What to plant after cucumbers in a greenhouse: the intricacies of growing cucumbers in a limited space
Growing cucumbers indoors has many advantages, but there is a problem with crop rotation.
Enthusiastic young summer residents sometimes approach this issue, guided by industrial-scale experience.
In industrial greenhouses, they simply change the soil - they take out the old and bring in new. But this is a labor-intensive process that not everyone can handle. Especially when there are simpler ways to improve the soil.
How to maintain crop rotation in a greenhouse
When growing cucumbers in closed ground, only tomatoes and peppers can be planted after them. But such crop rotation is not enough.
If you repeat this alternation from year to year, diseases and pests will still accumulate in the beds, and the soil itself will become depleted.
To prevent this from happening, you should practice planting other crops after cucumbers.
The best way to improve the health of the soil and increase its fertility is green manure.
They can be sown after harvesting cucumbers in the fall and before planting seedlings in the ground in the spring. It is also recommended to alternate green manures, using one type of plant in the fall and another in the spring. A mixture of different green manures also works well. An experienced gardener has several types of plants in his arsenal.
The most common are mustard, oilseed radish, oats, lupine, and wheat. Recently, phacelia and buckwheat have become increasingly popular.
Green manure will not only become an element of crop rotation, but will also turn into fertilizer, enriching the soil depleted by cucumbers with nutrients. Their roots go deep into the ground, extracting nutrition from there, while cucumbers have a superficial root system.
Legumes such as lupine, vetch, fodder peas, a mixture of oats with vetch or peas are well suited. Legumes saturate the soil with nitrogen, which is very important, since cucumbers consume a lot of nitrogen.
After cucumbers, it is good to sow salad greens in the greenhouse. All cold-resistant plants will feel great in the greenhouse until severe frosts arrive.
Sometimes you can treat yourself to fresh lettuce, dill, arugula, spinach and cilantro until December. It is also convenient to grow radishes in the cucumber bed in the fall. If the cucumber vines are tied to trellises, the bottom of the stem becomes bare by mid-summer.
In August, you can plant vegetables that are grown in the second half of summer between the plants - radishes, rutabagas, Chinese cabbage, carrots. The same vegetables and greens are grown in early spring.
Don't forget about combined plantings. For example, in early spring you can plant green onions, early carrots, beets, and Chinese cabbage in a cucumber bed. While the cucumbers are small, these crops will grow well and gradually be eaten. And for pathogenic microflora and pests, the new plants act suppressively.
