Blue spruce from seeds: sowing, care and transplanting seedlings into the ground

The blue spruce is amazing and beautiful! She enchants and attracts the attention of connoisseurs of her beauty and ordinary passers-by. Many plant this amazing wood near houses, in gardens to give a beautiful look. Growing such a spruce is quite laborious, but worth it. In this article, we will look at the basic rules that must be followed when growing blue spruce.

Content:

• Collecting blue spruce seeds
• Sowing seeds
• We take care of seedlings
• Transplanting seedlings of blue spruce

Collecting blue spruce seeds

In order to get a beautiful blue spruce tree on your favorite plot, you need to find the seeds for planting it. Spruce belongs to gymnosperms and is propagated by seeds that ripen inside the cones. Therefore, it is worth collecting a certain number of cones from this plant.

Preparation of spruce seeds:

• The best time to harvest your buds is February, because this is when the seeds in your buds are fully formed.
• The collected buds should be put in a warm place for some time to ripen and open. A battery is ideal for this.
• After some time, the cones will begin to open, and the seeds in them with wings for spreading will begin to be released themselves.
• Having collected the received seeds, they are also placed in a warm place for a while.
• After a little time, the obtained seeds are processed and their wings are removed. They won't need them anymore.
• Then the seeds of the blue spruce are placed under running water for thorough rinsing. This event helps to remove essential oils from seeds that affect the germination process.
• Subsequently, the washed seeds should be dried so that they are not covered with fungal organisms.

Prepared seeds must be treated with potassium permanganate before planting. To do this, prepare its weak solution and place the spruce seeds in it for a few minutes. After that, the seeds should be dried. The dried seed material of blue spruce is placed in a clean dish and tightly closed with a lid.

A container with seeds must be placed in a cold place for a long time.

In the role of it, a refrigerator is perfect, to provide the seeds with the state of the required dormancy before germination. The time the seeds are in a cold place is about two months.

Many gardeners store dormant spruce seeds by placing them in natural conditions. To do this, in the winter they make a small hole in the snow in which they put the seeds. To protect them from winter frosts, sprinkle on top with a small amount sawdust... This will keep the seeds stored until sowing.

Sowing seeds

After setting the sowing date, take out the seeds from the refrigerator or snow and dry them for some time. It is worth doing this several hours before sowing into the soil, since they should already be stored no more than fifty hours, otherwise they will lose their germination.

To accelerate the emergence of blue spruce seedlings, the prepared seeds are soaked before sowing in a small amount of the prepared solution of trace elements.

The soaking time is about ten hours. Then the seeds must be treated with a foundation prepared in the form of a solution. Usually they take about twenty grams of the drug and dissolve in one ten-liter bucket of water. By treating the seeds before planting with this solution, you prevent them from contamination with various diseases.

Small containers or flower pots are suitable for sowing seeds. When planting, seeds should be placed not in ordinary soil, but in a specially prepared soil mixture, consisting of high-moor peat and fertilizers.

She prepares like this:

• They take about five kilograms of peat and mix it with twenty grams of ammophos, adding thirty grams of limestone flour to the peat beforehand.
• The soil mixture obtained in this way is placed in containers prepared for planting.
• The containers with the soil mixture are placed in a greenhouse, making insignificant depressions in its soil.
• Then spruce seeds are placed in these containers, no more than one and a half centimeters deep.
• To add extra warmth, the containers are covered with foil.

When sowing seeds, they ate directly into the soil itself, which is in greenhouse, then it is previously prepared. To prepare the soil for seeds in a greenhouse, it is compacted manually. Seeds prepared for sowing are spread over the surface layer of the soil, keeping a distance of five centimeters from each other. Top seed material is sprinkled with a small amount of peat and pine sawdust.

We take care of seedlings

After you have made sowing seeds ate in the soil will take about three weeks and shoots will appear. It is immediately necessary to do the thinning of the seedlings of blue spruce. Thin in such a way that they remove weak and irregular seedlings, leaving strong and beautiful ones. The distance between thinned spruce shoots should be at least seven centimeters.

Seedlings should not be watered, as this does not have a very positive effect on their growth.

It is best to lightly spray about twice throughout the day. Do not spray the seedlings too much, as you can damage them. Watch the soil moisture, do not let it dry out.

For seedlings, the optimum temperature is about fifteen degrees Celsius, so you should keep it at this level. Make sure that the seedlings are not exposed to direct sunlight, which can cause burns on them. Frost also has a negative effect on the growth of spruce trees.

Transplanting seedlings of blue spruce

Transplanting seedlings is very important for the spruce. Plants can die from improper execution of it or acquire an irregular growth shape. It is worth transplanting fir trees in the spring, without waiting for the appearance of active growth. seedlings.

For this:

• Seedlings obtained earlier and grown to the size of seedlings are dug out of the ground and disconnected from each other.
• This should be done very carefully to prevent damage to the plant root system.
• Disconnected plants are subjected to root treatment with a clay talker.
• Then these seedlings are planted in a school, having previously made small holes in them and placing soil collected under growing conifers in them.

All the main transplant measures have been carried out, it remains to await the results. Usually in the third year of life of seedlings after transplants re-seating, but already at a greater distance. Blue spruce is very capricious to the growing conditions, therefore, in the first years of life, after transplanting, many of its seedlings die. In addition, all blue spruces grow very slowly, so you should be patient to get a beautiful and tall tree.

When replanting a blue spruce to a place of constant growth, pay attention to the composition of the soil characteristic of the area.

Blue spruce will grow very slowly in poor soil or dry soil.If the spruce grows on soils with a high lime content, then it has a rather solid age, since spruce grows very poorly on these lands. Fertile soil with sufficient moisture is best suited for them. In any case, do not plant a blue spruce on the soil where it previously grew corn or potatoes... These soils no longer contain trace elements necessary for the normal growth of spruce.

Make sure that the planted spruce plant is not exposed to strong winds, otherwise it will acquire an irregular growth shape and will suffer from frequent branch breakage. To protect the blue spruce from strong winds, small shelters or plantings are made next to it. All the efforts made to grow the blue spruce are well worth the beauty it subsequently received.

More information can be found in the video.