(soft guitar music)
- This is a sequel to the video we've posted
about growing potatoes in sacks of different composts.
And it's the same sacks.
After we tipped out the potato harvest
and weighed it and recorded it, we refilled,
refilled the sacks with that same compost, watered it well.
And now I'm going to plant leeks
because we want to see the long-term effects
of these different composts.
So we've got a measurement of how they'd performed
in the first half of the year, between April and mid-July.
And this is now the same day.
It's a couple of hours since we harvested the potatoes.
This is still the 18th of July.
It's three o'clock in the afternoon
and I'm going to plant these potatoes and they've been grown
in pots, in seven centimetre pots like that.
Having started life in multi-zone modules
with, we put three seeds in or sometimes four,
three or four.
And aiming to get two or three plants, sometimes four.
And they grew really well.
Leeks grow well in a clump.
So I'm putting two clumps
average four or five leeks in each sack.
And I'm just going to pop 'em in like this.
Actually using my hand it's easier.
So I want to get them in fairly deep.
And so this sack, this first one here is mushrooms compost.
I'm checking that. Yeah, I'm sure.
And the mushroom compost grew the biggest looking
potato plant, but it had an average number of potatoes.
Now I think that was because you can cross-check this
at the end of the video, I think it is
'cause the mushroom compost still has a lot
of goodness in it and didn't have time to express
that in the time the potato was growing.
That was soil, homeacres soil
which did okay actually in the trial it gave a small
but respectful unit, better than I expected, to be honest.
You know, that's where it's so fascinating.
You would get a different result with your soil.
And so it's just more than anything here to,
not to say soils good or bad to give a a crosscheck.
And yeah, this one, yeah, this is homemade compost.
So this is my own compost.
We've sifted it to four millimetres
and it's by now it's a about a year old.
It it is very nice compost.
A very nice looking compost.
And this one also had very dark green leaves
on the potatoes at the time we harvested.
So I think it didn't quite express its result
in terms of the potato yield.
Here, I have four millimetre sifted wood chip
and by contrast somewhere here.
Okay, this one, this was the wood chip, which is not sifted.
So we got two different types of wood chip.
Here is potting compost.
This is Mulling Gold Potting and container compost
which gave the most potatoes.
I have a feeling it might not give the most leeks,
because I think, like all potting compost,
it's programmed to grow fast
and then kind of run out of nutrients.
It's not a long term growth compost.
Finally, this is one year old,
even more than one year old now green waste compost,
that's garden waste
that has been composted at high temperature.
It's very black and jet black, not so much full of life.
When we took these out for the potatoes,
the, not many of them had worms in, but the ones
with wood had quite a few worms that was very noticeable.
And actually the mushroom compost has some worms as well.
So if you want to find
out more about these, what's in these sacks,
do have a look at the potato video, but you'll also find
out more when we do the harvest 'cause we'll again,
we'll have a close look
at what's in there and the harvested leeks.
We may do an interim video in between sometime in September.
My main job now is to water these,
keep them watered and we'll do a final harvest
and crosscheck sometime late autumn.
I'll see you then.
Now it's mid-October,
six months since these leeks were multi-zoned,
three months since they were transplanted here
on the same day that we harvested the potatoes.
Since then, we've just been watering them.
Quite a lot recently,
as they get bigger, no feeding, no nothing.
So all the growth you see is from whatever is
in these different composts and the ones sacked in soil.
And I've ordered them here in a line more
or less according to how strongly they're growing
just to illustrate the differences.
And this first sack is the Johnson Sue.
Slightly larger pieces of wood.
This one is the potting compost Mulling Gold,
which clearly is not designed to grow for the longer term.
This one is green waste compost, which is now 18 months old
or 18 months since it was delivered here.
This is the homemaker soil.
And then that sack is the one
with the sifted wood chip of about three years-old wood.
One before the end is mushroom compost.
And the very final sack is my homemade compost.
And what's going to happen now is Adam is going
to harvest these and the way he'll do it is
with a trowel just cutting down around the, roots,
lifting out the root ball, trimming it off,
and then cut off the tops.
There's quite a lot of yellow on these leaves.
And actually I have been de-leafing these leeks a bit.
You can do this when you're growing them
if you want to maybe reduce the rest a bit.
So I'm like taking off that.
And it keeps it looking nice
you can see what's going on a bit more.
Anyway, he'll trim them off and then weigh them
and lay them out here in this same order.
And we'll come back and see how it looks.
So here we are, harvest has happened
and we have the weights and you can see certain amount
of trimming of the outside leaves.
Everything that's here is edible and it's pretty
much the order the sacks were in with one exception.
In terms of weight of harvest,
we have the least harvest is 50 grammes
from the very woody compost that rises 265 grammes
from the old putting compost.
Then we get quite a big jump upwards.
This is the green waste of 18 months age, 370 grammes.
I'll put these totals in the description just
in case you want to check up.
290 grammes, that's from soil. More than I thought.
It is good soil here.
310 grammes from the sifted wood compost.
So all of those are pretty similar except for this one.
Not really, not much.
And then we get the two bigger ones,
425 grammes from the mushroom compost and 495 grammes,
nearly half a kilo from the homemade compost.
And probably that's the nicest leek of all.
You can see they're not particularly long.
These are not champion leeks, but there's a lot of food here
and it's been very easy to grow, just giving some water.
These sacks have already grown potatoes,
so they weren't rich.
If you'd wanted to increase the leek halfs
you could have added, say, some chicken manure,
a bit of extra compost on top actually would've been,
I would've done normally 'cause the sacks weren't full-full.
And they could have been.
And that would've earthed up potatoes.
You'd have got a longer white shank.
What to do with the compost now?
Well, we will spread it on the beds.
Going like this is,
and not using any feeds or anything.
I would say these compost,
you could still grow some more plants in there
but it won't be spectacular harvest.
So we'll use this compost on the beds.
And if I was going to grow in sacks again like this,
you could use these same sacks
and I would put a fresh compost in,
for example, new homemade compost or whichever type
of compost you want to use.
And I hope you've enjoyed having a little look
at growing in sacks.
(soft guitar music)