How to Increase Your Strawberry Yield: Tips
At the end of spring, you need to pay attention to the strawberry beds. Our consultant Alexei Rybin, agronomist, Ph.D. in agriculture, presents five steps to an enviable berry harvest.
19 May 2016
Clean the bushes from dry and diseased leaves, remove the frozen and frail plants. If you poured soil or peat before wintering, remove them, and the soil itself needs to be loosened so that the root system starts growing faster.
Plants have a shallow root system, so the soil should not dry out. Water generously once a week in the morning with warm water. Before flowering, you can use a sprinkler, but with the appearance of flowers and berries, it is better not to get water on the plants.
When fresh leaves appear, but flowering has not yet begun, fertilizing must be applied to each plant. The best is a ready-made compound fertilizer for strawberries, but a mullein is also suitable. The nutrient mixture is made as follows: 10 liters of water are diluted with 2 cups of manure, you can add a spoonful of fertilizer ammonium sulfate and pour a liter of liquid under each bush.
4. Treatment from pests and diseases
To avoid strawberry diseases, after the first loosening of the plants and the ground around them, it is advisable to spray with a solution of copper sulfate. Treat pests before flowering. If you have a strawberry or spider mite, weevil, whitefly, strawberry beetle, buy karbofos. After processing, the bushes should be covered with foil for 1-2 hours. Divorced slugs, snails and millipedes – sprinkle granular metaldehyde on the beds. It is most convenient to use the granular form of the drug. Spraying with onion infusion saves from most nematodes.
You cannot do without this procedure if you want to get high yields of berries. Mulch will protect against weeds, prevent the soil from drying out or overheating. Gardeners love to use black film to cover the surfaces of the beds. We would recommend a more environmentally friendly straw mulching – this is an old English technology. Cover the soil with this material, and the berries are clean, and the bushes practically do not get sick. You can fill the beds with needles if the site is located in an area with pine or spruce forests. Just like sawdust, this material strongly acidifies the soil, so be sure to sprinkle some lime or ash on top.