It is difficult to find a person indifferent to the sweet and fragrant berries of garden strawberries. Knowing how to plant strawberries correctly and how to care for them throughout the year, you will always have abundant harvests and delight your family and friends with refreshments from wonderful fruits.
How to plant strawberries?
Before planting strawberries, choose the right place for it. The soil should not be acidic, the culture does not like flooded lowlands. Suitable areas where in the past planted salad, dill, spinach, garlic or carrots. After eggplant, pepper, potatoes and cabbage, strawberries will grow much worse. Magnesium, phosphorus and potassium should be abundant in the substrate, in order to enrich the soil with these minerals, dolomite flour, nitroammophoska and high-quality humus are added to it.
Seedlings are planted from mid-August to early September or early summer, especially in cold winters. Early planting will give the bushes to grow stronger and prepare for frost. The finished bed can be mulched with grass, newspapers, film or agrotextile to avoid the appearance of weeds and to maintain a sufficient amount of moisture in the soil.
Sometimes strawberries are planted not on beds, but in special constructions - strawberries, consisting of several floors in the style of a children's pyramid, each next tier of which is smaller than the previous one. A simple and convenient strawberry can be arranged on a site of tires of various diameters, cutting off one of the sidewalls at each of them, laying on top of each other, and then filling the containers with earth.
How to plant strawberries with seeds?
It is not always possible to find seedlings of the desired variety, and if it is found somewhere in a distant city, it is not a fact that the bushes will not suffer during shipment. Therefore, sometimes you have to grow strawberries from seeds. They can be bought at any garden center, transportation and storage for such planting material is not difficult. True, sprouts do not always appear from the purchased seeds, but more often the trouble happens when agricultural rules are not respected. In order for the desired strawberry variety to take its place in the beds of your garden, it is necessary to strictly observe the conditions for planting and growing tiny bushes and protect them from any kind of dangers.
Before planting strawberries with seeds, you should carefully select the material for sowing. Elite high-yielding seeds are often packed in just a few pieces per bag. For the first experiment, you can try to sow something simpler and more common or just take a few packages to increase the chances of success.
You can start work at the beginning of winter. Then the plants for heat will be ready to grow in the open ground. For planting, prepare a box and substrate. Garden soil, not too peaty and at the same time not loamy, would be the best choice. Before laying it, you need to bake it on a baking sheet in an oven with a temperature of about 100 degrees, half an hour or an hour, in order to achieve sterility and destroy the seeds of weeds. Moisten the cooled soil and spread the seeds on top of it at a distance of 3-4 cm from each other. Do not sprinkle them on top, and cover the box with transparent plastic wrap or glass and place in a sunny place.
If you immediately plant each seed separately, then you can use small cans of mayonnaise or baby food, turned upside down, as greenhouses. After the sprouts appear, any shelter must be removed, and until then just periodically ventilate the plantings in order to avoid stagnation of air and the appearance of mold.
That's all about how to plant strawberries, then you just have to wait until the sprouts come up. The film or glass is removed at this time, and the plants pick, as soon as they have several leaves. It is better to transplant in separate pots or peat tablets, so as not to injure the root system anymore, including when planting in the ground.
With the formation of stable heat, seedlings can be transferred to the beds, during the summer it will have time to grow stronger, so that by the next season it will yield its first fruits.