What to grow from the sun and water in South Wales?

[Bigmallly]

^^^^^^^^^^^There is quite a few on here who leave my gaster well and truly flabbered...............

I'm saying nowt.

[Baldy]

I'm off to bed to avoid further trouble...

[Baldy]

you're ganging up on me though...

[veggiechicken]

Goodnight Baldy.................or as we say in South Wales, Nos da!

[Malooq Tariq]

Growing and water amount and reason for sunlite

Ive never heard of anyone in the UK using outside grow lights!? Especially for spuds! There is plenty of light in the UK to grow potatoes outside. If growing in pots, just water them until the compost feels moist. How much space have you got? Growing spuds in buckets to last you a year is going to take lots of buckets and or dustbins..
If you are serious about growing you may need to be very realistic on what you can achieve.

Good to hear that South Wales gives enough sunlite for potatoes to grow all year. I still want to find out the reason for the number of hours a potatoe needs to grow or why a potatoe needs the sun to grow. I am able to find this information on the internet that saves you time and effort.

I know potatoes need water, though you talk about this "just water them until compost feels moist", to myself I am able to water the potatoes for one minute or more. Water that goes on for minute or more when you measure from tap water is half a litre of water. Half a litre of water is one large, water glass full. I think having adding half litre of water to a potatoe with one bucket is enough water for the potatoe to use the water with the soil to grow.

I need to work out the exact space in my garden for growing by measuring the length, width and height and area as well as perimeter. By measuring the length, I am able to work out the number of buckets in a straight line. Then, measuring the width, I am able to know the amount of buckets straight in a row. This the amount of buckets to fill up the width and the number of buckets to fill up the length gives the total amount of buckets to have in my garden. The reason for area is I need to get the total space in number to see the total amount of buckets that are able to fit in the garden. By using the circumference of the buckets to add up to total garden number, I am able to work out the total number of buckets that fit in the garden area.

I want to know the food that I can grow that needs a lot of sun, more sun than the UK gets to know what food I am able to grow. Then, I am able to grow that food that needs a lot of sunlite thanks to the grow lights giving more light than the sun all the time, that is enough light for the food properly. I need to work out the food that need a lot of sunlite on the internet to save you effort and time.

[Guest]

Hi and welcome to the vine,

Is there a reason why you need a scientific approach to your veg? If I was after that sort of calculated information I would be contacting horticultural research centres, horticultural colleges etc but I fear it would actually just be trial and error.

Good luck with your growing.

[polc1410]

Malooq
I'm just going to come out and say it. Stop. Breath. Calm down.

There. That is better isn't it?

Wheat
To grow wheat as has been said you need a LOT of land. If you just wanted to try it because you want to see if you can, I could understand that but I'd suggest trying something simpler first.

As said, while it needs sun (actually I think it needs relative dry towards harvesting to help it keep) - your issue is space unless you have lots of space, preferably flat. And my lots we are talking about area measured in acres not meters or feet! You can assume if you were 'giving it a go' you wont get it spot on first time, so 'd bank on you needing 1 x 2m to get 2-3kg of flour to make one loaf.

If you do it, we'd love to see how you get on...

Potatoes
Pretty much the easiest crop to grow. In the ground put one potato in the ground about 6-9inches deep with a spacing of about 12 inches apart and 18-24 inches between rows. Cover up. Protect first shoots from frost. Keep potatoes hidden under soil or the go green and get toxic. I'd be surprised if doing that you need any water on the at all in Wales with it's natural rainfall.

If you search for Potatoes in MFB on the forum you will find lots about growing in pots. MFB = Morrisons Flower Buckets which are the black buckets the Morrison's Supermarket put their flowers in, and can usually be picked up for pennies. They have about 11 litres of soil in them. One potato.

Watering
You seem to be getting frustrated that we can't tell you how much water plants need. I think you are confused. You can't just apply 1 litre of water to a bucket with a potato in it every day. You need to assess how much water is left in the bucket from yesterday, that will vary based on heat, folliage, humidity, wind, soil type, drainage in the bottom of bucket. The hard bit is that people say "keep soil damp" but my damp could be your wet and someone else's dry. It is possible to spend a LOT of money on a very fancy soil moisture meter. But I mean a LOT! So here is a basic guide. If you gently press a piece of dry kitchen towel against the soil lift it up and give it a shake and no soil is attached anymore, it is too dry. Apply water. If you take a small handful of soil and squeeze it and water drips out it is too wet, don't water anymore until that stops happening. If it wont form into a "snowball" its probably too dry (although some compost doesn't form very well).

Potatoes in buckets need watered. But once per day would usually be fine, and usually only once growing above the surface.

Yields
You seem disappointed with a past growing experience. That was almost certainly not light related for potatoes unless they were in full shade. More likely:
- you didn't let them grow long enough
- you didn't water enough
- you didn't feed them
- you used poor quality soil
- you got a disease in them - but without more info we couldn't tell you that
- there wasn't enough soil in the bucket. You said they went green - did you plant deep enough? Did you add extra soil as they grew?

In my opinion yields of pot grown potatoes are often lower than soil. BUT soil grown takes more digging effort etc. You will most likely grow 0.25-0.5kg per pot, or 0.4-0.8kg in *well prepared* soil. Most of us who grow our own potatoes don't do it because its particularly efficient. In reality its not! (Other crops can be). You can buy 1kg of Potatoes for £1 in Tesco. You will pay about 40p for 3 seed potatoes. You will need a bucket and soil (costing £2 for 33litres if you don't have a compost bin). You will also need fertiliser. So you will probably spend £3 making 1kg of potatoes that you could have bought for £1. You will have also used up a large amount of space. **BUT** your potatoes will taste far nicer. (Or at least they should) and you will know what chemicals you added to them.

Season
You keep saying you can grow potatoes all year round in Wales. That is WRONG. Potatoes are not frost hardy. You should be planting a seed potato towards end of March / in April. It will take 10-12 weeks to grow for first earlies and up to 18 weeks for main crops. You'd normally then dig them up and store them in cool dark dry place until you want to eat them. Potatoes you buy now in the shops were probably dug up and stored in October.

With a greenhouse you can grow Christmas Potatoes - but I'd suggest you sort out normal growing first.

Space
I may be being pedantic, but you said you'd use circumference to work out your number of buckets. However, I think you should be using diameter. You can't really tile with circles. So use the diameter, and then treat it as a square.

Why
BUT - what you haven't described is WHY you want to grow your own. Or what you want to grow except potatoes and wheat.

You have got very keen on lights and vertical growing and all sorts of stuff that doesn't suit its self well to big crops.

Are you into the technology/science more than the food? Would you prefer to grow something using hydroponics, grow lights etc. If so wheat and potatoes are NOT your veg of choice.

Are you wanting to grow for financial savings? Then either (man calculation*) - take your current food bill and find the 5 most expensive veg on it and tell us what they are and we will tell you if you can grow it economically in the UK or (woman calculation*) go to supermarket and find the 5 most expensive veg even if you never normally buy them, ask here if you can grow them, then convince yourself you made a saving even though you never bought the food

Or can you tell us what your motivation to grow is, and can you tell us what you eat other than bread and spuds.




*Please excuse my gross sexism! This is a bit of a personal joke! Man takes £100 to January Sales, comes home buying nothing. Wife says how much did you save, he says £100. Wife then goes to January Sales with £100, buys 3 dresses originally for sale at at total of £400, tells husband she saved £300...

[polc1410]

Oh and if you want to get scientific about it... you could do the research by actually doing the experiments rather than looking on the internet.

e.g. 12 MFBs, 1 spud in each, equal soil in each. "over water" 4, "under water" 4, "about right water" 4. Put 6 in shade, 6 in full sun. Over feed 4, correct feed 4, starve 4. Measure quantities of water (volume), feed (weight per pot), Look into a suitable way of measuring sunlight. Weigh each pot's yield

Feed all data into a spreadsheet that should look like this:

Pot_No, Watered, Sun, Feed, Yield
1, O, S, O, 264g
2, U, F, U, 270g
...

Then do a multivariate analysis on the output and write it up and share it on the interweb for us all in future...

[mothhawk]

Good post, Polc!

[Malooq Tariq]

Size of garden with pictures of garden

Here are pictures of my garden to get roughly the size of the garden:




I think I can get at least 48 buckets by covering all the garden. That is one potato in one bucket that gets at least five or six potatoes, 48 times six potatoes is 228 potatoes in one year. Takes three years to get 684 potatoes and will cost a lot more.

[Malooq Tariq]

Update with image links

Here are pictures of my garden to get roughly the size of the garden:




I think I can get at least 48 buckets by covering all the garden. That is one potato in one bucket that gets at least five or six potatoes, 48 times six potatoes is 228 potatoes in one year. Takes three years to get 684 potatoes and will cost a lot more.

Image links: https://ibb.co/dYC3mF https://ibb.co/jN7Etv https://ibb.co/eGob6F https://ibb.co/d3LOmF

[polc1410]

Covering all the garden? WHY WHY WHY!

I would have been expecting more than 6 spuds TBH. Maybe 10, but size doesn't matter alone its size + quantity = weight...

Why do you want 684 spuds over 3 years.

Your spuds will only really be better than shop bought when freshly dug.

Why cover up your whole garden with a relatively inefficient crop, using the lest efficient way of growing it. At best you will grow 24kg from that lot in buckets. I'd expect 12-18kg to be more likely.

It will cost you £50 to do that, minimum. So you will be paying £2-4/kg vs £1/kg in a shop.

I'd go to a discount shop (B&M Home Bargains etc) and buy a cheap (SINGLE) pack of seed potatoes. Then for each seed, get 10 litres of compost and a bucket from Morison. Then get planting. (Probably cost £15 all in)

See what you think and if it goes well repeat next year and so on adding buckets and refreshing soil every year or two.

BUT crucially - you haven't said what else you'd like to grow...

All that stone around will absorb heat during the day and artificially increase heat into the evening. You might manage pumpkins etc quite well there...

[Malooq Tariq]

How to work out whether my potato costs more to buy than potato from supermarket

Covering all the garden? WHY WHY WHY!

I would have been expecting more than 6 spuds TBH. Maybe 10, but size doesn't matter alone its size + quantity = weight...

Why do you want 684 spuds over 3 years.

Your spuds will only really be better than shop bought when freshly dug.

Why cover up your whole garden with a relatively inefficient crop, using the lest efficient way of growing it. At best you will grow 24kg from that lot in buckets. I'd expect 12-18kg to be more likely.

It will cost you £50 to do that, minimum. So you will be paying £2-4/kg vs £1/kg in a shop.

I'd go to a discount shop (B&M Home Bargains etc) and buy a cheap (SINGLE) pack of seed potatoes. Then for each seed, get 10 litres of compost and a bucket from Morison. Then get planting. (Probably cost £15 all in)

See what you think and if it goes well repeat next year and so on adding buckets and refreshing soil every year or two.

BUT crucially - you haven't said what else you'd like to grow...

All that stone around will absorb heat during the day and artificially increase heat into the evening. You might manage pumpkins etc quite well there...

I think what I need to work out that is most important is whether I am able to enough food that costs the same as buying the food in store rather than the food costing more to grow and buy than the same food to buy in the store. How can I work that out? I know that I need to work out the price of the seeds and how many seeds I use. Then, I need to know the amount of compost you need to grow one seed or more. Next, the number of buckets with the price. Now, I work out how many potatoes I get from growing one seed. After that, I weigh all the potatoes from one seed to find the cost for the total number of potatoes. Going on, I compare my weight of potatoes with the cost and the weight of potatoes with the cost that you get from supermarkets to see whether my potatoes are cheaper or more expensive to grow.

[Scarlet]

Well, at Christmas I bought a 20KG sack of spuds from the farm shop for £8. You'll never beat that growing your own. For a start you need to fill those buckets with compost. Are you on a water metre? If do you'll be paying for that too.

I think Potstubsdustbin grows his spuds in dustbins...

[Scarlet]

Can I ask if you've ever grown anything before? You may not like having to water your buckets everyday, you'll also need to top them up as they grow. The yard is going to get pretty messy, you'll also need access to each bucket, your washing line etc so you can't fill it completely.