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Tomatoes and peppers are wonderful vegetables that are present in our diet throughout the year. In the summer we use them fresh, in the winter they canned, dried, dried. Juices, sauces, seasonings are prepared from them, they are frozen. They are remarkable in that everyone can plant them in the garden - a variety of varieties and hybrids allows you to grow peppers and tomatoes in almost any climatic zone. This article is about feeding seedlings, in particular, many are interested in yeast, we will dwell on this issue separately.
What you need to successfully grow pepper and tomato seedlings
Peppers and tomatoes belong to the nightshade family, but their needs are different. In order to better see this, we have compiled a comparative table.
Some points that are not included in the tables should be noted separately:
- Tomatoes love frequent transplants, their root can be pinched, this stimulates the development of lateral roots. Pepper, on the other hand, tolerates a transplant very poorly, and if the root is damaged, it can die altogether.
- Tomatoes are deepened during transplantation, additional roots appear on the stem, which improve the nutrition of the plant. The pepper prefers to be planted at the same depth as before. Part of the stem buried in the ground can rot.
- Tomatoes do not like thickened plantings - they need good ventilation, besides, thickened plantings contribute to the appearance of late blight. Peppers, on the other hand, should be planted close to each other. Its fruits ripen better in partial shade.
As you can see, these cultures are in many ways similar to each other, but they have significant differences that should not be forgotten.
Top dressing of tomato and pepper seedlings
Our article is devoted to feeding tomato and pepper seedlings. There are no difficulties here, if you have a good idea of what you are doing. Let's figure it out together.
Why feed the plants
We are so scared of herbicides, pesticides, nitrates that sometimes we think that it is better, in general, not to feed the plant - weeds grow without any fertilizers.
Retreat! Once Aesop was asked why cultivated plants are cared for, cherished, but they do not care grow poorly and die, the weeds, no matter how you fight them, grow up again. The wise slave (and Aesop was a slave) replied that nature is like a woman who has married a second time. She tries to take a tidbit from her husband's children and give it to her children. This is how weeds for nature are children, while cultivated garden plants are stepchildren.
Peppers, tomatoes - plants from another continent, where the climate is hot and dry. In nature, these are perennial plants that can develop in the absence of strong winds and mechanical damage into very large plants several meters in height. Those babies that we grow in gardens, in greenhouses are the fruits of selection, without our help they are unlikely to survive.
In addition, the opinion that all fertilizers are harmful is delusion. Plants need nitrogen to build up green mass, phosphorus - for flowering and fruiting, potassium - for the development of the root system. This is far from the entire spectrum of action of macronutrients, which are nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, but this information should be enough for an amateur gardener.
Trace elements for garden plants are not as important as for perennials - often peppers and tomatoes during their development do not fully feel the consequences of a deficiency of trace elements, moreover, they are present in small quantities in the soil itself, in water for irrigation. But their lack leads to many diseases: for example, the same late blight develops exclusively against the background of a lack of copper, and it is treated with copper-containing drugs.
General rules
Tomatoes love phosphorus... Pepper loves potassium. Neither peppers nor tomatoes like fresh manure and higher doses. nitrogen fertilizers... But this only applies to its excess, the correct doses of nitrogen are vital for any plant.
Pepper dressing, tomatoes are best done in the morning. During the day, you can feed the plants only in cloudy weather.
Top dressing is carried out after the seedlings have been moistened. If you spray young sprouts of pepper and tomatoes with fertilizer on dry soil, the delicate root can get burned, the plant will most likely die.
Fertilizers are dissolved in soft, settled water with a temperature of 22-25 degrees.
At first, watering pepper and a tomato with cold water is harmful, and secondly, at low temperatures, nutrients are less absorbed, and at 15 degrees they are not absorbed at all.
Growth stimulants
There are many plant growth stimulants, particularly for seedlings. But if you've planted quality seeds in good soil, you don't need them. The exceptions are natural preparations such as epin, zircon and humate. But they cannot be called growth stimulants - these preparations of natural origin stimulate the plant's own resources, help them to more easily survive the lack of light, low or high temperature, lack or excess of moisture, other stress factors, and do not specifically stimulate growth processes.
They should be used even at the stage of preparing seeds for sowing - soak pepper and tomato seeds. This will help them germinate better, in the future, peppers and tomatoes will be more resistant to the influence of negative factors. Epin can process seedlings on a leaf every two weeks, and humate, a teaspoon of which is poured with a glass of boiling water, then added with cold water to two liters, can be well diluted and used for watering seedlings.
Other stimulants should not be used. If peppers and tomatoes are developing well, they are simply not needed, they can cause stretching, and then lodging and death of seedlings. In addition, treatment with stimulants can cause early bud formation, which will be very inappropriate before the tomatoes and peppers are planted in the ground or greenhouse. In northern regions, regions with extreme climates or under particularly unfavorable weather conditions, stimulants may be required at the stage of flowering, fruit setting, and ripening, but this is not a topic for our conversation.
There is a danger that tomato and pepper seedlings were simply treated with preparations similar to the tour - Atlant, Kultar or others. They slow down growth aerial part of the plant.This is appropriate for ornamental crops, if we want to get more compact bushes than those laid down by the varietal characteristics of the plants. When used for vegetable crops, these drugs inhibit growth, the seedlings are subsequently forced to catch up with their untreated counterparts, their development is inhibited, the fruits become smaller, and the yield decreases. Better to buy overgrown seedlings or grow them yourself.
Fertilizers for seedlings of tomatoes and peppers
Peppers are fertilized from the moment of planting to planting in the ground 3 times, and tomatoes -2. Let's say right away that it is best to feed it with special fertilizers for each plant. There are drugs on sale for every wallet. Of course it's better to fertilize kemiroi for seedlings, but there are much cheaper products of good quality, and often they are also suitable for adult plants.
Nitroammofosk, amofosk are good fertilizers, but they are universal, while specialized fertilizers differ in that the manufacturer himself took care of taking into account the needs of a particular plant. Naturally, do not mindlessly pour in fertilizers - read carefully and strictly follow the instructions.
Tomatoes are fed for the first time on the twelfth day. after picking with special fertilizer with a concentration two times lower than that recommended for seedlings, with the addition of 1 teaspoon of urea per 10 liters of solution (calculate the required dose yourself). At this time, tomatoes really need nitrogen.
A week later, a second feeding is carried out either with a special fertilizer, or a teaspoon of amofoska is dissolved in 10 liters of water. If the seedlings are developing well, no more mineral fertilizers can be given before planting. But if necessary, tomato seedlings are fed every two weeks in the same way as the second time.
Pour in a tablespoon superphosphate a cup of boiling water, let it brew overnight. Top up the solution up to 2 liters with water, pour the tomato seedlings over the leaf and soil.
The first time the pepper is fed with a special fertilizer, when the first two true leaves appear. The second feeding is given two weeks after the first, and the third one three days before planting. If you feed the peppers with Amofos, prepare the solution as for tomatoes, only for each liter of solution add a tablespoon of wood ash, filled with a glass of boiling water for 2 hours.
Top dressing with ash seedlings of tomatoes and peppers
If the weather is cloudy for a long time and the seedlings of peppers and tomatoes do not have enough light, this negatively affects the plants, especially shortly before planting in the ground. Here wood ash can help us.
Pour a glass of ash with 8 liters of hot water, let it brew for a day and filter. Pour the pepper seedlings over the leaf and into the ground.
If it turned out that you flooded the seedlings, they began to lie down, or the first signs of a black leg appeared, sometimes it is enough to powder the soil in boxes with seedlings with wood ash.
Feeding tomato and pepper seedlings with yeast
Yeast is a wonderful, highly effective fertilizer. In addition, they protect the plant from certain diseases. But they are not suitable for seedlings. Yeast stimulates plant growth, and we don't need elongated sprouts of tomatoes and peppers. Even if the seedlings are lagging behind in development, it is better to accelerate their growth in other ways. Yeast dressing it is very good to give both peppers and tomatoes after planting in the ground.
Watch a video about feeding seedlings:
