- I filled two small, round, raised garden beds
with exactly the same plain soil.
In one, I put nine eggs
and the other, none.
Then I planted two of the same type of tomatoes
in both of these beds.
And in this video,
I'm gonna give you the results.
Which plant grew best?
Did the eggs make any difference at all?
Or was this experiment a complete egg wash
and waste of time?
G'day, I'm Mark from Self Sufficient Me,
and let's get into it.
(gentle music)
(bird tweeting)
Now, in case you haven't noticed,
I'm shooting this video at midday,
so the sun is right on top of my scone and my bald patch.
It's getting so hot,
I'm afraid that it's going to start a bushfire
on top of my head.
So, if you don't mind,
I know it's difficult to see my face,
but I'm gonna whack a hat on
for the remainder of this video.
(blows into hat)
All right, I'm all done and set.
Speaking of set,
the setup for these two plants was simple.
I got the soil from the same place,
plain but good garden soil from some of our old beds
that I was refurbishing.
This one here, I put duck eggs underneath it.
You could use any eggs.
You could use chicken eggs, you could use quail.
I put nine medium-sized duck eggs underneath this plant.
And this plant, I put none.
They're both exactly the same tomato plant.
I actually bought them from the nursery.
They're a San Marzano.
By the way, this tomato plant is a dwarf variety
or it's a determinant variety.
That means it doesn't grow like a vine.
Well, it's not supposed to anyway.
It's supposed to grow compact and small.
As far as growth goes, for the first month or so,
they both grew very similar.
There wasn't really much difference,
except I did notice that the plant with the duck eggs
did grow a little more compact.
But strangely, the one without the duck eggs
started flowering earlier,
and it actually started fruiting maybe two weeks earlier
than this one here.
As far as disease goes,
I didn't notice any difference in diseased leaves.
Both of 'em suffered quite a bit.
The only other thing that really did stand out
was the legginess of this one here,
how it almost felt to me like it was reaching out.
It was starting to turn
into a indeterminate variety of tomato,
whereby it was searching for more ground.
Tomato plants, by nature, they're a sprawling plant.
We grow them compact
when we tend to trellis the plants
and train them in certain directions that we want.
But if you leave them in a garden bed
or just leave them naturally grow in the environment,
they will sprawl out.
And when they sprawl out, where the stems touch the ground,
they can then start to reroute down
and tomato plants can then get more energy
and more nutrients from the soil in a wider place,
simply because of their sprawling habit.
So, I had a feeling
that because there wasn't enough nutrients in this bed,
that the tomato plant here was starting to get leggier
and grow more at the expense of the size of this fruit,
simply to try to get some more energy
and find some more food before it settled down
and started flowering and fruiting properly.
All right, here we are at the seven-week mark
of the duck egg experiment,
where we put duck eggs under this tomato plant
and none under this one,
just plain good soil, that's all.
So far, I've got a couple of fruit off both,
nothing fantastic, the fruit's not too bad.
Essentially, both plants are growing just okay.
Both have disease problems right from the start.
I've had to trim them both back
just to get rid of a lot of that diseased leaves,
but regardless, they're still growing and producing.
The one with the duck eggs
is probably at least half a gain more fruit.
This plant here without the duck eggs,
the fruit started earlier
and is ripening now earlier as well.
Yeah, both have two ripe ones,
but this one here is fairly much ahead,
and I think that's more of a stress thing,
and that's probably also why this one here
has got less fruit than this one.
So, that's where we're up to at this present stage
at the seven-week mark.
The one with the duck eggs is slightly outperforming
the one without the duck eggs.
But to be totally honest,
there's not a huge difference.
So that was a much younger me, around three months ago,
and at the 11 to 12-week mark,
that's when the plants
probably had their best fruiting time.
After that, I just continued to harvest bit by bit,
and I kept a record on my phone of how many grams
I took from each tomato plant
so that I could add it up at the end
and let you guys know exactly what the yield was
from the tomato with the eggs
and the tomato without the eggs.
By the way, how did they taste?
My standard tomato toasty test
came out a big double thumbs up.
They were actually a very tasty tomato.
I didn't really taste any difference at all between either.
And then we finally get to this point where we're at now,
at the five-month mark.
Both plants, as you can see, have pretty much had it.
Well, they have had it.
They're both dead.
The weather's getting way too hot,
but they've just done their time anyway.
Let's just finish this off.
I'll pick the fruit remaining off both of these.
We'll weigh it and then we'll find out
what the final yield weight was between these two.
All right, we'll do this one first with the duck eggs.
I won't count the green ones
because we're not gonna eat them anyway
or make a sauce out of 'em.
Okay, righty-oh.
We put this on top and then switch it on.
That'll give us a negative weight.
There we go, perfect.
Now, we'll put these in.
702.
Righty-oh, that's 702 grams, not bad.
We'll add that
to the with eggs.
And now, let's do this one and we'll add it all together.
Get rid of these green ones.
Not necessary.
There.
We'll be fair and even these little orange ones, we'll keep.
Right, let's do the same thing.
1,069 grams.
So, let's add that
onto the one with no eggs.
Okay, I've done my sums
and here are the results.
The no eggs yielded 2,803 grams
over the lifetime of the plant,
and the with eggs yielded 4,383 grams
over the lifespan of the plant.
That makes a difference
of 1,580 grams difference,
or 1.58 kilograms
or one and a half kilograms
more yield from this plant than this one.
In conclusion, I think that is a fairly interesting finding.
It wasn't a complete hiding,
like it wasn't twice as much,
but the egg plant grew substantially more
than the one without the eggs
by one and a half kilos.
So, that's a fair amount of tomatoes.
And that could be the difference,
and it does demonstrate what fertilizer can do,
no matter where you get it from,
whether it's from the shops,
whether it's your homemade stuff,
whether it's just some old duck eggs
that you weren't gonna use.
And that is the key,
I probably should've said that at the beginning,
but I've done these duck eggs experiments before
on other things like potatoes,
so, you might wanna have a look at that.
I explain that the duck eggs I use, or chicken eggs,
or quail eggs, whatever,
they're all eggs that we weren't gonna use anyway.
So, what could you do with those eggs?
Well, I use them in the garden
and we turn those eggs
into egg-shaped tomatoes.
Beautiful-tasting, wonderful sauces,
wonderful on toasties, wonderful on salads,
whichever you want,
but the energy and the nutrients they get are from eggs
that would have otherwise been maybe thrown away.
So, it's definitive.
Using eggs does work as fertilizer in the garden.
And what happens when you put eggs under one tomato plant
and no eggs under the other,
but with exactly the same soil,
you get a better result
out of the one that had the eggs underneath it,
simply because it had more nutrition
and more energy to be able to produce more produce.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this video.
If you did,
make sure you give a cross between an egg and a tomato,
but make it big, thumbs up.
That's a bit medium.
Make it big, big, red thumbs up.
Thanks a lot for watching.
Share the video around
because that helps my channel out heaps.
Bye for now.