Planting RARE Sweet Potato, Pruning Super Dwarf Bananas & Homemade Fertiliser

G'day, I'm Mark from Self Sufficient Me and I thought today you might like to follow me around the garden, like my wingman, someone to talk to as I go about, well, a fairly normal day, tending to the veggie patch, doing normal jobs. So come along with me and let's get into it. So this is that deep purple type of sweet potato. When I bought it, I got it off eBay, they didn't come with a name, it was just deep purple. But what I was looking for was the, I think it's Oka one, the southern island of Japan that's famous for sweet potato and longevity and all that. I was looking for something really dark purple and this was the closest one I could find that was available. It seems like a lot of it sold out all over the interwebs and I was lucky enough to be able to find these four plants in a package. It was only local too, just a few hours north of me. So the plants got to me quickly, they're well packaged, they're in good order. It was a variety that I just didn't have, that really dark rich purple. I thought that not just because I think that it might make me live longer, but that would be nice if it did. But if it's a more healthier type of sweet potato, great. If it's got more antioxidants, fantastic. But it also will look splendid in dishes and add that purple colour to salads and stuff. So I just wanted it. And plus I just love getting new varieties of plants and trialling them and seeing how they go. So I've potted one up already. Normally I wouldn't pot up into such a big container, but I'm doing an experiment here in this grow bag. You might remember the video that I just released not long ago about growing potatoes from just a cutting. So not tubers or anything, just a piece of plant tissue, just a bit of cutting and how I turned that cutting into a couple of kilos of potatoes. If you haven't seen that video, go and check it out. I really am satisfied with those results, but this is that bag. So instead of getting rid of all that potting mix or that expended potting mix, all I did was improved it. I just added a few extra ingredients, buffed this medium up again and planted this sweet potato here in the middle. And I'm experimenting to see how that goes, just rejuvenating old potting mix, but also to see how this sweet potato might expand throughout this grow bag and how much I can produce out of one sweet potato plant or slip that's going into this size type of container. I think it should be interesting to see how it goes. The rest of these, I'm just going to pot up into some standard pots. And the reason I'm doing that is because I don't know where I want to put them out in the garden yet. Sweet potatoes can be fairly invasive in the garden. They'll take over a large garden bed if you let it. And so I want to make sure that I know where I want to grow it. And secondly, we're in winter here at the moment in our subtropical climate here in southeast Queensland. And sweet potato, although it grows, it's kind of dormant. It grows a lot slower through the winter months. And I think it would be better to let it grow on in a container where it can get a little warmer. It warms up a bit faster if I can just put it against a sunny wall or something like that through a winter time. And that will give it a good head start for spring when I, probably mid spring, when I find a good bed and then I can plant them out into that new space and they'll be all thriving and much bigger than they are now. I'm just going to use a premium potting mix, three containers. I'll fill them up. I'll add a few additives to it. Okay, I'll need some more. If the bag's too heavy or you want to just lighten the load, then you don't need as much potting mix. I just simply cut it through the middle. As it was lying down, I just make a slice through the middle like that with a knife and then you can lift it up and then you've got two bags. Just make sure you don't lose any, maybe even it up a little bit and or not, whatever you want. And then you can just divide that up. And then you've just got one bag, much easier. I'm just going to add a few additives. I've been using Ocean to Earth for a long time. It's not sponsored or anything like that. I buy my own. I just like it and I like the principle behind it. I think just one handful is enough because the potting mix has its own fertilizer in it too. And then I've been trialing this shed organic stuff. I think you can only get it in Australia. A couple of young fellas made up this blend and I haven't used a lot yet. I've been using it for several months. It's like a meal, like a bone meal, but it's more than that. It's a combination of a whole heap of things. If you're in Australia, you can go check it out and I'll just mix that in. Again, this isn't sponsored. I purchased my own. Okay. Now I will put these in. I've probably got four or five different varieties of sweet potato. I like them all. We all love them all, but you know, I just wanted this really unique deep purple. I hope it is deep purple. I've got some purple varieties, a purple skin one with white flesh and that, but I wanted a deep purple like the rock band. Always make sure I have a little lip because when you water the pot, it doesn't overflow then. So you don't fill it right up to the top and it will sink. That's why I pushed it down earlier on the bottom half. I crushed down a little bit just to save some of that sinkage. Give them a quick water in. Now I'm going to put some mulch on top just to keep them nice and tidy, prevent reeds from growing up in the pot and grass getting blown in there and then growing in it. And it also just protects the root system and the plants, keeps them nice and like a little blanky for them through the colder months. Now I'll give them another water in, just to bed down that mulch, sort of make it stick together and sit there instead of blowing off. We've been getting some big winds here through winter and now I'm just going to sit them underneath those potted banana trees. The bananas need a bit of a trim. They slow down through winter as well and these are a super dwarf variety. So I'm trialing them in pots and trying to get the best way to grow, best mix of fertilizer. I actually do next, what I can do is get rid of these sucker plants because I really only just want one banana stem coming out. So I might actually do that next and get that over and done with while I'm here, which means I'll probably have to move these pots again. Before I do the bananas, I'll just let the girls out and let them go into their secluded free ranging raised bed area. I've got some nice little feed for them, bit of extra. I've been throwing in some kitchen scraps in here as well, some lettuce and that in here too. This just gives them more of an incentive to get out and dig around. I might get an automatic door on here, but I haven't yet. It's just a matter of opening that up and then just securing it over the top and out they come. I've only got two birds left. If you've seen my go and I ate my chickens video, you'd know why there's only two birds. I'm trying to get hold of some more chickens to increase my flock hopefully to about 12 or so, maybe 15. But for now, these are the only two survivors. God bless them. Everything is contained in here. Get their drinkers and I've got some food for them. So if we are late, letting them out doesn't matter too much. Don't need that at the moment, but that's their ladder to get in and out. If we had them in a secure area that they could get down their nesting boxes, but neither of them have laid because A, it's winter. Well, I don't think so. No. A, it's winter. So they're laying slows down anyway. And B, they've been so scared from that lizard attack that they haven't laid since. So I'm hoping that we'll get that back coming in springtime. Now let's tackle these banana plants. By the book, they say you can grow two bananas in here in a single grow bag. These are big grow bags. They're 200 litre grow bags and even bigger would be better. But then the bigger you go, the harder they are to move around. And that's not the experiment that I'm doing. The experiment is to grow these super dwarf bananas in a container that most people could still move around at least a bit. They don't take up too much space and all that. With this type of growing setup, they recommend you grow one primary plant and then let a sucker grow off behind it. And that primary plant then fruits, you get your bananas, you then cut that back and you let the secondary plant, the sucker, start to regrow and you keep fertilizing it and you get those multiple crops. However, I found that the sucker plant starts to catch up with the main plant and when the main plant starts to fruit, what happens is it's not enough energy in there because you've got two plants competing in this relatively small space. And so the fruit isn't very good. And that's why I've come to the conclusion over my testing that pretty much you need to keep them down to a singular plant when they're starting to fruit. I'll move it out. Give myself some room. So there's two suckers coming out of this. Well, there's three suckers. There's me and those two. Yeah, so I'll get rid of these two suckers. I'm going to cut them away from the main plant with this fella here. Don't worry, it's not sponsored. Rob, you would never sponsor me. So I'm just going to cut it away from the thing. I'm not going to bring you in close. Pretty self-explanatory. There you go. Just cut it off the main plant because that's where the suckers come from. They come from underneath the main plant. They're all clones. Here's the beginnings of a real tiny one. You put that in a pot, a little small pot, and that'll grow into a banana tree. There we go. I'll probably plant this one today. Might as well plant it somewhere. I'll find a spot. It's a really good specimen. Healthy looking, even though we're in winter. So, you know, I've either got to pot it up or plant it out somewhere. I didn't see that one there. I mean, it stands out like the proverbial, but yeah, there's another one on the other side. There we go. Another one. Now it's a bit precarious. This wasn't the original. This was the second sucker. The original one has already flowered and it produced. I'll do a whole proper dedicated video on that. Okay. I think you'll agree. This looks a lot better. Nice and sturdy now. I've put a stake in the middle of this one here to stop it from just keeping on training it that way. Going to pull it back over time. Just keep tightening it up slowly and hopefully that'll straighten that up just naturally, but better than looks. The main thing is that you're going to have these two plants be able to get all those nutrients to themselves and that will make it a heck of a lot better for it overall, especially if you want a fruiting crop. I've got our kitchen waste bucket or slops bucket. If you want to be crude, we'll take that and we'll bury that and I'll tell you a little bit about this. We'll bury it in this bed here next to this magnificent parsley, self-seeded, but essentially this bed's just been resting. So we'll put it there, but before we do, I want to show you, for those who have been watching my channel for a while, you'd know that we've had insanely wet weather. It's great to see the wind blowing and the sun shining. It's a beautiful day today. So the area is starting to dry out a little bit, so I'll show you that. Basically anywhere sort of past here was too boggy to mow. So probably a good acre and a half of land could not get the ride on down and it's probably too much for me these days to whip a snip the whole thing. But yesterday I was able to get the main tractor out, the slasher tractor that I've got. I've got two ride-ons, a Toro which does really good job on the grass and a Cub Cadet that's more of a traditional tractor type mower that goes more places than the Toro can. And so I took it through here and I just slashed it down. Hello little one, what are you doing? Want to say hello to everybody? Yes, let the camera, yeah. All right, go on bugger off. To give you perspective, that's the reverse angle. So all this area was unmowable for the last almost 12 months and it's still quite boggy, but you can get that tractor around and slash it down so that it dries out even more and hopefully it won't rain too much more through our winter, which it typically doesn't. Touch wood. So I just came from over there. There's our chicken free ranging area back down there. That's the front gate. That's where the new coop's going to go. The banana trees have really taken a hammering because although they like water, they don't like sitting in water and they can tolerate sitting in water for a while, but 12 months of boggy ground is a long time. Anyway, all these bananas here, I'm getting rid of them. Some of them are still way too tall for me and they were supposed to be dwarfs. I don't know how they got to be tall dwarfs. It's a good opportunity now after they've been suffering through the bog to get rid of them. And I'm going to expand the veggie garden down back this way and perhaps put even a little greenhouse in. I haven't fully decided yet. One thing that's been growing really well, and that's the galangal. Can you see the clumps down there? Those big green clumps? They look like a really good screening plant. Plus they're edible, of course. Got a nice aroma. They're not terribly invasive, but they do grow pretty big. For anyone wanting an edible ornamental and the screening plant and the one that's sort of green all year round, especially in the subtropics or tropics, I'd go with galangal. It's better, I reckon, than bamboo or sugarcane. It's tidier looking. It's nicer looking at flowers and you can eat the rhizomes. Okay, let's bury this. If I was a pig farmer, this would go to the pigs. I remember on my uncle's farm, we used to take all the kitchen scraps and all that and give it to the old porkies. Get rid of some of these weeds. I don't want to feed the weeds with all this good stuff. Just scrape them off. I often let beds just rest, especially if they've had a heavy crop in them before, tomatoes or potatoes or anything really that I've overloaded the bed with. Give the bed a good rest for sometimes a season or even 12 months. In the meantime, I just load it up with kitchen scraps and things like that. It keeps the microbes and the worms and the bacteria and everything in the bed happy. Plus it just keeps fertilizing the soil and rejuvenating everything. So this is full of mainly old cucumber. It's fermenting now. I can smell it. Pink. But the reason we've got this size bucket thing, I'll bring you in for a closer look. We do have a smaller one in the kitchen that we use for normal kitchen scraps. And sometimes I can't be bothered because it gets filled up pretty quick because it's only small, but it works really well. And sometimes I can't be bothered walking out all the time and burying the stuff. So we'll have this underneath the kitchen counter and this has a good seal on it, a lockdown lid, and that, you know, doesn't smell. And then I can just pour into this over and over. I can get about five of those other ones in it, and then I can just take this out in one big hit and bury it in the garden. And that way I'm not coming out every day and burying things in the garden. I suppose I could if I wasn't so lazy, but this just works really well. And I got this off Timu, not sponsored, okay. What do you think? I am a sellout, but I'm not overly, I like it. I like the size of it and I like how it seals. I like how it doesn't smell, but what I don't like is this little tap down the bottom here because the idea is okay. It's supposed to, all that fermented water and fermented liquid that your veggies ferment can then run through into the bottom of this container. And then you can turn the tap on, take all those liquids out, and you can use that as fertilizer in the garden. Very effective. And it's a great idea, except it doesn't work. This here leaks and it just constantly drips out. And that's the last thing you want is stinky, fermented liquid dripping out of your container, your compost container in the bottom of your kitchen cabinet. So what I've had to do is I've sealed it up with some silicon and I've made sure that not even the kids can accidentally think that they can fiddle with the tap or turn it on. It's completely sealed up now and essentially I'm not using it as that function. And I don't really need to anyway. We make plenty of our own fertilizer and I'll show you that in a second. So I'm just going to bury these here now and that's the rundown on this. I might even come across some stuff that I've already buried. Probably not because it pretty much eats it up within weeks. Let's pour it out. That little insert there is supposed to be what separates the base there so that the liquid can form on the bottom. You can see it's old banana peels, avocado, old tomatoes. We had a whole heap of cucumbers that we didn't eat and well, instead of giving them to the chickens, we don't have that many chickens anymore. It just goes into here. We've preserved a lot of cucumbers, like a lot of eggshells. Go in like that and then just backfill. It's as simple as that. Leave a bit of a mound on top just like you're burying anything. Pat it down nicely and then leave a bit of a mound on top so that it can sink down a little bit as everything decays. Now I'll give this a wash out and the last thing I'm going to do today is fertilize some of our plants that need it with some of our homemade fish fertilizer just made in a bucket with water. Pretty much that's all it is but I'll make another video about that down the track. I've got this plastic thing here that I'll make it up in first just so that I can show you the consistency of it, the color of it because I can't if I just pour it into this. I cover it over to try to keep the mozzies out. I'll give it a bit of a stir. It's like I don't know swamp water. There's absolutely nothing left in there. There was bones, fish head, scales, everything in this and now pretty much nothing left in it. I could strain this. I probably should strain it at least through a fine mesh. I'm not too fine just a little bit so it doesn't clog up my watering can nozzle but I'm not going to. I'll just wash that out if it gets stuck. So give it a good stir. Now I'm gonna pour that into there. I'm gonna use quite a bit but I'll just see how that works for now. That's the consistency raw pretty dark and now I will add some water. So it's probably a quarter I put in that bucket and I'll probably three-quarter fill it up or almost fill it up. It doesn't smell well not not bad anyway not like heaps. So now it looks like I don't know I don't know how you describe it but it's it's it's pretty dark tea dark green tea. Check that out. So it's about that consistency. It's not it's not a light tea you know like you'd make sometimes you have a light tea just for a salad crop or something like that. I want it a bit dark. I want to give it some even that might be slightly underdone yet but I'll I'll see if I can fill up the watering can with that and maybe add a bit more to it. The dog likes it so that's a good sign. I don't know how you can drink that Bella. I really don't. Yucky. I'll just put a little bit more about that mix it with a bit of this stuff. And that'll top it up well there we go. Now it's not like these crops are doing terrible they're growing quite well it's just that I can tell that they could be doing better and so just by looking at the leaves the leaves are a bit motley they're they're not as green as they could be. They seem to be missing some nutrients and I know why because this is another experiment that I'm doing that I will bring you in another video but bottom line is it needs some fertilizer. I've got radish in the middle here and you can see they're growing pretty well and I've got cabbage on the outside large cabbage but I expect the cabbage should be bigger at this point in time so I just know that it needs some fertilizer and I'm going to use our own homemade mix and we'll see how this goes in the next few weeks. I might even give it another helping in another week just to see how it goes to start off with. Now you can see how I should have filtered that water look how it's yeah anyway I mean it runs straight off the leaves so it's not like I'm trying to water the leaves this isn't a foliar cover but yeah probably should have strained it but doesn't matter because this would be faster to do it this way anyway and I'll just give every plant a good water at the base that's what I'm after probably a more effective way to water like this anyway and we'll see how that goes and how effective that homemade fertilizer is on this particular crop that I know needs a bit of a pickup. The way I wash this out is just like this pretty simple reverse it then you can start seeing the little holes open up again and even put it on full really force it through they're pretty robust these steel things this one's been knocked around quite a bit you can see the dents in it but that's the good thing very robust the plastic ones they degrade in the sun and you don't get much life out of them these you can knock them around and they won't crack and split they'll just dent. Oh well I hope you enjoyed your time around the garden with me I enjoyed your company to be honest this type of video I haven't done a lot of and I found it really fun to do just having the camera while you follow me around and just do the odd jobs because I'm able to do some work as well as do a YouTube video which is extra handy because I kill two birds with one stone so if you like this type of content give me a thumbs up and let me know in the comment section that yeah keep doing this type of stuff Mark it's it's you know it's interesting to me just say that or something and that way I'll know probably by the numbers as well and the comments and the thumbs up if I should continue on with these types of videos. Well thanks a lot for watching if you like the video make sure you share it around comment subscribe if you haven't already thanks for watching bye for now cheers