyasha and Children's Dream. Their roots are juicy and sweet.

The salad was decorative and tasty. Nearby bright green plants and bushes with purple leaves looked very beautiful on the garden bed. And the flower beds, it seemed, were not needed, so beautiful was this bed. We liked the varieties Parliament, Revolution, Ballet, Azarius and Pearl Jam.

Tomatoes also yielded a very good harvest last season. The planting of this culture, fortunately, did not suffer from the heat. We think that a new design solution for the greenhouse roof helped out here, we could, if necessary, roll the roof over tomatoes and other plants. Of course, as always, we had new varieties. I liked the Moulin Rouge tomato - it has early and abundant fruiting, the plants do not have a tendency to disease and, most importantly, the excellent taste of the fruit and rather long fruiting. The tomato variety we have already mastered, Pink honey, suffered from the heat this summer, and therefore it did not bear fruit as abundantly as in the 2009 season, and this variety did not produce large fruits. We harvested a decent harvest of lettuce tomatoes, but they quickly ended their fruiting period, and some varieties also showed a tendency to disease.