Many gardeners know that in the suburbs you can grow a southern berry - apricot. But not everyone knows how to do it right, what difficulties can be encountered. Apricot can be increasingly found in summer cottages and estates near Moscow. It does not always grow successfully, but many achieve good success. For those residents of the Moscow Region who want to grow this culture, it will be useful to know the features of this process.
When to plant apricot in the suburbs in the spring
In any region, spring is the most preferred time for planting plants. For the Central region, including the Moscow region, this is the only possible option. In the conditions of cold and early winter, the apricot seedlings planted in autumn will not have time to take root and grow stronger, and therefore simply will not survive.
So, you need to plant in the spring, more precisely, before the start of sap flow. This is the best planting time, since a seedling planted in thawed and warmed up soil will soon wake up from winter sleep and will grow, taking root and gaining strength. In autumn, such a plant will be healthy, strong and prepared for the frosty winter near Moscow.
How to plant apricot in the spring in the suburbs
Planting apricot in the suburbs has its own characteristics compared to the southern regions. When planning to plant such a tree on his plot, the gardener needs to know the rules and subtleties of this process.
Choosing a landing place
This is the defining moment from which apricot planting begins. A plant that is thermophilic in nature needs a sunny place, protected from the cold northern winds. Usually, if there is such an opportunity, they place a tree near the fence, the walls of the building or thick trees. This option is acceptable when such barriers are located north or northeast of the future landing site. If there are no such conditions, then you need to make special boards painted white (you can do this with a lime mortar), which will reflect the sun's rays, additionally illuminating and warming young trees.
Small south and southwest slopes (up to 15 °) are well suited for growing apricot.
The second condition is that the place must be dry, with a deep occurrence of groundwater. Apricot will not grow on a damp, wetland.
The composition of the soil is not of particular importance for apricot. Apricot grows on any (except peat) soils with acidity close to neutral. It is only important that they are loose, well-drained, permeable to air and moisture.
If the above conditions are not met, planting an apricot should be abandoned.
Seedling purchase
Experienced gardeners acquire seedlings in the fall and store until spring.
Grade selection
Before you buy a seedling, you need to decide which grade (or varieties, if there are several), should be preferred. For the Moscow Region, they primarily choose zoned winter-hardy varieties that can tolerate not only cold winters, but also withstand spring-back frosts. Secondly, you should pay attention to the ability of the apricot to self-pollinate. If the selected variety does not have self-fertility, then pollinators should be taken care of for it.
From the experience of gardeners, the best for the Moscow region were the following apricot varieties:
- Lel
- Royal
- Countess
- Alyosha,
- Black velvet
- Varangian,
- Alyosha,
- Aquarius,
- Iceberg,
- Triumph of the North
- Favorite,
- Winter-hardy Susova.
The age of the seedling should not be older than 1-2 years. Older trees, in cold areas, take root worse, get sick and often die in the first winter.
When choosing a seedling, you need to ensure that the root system is well developed, the roots are fibrous and without damage, there should be no growths and cones on them. The bark should be smooth, healthy looking, without cracks and gum.
Currently, seedlings with a closed root system, that is, growing in bags or containers with a nutrient mixture of 10-30 liters, are being increasingly sold. They have 100% survival, undemanding by the time of landing. You can plant them at any time from April to October. They have only one drawback - high cost.
Own apricot seedlings are not suitable for planting in the suburbs. They must be grafted on, resistant to frost and heat, boilers. The vaccination height is not lower than one meter. Highly resistant plums are used as stocks:
- Tula black
- Eurasia 43,
- Early ripening,
- and other local varieties or game.
Seedling storage
There are two options for reliable storage of the purchased seedling until spring:
- In the basement. We need a basement in which the air temperature in winter will not fall below 0 ° C and does not exceed +5 ° C. The procedure for laying seedlings for storage is as follows:
- A wooden box of a suitable size is placed on the floor in the basement, a layer of sand or sawdust is poured on the bottom.
- The roots of the seedlings are first lowered into a mash of clay and mullein, and then placed in a box.
- Fill the roots with a layer of sand or sawdust and moisturize.
- Cover with a loose film, and subsequently make sure that the sand (sawdust) does not dry out. Instead of boxes, you can use bags.
- Buried in the ground. For this:
- Dig a hole in the garden 40 cm wide, 100 cm long, 50 cm deep (approximate sizes, you need to navigate the size of your seedling).
- A layer of sand or sawdust is poured at the bottom of the pit.
- Have a seedling with roots on the sand, a crown on the edge of the pit.
- Fill the roots with a layer of sand or sawdust and moisturize well.
- The seedling is covered with loose earth, leaving only the ends of the branches.
- With the onset of winter, the place of shelter is covered with snow up to 60 cm high.
The dug apricot seedling is stored until spring
Important. Seedlings are taken out of the storage place only before planting. They should not wake up prematurely, this will worsen survival.
Landing pit preparation
According to the rules of planting plants, a pit is prepared in at least 20-25 days so that the soil in it has time to settle and compact. It is clear that in early spring weather conditions are likely to not allow this to be done in advance. Therefore, the pit must be prepared in the fall.
They do it like this:
- They clean the chosen place, weeds and garbage are removed.
- Mark the perimeter of the future pit. It can be either round or square - as convenient. The size is chosen based on the fertility of the soil - the poorer the larger the pit. A diameter of 70-80 cm and the same depth is usually sufficient.
Pit for planting apricot should be at least 70 cm in diameter and the same depth
- Proceed to dig a hole. Remove the upper fertile layer and fold separately. The rest of the soil is removed and stacked in another pile.
- A 10 cm thick drainage layer is poured to the bottom. Crushed stone, expanded clay or other similar materials are used.
- The nutrient mixture is poured into the pit: organic fertilizers (humus, compost), fertile soil, peat, sand in equal proportions. Mineral fertilizers (300 g superphosphate and 1.5 kg wood ash) are added and mixed with a shovel.
The nutrient mixture is mixed well with a shovel
- Cover with roofing material, a film or other suitable materials, so that in the early spring with the onset of the thaw, nutrients are not washed out.
Technology and step-by-step landing instructions
In the spring, as soon as suitable conditions have arrived, they begin to land.
Step-by-step instruction
The last, final, stage of planting an apricot consists of several simple steps.
- A seedling is taken out of the storage place and inspected. If he wintered well, he should look the same as when laying - a smooth, without cracks, bark, which has a light green color on the cut, white wood, moist, flexible roots.
- A conical mound of the nutrient mixture is formed in the landing pit.
- At a distance of 10-15 cm from the center of the pit, a wooden peg is driven in.
- The sapling is placed with the root neck on the top of the mound, the roots are carefully straightened and placed on the sides.
- They fill the hole in several steps, compacting each layer of the earth. The root neck is located slightly below ground level, at a depth of 3-5 cm.
They fill the hole in several steps, compacting each layer of the earth
- Tie a tree to a peg with a rope, trying not to pass the trunk.
- A near-stem circle is formed with a roller along the diameter of the pit and a knoll near the stem.
- Water the tree with water so that the soil in the pit is well saturated. This is necessary for tight contact of the roots with the soil and the removal of possible sinuses that occur when backfilling.
Having fallen asleep, form a near-stem circle and watered
- The central conductor and branches are cut by 30-40%.
Planting of a seedling is completed, but in the conditions of the Moscow Region climate, it is possible to return frosts that could damage, or even destroy, a fragile tree. To prevent such a nuisance, prepare temporary shelter for the seedling. To do this, you can build a lightweight frame of wooden bars or plastic water pipes and cover with plastic wrap or spanbond. In case of frost, it is easy to cover a tree with such a hut and save it from freezing. This design will come in handy next winter, so do not rush to disassemble it.
Possible problems
The Moscow region is a difficult region for growing apricot, and the gardener is faced with some problems, which are better prepared in advance.
Apricot does not bear fruit
It happens that the time passes through which the apricot should already have brought the first fruits, but this does not happen. Several reasons are possible.
Apricot does not bloom
If the apricot does not bloom, then perhaps the time has not yet come. Fruiting does not always begin at the times indicated in the description of the variety. There may be a delay for some reason, for example, the seedling was not of the variety that was declared at the time of purchase. You need to wait another 1-2 years and, possibly, everything will work out.
But more often in the suburbs this situation may occur if, during periods of temperature changes, flower buds were damaged by frost. This sometimes happens and nothing can be done about it.
Apricot blossoms, but does not form ovaries
This happens when the apricot variety is not self-fertile and there is no suitable pollinator nearby. There is a mistake gardener. When planting, it was necessary to choose a self-fertile variety or at the same time plant a suitable variety for pollination.
The second reason may be the defeat of the flowers by a disease, for example, moniliosis.
Ovaries form but fall off
A possible reason is the lack of food and (or) watering.
Apricot bears fruit, but the fruits do not have time to ripen
A common case for varieties with late ripening (for example, Favorite). In the cold and rainy summer, the berries do not have time to ripen and remain unripe on the branches. There is nothing to be done. We'll have to wait for the next season, perhaps it will be more successful.
Root and stump
Wrong place to land or in winter there was a lot of snow. It became denser, the melting slowed down, and a too damp environment was formed around the apricot trunk, conducive to evaporation. The problem is easily solved by scooping up snow from the plant stem in early spring and the installation of grooves for the removal of melting water.
Video: growing apricot in the middle lane
Gardeners reviews
My brother has a summer house in the suburbs and he has been growing apricots for five years. The weather there is moody, with long winters and severe frosts, so you need to take only winter-hardy varieties. They can withstand up to minus 30, and the kidneys can withstand even long, severe frosts. So that the seedlings do not undermine, as is often the case in this climate, grafted onto winter-hardy local plums should be taken. You also need to take self-fertile varieties, and in bad weather without other pollinating trees they will yield a crop. The best variety for gardens near Moscow is Lel; his brother has several such trees that produce excellent fruit. It is both frost-resistant and self-fertile, precocious, compact, up to three meters in height. For the suburbs it was bred back in 86m and since then it has been successfully grown in large gardens and summer cottages.
Alla Ivanovna
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Good specially bred frost-resistant self-fertile varieties Snegirek, Russian, Northern triumph are also good. These varieties can be grown in warmer regions, not only in the suburbs. Northern triumph from the Voronezh region in general spread throughout the southern suburbs. Tall, fruitful, resistant to all apricot diseases. But Snegirek is only one and a half meters, but fruitful, self-pollinated, is stored for a long time, has resistance to all diseases except moniliosis, and fungicide prophylaxis is needed. Saplings for planting must be bought only grafted grown in nurseries, because the properties of the variety are not transmitted by cuttings. In the best case, from a shank or grafted on a weak root of a seedling, you will get a wild game crop or there will be no crop at all, it will freeze.
Igor Andreevich Linev
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I personally know a person whose apricots grow and bear fruit for more than 10 years. He does not know the variety, seedlings were brought to him from Siberia already in due time! I also want to plant. This year I even looked at the seedlings, but I didn’t like the seedlings, there were some suffocations. I read that Irkutsk winter-hardy, Aquarius, Lel, Monastic are suitable for the Moscow Region. Varieties Aquarius and Monastic were in OBI, but, apparently, the best has already been chosen!
Anonymous
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last year I had one apricot blossom, a three-year-old. In this I hope the two blossom. It’s too early to say yet. But the kidneys were swollen on both, so they certainly did not freeze. Cottage, if that in the Ramensky district 50 km from Moscow time - southeast. The main thing is to plant them not in a blown sunny place. I don’t remember the varieties now, but I also bought a nursery from motherhood in procurement - a nursery in a nekrasovka. 04/21/2016 10:00:21, lapolka +1 -1
here I also want to plant in Ramensky district ... and in the kuzminki near the neighboring house the apricot was just planted near the house on the south side .... the sun heats it well ... 04/21/2016 10:55:01, ksuhen +1 -1
Give it a try. You can safely reach both Nekrasovka (Sadko) and the gardener. Look at their website address. I bought all kinds of bushes there. The survival rate of 100%. But from Timiryazevka not a single bush took root with me. 04/21/2016 11:12:34, lapolka +1 -1
They grow well and bear fruit, the neighbors have a large tree on the site. But I remember somehow it was that the year was empty, most likely the weather affected 04/21/2016 07:43:10, KlaraSS
lapolka
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Growing apricot in the suburbs is not easy. Difficulties and problems await the gardener along this path. New varieties grown on frost-resistant stocks help to overcome these problems. Carefully adhering to the rules of planting and care, a diligent gardener will certainly succeed.
