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Onions and garlic – these crops are especially loved by gardeners for their unpretentiousness in growing and versatility in use. Garlic is traditionally planted before winter – this allows you to save on spring planting work and at the same time get a run in time. So the crop can ripen much faster than with spring sowing. Although spring garlic (the one sown in the spring) has a great advantage – it is much longer stored.
Small onion sets are also planted in the fall, so that they have time to ripen well by the end of summer. Winter onion planting is especially common in the southern regions, where winters are not so severe.
After a long and cold winter, the emerging seedlings of plants need to be helped to restore their strength, which is why top dressing of onions and garlic in the spring is so important. The further development of plants and, ultimately, the resulting crop depends on it.
What happens in early spring
Often the first crop in the garden, which marks the beginning of spring, is winter garlic. After all, its young leaves sometimes sprout even before the snow melts. They appear through the thickness of the mulch, which covers the planting of winter garlic in the fall.
One to two weeks after the snow melts, the garlic is ready for the first spring feeding. If the weather is still very unstable and unfavorable for the active growth of garlic, then it would be better to spray the plantings with the Epin or Zircon immunostimulant. To do this, 1 drop (1 ml) of the drug is diluted in 1 liter of water. With the help of these tools, it will be easier for garlic to endure possible frosts and do without yellowing of the leaves.
First dressing of garlic
In other cases, garlic must be fertilized with a composition with a predominant nitrogen content. It can be both mineral and organic fertilizers. Most often, the following recipes are used for the first feeding.
- One tablespoon of urea or ammonium nitrate is added to 10 liters of water. With this solution, you need to shed the aisles of garlic plantings, trying not to get on the green leaves. If the solution gets on the foliage, the plants are well shed with clean water to avoid burns. About three liters of liquid with fertilizer are consumed for each square meter of beds.
- Mullein infusion is often used for the first feeding of winter garlic and onions. Only you need to prepare it in advance, about two weeks before the date of the proposed procedure. Manure is diluted in a large container in a ratio of 1:6 with water and infused for 12-15 days in a relatively warm place. If it is still cold outside, then you can place a container of manure in a greenhouse or in a room where animals are kept. If it is not possible to create such conditions, then it is better to postpone the preparation of organic fertilizer until warmer days, and limit yourself to mineral top dressing.
- In recent years, the method of feeding garlic with ammonia has become widespread. After all, ammonia is a solution of ammonia, and therefore, differs little from ammonium nitrate, except perhaps in concentration. To prepare a working solution, 2 tablespoons of ammonia are added to 10 liters of water and garlic is poured over the resulting solution under the very root. If you want this solution to serve as additional protection against pest larvae that begin to wake up in the soil, then you must immediately shed the plants with twice as much water. In this case, ammonia can reach deep layers of the soil.
Later, this mulch can cover the aisles so that the earth does not dry out in the heat and the growth of weeds decreases.
Onion awakening and its nutrition
Onion sprouts sown before winter usually appear somewhat later than garlic shoots. If the spring is very wet, the seedlings must be completely freed from the winter shelter and the ground should be raked a little from them so that there is no stagnation of water and they dry slightly in the sun.
When the sprouts reach a height of 15-20 cm, they must be fed using the same fertilizers as for the first feeding of garlic.
Considering that phosphorus is very important for onions at all stages of its growth, instead of purely nitrogen fertilizers, nitrophoska or nitroammophoska can be used. These fertilizers are bred in the same way as nitrogen fertilizers, they are also watered under the root, without touching the green leaves of plants.
For processing winter onions, it also makes sense to use ammonia. After all, it can serve not only as fertilizer, but also as a means of protection against onion flies and other pests wintering in the soil, since they do not tolerate ammonia. The processing method is exactly the same as described above for garlic. In order to finally solve the problem with onion pests, you can use additional folk remedies.
- A week after treating the onion with ammonia, spill the onion aisles with a salt solution. To do this, a glass of salt is diluted in a bucket of water and this solution is used for irrigation. After the end of the onion planting procedure, it is imperative to spill it with clean water.
- A week later, the onion beds are spilled in the same way with a bright pink solution of potassium permanganate. Don’t forget to rinse them with water afterwards.
Spring garlic and its top dressing
Spring garlic is planted one to two weeks after the snow melts, at the earliest possible date, when the earth has only time to thaw. But this garlic does not withstand frost well, therefore, with early planting for the first few weeks, it is advisable to cover the beds with plants with any protective material: film, lutrasil.
For him, the best option would be to use complex mineral fertilizers in order to provide all the nutritional needs of plants from the very first days of development.
Basic spring dressings
Spring is a time of active growth for all garden crops, and onions and garlic are no exception. Approximately two to three weeks after the first nitrogen fertilization, both onions and garlic need fertilizers that contain a greater variety of nutrients.
Both onions and garlic will thank you for using organic fertilizers during this period. You can prepare a herbal infusion – after all, for its manufacture you only need weeds that grow in every garden, and in terms of the richness of the mineral composition, few fertilizers can compete with it.
To do this, prepare any container with a capacity of more than 10 liters, stuff it tightly with any weeds, add a few handfuls of wood ash and fill everything with water. If it is possible to add at least a little bird droppings or manure, then it’s great, if not, it’s okay, the liquid will ferment well anyway. All this should settle for 12-15 days and the finished complex fertilizer is ready.
Dilute one cup of this fertilizer in a bucket of water and use in place of watering onions or garlic every two weeks.
Since the bulbs will ripen from this, they will not be stored well.
If the land for planting onions and garlic is sufficiently fertilized and the plants develop well, then there is no need for further feeding of both crops. If something worries you about the condition of the plants, and the soils where they are planted are quite poor, then it is possible to carry out one or two top dressings in the summer. It is only important that the composition of fertilizers includes mainly phosphorus and potassium.
Thus, it is the spring feeding of onions and garlic that is the most important and decisive for the further growth and development of plants.
