If you love elegant and bright petunias, this article is for you. Today I want to analyze what top dressings are desirable and favorable for petunia seedlings, and how to apply them, to grow strong and healthy young plants, as well as what conditions, in principle, are needed for young seedlings.
What do seedlings need?
At the seedling stage, one of the most important requirements is good lighting, and around the clock. With a lack of light, the seedlings will weaken and stretch. Two weeks after germination, daylight hours can be reduced to 14 hours, allowing the plants to rest at night.
No less important for the proper development of seedlings and temperature. The optimum temperature is in the range from 18 to 22 degrees.
Be sure to monitor the humidity, not only air, but also the soil.
If all three criteria make up a comfortable microclimate, this is quite enough for the first fourteen days of seedling life. If for some reason at least one of the indicators is lame, spraying once a week with a special stimulant like Epin will help correct the situation.
Seedlings do not grow: what is the reason
Before resorting to top dressing, make sure that stunted growth is not caused by:
- Unsuitable soil acidity. Petunia loves neutral or slightly acidic soils.
- Too heavy soil. To avoid this, be sure to add vermiculite when preparing the soil mixture, which will increase air permeability.
- Neglect of soil disinfection processes at the stage of preliminary preparation.
Unique top dressing
If you have provided all of the above conditions, and the seedlings still do not grow, feed it with the usual pharmacy B vitamins. From my own experience I can say that they are absolutely not inferior to specialized tools.
For the best effect, I prepare a complex solution of vitamins B1, B6 and B12. Everything is very simple: dilute an ampoule of each vitamin in a liter of warm water, and the miracle composition is ready. If the sprouts are still very tiny, fertilizer can be applied with a pipette, a few drops per sprout. For adult seedlings, it is convenient to use a spray gun. Top dressing can be repeated at intervals of seven days, and very soon you will notice a positive trend.
What else to feed and when
Do not neglect top dressing, petunias need them very much.
It is favorable to use liquid complex compositions for feeding, combining both organic and mineral components. In any garden center you can easily find the right option. Among the popular ones, I would note "Agricola" and "Ideal". I consider their main advantage to be the ease of preparation: the calculated amount of the drug according to the instructions should simply be diluted in water, and the fertilizer is ready.
Starting top dressing, at first, focus on nitrogen-containing compounds. Potassium and phosphorus are equally important. Phosphorus is necessary for the formation of a healthy root system, and potassium helps plants form a normal number of flowers and ovaries, although we will need it a little later.
Ideally, select fertilizers so that the proportions of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are 50, 40 and 10%, respectively. It is good if, in addition to these essential components, the fertilizer also contains an easily accessible form of iron. Always choose formulations with a chelated form of micronutrients.
Petunia responds very well to frequent feeding. For maximum effect, reduce the concentration to about three times what is written in the instructions, but water the plants more often. Small doses of fertilizer can be applied almost every other day.
If you start feeding on time, select the optimal composition and follow the steps systematically, your chances of growing strong and healthy seedlings are very high.
Read also: The perfect selection for your flower garden: these plants are the most tenacious
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