Root Trainers/ Air Pots: Make your own at low cost...

so in today's video we are looking at making our own route trainers low-cost route trainers to save bunch of money growing up trees and other perennials in big air pruning pots to get high quality plants for planning out at a later date so this is a basically air pot and they come in slightly different shapes and sizes but the typical thing is they have plastic screws that hold them together and you wrap them around the base and the base is important so the whole point is that trees and shrubs will lude out to the edges and then air prune because they don't like growing in air and the base is off the ground like the other root trainers we have which are held up off the ground by their container these does have it integrated into the base but these are about 10 euros where we live and we're trying to make them for about 80 cents each so that's gonna be a fun trial to see if we can use materials lying around to make something that's factor of 10 times cheaper we like factors of 10 so this is the grapes and the danger with these these are just rooted cuttings but they start to grow together like so so we want to get these in bigger pots thick and they grow much bigger to go down at the vineyard where we've had a lot of problems with with their voles and so basically we basically want to build these pots get these planted up fertilize a bit more put them on stakes so we can get good plants and spaces out again here in the propagation tunnel just to allow them to grow and if this design works well we've got a lot of chestnut and then the trees popping up that we can get out to so hopefully this will be useful for other people too okay we're trained to making this is to replicate it's a bigger wheel trainer but they're about 8 euros each to sing this big here we want to make 150 so we're testing ideas gotta have things off the ground so we're in rapid prototype mode so we've trainers these are gonna be drilled out to a land plant to root out these are going to be four great lines that we want to go big to put the mouse and the stage where balls are going to be you know they're not gonna be able to take out with the young plant now it's designed around our August so we can plant this eventually into an auger hole in the design challenge is how they do this at scale with rolls of building material this is what you typically put between the foundation wall and the soil and chicken-wire seems to work in the Swift dish way to create a bottom that will lift the root mass off the ground with holes for cable ties so we're gonna test it with some possible plant see if you like it and then so we are using from the winter layers this is basically peat moss to see if this mesh holds up the material and then these plants have rooted cuttings and we don't want them getting root bound these are five different varied forms and grapes these are things that are becoming root banned just so we've got an opportunity to help these out and they're also growing very tightly together in the greenhouse that they will start to send out their little feelers and join together that we won't be able to do this at a later stage so the aim is to given bigger parts get better root development that will concentrate moves down and we'll be leaving these for another year or so in the pots before we put them out [Music] these returnees are gonna be 12 liters in size and cutting down the sorting of plastic this plastic is 50 euros and we can make 75 out one roll that comes in at 66 cents 12 meter train we need to then have cable ties to connote to put together and put a little bit of chicken wire in because we have lots of scrap lying around unit for about 80 cents which is way cheaper and way more fun - Julie's out is sixty four thousand eight hundred volts which does make sense how big that hole and this clip is holding the bottom - holding this wire in place we using square YX just quicker the cuts and it's held two sides [Music] okay so cable ties ends have been going well first Evers will find the bottom end technique over a sauna button to get the precise end because doing a little production line is like this you want everything as even as possible now the only thing that could have been improved slightly we think is the drilling of these holes now we didn't want to make the holes too big because it will promotes water leakage and drying out a lot quicker but you can see there drilled in different places when we're drilling mark all there's at once and it makes it a little bit more time-consuming to feed through the cable ties however it doesn't take long anyway we calculate it will take about 18 hours to do these pots on your own 150 pots at 8 euros each show they're costing us about 70 cents so we're saving them to date work this is the podcast whatever you like doing you're saving a thousand euros very worthwhile but we're gonna have to finish this up another time and pull them up we're gonna make a big old potting mix out of our whole winter baling with some different preps added to it and cut up all the grapes so one of the main reasons we want these route trainers is to grow up The Grapes really big to put on this vineyard now there are grapes still in here but voles are particularly fond of grape vines so we had some big problems and to be honest we've just let them go a bit cramping in here but what we want to do is you can see the alders doing really well I want to come in and prune a little bit more of the side branches now to let more light in here I'm basically using these alders as a pole and nitrogen-fixing Pole in order to grow grapes up now what we need to do is put a lot bigger plants in to make sure they survive we've got plants that we're growing right up into the trees they've just got their roots 7 last year and the year before here's an example this is a great that's basically not being cared for very much but it's growing up ok and you see they're going off up into the tree but we've lost a lot in here that I want to give this a good overhaul we can graze through here you can see the growth that these alders have put in I want to take off basically leave 40% of the crown taken all the side shoots off it'll let a lot more light through in here and then once the grapes are all really established in their root train this will take out or get bit you can see it clips come right out here but oh yeah we'll take an auger bit and and put chicken wire around the base of the root system so they don't get eaten so easily I always said retire when they get a bottle of wine out here so I guess it'll be a while till we get there but yeah we'll see how it goes it's really becoming nice in here with all the native lilies that are popping up that's some beautiful getting quite well established so agroforestry week making cheap food trainers that's a big success we'll finish them up tomorrow make a nice mix of plantings in I think we'll come down here do a bit of pruning do a bit of fencing up in the forest after the logging work so we can bring the cows and sheep up into that area we were having a look at the fencing job to work out what's involved to fix it's actually quite easy I think you know it's a day's work for a fencer and we're just going up to scope the job out and think about what we need to think about yesterday and we went up to the forest patch where Winston the RAM is and it's interesting like because the cows and sheep have been in there a lot you can get down and look under the trees for like 30 meters in any direction because they've pruned the branches and that's allowed a lot more light through so you get a lot more pasture species growing up there and the same conditions across in the back side of the property adjacent to our neighbor's property the trees are similar age same density and you just you can't see more than a couple of metres in any direction so I've I'm willing to change our grazing plan and get a bunch more it's beautiful here with all these meadow flowers yeah I want to change the grazing plan have the cows and sheep get up into the forest patches just to crash through and graze a bit and I could even do that in here on these older but I want to prune these up quite a lot higher so I'll probably prune them up to here at this point in order to just let a lot more light down into the base of here and then hopefully next summer or the summer after we will get the grapes in here and get it operational again and expect much better result I think part of the problem in here has been water valves also I see them swimming around sometimes and they're just there's a network of holes that go up to the alder you see we've got the old on the other side that's also growing up well so we need to get grapes on that too but a great success with the route trainers that's been a fun day just getting a little work flow going and and it's nice we've seen with you know you can always weigh up your time versus money you can save and sometimes it's important to save time and just spend money sometimes it's great to put the time in doing some repetitive tasks is just ease full and fun to do and save a lot of money in the process so that's all in the video just quick one just to let you know about these route trains will show you them as we filled them up and talk about the potting mix and see how they go throughout the rest of the season but thought you might like to see that little process we've been through today so thanks so much for watching our videos folks appreciate your views and comments and shares and likes and subscribes and all the stuff that you do on your end of things and we'll see you in the next video bye for now [Music]

Channel: Richard Perkins

Views: 113,316

Rating: 4.8904648 out of 5

Keywords: air pots, root trainers, growing trees, regenerative agriculture, ridgedale, ridgedale farm

Id: bNnC_lbav74

Length: 12min 27sec (747 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 02 2019