Why use salt in the garden and what is its use and harm

Reading the articles and especially the comments, I noticed that year by year the summer residents increase the use of salt on their household plots. They salt the fermented grass for top dressing, salt the ground prepared for planting, salt almost all the plants that sprouted on it, especially onions, garlic, beets, cabbage ... And for what, one wonders?

The use of salt in the garden or your own enemies

I believe that people use salt to harm themselves. And all because its solution though has a neutral reaction, but getting into the soil, under the influence of microorganisms and water decomposes, forming hydrochloric acid, which, acidifying the soil, reacts with many elements of plant nutrition (for example, calcium, magnesium and phosphorus). As a result, harmful insoluble salts are formed which are inaccessible to plant nutrition.

In other words, there is man-made and voluntary depletion of the soil!

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To the same (although to a lesser extent) are regular fertilizing with mineral fertilizers, which initially have acid reaction, therefore acidify the natural soil environment.

Well water saturated with salts from the wells, which we use for irrigation, is far from ideal. All this, one way or another, increases the acidity of the soil, which means it worsens the development of plants - in an acidic environment, they poorly absorb nutrients. And then there is salt ... I note that most often summer residents use it to fight the onion fly, which it really helps to cope with.

In my opinion, it is much more effective to use such deterrents as kerosene, lysol and creolin: you just need to moisten one of these substances with strips of tissue and pull them around the perimeter of the bed on the pegs. And the most important thing in this case is that the earth does not suffer at all!

There is one more important point. The summer season of the onion fly depends on the weather, so it can stretch almost to the end of the season. So, salt the beds several times a month? That's certainly the easiest way to kill your land! But the fence of impregnated with "stink" rags can without any harm for the garden to stand until the end of August.

Some gardeners using salt also try to fight the stealthy beetle bug (another active pest of the onion, which gnaws holes in the necks of the bulbs and lays the larvae inside), not even knowing about the existence of this insect and never hearing its name. And all because the result of his malicious activity is mistakenly attributed to the same fly: first, white longitudinal strips stand out on the surface of the feather, after which the leaves turn yellow and dry, and the bulbs die. But it cannot be otherwise, since these white strips are nothing but the passages that gnaw through the beetle larvae, while the fly only affects the bottom of the bulbs.

So no matter how much you watered the ground with salt, the effect will be zero, since the larvae, comfortably arranged inside the bulbs and feathers, are absolutely not afraid of saline.

The only way to protect the bow from the secretive hunter is with the same deterrents. And gardeners often confuse fungal diseases with pests. Take, for example, the well-known powdery mildew. Who said saline helps from her? Unknown But for some reason, many summer residents are convinced of this, although the salvation from it is actually medications containing copper chloride (if green folk remedies are already powerless). Do you want to argue?

Deceptive sweetness or why beets do not become sweet from salt

I do not agree with the statement that watering with a solution of salt increases the sugar content of beets. Yes, sodium is actively absorbed by roots from the earth, as a result in plants very long chains of substances are formed, at the end of which sit sugar molecules. And all these chains move from the leaves to the roots. It turns out that sodium really contributes to the transfer of sugar? Yes. But this process is only in the daytime, and at night the plants get rid of sodium, leading it through the same roots to the ground. It turns out that, as much as it was in the soil initially, it will remain the same.

Then no no need to podsalyvat land under the beets.

Exactly the same process occurs in other plants. And why, then, it is asked, does not anyone think of feeding salt tomatoes so that their fruits become sweeter? It will be objected to me, that, they say, this acid is completely counter-indicative to this culture. I agree. And the beet is worse? The fact that it is not so bright and unambiguously demonstrates aversion to salty soil? And you did not think about lowering the rooting capacity of root crops?

In this regard, I will return again to the fight against pests. Many truck farmers err, suggesting that if they killed salt on the onion fly larvae, then this same remedy can also be used against the carrot fly. But! Onion, though it can withstand such an execution (in this it looks like beets), but it produces bulbs of smaller size and with a lower leavessness, but the carrots do not tolerate salt at all: the root crops turn black, which then simply begin to decay. Their decay is noted even in the second year after salt application on the same bed!

The best remedy for carrot flies - spraying crops with turpentine. I have been using this method for thirty years, and none of the pests has encroached on my carrots. I breed 2 tbsp. l in a large watering can of water (each such watering can - on one bed) and I spray plants from it after each watering or rain. This treatment I begin to carry out after the appearance of the first true leaves in carrots, and from the second half of July I reduce the concentration of the solution - I take 1 tbsp. l turpentine. I do this until the harvest.

Patience and perseverance-and the number of slugs will diminish without harm to the earth.

At the wrong end

Among the articles, especially remembered the one where the author told that he used salt to fight thrips on garlic.

This is generally a complete absurdity, because it is the garlic itself that is used as a deterrent against thrips when storing gladioli. Here there is a mistake gardener who incorrectly diagnosed the cause of yellowing of leaves of plants and thereby only made their survival difficult. As a rule, winter garlic is planted on "complex" beds, where under the fertile soil layer there are crushed branches, leaves and stems of the siderates. And the whole thing is that a large amount of nitrogen is required to ferment this organics. But he needs garlic too! And precisely because of the lack of this element, the leaves turn yellow. Therefore, in the spring, when sprouts appear, I always water the garlic bed with a solution of urea, and the plantings are green, powerful (the harvest, as you know, pleases).

Now, apparently, it's time to talk about the “menu” for plants. It was established that for their proper nutrition 13 elements are absolutely necessary: nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, iron, manganese, copper, zinc, boron, molybdenum and chlorine (the first six, the need for which is very great, are called macroelements, the rest are trace elements). But sodium is not among them. Why? Firstly, plants consume it extremely little, and secondly, it is present in all types of soils.

In addition, sodium is present in sufficient quantities as an accompanying element in potash fertilizers (which fully ensures the need for planting). At the same time, a mobile equilibrium is established between the content of sodium in plants and in the soil, which our green pets regulate themselves (I have already talked about this with the example of beets), and all treatments with salt solutions only violate this balance. So is it worth the risk of harvesting?

By the way, if you really want to get a beet of unusual sweetness, so treat it twice for the whole vegetation period with brown (1 tsp for 10 l of water). The composition of this drug includes, in addition to sodium, and boron, which contributes to the increase in the mass of root crops, increases their shelf life and at the same time eliminates the appearance of root rot.

And one more important clarification. When I sound familiar to truck farmers the average dose of fertilization (according to 600 g per hundred square meters), they are horrified: why so much ?! But in terms of 1 square. m is obtained in all 6 g (or approximately 1 tbsp in medium sized beds), i.e. very little. But the table salt, without hesitation, they make a glass (250 g) in the garden. It's strange, is not it?

But the negative effect of salt also consists in the fact that an excessive amount of sodium in the soil leads to the formation of soda harmful to plants, which worsens its structure. All this accumulates gradually, imperceptibly for the eye, and when humus can not cope with a constant overabundance of salt, the soil will become unsuitable for growing cultivated plants.

The use of salt in agriculture is amateurish. It is not confirmed by long-term observations. And most importantly, there are no control plots where salt has not been applied, so there is nothing to compare with how effective this technique is and how the soil condition changes. That's why for me the answer about the use of table salt in the garden is unambiguous: salt does not bring any benefit!

Moreover, in large quantities it becomes destructive for soil and plants.