Strawberry tower questions

Sorry folks but Mike is going to throw a spanner in the works. So, OK. I started in gadening at an infant age just as the gerry bombs stopped falling. In those days even the most illiterate realised, you took a chance, dig, plant and hope. Yes at that time you needed to survive. Little was on offer statewise. Anyone with a bit of ground, plumped for spuds and greens. Now today gardeners tend to feel that. Hey I must have ago at that. So be it. So here you go to the plot. You dig it over adding whatevever chemicals you think might help Time passes. You continue to hoe and cultivate the surrounding soil. Come the harvest. Wowee I have git some fruits. Well done YOU but, at what cost?

You have paid your land rent. You hasve toield in all weathers to sustaine your crop. Harvest time. Wowee, I ghave picked fourteen pounds of strawberries. OK mathemticians please come up with some calculations. Land rent. Divide this into workable man hours. Now, whooppe. Please compare your outgoing expenditure, set this beside todays market price. Sorry folks. Todays prices prove it is cheaper to buy

 

I live in London, so space is a premium. I don't garden to save money, I garden because I get joy out of seeing plants grow and produce fruit.

Store bought strawberries just can't compare to home grown strawberries. Tree ripened strawberries will go bad within a day of ripening. So commercial strawberries are picked before they're ripe, processed and sent to the supermarket shelves so they ripen at home. They taste sour or watery. Nothing like the sweet and sour strawberries with intense flavour you get from the tree.

Also it's great education for the kids, helping them see how fruit grow, how leaves grow. How plants react to watering etc.

I think you'll find that even with your "traditional gardening technique" the cost benefit analysis still does not stack up. With industrial farming techniques, spuds and greens are incredibly cheap. A 5kg sack of potatoes can be found for a couple of quid at asda. 1 carrot costs pennies. Needed 1 carrot for a dish the other day. Got it from the supermarket, cost me 18p. At the price it's not even worth my time bending over and pulling it out the ground and washing the soil off.

 

An interesting thread.

Last year I used lengths of pvc guttering placed up a wall to grow strawberries. One length would drop and feed the length below it etc etc.
Pump supplied the water and feed on a timer. Good use of a spare section of wall.

 

I think you are perfectly correct as for the financial side to it.
However, admittedly, the total benefit of doing something should take into account all positive and negative sides to it.

Last year I bought my first strawberries from a gardening centre. Because I did not know any better, I purchased a bunch of Elsanta plants, which, as I later discovered, are the most common commercial variety, and are also June bearers.
So, exactly the same stuff you can buy in supermarkets and for a limited time. And of course, in the right season I could buy several kilograms of those for the money I spent on growing my own, let alone the time and effort I put in.

So, when I realized my plants were Elsanta, and tasted them last year, I was disappointed.
However, when I tasted them this year, I realized that they were so much better than any I bought in supermarket.
Whether a better taste justifies all the effort, is certainly a personal thing, but for me it does offset the cost and effort more than if I was getting "supermarket quality".

This year I am trying to start some day neutral and alternative varieties, which are not to be found in supermarket shelves, so it is worth my effort I think.

Other produce, such as courgettes, is relatively expensive where I am, and the plants are very productive. Between potting soil, a bit of perlite and similar, epsom salts, fertilizer, materials to train them and the cost of the plants themselves, my 5 courgettes plants costed me around £22 all in and they are producing enough to cover that fully.

Rocket costed me 99p of seeds, let's say £3 total all in. But it is way more spicy and tasty than the three supermarket bags I could buy for that money, and it is very easy to grow. So, that is a winner for me in all respects.
Radish, again 99p, are better of what I can find in supermarkets, but not astonishingly so. So, perhaps not the best deal.

I cannot say for the tomatoes yet. My cordon plants were around £3 each, but when I consider other related expenses, I would say £10 each. The bushes varieties, of which I have 7, but only 4 really productive, I would estimate at £7 each all in.
But decent tomatoes are expensive in supermarkets, and even limiting our consumption, as a family we spend at least £5 per week for that. So, hard to say.
My two aviditas plants are making at the very least 7 trusses each, so, even finding a good price in Lidl on good spanish or italian improt, an equivalent of £3*7= £21 per plant.
The indigo and santorange might only be 4 trusses, so £12 each.
The Lizzano bush will end up producing around 2kg total of medium quality ones (I should have probably planted in soil instead than in a large planter to make it more productive), so around £12.
The other bushes make very small ones, but very numerous, I am guessing an average of 400g each, so £3 each from my local supermarkets, give or take.

So, they will pay for themselves, barely, and taste will be medium to good, if it all goes well by the end of september. But of course without the easiness of just buying them. Practically, we will end up eating and cooking much more tomatoes than we would otherwise over a few months, so not necessarily a winner financially, I agree.

Cucumbers do pay for themselves, but barely, saving £1.50 per week or so. Peppers, at least those I am growing, absolutely not. The produce each an equivalent of a few quids in Lidl, so for me are definetely not worth the effort, but I am still glad I tried, out of curiosity.

Mushrooms costed me a whopping £250, but I am including the cost of over 4 cubic meters of freshly made woodchips delivered in jumbo bags, plus some other materials. In reality, I anyway needed to mulch with woodchips but let say it was just for the mushrooms and let's make it £300 if I needed to get another cubic meter later on to keep the mushroom beds productive.
I am making 20kg of woodchips bags inoculated with shiitake spawn, which would produce at the very least 6KG of mushrooms. Best price I could find is £12 for a kilogram fresh, so £72 total.
3sq metres of King Oyster will give me at a very minimum 10kg , so perhaps £120 equivalent for generic oyster, but £180 from gourmet retailers, for actual organic King Oyster.
3sq metres of Stropharia plus 1sq metre of pioppini will perhaps be another 13Kg. These are not commercial mushrooms, so let's say very conservatively a £60 equivalent.
Provided one likes mushrooms in large quantities and is keen on substituting other food with them, which I am, I think growing them makes sense financially (crossing fingers, of course.. I am assuming it all goes well and they will produce some this Autumn).

When it comes to carrots and potatoes, I can only agree with you, they are fun to grow but I am better off buying them in shops.

Of course.. I live in London. If you can buy good quality fruits and vegetables for a pittance where you are, the above does not apply at all..

 

Did you find them productive enough?
What I noticed with mine this year was that giving them lots of soil to develop made for much more productive plants than otherwise, but I might have done something wrong..

 

It did work well but could be improved upon. Each plant cropped well but not as good as plants in the ground. It made good use of a vacant wall.

Would work well also for salad crops id imagine.

If i were to do it again the soil in the guttering would have to be covered to reduce weeds between plants using either plastic sheeting or using pipe with holes drilled into it to place the plants in.
A good system if your short of growing space. Easier to water than baskets too. Imho

 

Thanks for the info, I have some self watering baskets and they have been a bit of an hassle in that they get clog up and stop wicking very frequently.
I might give it a go next year to make use of some bare space on our fence, also for rocket and similar.

I did notice that black mulch did seem to help with strawberries, not only for weeds but for avoiding diseases. Now I will be planting several new runners in soil, and I think I will keep it mulched and see how that pans out next year.

 

Strawberries can be grown in fully hydroponic conditions so the issue probably isn't due to the soil itself but rather that the low quanity of soil dries out quickly. I have noticed with my tower than I need to water it every day. Will need to invest in a water pump of some sort that will water the towers from a bucket or water butt.

I've managed to get my first few independant strawberry plants grown from runners. Just a small batch for now. I am making another tower - I;m going to use fresh plants for this one and won't transfer old ones over. Need to build new one ASAP and migrate these baby plants onto them. I will also get everbearing strawberry plants to fill out the rest of the tower (each tower holds 48 plants)


Growing them in petit filous pots. Which is risky as watering requires extra care. One day of extra rain can flood these pots, and a paticularly hot day can dry them out completely. Wind kept blowing them over so I made a rack out of spare wood I had laying around.

Interestingly, the snails/slugs seem to be loving the label glue on the pots. They're eating them clean off the plastic. You learn something new every day! Definitely been stripped off by some snails or slugs as the rain/water alone does not cause these labels to peel. The hole in the tray is loose fit so it doesn't scrape anything off the pots.