How To Increase The Harvest Of Strawberries And Radishes And Grow Beautiful Gladioli

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

Last year's summer cottage season was unusual in that I decided to check on my own experience several tips and recommendations received from one wonderful woman who devoted her life to working with the land and accumulated vast experience. Some of the results of my experiments pleased me, and I really wanted to share them with the readers of my favorite magazine.

Despite the rainy, cold summer, the harvest of strawberries pleased me. I am sure that this was facilitated by a new technology for caring for it, which consisted in the following dressings: from the moment of flowering, once a week, a solution was prepared - add 1 spoonful of iron and copper sulfate, boric acid, potassium permanganate and tincture of iodine to 1 bucket of water. This solution should be watered from a watering can directly over the leaves of the strawberries.

From the moment the berries ripened, a very simple top dressing was used: rusks, dried over the winter, the remaining bread, crumbs are soaked in warm water. All this must be left for a week at room temperature, then strain and water the bushes with this "tincture". I strongly advise our gardeners to use this simple method of caring for strawberries.

Now I have a different approach to growing radishes. Given that this culture is very demanding, you need to think in advance about how to protect radishes from a malicious pest - the garden flea. To do this, the seeds (I prefer the Duro variety), before planting, soak for 10 hours in sauerkraut brine. If this was not done, after the first shoots appear, they must be sprayed with ash infusion in the morning (1 glass per 10 liters).

Everyone knows this feature of radish - it likes to bloom before the root crop itself ripens. One of the reasons for this is that our region has a long daylight hours, so the surest way is to artificially shorten daylight hours using any dark, opaque material that is pulled over the frame. This is enough to keep the radish from blooming.

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Another successful experiment is the magnificent gladioli grown on coffee grounds.

It has long been known that tea leaves can be used as plant food, but it turns out that coffee grounds are also a good fertilizer for feeding gladioli. Because of this, their stems are more powerful and long, and the corms are healthy. All year I collected tea leaves and coffee grounds and dried them well.

In the fall, on a bed intended for gladioli, she laid out this mixture with a layer of 5-7 cm, adding wood ash to it. In the spring, I dig up the ground and plant gladioli, and on top I mulch again 5 cm with a tea-coffee mixture, but without ash. By the way, snow melts quickly on such beds, the ground warms up better, planting can be done a week earlier, and they bloom faster, and also - there are almost no weeds on such a bed.

And one more simple advice on growing seedlings.

If you want the plants to grow twice as fast and be healthier, use the accelerated growth method: add 0.5 cups of granulated sugar or 1 cup of old, sugared jam to 3 liters of water, add a pinch of baker's yeast there - and let it ferment all week.

After that, add 1 glass of the resulting "mash" to a bucket of water and water the seedlings once a week.

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In winter, and especially in early spring, salads from fresh vegetables are very useful. I recommend to everyone who cares about their health, three of my favorite salads:

"Original" salad

700 g of fresh cabbage, 150 g of onions, turnips, 85 g of walnut kernels, 15 g of garlic. To fill it all up.

Pumpkin salad

500 g pumpkin, 3 apples, 0.5 cups of fruit juice and half a lemon, nuts, or pumpkin seeds.

Peel the pumpkin, grate, mix with grated apples, pour syrup on top, sprinkle with roasted nuts or pumpkin seeds on top.

Carrot salad

Grate the carrots, fry the pre-washed raisins in vegetable oil. As soon as the raisins begin to turn white and swell, remove from heat and mix with carrots and mayonnaise.