How easy and simple it is to grow cloudberries in their summer cottage
Cloudberry is a wild but tasty berry that grows in the swampy glades of the forest. Although you can enjoy the taste of amber berries without leaving the country house, if you know how to grow cloudberries at home. At first glance, this may seem like a daunting task, but after studying the rules of planting and caring for the plant, you can get the first harvest next summer.
What a berry - cloudberry
The plant is undersized, up to 30 cm in height, resembles in structure strawberries or strawberries. The berries are bright, vaguely similar to raspberries, but denser and more juicy. Ripening of the berry occurs in an unusual order for us, from red when it is green to rich yellow or orange when ripe.
Cloudberries are consumed both raw and after processing. Delicious aromatic jam, juice, jam, compote are obtained from berries. It is possible to pamper yourself with cloudberry liqueur.
What you need to know about how to grow cloudberries in your summer cottage
Cloudberry is a very finicky crop, and it takes a lot of effort to grow it. Considering that the plant grows on swampy soil in the north, it needs to create about the same conditions at the summer cottage. This will require a little more time and effort than growing crops.
The best time to plant and transplant cloudberries is early autumn, when it is not cold yet. Before frost, the bushes will have time to take root and adapt, and next summer it will be possible to harvest the first harvest.
What is useful for planting:
- peat;
- film or roofing material;
- perlite;
- seedlings.
Since the plant is not yet completely cultivated, cloudberry seedlings are rarely where you can buy. It is easier to find them in the same forest clearing. In autumn, it is difficult to find bushes that have long faded and fruited. Therefore, it is better to find the right meadow in the summer and mark the cloudberry nursery with the largest berries.
The bushes are carefully dug up and, without shaking off the ground, wrapped in a wet layer of moss, and then in a bag.
For easier and quicker adaptation, it is recommended to collect a little "native" soil from the place where the seedlings are collected in order to add it to the soil where the cloudberries will be planted.
Choosing a site for planting and preparing the soil
Cloudberry, although it grows on swampy soils, loves sunlight. When choosing a place for a garden bed, this is important to consider. If the plant is in the shade, it will be difficult to wait for the berries from it. And for the bushes to take a good start, you need to create an "artificial swamp" for them.
It's easy to create:
- To begin with, dig a trench of arbitrary length, width and depth of 50 cm.For several beds, a distance of 30 cm is observed between the trenches.
- Line the bottom and walls with a perforated film or roofing felt. Perforation is important for air circulation in the ground, and so that water does not stagnate or bloom in it too much. For the same purposes, you can use clay, it is soaked and the walls are well coated with it.
- Mix peat with forest soil, 3 to 1. Add a little perlite to the mixture. It is useful to keep moisture in the ground longer and to protect the plants from drying out.
- Pour most of the soil into the garden bed.Pour enough water so that the soil is well saturated, but the water should not stand above it.
Shoots are planted in the prepared soil, at a distance of 15–20 cm from each other, and the remaining substrate is poured over them.
While the weather is warm and dry, cloudberries need to be watered so that the roots do not dry out. In winter, on frosty, but little snow days, the beds should be covered with foil, agrofibre or sprinkled with straw to protect the roots from freezing.
Berry care
Despite the hassle of preparing the soil and planting amber forest berries, it is not very whimsical to care for. But it is still necessary to follow some rules when growing cloudberries.
Soil care
In natural habitats, in the forest, the berry grows in soils with high acidity. And when watering it at home with ordinary tap or well water, there is a risk of chlorosis. This is facilitated by an increase in alkali in the soil.
To maintain normal acidity, you can use different methods.:
- add ground sulfur to the ground - 30 g of powder per 1 m²;
- add sphagnum, manure or compost from oak leaves;
- acidify water for irrigation - 2 g of citric acid per 10 liters of water.
In order for the soil to be fully saturated with oxygen, it is important to ensure that a crust does not form on its surface, and the earth is not clogged with weeds. To do this, you regularly need to loosen the soil.
Soil moisture remains an important condition - cloudberries require regular watering. The earth should not dry out, otherwise the plant will start to ache and will not bear fruit.
Pruning and feeding cloudberries
Pruning of plants is carried out more for sanitary purposes and giving the beds an aesthetic appearance. To do this, simply remove dried and diseased branches during the spring-summer season. And in the fall, the withering tops are completely removed so that it does not draw strength from the root.
Top dressing is carried out several times throughout the season:
- in spring, the soil is enriched with mineral fertilizers or manure;
- after flowering, around the end of May, cloudberries are fed with growth biostimulants and manure.
Treatment against pests and diseases
Cloudberry, although a wild berry, but when grown among "domestic" crops, it is possible that it becomes infected with pests: aphids, weevils, spider or raspberry mites, stem flies. For their destruction use insecticides: "Metaphos", "Apollo", "Flumite" and others.
Insecticide treatments can be carried out a maximum of 30–40 days before the berries appear. During fruiting, the plant, when pests appear, is treated with a decoction of dandelion tops - 1 kg per 10 liters of water, or its infusion - 800 g of a plant per 10 liters of water.
As a preventive measure, in order to protect cloudberries from fungal diseases and pests, in the spring, the site is treated with a solution of copper sulfate or 3% Bordeaux liquid.
Cloudberry breeding methods
There are two ways to choose how to grow cloudberries: vegetative and seed. The first will bring less hassle and will allow you to harvest much faster.
How to grow cloudberries using a vegetative propagation method
Despite the fact that cloudberry is considered a perennial plant, only its underground part - the root - is perennial. The upper, akin to strawberries, hatches in the spring with new leaves from the stiffened part of the central stem, and completely withers in the fall. But cloudberries don't have whiskers like strawberries. Her creeping rhizome helps her to reproduce, from which young shoots hatch.
In the wild, this allows the berry to grow on large carpet glades. By growing cloudberries in the garden, this process can be controlled by gently digging up and detaching small branches from the root of the parent bush. Stronger shoots are planted in a new prepared bed or instead of an old obsolete bush. Weak shoots are discarded.
After 3-5 years of cultivation, it is better to replant young cloudberry bushes to a new place, as the land “gets tired” over time and the plant will yield less and less yield.
Usually, young cloudberries are transplanted at the end of August at the beginning of September, before the onset of cold weather, so that it can take root.
How to grow cloudberries from seeds
Growing cloudberries from seeds is a more laborious process. For which you will need:
- tank with low sides for stratification;
- cotton pads;
- seedling cassettes or peat tablets;
- seeds from well-ripened berries or purchased.
Before the grains fall into the ground, they are stratified. Stratification - long-term exposure of seeds at a certain temperature to speed up the germination process.
Put cotton pads on the bottom of the container in an even layer, moisten them with water. Spread the seeds on the discs, keeping some distance between them. This is necessary so that after the germination of the seeds, the disc can be cut into separate parts and not injure the sprouts.
Cover the seeds with the same wet discs. Close the container with a loose lid and send the container to the refrigerator or to another place where the temperature will be maintained at 3-5 degrees. Duration of exposure is 20-30 days.
To avoid stagnation of air, the container must be ventilated. Also, as necessary, moisten the discs.
When the seeds germinate, they are transplanted into peat tablets or honeycomb cassettes with soil. When planting in the ground, the process will be a little more complicated:
- A mixture of peat and earth is prepared for seedlings.
- The soil, before use, is calcined in the oven or treated with a fungicidal solution. This will help to disinfect it from possible pathogenic bacteria and pest larvae.
- Place a drainage layer on the bottom of the cells (cups).
- Fill the containers with soil.
- Make about 2 cm depressions in the soil.
- Put the germinated seeds into the hole, and sprinkle a little earth on top.
- Sprinkle the soil with warm clean water.
- Cover the cassette with foil and place in a warm, bright place.
- During the entire period, it is important to monitor soil moisture, and regularly water.
After the appearance of 3 true leaves, the seedlings are transplanted into large pots. Seedlings are planted in open ground in spring.
When propagating cloudberries in this way, you need to prepare for the fact that the berries will appear on the bushes only in the second year.
If you wish, it's easy to figure out how to grow cloudberries in your backyard. The greatest difficulties can arise in the search for seedlings and the initial preparation of the soil. As you gain experience, caring for a plant becomes no more difficult than caring for raspberries or strawberries. It is possible to breed a decent plantation even if there are only a few bushes - cloudberries reproduce well in a vegetative way, giving new young shoots by autumn. The plant can be affected by diseases and pests, but this is easily eliminated in the same ways as for other garden berry crops.