Secrets Of Growing Vegetables And Fruits

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

Little secrets for older gardeners

• Cucumber secrets
• Your own tomato is the most delicious
• "Light" peppers
• Bow - optional
• Flowers and grapes

We don't grow old on earth … On earth, work never ends, it constantly demands attention to itself and attracts people who merge with its soul. And it is no coincidence that all these swamps around St. Petersburg, all waste areas, on which there was no fertile layer at all, have now been turned into fabulous worlds where everything blooms and bears fruit.

Many of the enthusiastic gardeners have already grown old, they have no strength, their legs give up, their hands hurt, but the earth, which has absorbed their labor, does not want to let go of itself. She got used only to their hands, only to the sound of their steps. A new person will come, the earth will freeze for several years, since he is not like that - different. Therefore, gardeners and gardeners hold on to their last strength and do not leave. With this article, I want to somehow help older people, without much effort, continue to grow cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, onions, flowers. There is no need to turn your site into a continuous lawn. Moreover, those who decided on this, after a couple of years, understand that this is a kind of hard labor, since he also needs to be constantly looked after.

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In winter, long before the New Year, phone calls begin to ring in my apartment. Gardeners are interested in: the timing of sowing seeds for seedlings; what kind of soil is better for her to buy (your own, from the site, it is already difficult to bring to the city); what varieties of vegetable seeds do not require much effort when growing … As a rule, they call those gardeners who are often sick and hardly leave the house. Those of them who have worked in gardening clubs know that in a difficult situation their colleagues will not leave them. There is already a "mutual responsibility" - we are sharing seeds, seedlings.

February, March, April are the most turbulent periods of communication between gardeners. There is no time to watch TV shows and cook dinners. Seedlings require a lot of attention, like all living things. And the shops are forgotten - we must have time to get ready for the dacha!

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However, young, novice gardeners and gardeners are asked to tell and teach them: how can you manage to do everything on the site? My answer is the same to everyone: you need love for the earth, you need knowledge. Then there will be no unnecessary fuss, and there will be time for the family.

Without waiting for the results of this season, at the beginning of June I try to draw my conclusions and observations based on the conditions of my site. And it is located near Vyborg in such a lowland that when I go uphill to go into the forest for mushrooms or berries, then instead of the houses of our gardening, only their roofs are visible. And our site is generally at a dead end and by winter it is so flooded with water that the height of ice on the soil and on the road is 50-70 cm, sometimes even higher. But even in such conditions, our huge evergreen rhododendron grows and blooms. He is already twenty years old. Grapes in the open ground near the house develop and bear fruit, climbing roses of their own roots also bloom magnificently. I was convinced that the grafted roses do not stand our glacier, they are dying, therefore I don’t plant any more of them. As soon as such plants passed the "ice" test for the first time, I do not cover them for the winter. The trouble isthat bulbous plants and lilacs of good, expensive varieties die under the ice.

Cucumber secrets

Every time after the "ice age" gardeners sympathize with me, and it seems that I should lose heart, but I calmly wait for the ice to melt. At this time (in mid-April) we are already leaving the plot with seedlings. We drain water, start work in the greenhouse. All this in order to once again get the first cucumbers in late May or early June. So this year we took off our first crispy greens and ate on June 5th. Of course, this requires knowledge and skill. It is necessary to prepare the soil, pick up varieties that you have already tested more than once, you know how they will behave, that they will not let you down in the summer. But you will always find a place for some new varieties. And cucumbers Rosinka F1, Okhtinsky F1 gave their first fruits already on June 5; Manor, Donskoy Passage F1 - June 7; Drinking F1, Grasshopper F1 - June 9; Karelian F1, North Pole F1, Northern Fantasy F1 - June 11. It is important that they all met in 35-40 days from the date of emergence.

Elderly people already find it difficult to tie cucumbers to a trellis, it is difficult to form them, so they try to sow those varieties or hybrids that do not branch, that is, that do not have long lateral shoots. But by the beginning of August, gardeners start calling and complaining that they were left without cucumbers. Of course, such hybrids yield a crop mainly on the central shoot, however, it is also written on the package that the cucumbers will form in bunches. But they have special requirements for agricultural technology, and often bundles do not work.

Another mistake of gardeners is the late sowing of cucumbers. The soil does not warm up for a long time in the ridge, it is cold, and sowing is delayed. And then in our zone, that is, in the Leningrad region, daylight hours become long, white nights begin. As a result, plants can form almost only male flowers. And dark nights will begin - and cucumbers will go, especially on those varieties and hybrids that branch. Therefore, you can often hear: "Wow - September, and cucumbers all bear fruit …" But this is as it should be - on dark nights there are many of them, and they are the most delicious.

And if it is difficult for elderly people to tie up cucumbers, to shape them, then they must abandon the vertical method of growing on trellises, and grow in a greenhouse or in a greenhouse in the open field. In modern varieties and hybrids, remove the ovaries and lateral shoots from 4-5 lower sinuses and cut out nothing else. If you are afraid to water on the leaves, then you can put cut plastic bottles with a neck in the soil near the plants and pour water into them, moistening the soil.

Your own tomato is the most delicious

When growing tomatoes, elderly people often complain that it is already hard on their legs, back, that their fingers do not obey when they tie plants. What can I suggest here? Of course, knowledge about varieties and hybrids is also needed here. There are so many of them now that it is difficult to please every plant. To do without tying, you need to take medium-sized, undersized varieties, i.e. determinant and super-determinant tomatoes and abandon their formation.

Here is one case: an eighty-year-old gardener asks to come to her and look at the tomatoes: something is not working out for her, she will not wait for the fruit. They praised her some sort (very large, very tall, very tasty, etc.), but she, without understanding, did everything the old fashioned way. She put a peg, tied all the shoots (central and stepsons) to it, including the lower stepsons. They are already higher and higher than the peg, she has cut off the lower leaves, and the upper leaves are twisted into a spiral. There are flowers here and there, and the rest of the mass of swaddled shoots stretches upward. What are the fruits in these conditions!

I appeal to all elderly gardeners: do not plant many varieties that you do not know. It is better to test one or two plants of the new variety. For example, for winter harvesting and freezing, I like to grow tomato hybrids Fancy F1, Kalroma F1. Their fruits are fleshy, there is little water, tasty, and most importantly - medium-sized, elongated, thick walls. They are good at the bank! From varieties of this quality I also grow tomatoes of the Golubka variety. If you form them in two shoots, then you need to tie them up with two twines and periodically remove the stepsons. The minimum distance for them in the greenhouse is required - 50x50 cm. This year I sowed them at the beginning of April and planted them without picking in the greenhouse on May 16. It's very late for me, but the ground barely revived after the ice. She changed the formation of plants: she removed the bottom three stepsons, left the rest. Tied up only the central shoot,the rest of the shoots will lie. The stepsons will also have stepsons, I will also leave them.

The C-98 hybrid grows well and sets fruit in any weather in a greenhouse or in the open field, its foliage is not very strong, you can not tie it up.

I never tie tomatoes in the open field.

In 2011, I tried to grow hybrids S-2005, S-2010 in the open field. They tied the fruits perfectly, the clusters were full, the fruits turned out to be tasty, blushed on the bushes. This year (2012 is the year of Mercury) I knew that the weather would be unstable, and planted these tomatoes in a greenhouse. The fruits bloomed and began to set well, but the plants were very leafy. That's how I learn from my mistakes. These hybrids are good for industrial fields, and I placed them in a greenhouse, where both space and ventilation are limited. If the foliage is strong, then more water will be required, and this is already a problem for the elderly. Especially for those with a polycarbonate greenhouse. In the hot summers of 2010 and 2011, there were problems with the fruits - they did not completely stain, they were ugly, and the top rot of the fruits appeared. Svetlana Ilyinichna Ignatova explained these problems to us. It turned outhybrids come in many different types. But we didn't know which tomatoes were heat-resistant and which ones weren't. So me and my peers will have to return to growing tomato varieties, abandoning hybrids.

"Light" peppers

If you take the agrotechnology of peppers, then those gardeners who have learned to grow large, thick-walled beautiful peppers are unlikely to want to grow simple varieties with medium-sized fruits. But on the other hand, such "light" varieties can not be formed, tie them not to a trellis, but to a peg. This is many times easier for the elderly. You can sow these varieties in late March - early April. I will name such reliable varieties: Tenderness, Medal, Loyalty, Golden Jubilee - they are light green in technical ripeness, you don't have to wait another month for them to turn red or yellow. Such peppers can be stuffed with carrots and tomatoes, they can be fried whole, they can be cut into pieces and frozen for the winter for the first courses or for the second.

Bow - optional

Onions are also not easy to grow, but older gardeners will still plant at least a small bed. I have grown sevok all the years myself, but for the second year I have been buying it in stores or at an exhibition. Everything has its time. And in the early spring, perennial bows help out. I have them growing on a separate bed - slime onion, Altai onion, sweet onion. And wild garlic under the apple tree in the shade has grown so much that we do not have time to eat.

But planting onions before winter is not always justified for older people. A lot of work was expended, and for various reasons the onion may not spring up in the spring.

Flowers and grapes

Many people grow flowers. It is known that annuals require the most labor and time. I remember that Lyubov Dmitrievna Bobrovskaya sowed so many of them that I was surprised: how did she remember their names? I also used to planted large flower beds from annuals. And this year, in May, we talked with her and laughed at ourselves that we did not have time to sow anything of the annuals, it is good that the calendula itself rose. By the way, I was very happy with the self-seeding of calendula. She sprouted somewhere under the bushes, and not in the place where the cut marigolds and calendula lay in the fall. Simply, apparently, there was no ice, so they ascended. I advise older gardeners to choose ornamental shrubs for their garden that require less attention.

Our generation of gardeners has tried to grow a lot. There was no literature then, scientists did not contact us. Now everything is available to everyone. Thanks to Yuri Mikhailovich Chuguev, we got involved in grapes. I was interested: will the grapes grow at 60 parallel in the open field? I know that Lyudmila Sergeevna Romanikhina has been growing it in greenhouses for more than twenty years. She even tried to make wine from her grapes. V. N. Sil'nov in Gatchina, M. V. Solviev in Ropsha already get hundreds of kilograms of grapes in closed and open ground. Hundreds of gardeners were carried away by this culture throughout Russia, and not only in the south, as before. I was convinced that the grapes growing here are not sour, but very sweet. We discuss all our "grape" problems in gardening clubs, conduct master classes, subscribe books.

My grapes have been bearing fruit in the wall culture since 2006. In the first year after landing, in 2004, he fell under the ice. In the winter of 2010-2011, I once again found myself under the ice. And this winter - again. However, in the spring it comes to life and again bears fruit to everyone's surprise.

In the spring of 2011, she planted hybrids of the Ussuri grapes from A. Potapenko. And I planted it not near the wall, but near the gooseberry bushes, then we will try to make a trellis there. And they fell under the ice last winter. But then they sprouted, and in the summer they began to grow, they are already gaining strength. And for the winter she did not cover with anything, put spruce branches on the ground (I scare away mice), pressed the shoots on it with a board and hoped only for snow.

At one lesson, where it was about grapes, we learned that, it turns out, there is a collection of grapes in VIR, which is supervised by E. N. Kislin. But why did we get to everything ourselves? Why didn't our local science help us to deal with this culture? In the March issue of Flora Price magazine he wrote so many horror stories about grapes that he could well alienate many gardeners who want to take up grapes.

But after all, when the Colorado potato beetle flew to the Leningrad region, the gardeners did not refuse to grow potatoes, and eggplants, and peppers. Now my grapes of the Aleshenkin variety have gained so many inflorescences that, according to science, I must cut out the extra ones, otherwise the bush will be exhausted and next year it will give few inflorescences or completely die. And if, contrary to science, it bears fruit again and again, despite the ice 50-70 cm high? So I will leave all the flowers in spite of all sciences and see what will happen next year. And I will share my observations with the growers. I am convinced that the bush will survive, that is why we are experts - we get to everything by trial and error.