Agrotechnical Techniques To Increase And Speed Up The Harvest In Summer Cottages

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

Big harvest from a small plot

• Convert podzol to black soil
• Enrich the soil with bacteria
• Give preference to high ridges
• Grow some crops on trellises
• Plant most crops with seedlings
• Extend the growing season

Garden plots of many gardeners in collective gardens, unfortunately, do not differ in special sizes. Most often, our gardeners own only 4-8 acres. Here, on this modest territory, you need to manage to place household buildings (a house, a bathhouse, all kinds of sheds and sheds), without which you cannot establish a normal life, and fruit and berry crops, and a vegetable garden.

And besides, every housewife wants to delight her eyes with some kind of flower cultures and even landscape compositions. So it turns out that most gardeners have planted little by little - as a result, it is simply not possible to provide themselves with vegetables, berries and fruits for the whole long winter with a small plot size. Nevertheless, there is still a way out - to increase the yield of crops grown, which is quite possible with proper agricultural technology.

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Convert podzol to black soil

One of the determining factors for increasing the volume (and quality) of the resulting crop is the level of soil fertility. At the same time, most gardeners do not pay enough attention to it (and more often they generally believe that it is completely unnecessary or simply expensive to increase soil fertility), saving on organic matter and mineral fertilizers. Unfortunately, this approach is futile - you will never get normal harvests on poor soil. And, despite this, most gardeners on completely unfertilized land with manic persistence from year to year plant some kind of crops, water the crops, loosen, flood and thin out the plants, with almost zero result. For example, in our garden, many come to me for advice: why is this or that plant not growing, and what is missing. Alas, more often than not it is even difficult to saywhat elements the plants lack - everything is lacking, and first of all, humus. So I explain …

All these are not just words - they are confirmed by my own many years of experience (I myself had to create a garden-vegetable garden on bare Ural rocks, where there was no soil in principle) and the results of leading world experts.

For example, according to research by the Henry A. Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture in the United States, it was found that with organic farming (which means growing vegetables on organic-rich soils), profits increase significantly. This is due to a significant increase in yields and a higher price that is offered for organic farming products, as the most delicious and healthy. The latter (I’m talking about prices), of course, is not so important for ordinary gardeners, gardeners, because everything is grown for themselves, but it’s also desirable to use tasty products ourselves.

The increase in yield on humus-rich soils can be easily explained. The deep layer of loose soil, rich in organic material, creates favorable conditions for the development of the root system, and the branched roots have direct access to nutrients and water. The result is an intensive and very rapid development of the aboveground part of the plants, which leads to an increase in yield.

Therefore, in practice, it makes sense to cultivate only that part of the garden on which it has already been possible to form fertile soil - on the rest of the land it is better to sow green manure for now. As a result, the "empty" (that is, not occupied by cultivated plants) soil, thanks to green manure, will become more fertile, because everyone knows that growing green manure crops with their subsequent incorporation into the soil enriches it with organic matter, nitrogen and phosphorus. In addition, green fertilizer, especially its cereal components, has a beneficial effect on the water and air regime of the soil, which is extremely important for improving the structure of the soil.

Enrich the soil with bacteria

A fundamentally new approach to agriculture was proposed by biotechnologists, who claim that obtaining high yields requires not so much soil fertilization as such, but accelerated reproduction of soil bacteria. The latter (in close cooperation with earthworms), in the presence of a large amount of organic matter in the soil, will provide the plants with everything they need, which will ensure the formation of good yields.

Vozrozhdenie and Baikal-EM1 are examples of such drugs. Such preparations are used both for watering plants throughout the growing season, and for preparing compost enriched with bacteria, which is called "urgas".

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Give preference to high ridges

The most effective way to increase the depth of the fertile soil layer and at the same time the yield of plants is to create high ridges.

The advantages of high ridges are many:

• faster heating of the ridges in the spring (relevant in areas with a harsh climate) and during the entire growing season due to the decay of organic residues - plants, having heating from below, begin to grow and develop much faster;
• fast and effective formation of humus on automatically irrigated (once they are planted) ridges;
• loose and breathable soil structure, which allows plant roots to easily penetrate deep into the soil for nutrients - as a result, the root system is stronger, and the plant itself is more productive.

It is also worth noting that it is much more convenient to process plants in high ridges, since you have to bend over to a much lesser extent.

The technology for creating high ridges is simple, but rather laborious. As a rule, they are fenced off with the help of any available material. At the bottom of a high ridge, large wood waste and other debris of organic origin are laid, above a layer of manure, sawdust and lime, then a layer of rapidly decaying organic matter in the form of hay, weeded grass, tops or leaves. And finally, all this is sprinkled with a thin layer of soil. Of course, the above option is not a dogma: in principle, any organic matter, up to cut newspapers, can be used. True, you need to remember that some of the components can have an acidifying effect (any wood waste, needles of coniferous species and leaves of trees in our zone), and the other, on the contrary, alkalizing (bottom silt) and take this moment into account, because in the end it is necessary to obtain an organic composition with a neutral reaction.

I would also like to clarify one very important aspect. In the middle of the high ridge, manure appears among other components, and everyone knows that it is absolutely impossible to use manure for root vegetables. But in fact, it is possible if it is at sufficient depth. It is important that its layer is small, and the depth is such that the roots of plants can reach it not earlier than the end of summer. By this time, only residues will remain from the manure (even if it was fresh), and the mixture of organic matter together with it, thanks to the intensive work of earthworms and soil microorganisms, will turn into real humus.

Grow some crops on trellises

You can increase the return on the garden by growing a number of crops (all melons and gourds: cucumbers, pumpkins, watermelons, etc., as well as climbing beans) on trellises. On the one hand, such placement of plants will lead to significant savings in area, and on the other hand, it will provide plants with more comfortable conditions for development. Their illumination and ventilation will improve, which means that the susceptibility to diseases will decrease and the yield will increase. And it will be much easier and more enjoyable to care for crops on trellises. Even zucchini and those are more profitable to lift on supports (here we mean tying individual shoots to stakes, the lighting of which is extremely important for prolonging the process of intensive fruiting). In this case, the yield of zucchini is significantly increased.

Plant most crops with seedlings

Scientists have long recorded that plants grown from seedlings mature much faster than those planted directly in the ground, so it is better to grow seedlings first. And we are not talking about tomatoes, peppers or eggplants (they are already planted with seedlings in most regions), but about other crops such as beets, cabbage (including Peking and Chinese), seed onions, various greens (spinach, lettuce etc.) and herbs.

Take, for example, beets, which are almost universally sown by gardeners directly into open ground. In the Urals, for example, given the frosts, which, at best, can last until mid-June, it turns out that it is impossible to sow beets early. Therefore, it is often sown in the second half of May, and during this period strong winds prevail, blowing out moisture already in the morning - as a result, beet seedlings on the ridges can often be counted on one hand. Then the crops begin to thin out (this usually happens in rather hot weather), and the plucked out plants try to plant them again to fill the voids in the ridges.

Naturally, after such an execution, few of them take root, and which do take root, alas, do not want to grow. Obviously, in the end, one cannot count on a normal harvest.

At the same time, in the case of sowing beets for seedlings in a greenhouse, everything would be different - you can sow much earlier (it is warmer in the greenhouse, and frosts are not terrible), watering on time is not difficult (the irrigation area is small), and when transplanting, the plants are carefully dug out, and do not break out (which means that the acclimatization process is more painless). The same can be said for the other cultures mentioned above.

Extend the growing season

If you take care of adding a few weeks to the beginning and end of the season, you can significantly increase your yield. And do not pay attention to the recommendations in the literature that one should not rush to plant, for example, onion sets or beets due to the fact that they will go into color. Of course, they can go into color if you plant them according to "medieval" technologies.

But today we have greenhouses (glass and even made of cellular polycarbonate) and film greenhouses, including portable ones, it is not a problem to purchase a covering material, and you can take care of the rapid warming of the soil. There is no need to be afraid of early planting, only you need to plant plants wisely, taking into account the biological characteristics of various crops.

To win a few productive weeks in the spring, you need to:

• carry out the maximum possible soil preparation (both in the greenhouse and in the open ground) since autumn, adding the required amount of organic matter and forming high ridges;
• achieve early snowmelt in areas of interest to you; for this, it is enough to dust the snow blockages on future ridges with ash, soot or dark sand;
• in early spring, fill greenhouses and hotbeds with fresh manure to warm up the organic matter introduced since autumn and form ridges; after that, you can immediately make the desired crops and planting seedlings of cold-resistant crops grown at home;
• in the open ground, sowing can be started when the first 3-4 cm of soil thaws - this is enough to make holes and sow seeds of carrots, parsley, turnips and various cold-resistant green crops;
• in greenhouses and in the open ground, immediately after sowing, measures should be taken to increase the temperature near the plantings and sown seeds in order to provide them with the most favorable conditions for growth (build portable greenhouses, including inside greenhouses, and throw covering material or film on them);
• in greenhouses in early spring, it makes sense to mulch the soil with a translucent perforated (with holes of 10-15 mm) film that provides the best heating of the soil under the shelter - in this case, the soil temperature in the early spring period is 4 … 8 ° C higher than without mulching;
• when planting potatoes early, it is better to first cover it with a film, and after the emergence of seedlings, change the film to covering material or mulch the planting with a thick layer of straw.

You can win a few weeks of autumn time for heat-loving crops only if your pets are in good health, because at the end of August (sometimes in the middle) heat-loving crops (tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, cucumbers, etc.) do not die from frost, but from numerous ailments. If you manage to prevent the invasion of diseases, you can get an additional crop in the early fall.