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With all the richness of the choice of fertilizers today, many gardeners often prefer to use folk remedies to feed vegetables on their site. This is primarily due to the fact that folk remedies, as a rule, are safe for health and do not have the ability to accumulate in fruits in the form of nitrates and other compounds that are unsafe for humans. In addition, they are relatively inexpensive and widely available compared to many specialized fertilizers, which are sometimes found only in large settlements. A person eats bread every day and its remains can be easily dried or frozen for future use.
Cucumbers are a crop that requires regular and fairly plentiful feeding, especially during the fruiting period. Therefore, feeding cucumbers with bread can be an ideal solution for a gardener who wants to save his time, effort and material resources so as not to spend them looking for and buying a suitable fertilizer.
Why do you need bread feed
What can be so useful in ordinary bread, and even for plants? Everyone knows that bread is carbohydrates, but when interacting with water, an analogue of bread sourdough is obtained, that is, the yeast component of bread comes to the fore, which also plays an important role. When you mix bread sourdough with soil, the primary role is played by the fact that millions of fungi and bacteria living in different soil layers begin to intensively assimilate all this richness. There are special microbes – nitrogen fixers, which are able to convert nitrogen from the air into salts available to plants with the help of carbohydrates.
All this together has a very favorable effect on the condition and development of plants, in this case, cucumbers.
Summing up, we can distinguish several areas of influence of top dressing from bread on cucumbers:
- There is an acceleration of the vegetative process – this allows you to get an earlier harvest.
- Increases the quality and quantity of ripening greens – the number of empty flowers decreases, and cucumbers grow without voids.
- The vital activity of beneficial microflora in the soil is activated, which means that its quality improves.
- There is an acceleration of the decomposition of previously introduced organic substances and, accordingly, the enrichment of the soil with nutrients.
- Weak, lagging behind in development plants are strengthened and restored.
Basic cooking technology
There are many ways to prepare cucumber bread dressing, but the following method is the most traditional.
To begin with, any grain leftovers are collected in the amount that you need for top dressing. If you do not have so many plants, then it is enough to collect about one kilogram of bread products. If you want to feed, in addition to cucumbers, the whole garden, then it is better to start preserving bread in advance. Since bread dries and even freezes quite easily, it is possible to collect a sufficient amount of unused bread, if only there is a place to store it.
You can use any kind of bread, even moldy pieces will do. It is believed that brown bread ferments better, but if you only have white bread, then you should not be upset – you can only keep it one or two days longer.
It is better to grind the collected pieces to a size of 2-3 cm, but this is not important. Prepare a container, the size of which will depend on the volume of collected bread. Usually use a 10-liter bucket or a smaller pot. Bread leftovers are placed on about two-thirds of the pan and poured with water so that it completely covers the bread. A cover of a smaller diameter is placed on top, on which the load is placed. Bread must be immersed in water at all times.
The liquid with bread is placed for a week in a warm place for infusion. It must be borne in mind that the smell will increase as the infusion sours and can cause unpleasant emotions. Therefore, it would be better if you choose in advance a suitable place for infusing the fertilizer.
After a week, the bread fertilizer is completely ready. It is advisable to strain it before use. Place the bread grounds in a compost heap, and use the resulting liquid as a fertilizer for irrigation in a ratio of 1:10.
Other manufacturing options
No matter how good fertilizer from bread is in itself, gardeners often use recipes that contain several more components, which allows them to increase the effect of the resulting fertilizer on cucumbers.
The following recipe is very popular, with which you can feed cucumbers every two weeks from the moment the first inflorescences appear until the end of fruiting.
A barrel with a volume of 50 to 100 liters is prepared, into which one bucket of green grass is tightly stuffed, about 1 kg of bread crusts is poured on top and 0,5 kg of fresh yeast is added. A few glasses of wood ash are also placed there. All this is filled with water and covered with a lid on top. Instead of a lid, you can use a piece of polyethylene, tightened with a rope around the perimeter of the barrel. The barrel is installed in a warm place. About a week after the end of the fermentation process, the resulting liquid is used as top dressing for cucumbers. It can be diluted in a ratio of 1:5.
Reviews of those who used
It is interesting that gardeners have been familiar with feeding bread for a long time, recipes in the family are often passed down from generation to generation.
To summarize
Fertilizing with bread is not in vain so popular among many generations of gardeners. Try to apply it on your site and you may be surprised what kind of harvest you can get from familiar garden crops.
