Preparatory work, fertilizers with manure before planting vegetables will help to obtain high, high-quality harvests in the future. And it’s worth starting to think about planting in advance. Some garden crops are planted in winter. Therefore, it is important to know how to prepare a garlic bed for planting in the fall. After all, you need to decide on the landing site a month and a half in advance. The timing of planting depends on the weather and climatic conditions of the region. The main thing here is not to be late, otherwise the plant will freeze without taking root. But early planting will lead to the sprouts hatching and dying from a sudden cold snap.
Selecting a location
Before planting, choose a place for a vegetable crop. It is forbidden grow garlic in the same place. Every year the area for cultivation is changed. Where garlic grew, you can plant it after three years.
For a good vegetable harvest, fertilizers are applied to the soil in advance before planting. Experienced gardeners advise how to fertilize the soil before planting garlic on a plot in the fall. It is better to use both mineral and organic. But it is better not to feed the soil with fresh manure. Organic matter will damage the planted cloves and cause them to rot.
Preparing a place for planting garlic begins with determining the acidity of the soil. Neutral soil, classified as light loam, is suitable for vegetables.
The choice of location is determined by how well the soil warms up and how far the groundwater lies. You cannot plan a bed for winter garlic in places where water stagnates after rains.
Determination of soil acidity
Planting winter garlic in the fall begins with planning:
- amount of fertilizers;
- at what depth to plant a winter type of plant;
- selection of predecessors;
- adding compost to pre-treat the beds.
But without determining the acidity of the soil, planting work cannot be carried out. For garlic, the norm is a neutral value from 5.5 to 7.0.
Acidic soils with a pH of 4.0 to 5.0 have a rusty tint, and the water accumulated in the lowlands is covered with an iridescent film on top. In areas with acidic soil, plantain, horsetail, and mint grow well.
On slightly acidic ones - chamomile, coltsfoot, wood lice. Nettle prefers neutral soil. And for garlic it is most suitable.
Acidity is reduced by adding dolomite flour or slaked lime to the soil. You can increase the level with wood ash.
Selection of predecessors
You need to think in advance about how to prepare the soil for planting garlic in the fall. An important role is played by what kind of neighbors the garlic bed should have. The best predecessors are cucumbers and zucchini. But vegetables - garlic and onions do not go well with each other. Although the vegetable with its smell repels pests of garden and vegetable crops, raspberries and grapes do not tolerate such proximity. Vegetable crops inhibit the development of the root system of berry plants.
Tomatoes and cucumbers can withstand proximity to aromatic plants. Vegetables, along with zucchini and beans, will supply the soil with nutrients. But for carrots, the pungent smell of the plant will repel the pest - the onion fly, but the crop will not grow well next to the carrot beds.
A bed for garlic before winter should be planned in advance, and its predecessors should be taken care of as early as possible.
Planting green manure - oats, peas, white mustard - will help make the soil nutritious. These plants are planted in the spring in the area where they plan to plant the plant in the fall.
In mid-August, the planted crops are harvested. The soil after green manure will be filled with the elements necessary for plant growth.
A mixture of oats, peas and mustard is planted along the bed in the fall. By October, the seedlings will have grown, and their stems will be covered by vegetable plantings. During the winter, green manure will retain the snow in the garden bed and protect the seedlings from frost.
In spring, rotten parts of plants will become an excellent organic fertilizer.
Tillage
Before planting winter garlic in the fall, you need to start by arranging the beds. The site is dug up, improving the soil structure:
- In the clay one, add a bucket of sand and peat per square meter.
- Heavy, dense soils are loosened with sand.
- Sandy soils are structured with a bucket of peat and two buckets of clay.
If the beds are made on virgin soil, then add a mixture of a glass of chalk or dolomite flour, two glasses of potassium sulfate and wood ash per square meter.
The quality of the soil will improve if you scatter humus over the bed and then dig it up.
Sowing green manure will make the soil nutritious and filled with useful elements.
Sprinkle the garden bed with urea in the fall, taking one tablespoon per one and a half to two square meters of area.
Preparing the land for planting garlic in the fall is an important step in obtaining vegetable harvests.
Disinfection
How to prepare a bed for winter crops in the fall so that the plant is not infected with pathogenic microorganisms? Fungi accumulate in the ground in the fall, and the garlic may die before it even begins to grow.
Sterilize the soil by treating it with a solution of copper sulfate. Dilute a tablespoon of the substance in ten liters of water and spill the soil. To improve the disinfection process, cover the bed with film for a day or two.
Cloves prepared for planting also require disinfection. They are soaked in a weak solution of potassium permanganate for twenty to thirty minutes.
Fertilizers
Digging of the bed is carried out to the depth of planting of garlic. The optimal dimensions will be one meter wide, twenty centimeters high. After removing the roots of weeds from the garden bed, the soil is loosened. After two weeks, they are spilled with a disinfectant solution of copper sulfate. The ground covered with film will settle. The missing elements are added to it. How to fertilize the soil for garlic in the fall? For fertilizing, the soil needs superphosphate. It is mixed with humus and added along with digging or loosening the area.
It is useful to use boric acid (10 grams), potassium permanganate (3 grams), iron sulfate (2 grams) as a top dressing, dissolving the substances in a bucket of water.
Fertilizers are applied to the garlic in the fall so that the vegetable meets spring with an optimal set of nutrition. Then the seedlings will come out early after winter and will be strong.
Preparing the beds
If the bed is prepared, then the correct planting of garlic in the fall goes like this:
- Holes with a depth of three to ten centimeters are made at a distance of ten centimeters from each other. Cloves are planted at a shallow depth two to three weeks before frost in the second ten days of September or early October. The cloves are placed deeper in areas with harsh winters. This method of planting will allow the plant to take root better.
- Only winter varieties of garlic should be planted in the fall, the heads of which are covered with a lilac skin and have a stem.
- The distance between rows is twenty to thirty centimeters.
- The bulbs are placed in the prepared holes without deepening them.
- Cover the holes with a compost layer on top.
- Mulching the beds is done with a layer of fallen leaves, pine needles, and peat.
When planting vegetables, it is important to know how to prepare a bed for garlic in the fall. If the work is carried out without taking into account the rules and advice of vegetable growers, then the shoots that appear in the spring will be weak and rare. Then you won’t be able to wait for a harvest of large heads of vegetables.
