How to properly care for your garden in the fall to get a good harvest?
In order for the garden to please with a good harvest, it is necessary to provide it with proper care from the fall. Autumn work in the garden includes:
- Autumn weed and pest control.
- Digging.
- Fertilization.
- Preparing holes for spring planting.
Autumn weed and wireworm control
After harvesting, in order to destroy the weeds remaining in the garden, it is advisable to treat the soil with systemic herbicides. Such drugs include Roundup, it copes well with "ever-living" weeds such as ragweed, wheatgrass, birch (field bindweed), scythe, sow thistle.
Practicing gardeners have noticed that one autumn herbicide treatment replaces two spring ones.
Against wheatgrass, Tornado is also quite effective. It is used as a spraying on weed leaves.
To destroy a birch tree, which loves acidic and clayey soil, in the fall, you should add fluff lime at the rate of 1 glass per sq.m. - it will change the acidity of the soil downward. It is also good to dig a shallow area with the addition of several buckets of rotted compost so that the earth becomes looser by the spring.
Unfortunately, handwork has the best effect in the fight against pigs. Since this weed has very long roots, in order to get rid of it completely, it is necessary to manually select all parts of the root system after digging or plowing the garden in the fall. Applying this method in parallel with herbicide treatment is not quick, but still after a couple of years it is quite possible to defeat the pig.
Sowing green manure plants, such as rape, will help to destroy wheatgrass, and at the same time fertilize the garden.
You can get rid of such a pest as a wireworm if you dig a garden not in the middle of autumn, but a little later - after the first frost, then it will simply freeze in the upper layers of the soil and die.
Digging the soil
For the winter, it is recommended to dig up the vegetable garden, while the clods of earth formed during the digging do not need to be broken. So the weeds and pests remaining in the garden since autumn will die faster from frost, and with the onset of spring the clods will disintegrate themselves.
Sometimes, instead of digging up the soil, it is mulched with leaves and raw compost. But it is not recommended to do this, since spores of fungal diseases can be stored in the leaves, and this method will not bring anything but harm.
Fertilizing the soil
Before the autumn digging of the garden, organic fertilizers in liquid form or manure are applied to enrich the soil.
It is recommended to close organic matter into the soil no deeper than on the bayonet of a shovel, so fertilizers will act faster.
Liquid fertilizer can be made from chicken manure or fresh cut grass. The more useful manure is from poultry manure, but cow manure is also widely used. To enrich the soil with useful substances, the area under the garden is sown with green manure in the fall.
Preparing holes for spring planting
To increase the yield of potatoes, experienced vegetable growers advise to carry out preparatory work in the fall. To do this, in the area allocated for the spring planting of potatoes, you need to make grooves on the bayonet of a shovel (or using a cultivator), located from north to south and row spacing of 60 cm.
In the spring, it remains only to slightly update the groove with a hoe, lay out the potatoes and sprinkle with soil taken from the poured sides. This method is good because in spring, when planting, the land in the grooves is very loose and warmed up by the sun.