Urea is a fertilizer that many gardeners use when growing various types of vegetables. It is worth noting that it also has another name – urea. Proper fertilizing with urea helps improve fruiting of plants and stimulates their development. However, before using such fertilizer, you need to familiarize yourself with what urea is and how to use this fertilizer in the garden.
What it is
Urea, or urea, is a chemical compound with carbonic acid.Externally, humatized urea is similar to ordinary transparent crystals that are odorless. They dissolve easily in ethanol, ammonia and warm water. Urea grade B contains quite a lot of nitrogen and may have a white or yellowish tint.
Currently, urea fertilizer is used in various fields of activity. For example, in the medical industry, urea is used to create drugs that can remove water from the human body and relieve severe swelling. The substance is also often added to various sleeping pills.
Sometimes urea is used as a food additive to improve the aroma and taste of products. Quite often it is added to chewing gum and baked goods.
However, urea is most often used as a fertilizer. The use of urea in agriculture allows you to increase the amount of nitrogen in the soil. Thanks to this, soil fertility improves and the yield of grown vegetables increases. This nitrogen fertilizer is highly active and is therefore quickly absorbed by plants. It is recommended to use it for feeding vegetable crops during pre-sowing preparation of the site or when the bushes begin to gain green mass. In summer, during fruit formation, you should not use urea, as this can significantly worsen the yield.
Advantages and disadvantages
Granular urea, like any other plant nutrition product, has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of urea as a fertilizer include:
- increasing the rate of green mass formation;
- an increase in the amount of protein in almost all cereal crops that were fertilized with urea;
- improving the plant immune system and preventing pests;
- absence of large amounts of nitrates even after frequent use of fertilizing.
There are not many disadvantages to using urea, but you should still be aware of them before using the fertilizer. The disadvantages include:
- if dosages are not observed, serious burns may appear on the seedlings, which in the future will lead to the death of the bushes;
- the temperature of the solution is much lower than the air temperature, so it should only be used on warm days;
- Urea is not recommended to be combined with other fertilizers.
How to dilute urea
A liquid urea solution can be used to feed almost any garden or vegetable crop. Before using urea, you need to familiarize yourself with its varieties. There are two main markings:
- Marking "A". This brand is produced to create special feed additives for animals. Sometimes a fertilizer with this name can be granulated to create a resin or glue.
- Marking "B". This urea fertilizer is granulated for feeding plants grown in the garden.
For dilution of fertilizing fertilizer, it is the “B” brand that is used, since the “A” label can negatively affect the quality of the resulting crop. To create high-quality fertilizing, you should familiarize yourself with the peculiarities of preparing the solution. It is recommended to maintain the correct proportions of urea, which depend on the plants being fed. For example, foliar feeding of potatoes urea is carried out using a solution prepared from 50 grams of fertilizer and 10 liters of water.
To get it right feed the potatoes, 3–4 liters of the prepared mixture are consumed for each bush.
The optimal dosage of urea when creating a fertilizing mixture for fertilizing shrubs and trees is 30 grams per 10 liters of water. The preparation of such a mixture is carried out in several successive stages. First, all the granules are poured with two liters of cold water and stirred until they are completely dissolved. Having diluted the granules, add another 8 liters of liquid to the mixture.
How to apply fertilizer
Having familiarized yourself with the features of preparing the working solution, you should figure out how to carry out foliar fertilizing with urea. Instructions for using this fertilizing mixture will help improve vegetable yields in the future.
Top dressing
Quite often, potatoes are fertilized with urea. It is recommended to do this while planting the plant. However, some people use this method when growing bushes. To do this, urea granules are dug in near the potato bushes to a depth of about ten centimeters. In this case, the correct dosage must be observed. When adding granules to the soil, you must remember that 200-gram glasses can hold 130 grams of the substance, a matchbox can hold 15 grams, and a tablespoon can hold only 10 grams.
If manure or any other organic fertilizer with a large amount of nitrogen was added to the soil before adding urea, the dosage will have to be reduced by half.
Granules need moisture, so almost immediately after adding them to the soil, abundant watering is carried out. You need to pour at least a liter of water under each bush.
In dry form, granules are often used when preparing soil for planting vegetable crops.It is customary to do such preparatory work in the fall when digging up the site. In this case, about 150 grams of urea will have to be consumed per square meter of garden.
Watering
Urea with the addition of humates is an organic fertilizer that can be used for watering grown vegetable crops. There are various folk recipes for preparing liquid for watering plants. To treat shrubs and low trees, use a very concentrated solution. Therefore, to prepare the working mixture, you will have to add at least 350 grams of the substance to 10 liters of water.
Currants and other berries do not need such a concentrated liquid. In this case, to prepare the mixture, only 40 grams of urea are added to a ten-liter container of water. Vegetable crops need nitrogen fertilizers, so more concentrated mixtures are used for watering them. To create them, you will have to mix 10 liters of water and 200 grams of urea.
However, when using a fertilizer such as urea in the garden, you must remember that it oxidizes the soil. Before using it, it is recommended to normalize the acidity of the soil and add about 400 grams of chalk to it.
Spraying
Many people are interested in whether it is possible to use urea to spray vegetables. You can spray seedlings with this solution, and there is nothing wrong with that. Spraying of potatoes and other vegetable crops is carried out in the evening or in the morning when there is no sun.
To prepare a urea solution, it is recommended to add 30–50 grams of fertilizer to five liters of cold water. If no plant has ever been sprayed with mineral solutions, you can make the mixture more concentrated.To do this, add 120 grams of urea to a ten-liter saucepan. About two liters of liquid should be consumed per plant.
The prepared mixture can be used not only to stimulate the development of seedlings, but also to protect them. The prepared spray liquid can destroy all pests on the bushes and protect plants from the most common diseases. It is best to use this solution against copperhead, weevils and flower beetles.
Before spraying, you must make sure that there will be no heavy rains in the coming days. If there is a downpour in the first two days after spraying, you will have to treat the seedlings again, as the urea will be washed off the leaves.
How to replace urea
Many people are interested in whether it is possible to replace one fertilizer with another. Since urea contains a large amount of nitrogen, any other nitrogen mixture can be used instead. Sometimes, in the absence of urea, vegetables are fed with calcium, ammonium or potassium nitrate. You can also use diammophos or ammophos.
Conclusion
Currently, many gardeners use urea fertilizer. Before using urea, you need to familiarize yourself with the features of its use. To do this, you should study in detail the instructions for using the fertilizer with a detailed description and photo. You can also read reviews from vegetable growers who use urea every year.
