How Much Food Can I Grow in 1 Year?

oh no way it's giant it's huge after the last couple of years of pandemics and panic buying i thought it would be a good idea to try and become a little more self-sufficient so i decided to start a vegetable garden but how much food can i actually grow from this small garden and would i save money doing so it is the first week of 2020 one and i'm sat in my garden at home because you're not allowed to do anything else right now it's been extremely cold wet and windy which has caused a little bit of damage to some parts of the garden my pizza oven which i so much love using in the summer months got very wet this year and has actually collapsed which i'm very sad about so i'm gonna need to sort that out after observing the mess that was my garden i started writing up a plan which you could describe look more like a five-year-old kids drawing i should point out that i live with two other people so i couldn't just go digging up the whole garden i was allowed a third of the space which is 15 square meters [Music] at the beginning of the year the garden had some grasses some other plants in it and also a slack line like a balancing rope that i used every now and then to practice my balancing but all that would have to come out once the slack line was all dug up and pulled out i then got to work digging over the patch i dug over the garden and at this point i realized it was incredibly solid clay ground which made it very hard to dig so i was going to have to make some adjustments to that later on in the year i would have liked to get cracking straight away and build the raised beds and get planting but the winter was just relentless it just went on and on and on well it's such an exciting day for a southern english person like me because as you can see it snowed we can make some snowmen play snowball fights and also eat the snow so many fun things to do but it is annoying because it's still it's mid-february now my vegetable patch is gonna have to be delayed still i'll see you in a few weeks when it's 15 degrees and sunny and warm and spring is in the air because of the weather conditions i couldn't do much at all but there was one job that i had to get on with and that was destroying the old pizza oven removing it from the base so that it was ready to rebuild again [Music] and there we go the old oven is gone the base that it sits on is now clear ready to be built on again i've just got to have a think about how i'm going to do it this time because i don't want it to break in the winter when it gets cold and wet finally by the end of march things were starting to warm up a little and although the garden was still completely waterlogged and i couldn't do anything with that i could start thinking about what i wanted to grow and so i started ordering bulbs seeds and when i started receiving them in the post yeah that's when things got more exciting i bought a selection of seeds from carrots to cucumbers even some of james wong's purple carrots also i didn't forget my sugar snap peas and tomatoes i also unboxed a load of garlic shallots and onion sets and i was quite excited to get them in the ground i also had some seed potatoes arrive in the post and basically chitting is the process of sprouting the potato indoors in like a warmer place and it gave them a chance to sprout you know get a head start and then when i put them in the ground they'll be already ready and growing and then hopefully they would grow quite quickly that's the theory anyway that's what i read in a book so there are two varieties of potatoes prepared over the next month apparently they are supposed to start to sprout and then they'll be ready to put in the garden i also started germinating some seeds as well i did some tomatoes cucumbers chilies various other things as well but yeah the whole process of germinating is like super fascinating and it's like it's just like a fun thing to do you put a seed in some soil and then over the course of a week or two you watch it become another plant it's kind of it is like magic or it seems like that to me because i have no knowledge of how science works i've got a saw there's a hazel bush behind me and i'm going to get to work and cut off some branches to use as a trellis to grow pisa [Music] a few weeks later and spring was finally here and because the ground had started drying out i could start building my raised vegetable beds [Music] now the reason for making raised beds rather than just putting the vegetables straight in the ground was that i wanted to add compost to the soil the soil in my garden is so like sticky and like compressed that water doesn't go through it so my aim was to create these vegetable beds fill them up with a mix of the clay and some compost that would loosen the soil and create a better growing medium for the plants until quite recently i have very ignorantly thought that soil was just duh it was just this brown stuff on the ground which had no real purpose and it was annoying when it got on your clothes and made them all dirty but how wrong i was soil is firstly incredibly complex and secondly it's incredibly important for life it's a mix of minerals nutrients bacteria fungi animals like worms millipedes basically what i'm saying is it is a living thing it is very important and you need your soil to be good quality if you're going to be able to grow vegetables and have food to eat finally it is time to start growing some vegetables in fact i've already started i have been very eager to get going and start planting a few bits and i think i'm going to do some carrots today and then i've also got some onions some garlic some shallots so i've got plenty of stuff to get going and also those potatoes that i prepared has actually started sprouting so they would be ready to plant very soon but the first thing i actually put in the ground were onions and i bought these as sets now sets are basically just like baby onions that you put in the ground and over the course of the year hopefully they expand into great big bulbous beauties that you can put in your bolognese so i put them in the ground just with their the tips just poking out that's how your mena apparently do it and uh yeah basically just left them thinker planted 60 or 70 of those so if they all were to turn into big onions it was going to be a pretty good harvest today is actually going to be the first time of my life where i've tried planting potatoes so please bear with me if i'm doing everything wrong four inches deep 30 centimeters apart 45 centimeters between rows let's get planting them one of my fondest memories as a kid was when we were driving back from holiday i think it was in somerset in the distance i saw what looked like a pyramid and as we looked closer i realized it was no pyramid it was a mountain of potatoes i'm gonna shut up and plant some more potatoes [Music] and there we have it the potatoes are in the ground i think they take around 100 days so i've got to be patient but i'm looking forward to it because i absolutely love thick cut fried chips or roast potatoes on a sunday afternoon with plenty of stuff in the ground i then patiently waited now plants grow by photosynthesis using sunlight and co2 carbon dioxide from the air and convert that into sugars which they use as energy to grow they also take up nutrients from the ground through their roots i think the main ones that gardeners talk about are nitrogen phosphorus and potassium there's also a ton of other things that plants need but yeah those things are necessary for plants to thrive and so i hope that my soil would be you know good enough the only thing i really had to do regularly was water the plants so at most mornings i would put my finger down into the soil check whether it was dry or not and then water if necessary and throughout parts of the spring we had some proper dry hot weather and i had to water it like twice a day and keep on top of that i lost a number of spring onions because i just forgot to water one day and they all just frizzled up and died but other than that i i pretty much just waited got on with my life and and waited patiently whilst i let the plants grow i found the time to rebuild the pizza oven and a couple of friends helped me out with this firstly we made a large mound of sand this would create the oven space inside over this we lay some sheets of newspaper to stop the clay from sticking to the sand and then we finally built up a number of layers of clay for the entrance to the oven we built a brick arch which i quite like the look of the wooden former was removed and i put on another couple of layers of clay i could then scrape away all the sand from the inside of the oven which reveals the newspaper that i used that will quickly burn away once the oven is lit a final layer of outdoor cement was added to make sure it was waterproof it was good to finally get that project out the way and hopefully it would last a little longer than last year's one as well as my 15 square meter patch in the garden my dad who lives 15 minutes down the road very kindly let me use his greenhouse to grow some other stuff i've got two cucumber plant fish have just decided to go go crazy and spread all over the place and i've got a couple of courgette plants as well which are looking good yeah thanks dad for letting me use this little space [Music] quick update on the garden everything is growing so much when you last saw it these were all pretty much bare check out the potatoes they have grown so much look at that we've got two different uh varieties of potatoes and i've got some tomatoes over there check out these this is so cool so these are sugar snap peas they grow like these whiskers and they use them to attach themselves to the thing that they're climbing up so they can go right to the top and i've got loads of carrots that i've been growing from seed onions garlic even some strawberry plants some courgette plants the list goes on and on and on we're gonna have so much food later on this year if it doesn't all die fingers crossed fast forward to the 3rd of july i think it was 100 days after i planted the potatoes and i decided to have a little look and see if they were ready to harvest hey guys see what we got oh no way that's way better than i thought i had whoa all right lots of small ones as well oh that's a beast wow it's going straight in my basket that there is the potato which i planted the seed potato ended up with all these other other ones this is fun this is like digging up treasure [Music] i was quite impressed with the result i managed to fill a nice little basket full i know it could have been better i would have preferred if all of them were a bit bigger but you know first time first crop of potatoes i was quite happy and i still had one more row that i was going to harvest a bit later on in the year however not everything in the garden was flourishing and for reasons i just didn't have a clue well these quarjet plants just don't look very happy and i don't have a clue why this one however look at that it's a beast the biggest pest we have in this garden are slugs now i'm not gonna lie they are my least favorite living organism on earth it's probably because i've had a i had a bad experience with slugs in the past i was out camping one night and uh a slug had crawled up my body over my mouth and i woke up to a slug on my mouth i pulled it away and it like peeled off and it left like a layer of slime on my face what is that my tomatoes are being eaten are they just keep eating the courgettes as well maybe i need to get chickens chickens eat slugs as well that might be the way forward but yeah slugs are a right pain i also had some sort of disease on my tomatoes i think it was blight because one of the plants just went really black and everything died still though a couple of couple of tomatoes managed to survive and i managed to get them a bit later on in the year see these ones are starting to go red and then the further we go on the better they get actually look at that as a full set every single flower produced a tomato but other than the diseases and the slugs and what have you things started to get really hectic late in the summer and the harvests were coming in thick and fast well that has to be my biggest cucumber yet look at that oh nice no there's some baby birds stuck in the greenhouse oh it's okay it's okay [Music] [Music] at the beginning of august i pulled up all my garlic shallots and onions the crop was massive and there was probably going to be enough to last me throughout the whole winter so i needed to prepare these onions so that they lasted me a long time and you do this through a process called curing and it's basically by drying out the outside layers of the onions it it protects the inner capsule and makes them last a lot longer so i put them out in the sun for a few days and then left them in the conservatory for probably four weeks and the whole outside layer dried out they were ready to start i put them into sacks and yeah holding a sack of my own home-grown onions was a very good feeling i have to say so it was a good day of harvesting today i've got a couple of hessian sacks full of potatoes and also half filled this bag with some shallots and we've still got quite a lot to go so things are looking quite good and by this point in the season i was actually regularly getting enough food to not have to get any vegetables from the supermarket had garlic onions courgettes tomatoes bean peas like i actually had enough for at least a few weeks of the year which was a incredible feeling it's giant it's huge what you've broken a world record that must weigh as much as a baby [Music] [Laughter] it's not even that funny look at it just been preparing some of my potatoes for roast dinner tonight they are super fresh and they're really firm and i'm just boiling them and i'm gonna roast them for dinner also shout out to mick from breakfa knives he made me this sweet kitchen knife even carved my initials into it i've been using this for the past few months for my cooking and it's very nice [Music] [Music] cool look at that that is from my own tomatoes [Music] you happy with that harvest it's all right yeah i wanted them all to be this big not that big that was one of the last harvests of the year i'm quite happy with that first year growing potatoes so the big question is how much food did i actually grow from my small 15 square meter space bear in mind that i didn't have a clue what i was doing most of the time also was it cost effective did i save money by growing through myself rather than going to the supermarket well i have some statistics here some numbers the exact amounts of harvest are as follows five kilograms of cucumbers one kilogram of spring onions 4.9 kilograms of courgettes 7.5 kilograms of potatoes three kilograms of carrots by the way all my purple ones died 1.1 kilograms of tomatoes 1.1 kilograms of shallots 25 bulbs 500 grams of garlic and a whopping 10 kilograms of onions which were definitely my best crop i looked at the prices of the local supermarkets vegetables and compared the exact weight of what i'd grown and translated it to like how much it would have actually cost me to buy that same amount from the supermarket and i grew the equivalent of a grand total of 600 and no i'm joking 664 pounds of vegetables 64 british money pounds not weight seeing as i spent no less than that on the compost itself and then the same amount on the wood for the raised beds and the tools and the seeds i didn't earn any money i lost quite a bit of money actually you've got to remember though this was my first year doing it and of course there was lots of startup costs that i wouldn't have next year so i may not have actually saved any money this year but i feel happy to know a lot more about plants and how they grow also i appreciate a lot more when i buy food from the shop and also when i eat stuff that i've grown myself i appreciate how much like time and work has actually gone into it because i've seen the whole process now from beginning to end but for now my next project that i'm working on is something completely different it's beekeeping my aim over the following year is to get some honey from my pet bees so stay tuned for that because i'm gonna make a video of the whole beekeeping project thanks for watching and we'll see you soon [Music] you

Channel: Just Alex

Views: 7,115,699

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Id: DOgOMLG-Zyg

Length: 20min 51sec (1251 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 27 2022