Kasvavien kesäkurpitsaiden salaisuudet: kokeneiden puutarhureiden vinkkejä

Squids have recently become more and more popular among gardeners. Why? Because this vegetable is just a storehouse of vitamins and microelements, and it is also great for the first feeding of babies, which only adds to its popularity.

So how to grow zucchini correctly? Let's see!

Starting small - seeds and seedlings

There is a tricky way to grow zucchini. To do this, warm the seeds before germination. So the shoots will be more friendly, and the yield of plants will increase significantly. It is fine to spend the night a bag of seeds on the included heating battery.

Then the grains should be soaked in warm, but not hot water for several hours. When the seeds swell, they need to be expanded between layers of damp tissue. It is not recommended to use such loose material, such as gauze, as brisk roots easily get confused in it.

At room temperature, after only three to five days, they reach several centimeters in length. It is at this stage that the zucchini is planted in open ground. Do not tighten up with this, otherwise the long roots will intertwine quickly, and it will be difficult to separate one seed from another without damage.

Growing squash in a barrel - a common phenomenon

The size of your land plot does not allow to allocate a large area for squash beds? No problem. In such cases, among lovers of pumpkin plants, one of the most popular ways of growing zucchini was the construction of "green barrels".

Cooking an

barrel A barrel for growing zucchini should have a capacity of at least two hundred liters, and in the middle of it, be sure to stretch the pipe, pierced in several places. It will be used for watering zucchini. In the bottom of the barrel, you must make several holes to drain excess moisture.

When installing the barrel, pay special attention to the average summer temperature in your area. Does it exceed thirty degrees( Celsius)?Then install the barrel on the north side of the site, where it will be cooler. If in your area clouds are not uncommon, place it in the south.

Now you can begin filling the barrel for growing zucchini substrate for your future harvest.

It is filled with layers, each of which is a delicacy for courgettes:

• At the bottom there is a twenty to thirty centimeter layer of brushwood that will serve as drainage.
• Five to six centimeters of compost and the same last year's rotted leaves. From above - a couple of centimeters of ordinary garden soil.
• Five centimeters of hay and tops of any crop( ideally, potatoes).Again a few centimeters of garden land.
• Finally, three to four centimeters of sawdust of the middle fraction and peat. We complete the filling of the barrel with another layer of garden soil.

A couple of days before planting seeds or seedlings in a barrel, the mixture should be strongly moistened. This will require about ten liters of water.

Planting and care

For growing zucchini in a barrel, varieties such as Long-fruited, Apollo F1, Gribovsky 37, Beloplodny, Sosnovsky, Pharaoh are best. Planting of seedlings in the ground is carried out when the mixture in the barrel is sufficiently heated. This usually happens in the second half of May.

Watering of plants is carried out exclusively with the help of an integrated pipeOtherwise, the earth often ceases or dries out, and neither of them, by itself, "is not good."The rate of watering is about two liters per bush. If you live in a hot region, you can slightly increase the amount of water.

For successful cultivation of zucchini in a barrel, it is necessary to loosen the soil in a timely manner, cut off excess leaves and, if possible, help insects in pollination of flowers. For the first time it is recommended to fertilize plants one week after landing in the ground.

In ten liters of water dilute five grams of superphosphate extract + ten grams of urea + three grams of ammonium molybdate, boric acid, and magnesium sulphate. On one plant of such fertilizer exactly liter is brought.

During fruiting, standard compound fertilizers for pumpkin plants are used to feed the zucchini. Their dosage is individual, usually indicated on the package.

How to get a big harvest of zucchini?

Are you going to preserve, dry, or freeze zucchini? Then you can safely collect them already in the stage of technical ripeness - thirty( sometimes forty) days after the emergence of shoots. However, if you want to pamper yourself and households with fresh vegetables all winter, you will have to postpone the harvest. Only such zucchini will acquire the characteristic color of the variety, smooth, firm skin, aroma and juicy flesh.

Fully ripen pumpkin only after a hundred or one hundred and twenty days from the moment of the appearance of the first shoots( that is, in the beginning - the middle of September).It is important that the fruit should stay "on the vine" all the time until the collection of mature vegetables. If you follow all the rules of growing zucchini, they can lie in a cool place until the spring, without losing the original quality.

So, what are these rules?

• At the beginning of the season, when the plant is already preparing for flowering, it is necessary to carry out minting - pinch a growing point. So on a bush more flowers will turn out, and, therefore, subsequently and more fruits.
• After the end of flowering, all shoots with unbound fruit must be removed in order for the plant resources to be spent only on maintaining leaf work and ripening vegetables.“Empty” whips will only be additional consumers.
• At the end of August, when the fruits increased significantly in size and began to acquire the characteristic thick color of the variety, the gardener needs to cut all the excess leaves from the shrubs that obstruct the access of the sun to the ripening vegetables.
• Under the fruit, it is desirable to put some dense dry material. It may be a bark or plain cardboard. It will protect the zucchini from excessive moisture( and rotting from the bottom), as well as reduce the risk of eating vegetables by the main night hunters for ripe fruits - slugs and snails.
• It should be remembered that it is necessary to cut the zucchini on time. Both immature and overripe fruits are significantly inferior in their “keeping quality” and taste to their fellows who are gathered at the right time.
• How to check whether the fruit is ready for cutting? It is necessary to knock on it. A ripe vegetable will make a dull sound, typical of melons and pumpkin crops. In addition, the skin of the fruit should be dense and smooth. The peel of a ripe zucchini is quite difficult to scratch with a fingernail, but if you succeed in this, it means that it is too early for the vegetables to part with the bush.

Are your zucchini ready for assembly? Fine! This means that you have successfully coped with the first part of the work - you have grown a rich harvest of zucchini. Now they need to be cut off. Think it's easy? It was not there. Here, too, has its own rules, following which you can achieve the best results.

How to harvest zucchini harvest?

• Use a well-sharpened knife to gather fruit. One that will cut the vegetables smoothly, without damage.
• Zucchini should have a dense juicy stalk. If it dried up, it means that the vegetable is overripe and is no longer suitable for long-term storage.
• Do not cut the fruit "close", be sure to leave part of the stem - about five centimeters. After a couple of days, the resulting “tail” will dry out and become an excellent barrier to various kinds of infections.
• If you intend to send zucchini for long-term storage in the basement or refrigerator, they, of course, must be cleaned of dust and earth. For these purposes, use a piece of dry cloth. It is strictly not recommended to wash the zucchini, as water provokes the formation of mold.

Problems and malfunctions

Sometimes gardeners face problems in growing zucchini. The composition of the soil, light, temperature. .. You never know what can not look like capricious vegetables! So let's see what kind of problems the gardeners most often meet and how to deal with these problems.

• Zucchini categorically do not like sour soil. On it, they grow poorly, very often get sick and bring a small harvest. To reduce the acidity of the soil, add powdered chalk or wood ash.
• If the groundwater lies at a shallow depth under the site, a high bed should be built for courgettes. An excellent option would be to grow them in a barrel.
• Planting seedlings( or, moreover, seeds) in open ground only when the threat of spring frosts is over, since at the first drop in temperature to zero degrees Celsius, the heat-loving zucchini will simply die. If, at the end of May, a sudden chill arose, promptly cover the garden bed with film or agrofibre.
• Does your site go through the wind? Build zucchini "screen" - a small fence that can securely cover the plants.
• Squashes need abundant watering. One square meter of bed should have at least twenty liters of water. Pay special attention to its temperature. If the water is cold, zucchini can get sick.
• Overly caring( or greedy for the harvest?) Gardeners can often overdo the fertilizer zucchini, which also leads to various kinds of diseases, and sometimes the death of the whole bed.

The rules of crop rotation on the same plot are very important for zucchini. For example, they grow poorly on the ground, where other pumpkin plants( cucumbers, squash, or even squash themselves) were grown last season.

But on the soil left over from cabbage, onions, radishes, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, peas or greens, any pumpkin feels great and brings abundant crops.

The secrets of zucchini agrotechnics - video