Often flower beds are decorated with colorful plants such as aster. They bloom in the fall, are unpretentious and usually do not have difficulties with them. The flower is sown with seeds directly into the ground or its seedlings are planted, then they begin to bloom earlier.
Growing a plant at home requires the necessary knowledge, otherwise young seedlings can get sick and die. Therefore, the process should be considered in more detail: from sowing seeds to planting them in open ground.
How to choose the right seeds for seedlings
To be sure that the seeds will sprout, you should read the year of production and the expiration date on the bag. The best thing buy fresh seeds, as asters quickly lose their germination.
If the seed is in a bright package with a beautiful pattern, it is best not to buy it. Seeds in nondescript bags most often turn out to be better and fresher, since the colorfulness of the pattern and excessive brightness are a kind of advertising to sell a low-quality planting product.
To create beautiful flower beds, you should choose a mixture of asters. They usually contain up to 10 different colors. For a special design of landscape design, flowers should be purchased in separate bags.
Dates of sowing seeds. When to plant a flower for seedlings? So that their flowering does not fall on autumn frosts, it is important to correctly determine the sowing time. The best thing sow them in February-March.
It is these months that are optimal for flowering in September. In regions where snow falls a little later or does not happen at all, sowing is carried out in April or May.
Growing from seeds
When to plant this flower, we have already figured out. How to grow good seedlings?
In order for the plant to be strong, the seeds should initially be sown plant in nutritious soil... You can do it yourself.
To do this, mix in equal proportions:
- humus;
- sand;
- garden land.
Then this mixture is steamed in the oven, after which wood ash is added to it. It is very useful to add perlite to the finished soil, which helps to improve soil aeration and allows the seedling root system to develop better.
A wooden or plastic box used for seedlings is filled with harvested soil, slightly compacted and generously watered with potassium permanganate.
Before sowing seeds, they should be treat with any fungicidewhich is an effective remedy against fungal diseases that often affect seedlings. Sowing seeds is carried out as follows: grooves up to 2 cm deep are made in the soil, into which they are planted and sprinkled with soil no more than two mm on top.
Many growers recommend sprinkling the seeds with calcined sand, which allows them not to get wet when watering. There should be a distance of 2–5 cm between the grooves.
To prevent moisture from evaporating so quickly, crops should cover with a piece of glass... Seedlings begin to appear on the 5-10th day, and the glass is then removed.
Seedlings should be move to the windowsillwhere there is good lighting, but the temperature should not exceed 15 degrees.This is essential when asters are grown at home, otherwise they will start to stretch.
As the soil dries up, it moisten with warm water from a spray bottle. In this case, care must be taken not to flood the plant, otherwise a disease such as a black leg may occur.
At the first sign of such a lesion, you must immediately remove diseased sprouts with a small earthen lump. After that, the hole should be covered with earth and this place is spilled with a fungicide solution.
Seedling picking
This procedure is carried out after 2-3 true leaves appear in the seedlings. The soil composition should be the same, only add a spoon complex mineral fertilizer... To distribute it evenly, the soil should be thoroughly mixed.
The pot is filled with soil and tamped lightly so that it does not settle after watering. In the center of the pot, using a stick, a recess is made in which the roots of the seedling will be placed.
If the plant has a highly branched root system, then do a pinch... When transplanting, the seedling is buried in the soil no more than one cm from the cotyledon leaves. The earth around it is compacted in such a way that when watering it does not wash out with water.
Seedling care
Asters should be watered abundantly, but infrequently. To avoid stagnation of excess water, the seedling containers should contain drainage done... It is also not recommended to fill the flower with water, otherwise it may be struck by a disease such as a black leg, and it will die.
Top dressing of seedlings... If high-quality soil is prepared before sowing, then the seedlings do not need additional fertilizing. The poor soil is watered with biofertilizer or ash infusion a week after transplanting seedlings.
Do not get carried away with nitrogen fertilizers, otherwise only green bushes will grow, and the aster will begin to bloom late and not too abundantly.
Seed hardening... When 6-7 leaves appear, you can start hardening the seedlings so that in the future they can easily endure temperature changes and be frost-resistant.
For this purpose, boxes with seedlings are taken out into the street, for 3-5 hours. At first, the duration of stay in the open air should be about an hour, gradually increasing its duration.
Possible difficulties in growing seedlings
- The sprouts did not sprout or grow poorly. It is necessary to sow new seeds, before soaking them for a day in ash or aloe juice. The soil must be changed by disinfecting it with biofungicide or potassium permanganate.
- A disease such as fusarium has emerged. To prevent it, flowers should not be fertilized with manure. It is also not recommended to plant asters in a place where potatoes, physalis, tomatoes, as well as gladioli, tulips, and carnations were previously grown.
- Incomplete inflorescences have developed. This is possible if the plant is infected with a spider mite or aphid. Also, defective flowers may appear due to improper nutrition.
How and when to plant seedlings in open ground
When the root part of the flower stem is 7 cm, the seedlings can be planted in the ground. The landing site is chosen in advance. These flowers are quite unpretentious to lighting and grow well. near fences, trees etc.
Too acidic soil is not pleasant to asters, therefore in the spring or autumn in the ground make lime... It is forbidden to add fresh manure to the ground when planting seedlings - this leads to their death.
It is best to plant flowers in loose soil, and in order for them to take root better, this should be done along with pieces of root soil. Plants should be located at a distance of 20 cm from each other.
The workpieces are planted in small recesses, and from above they are compacted with earth. If, for some reason, the seedlings are stretched out, they are buried a few centimeters. After planting the plant water thoroughly, and so that after the earth dries up, a crust does not form, the soil is mulched with peat.
Caring for asters in the garden
These flowers are loved by many landscape designers or flower growers due to the fact that they do not require special care. But with enough attention, they are able to please with the richness of colors and abundant flowering. Thus, leaving includes the following points:
Periodic watering - this contributes to the correct development and timely flowering of the plant.- Loosening the soil is a very useful procedure, thanks to which the roots of flowers receive oxygen in the required amount.
- Fertilization - potassium-phosphorus fertilizing contributes to the colorfulness of flowers and the profusion of flowering.
- You can water asters with solutions of liquid organic mixtures.
Thus, to grow a flower from seed, you need adhere to certain rules... Failure to comply with them contributes to various problems.
If everything is done correctly, then in the future the plants will delight their owner with abundant and colorful flowering.
