(gentle acoustic music)
- Potatoes in sacks of compost
or organic matter of some kind
is a great option if you don't have access to much garden.
And it's fascinating, too, to just see what you can get
from that amount of material, how many potatoes to put in,
so we're going to explore a few different options,
in the course of this video,
which, we'll keep coming back,
so this is now the 20th of April.
It's a very good time for planting potatoes here,
we can have a frost until the middle of May,
that's still three weeks' time and more.
Which will burn the tops of a potato plant,
it doesn't kill the plant,
but it sets it back quite a bit if you get a bad one.
Something else we'll see later in the video
is putting a bit more compost on top.
But I'm not doing that, sometimes it's recommended
you start with almost nothing in there
and put your potato in, which you can do.
But it is quite a palaver,
'cause then you've got to keep the compost somewhere else.
(chuckles)
And I'm actually starting with quite a bit,
like this one has got 40 litres in already
that's nearly nine gallons.
I'm going to put the potato in quite deep, basically.
And then watch how they grow,
and if I see potatoes developing near the top
then I'll put some more compost on top,
which in traditional language is called earthing up.
I'm planting two potatoes in each sack.
And these are my own Charlotte.
It's the second early type.
And they've been chitting quite a lot, as you can see.
Actually, they were in a sack for a bit too long,
and that meant that the chits or sprouts,
same thing, shoots,
got a bit longer than I would normally like them to be,
but it's fine, actually, for putting in a sack like this.
So I'm putting two in each sack.
And this first compost is potting compost,
the one I use for propagation,
I know that it's really good nutrient status,
there's plenty of goodness in there
that will certainly grow a big plant.
And I'm going to put the two seed potatoes in.
It's about that level there.
So pretty deep.
Because that'll give plenty of room,
for, oh a big bit of wood, I'll just chuck that out,
for the actual tubers to develop.
On top there's going to be a lot of growth of all of these,
and I'm going to move them and slightly space them out
near the fence when I've finished,
to allow for that, it's something to consider
if you grow potato plants in sacks.
It looks very economical in space,
but the plants need a lot of room.
This sack contains green waste compost,
we call it, which is municipal compost
from the local composting facility.
And you can see it's also nice and black.
And a bit more woody, though,
than the Moorland Gold potting compost.
This is two year old wood chip
from a Johnson-Su, actually, bioreactor,
which, I didn't look after brilliantly,
but it's pretty nicely decomposed.
Quite old wood chip, not sieved.
So there are still some quite big pieces of wood in here,
and I'm not expecting this one to grow great potatoes.
(birds chirp)
But I could be wrong.
Now we have a classic, well rotted, old,
probably one year old, cow manure (not cow, horse!)
Can't be too sure,
I got it this morning from the local stables.
And you can see it's still a bit of straw there,
the horse is bedded on straw.
When one says manure,
there's an assumption of some bedding
involved at some point.
And it feels nice and warm there,
that's very interesting actually,
that's one advantage of sacks like this,
to get rapid growth, you can get some,
if they're in sunlight you will get faster growth.
This is pretty wet and sticky in there.
You can see by my hand, not so nice to handle
as some of the other ones.
Not least this one here,
which is the four-millimeter sieved wood chips,
that's three year old wood chip,
which we sieved very carefully,
it took quite a long time, actually.
And in other trials we're doing of it,
it's showing a pretty nice result.
So, again, two potatoes going in there
and that's a pleasure to put my hand in,
it feels really, really soft.
And in fact, of all of these composts,
it's probably the nicest one.
Also 'cause the four-millimeter sieve is pretty fine.
And that means there are no bits of wood in there.
As opposed to this one, which is my homemade compost.
Which potentially, or should be, a bit richer than that,
you might have thought.
And we didn't put it through the four millimetre,
we put it through a 12 millimetre,
so, that's about half an inch.
So it's not sieved quite so much now.
That does beg the question a bit, you know,
this is not what I'd call a scientific trial.
In that not every parameter is the same.
And what I'm looking for,
and want to show you and share with you,
is the variations.
And signs and symptoms and tendencies,
and, you know, what we can learn
from the different qualities of these compost.
That will be the last one,
I'm trying to roughly match up these size-wise.
Now, this one, (chuckles) look what I'm finding in here.
Is bindweed and soil.
I left some bindweed on top just to make that point,
that this soil is from Homeacres,
there's a pile of it over there
from when we were doing some building work.
And it's got quite a bit of bindweed root in it.
So, it's not the end of the world, just be careful,
I'm going to put it on the compost heap.
This morning,
when we were loading up a wheelbarrow with it,
we did find quite a bit.
And there we go,
potatoes going as deep as I can get my hand in.
But this one, I am going to put more soil on top.
I just didn't want to put too much in at the moment,
partly 'cause of the weight of moving it around.
And finally, we have some quite fresh mushroom compost.
When I say quite fresh,
it's about a month since it was delivered,
at which point it was steaming off the lorry,
and went up to 60 centigrade.
In another trial we're doing, it's not doing quite so well,
growing plants.
But now that it's a month old,
and you can see with mushroom compost too,
this sort of whiteness, too, that's a nice sign,
that's fungal decomposition still happening.
And I'm putting the potatoes in there as well, too,
in that sack.
There's one more thing I'll do, actually, is watering.
Check that they're all fully moist,
like this wood chip one, I noticed, is not fully moist,
feeling really light.
And I'm cutting, in the bottoms of these bags, holes,
like there, to make sure there's drainage.
These sacks of compost.
In theory they would let out excess water
if the compost got too wet,
but I filled one with water this morning,
and very little drained out, if any.
(chuckles)
So I'm cutting sacks and making slits
just to make sure that water can drain out,
that's really important,
you don't want your plant sack, like a pot,
filling up with water, and it'll just, roots will die.
So, I'll make sure that the water that I give is correct.
It'll be mostly me watering,
'cause even if you get some rain,
it's not falling on a very big surface area,
compared to if it was a potato plant,
or two plants growing in a bigger area.
So there we are, see you again in early summer.
It's now nine weeks
since we were here planting these potatoes,
and you can see they have grown.
(chuckles)
The growth, though, is very variable,
and that's what's so interesting about doing this.
And I'll take you through sack by sack in a minute.
I'll just say briefly at the introduction,
there's one big and rather horrible surprise to come.
And there's also,
where some of these are growing a bit weakly
or going a bit yellow.
I am feeding these sacks,
I've just started putting a bit of chicken manure pellet in,
because, we can already see at this stage
which of these different composts have not enough nutrients
to take the potato through to a worthwhile harvest.
Let's start with the woody mixes,
so this is three year old sieved wood chip,
sieved to four millimetres, and it's doing alright.
Until recently,
this was pretty much the strongest looking plant.
But now you can see, by the colour, it's starting to fade.
And that's why I put some of this chicken manure pellets on.
How much to put on? (chuckles)
Well it's a bit of a guess to be honest,
but, I put on enough
that would just cover the surface of the sack,
and then that gradually soaks in, they're dry,
as you water them.
And I did the same here, but a little bit more,
for the slightly younger but not sieved wood chips,
this is two year old wood chip in slightly larger pieces.
And look at the plant, it's not that strong.
I'm not too hopeful of great potatoes there.
However, we have put the chicken manure on.
And, I've got a bucket of a little bit, slightly better,
(chuckles) younger, actually wood chip, but it's more fine.
And it's about 8 months old, we're going to put it on top,
and see what difference that makes.
'Cause we're starting to see
one or two potatoes nearing the surface, but not yet.
Look, this is homemade compost from my heap,
about eight, nine months old.
Although by now it's nearly a year old,
and that has been very slow to start.
It's exactly the same as we saw
in the trial of the spinach in pots.
But now it's starting to look really strong,
and you can see by the colour its nice nutrient profile.
Likewise this one, which is mushroom compost,
which also did very well in the spinach trial.
And that has been, likewise, a little bit slow,
certainly compared to this.
So you can see it's a smaller plant, at this stage.
But a much darker colour.
So we'll see how that translates into potatoes.
This one impresses me.
This one is soil.
Just Homeacres soil.
And all I can say is it's doing alright so far.
To my right we have, green waste.
One year old,
so that's compost from the local facility
that we've kept for a whole year
before putting some in this sack.
And that's looking really strong,
and that's been one of the strongest.
And you can see it's growing fast
by how limp the leaves are,
it shows you I forgot to water them this morning.
But actually that's quite good,
'cause it's an indication, with watering,
how much do you water these?
And I've been amazed how little I've needed to water them,
I keep an eye on them and lift them as well,
that's a good sign,
if they feel very light, that's a sign of needing water.
And probably no more than twice a week,
and at the beginning I didn't water them at all
for the first three or four weeks,
'cause they were hardly growing, and it was raining a bit.
But when it does rain, the water goes less into a sack
than it does onto soil, you've got a smaller surface area,
so from now on, I will be watering more.
Behind me there is the strongest plant of all at the moment,
which is growing in the potting compost, the Moorland Gold.
So that's kind of not surprising, it's potting compost,
but also it's designed not to last much more than a month.
So again, I put a little bit of chicken manure on that.
And we're going to put a little bit more compost
on quite a few of these.
Like in this sack here,
the strong one growing in the green waste compost.
I was just having a little rummage earlier,
and I could see a potato quite near the surface.
And that's a sign
that it's worth putting some more compost on top.
And it will support the stems as well.
Now, the last one I've not mentioned is very disappointing,
but also really educational, it's the horse manure.
And clearly that horse manure
has got the horrible weed killer pyralid,
probably aminopyralid is the active ingredient.
I have made a video about this.
I know from the emails I get
that a lot of people this year are suffering from it,
it's in horse manure products that are sold.
It's weed killer sprayed on the grass,
which the horses then eat,
it goes through the horses, comes out in their manure.
People say it doesn't harm the horse.
Well, make your own conclusion.
But it's in the manure and it doesn't go away
until it's broken down by sunlight,
and also by soil microbes.
So in a sack like this, it's not going to degrade at all.
And that potato isn't...
Well, we'll see what it's like in a month,
we're going to come back in a month,
to have a look at all these and we'll do the final harvest
and I think it'll be fascinating,
so I'll look forward to seeing you then.
Five weeks later.
This trial has been always interesting.
And there's some dramatic changes now,
like look at this one,
that's the one year old green waste compost,
which has finished growing.
This is the potting compost,
potting and container compost from Moorland Gold.
It's doing alright.
It's quite dry actually, I noticed when lifting the sack.
But I've been reducing the watering
'cause we're just about to harvest,
we're going to show you homemade compost, looking strong.
The wood sacks, sacks with wood have greened up quite a bit
since putting in the chicken manure.
This is soil, well, it kind of looks alright.
It'd be fascinating to see what's in there.
And look at the horse manure.
That's the, we think, the weed killer effect.
We'll see if there's any potato,
not that I'd want to eat them.
This one's looking possibly the strongest of all
in terms of the top growth,
that's mushroom compost, done really well.
So, we're going to tip out each sack in turn,
harvest the potatoes, put them in a bucket with a name.
Then we'll weigh them, we'll post those weights.
And we're going to refill the sacks with the same compost,
give it a good water, and then put leek plants in there,
leek plants 3.5 months old already.
Just to see, ongoing, what difference might show
until the end of the year.
(gentle acoustic music)
That was so interesting.
And I'll just quickly show you
the actual weights and the harvest we got,
and give an impression that I took from it.
The bioreactor compost, 0.42 kilos.
Not a lot.
Very nice potatoes, though.
And there were some lovely worms in that compost,
I would say that's still a working compost.
It's not ready to grow potatoes yet.
All this is here,
is a snapshot of the progress of the compost
at this point,
and some of these harvests were taken a little bit soon,
when the leaves were still green.
Soil, well, the soil did have
a little bit of chicken manure as well, but 0.785.
It's not bad actually, for just pure soil in a sack.
Not so easy to handle, though, really heavy.
Noticeably, the heavier sack,
soil is much heavier than compost.
But if all you had was soil (chuckles),
and all you had were sacks, you could do that.
Then we big jump,
we get into the middle bracket of much higher yield,
and this is the mushroom.
I thought the mushroom would've been more, but,
against the mushroom, we took it too early, really,
it was still growing very strongly.
Beautiful potatoes, some of them are still quite small.
Maybe I'd not watered it quite enough,
the watering was very little
in the first part of this trial,
recently it's been a lot,
like today's 30 Centigrade, 86 Fahrenheit,
and I think I've been a bit slack
in keeping up with the watering, to be honest,
but the tops were not wilting.
But I could have watered a bit more.
Very similar to the mushroom,
a little bit more than that, was the homemade compost,
my homemade compost.
1.41.
You can see, though, nice potatoes.
These are kind of new potatoes.
These are all Charlotte, same variety.
When they get bigger, they're good for storing,
I'd say at this stage
they're probably better eaten within the next few months,
and within the next week or two they'll be quite sweet.
What have we got here, yeah, this is the sieved wood, 1.51.
Actually not that much different to the previous two.
Having said that, more medium sized ones,
and fewer small ones.
And compared to that, the one year old green waste,
which has a lot of small ones, had a slightly higher total,
this is the second highest total.
This is one year old green waste,
it didn't have anything added to it.
You can see by the blackness of the potatoes,
it's that very dark compost.
1.55 kilos.
And, most of all, shouldn't be surprised, really.
But it's a nice confirmation,
it's the potting compost from Moorland Gold.
And quite a big jump, 2.1 kilos.
And some nice sized potatoes,
this has got some of the bigger ones in this trial.
When we grow Charlotte in soil here,
we get them quite a bit bigger than that.
But in sacks, you wouldn't expect that.
Yeah, I would say that's a very worthwhile harvest.
So.
So far, so good.
We're now going to learn even more
about these different composts,
by re-wetting them,
and transplanting leeks today, 18th of July, into each sack.
Multisown leeks that were sown in April.
And that we'll put in a sequel video,
so do keep an eye out for that one.
(gentle acoustic music)