How pleasant it is to have a rest on a site on which a variety of flowers are fragrant and pleasing to the eye! Some of them, besides their beauty, also have healing properties. A vivid example of a healing flower is calendula or marigold, as people say. This herbaceous plant blooms with bright orange flowers, located on velvety stems with beautiful patterned leaves. Solar marigold flowers can decorate flower beds, making them even more colorful. Look great trees, surrounded by flowers of marigold.
Calendula is successfully used in the treatment of angina and other diseases of the mouth, problems with the liver and other organs of the digestive tract, and is a good disinfectant. In addition, the flowers of marigold are used as dyes in the food industry. Thanks to these properties, calendula is very popular among flower lovers. Often inexperienced gardeners are interested in how to grow marigold from seeds and when to plant it on seedlings.
Calendula - planting and care
Most often, the planting of marigold is made by seeds directly into the open ground, although it can be grown with the help of seedlings. Seeds are sown in spring, in April-May, or in late autumn. When sowing seeds of calendula under winter, the shoots appear much earlier than in the spring sowing, and the plant also blooms earlier. In the spring, the signal for the beginning of sowing is the readiness of the soil. In order to verify this, take a handful of earth, squeeze it and throw it from a height of one meter. If the ball is broken up, you can sow the seeds.
The plan for seeding the seeds of marigold depends on the purpose for which you want to grow this flower. Since the seeds of marigold are large, to decorate the flowerbeds they are sown to a depth of only 2-3 cm, and the distance between the seeds themselves should be quite large - 30-40 cm, and the distance between the rows - 60-70 cm. With such sowing, you will grow luxurious bright flowers.
In the case of growing marigold from seeds to produce medicinal raw material, they are sown quite densely: the distance between the seeds is up to 10 cm, between rows - about 50 cm.
Seeds begin to germinate in a week, and in ten weeks the first flowers appear. To dilute the calendula, they are sown once, and in the future it will multiply by self-seeding. You can sow the marigold several times during the season.
Calendula is an unpretentious plant, the care of which, like its cultivation, is not at all complicated. The only condition for the successful cultivation of calendula flowers is sunny color. Planted in the shade, the plant can become infected with powdery mildew, and the flowers will not have such a bright color. If they grow in a sunny place, then they blossom continuously from spring to late autumn. Calendula prefers fertile soil without stagnation of water. In the dry season, calendula needs watering. Periodically it is necessary to remove the weeds around the plant and loosen the soil under it.
Calendula is a winter-hardy plant capable of withstanding even minus temperatures. In addition, it is remarkably tolerated by the transplant even in the flowering state.
This flower has an amazing feature: it discourages pests of the garden, such as caterpillars, mites and others. Planted
Pay a little attention to the calendula growing on your site, and it will thank you for a long sunny flowering, and then come in handy as a useful medicinal raw material.