Each summer resident dreams of growing on his site a crisp cabbage for salads or for the future for the winter. But since they receive it in the main seedlings, not everyone can achieve the desired result. After all, before you start sowing, you need to clearly know how to plant cabbage on seedlings at home, because unlike tomatoes and cucumbers, that vegetable is more whimsical.
In what month should cabbage be planted in seedlings?
This uneasy question can not be answered monosyllabically - it all depends on which cabbage will be cultivated. To get an early cabbage, seed the seeds on seedlings from the beginning to the end of March. For medium varieties, sowing is important from the end of March to the middle of April, and for late varieties from mid-April to the end of the month.
There is another simple variant of calculating the desired date of planting. As is known, 60 days pass from the moment of appearance of the first shoots and before disembarkation into the soil. Focusing on this figure, you can calculate when you should start sowing cabbage.
Preparation of soil for sowing
The most important thing in the preparation of the land is not to take the land from your own vegetable garden, which is certainly full of pathogens of all kinds of cruciferous diseases, to which the cabbage belongs. It is best to work hard in autumn, having gone to the nearest forest, and to collect a mixture of deciduous (turf) and peat land, adding a little humus to it.
The soil for cultivation of seedlings of cabbage should be nutritious, but at the same time friable and air permeable. It must certainly be heat treated - baked in the oven or freeze for several days in the freezer .
As a disinfectant, wood ash should be added to the soil, which prevents reproduction of rot and black stalk , and also saturates the soil with microelements necessary for active growth.
Seed treatment
If the seed material does not have a special shell, into which the seeds are rolled in an industrial way, they should be soaked for 5 minutes in rather hot water - 40-50 ° C, then immediately put in a cold one. The final chord will be soaking seeds for 20 minutes in a dark solution of manganese for complete disinfection, after which you can proceed to planting.
At what depth should cabbage be planted in seedlings?
It is very important to not sow crops when growing seedlings. To see the shoots, it is necessary to make grooves no more than a centimeter deep, in which the seeds will be laid. As a result, the seed will be at a depth of 1 to 0.5 cm, which will positively affect the rate of its germination, and hence, in the future harvest.
Sow the seeds more often in boxes, leaving the distance to the next plant about 2-3 cm and a similar row spacing. Two weeks later, you can hold the first pick, and another three - the second.
Temperature and watering
For the cultivation of white cabbage, it is very important that the temperature at which the seeds germinate and in the subsequent was not too high. So far no sprouts have appeared, it is necessary to keep the room no more than 18-20 ° C. And when the young shoots already appeared, the temperature is lowered to 15-17 ° C in the daytime and 8-10 ° C at night.
Cabbage loves moisture at any stage of growth. Therefore, it must be sown in a well-water-saturated soil. After sowing, watering for a while will not be necessary and the next time you will need to moisten the soil when the top layer of the earth dries slightly. If the moisture is too much, it will be necessary to loosen, for its rapid evaporation from the deep layers.
How to plant Peking and cauliflower in seedlings?
Unlike the white-headed, Peking and cauliflower are more thermophilic. During germination and in the subsequent the temperature necessary for plants should be 5-7 degrees higher than for white-capped.
Since color and Peking cabbage are plants with a very delicate root system, it is better not to subject them to picking, but immediately plant them in separate containers, from which the seedlings will already be transplanted into the open ground. Thus, roots are less injured, and cabbage does not lag behind in development.