Medwyn Williams

Medwyn Williams

Hello. I'm Medwyn Williams – eleven times Gold medal winner at the Chelsea Flower Show, Past Chairman of the Royal Horticultural Society Fruit Vegetable and Herb Committee and President of the National Vegetable Society.

Watering and associated problems

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Powerful drilling rig could only go down 30 metres rather than the intended 60 metres

Believe it or not, this is my first ever blog and I trust it’s not going to be my last either as I hope it can prove to be a very exciting communicating tool. Dealing with the hot weather and naturally the constant watering that has to be carried out has become a priority. Work has to take a back seat for a while as we have to water in the morning as well as much earlier in the afternoon otherwise we would almost certainly loose a lot of plants.

To put you in the picture a little, I bought six acres or so of prime agricultural land about four years ago, probably some of the best land on the Isle of Anglesey. One of the first things I did was to invest in boring a hole for my own water supply which has been a blessing as there is seemingly plenty of it available. However last Saturday evening both my son Alwyn and myself had a reality check as all of a sudden there was no longer any water coming through the hose pipes!  Alwyn eventually deduced that the fault was an electrical one with a capacitor having burnt out.

How the system works is that the the bore hole is just over 30 metres deep, in fact the borer was aiming to go down to a depth of 60 metres but found so much pressure of water at 30 metres that there was no point in going any deeper. At the bottom of this bore hole is a pump that pushes the water up to a plastic blue coloured 5000 litre storage receptacle. The water from this container is then further pumped out to wherever we require it. I was very lucky on Sunday to be able to get hold of the borer who just happened to have a spare Capacitor on him which instantly had the pump underground working again, much to our relief. Although we do have over 2000 litres of water stored in IBC containers it would have been a Herculean task to have kept all the plants alive Sunday night.

All my show potatoes were started off in 5 inch pots this year using my  Exhibition Potato Mixture in relationship with Scott’s. The first lot are destined for my stand at the Royal Welsh Show in July and those planted out today are for use on our display at the Malvern Autumn show. Watering the polythene pots is now crucial as the developing potatoes can easily have a poor skin finish if they get stressed out through lack of water. We are trying an experiment this year by adding a brand new organic bio degradable product to the compost which will keep it moist should the potatoes get into a stress situation. I will tell you more about this exciting product after we have harvested the potatoes for Malvern.

Celery is definitely another vegetable that requires plenty of water during dry weather and to this end I intend to mulch around the plants with plenty of well rotted manure. I’m hoping to have my first batch of celery planted up tomorrow which is much later than anticipated and on top of that it’s also suffered with some heart rot. Once they are all planted up they  will be given a good soaking of Calcium Nitrate mixed with Nutrimate Liquid Gold through a watering can.

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3 thoughts on “Watering and associated problems

  1. How are your tomatoes?!?!?

    1. Having had a disastrous start they are now growing away well, depends now on what sort of weather we have this Summer.

  2. Medwyn, fantastic that you are doing this blog, we are still in a hosepipe ban situation down in East Anglia but to be honest I have only had one week thus far of lugging around watering cans. The foliage on the spuds grown in your mix loks very strong and fingers crossed the tubers will be good enough for the Midlands. The polar parsnips in my barrels are doing much better than I ever managed with Pinnacle, shame if they are being discontinued unless the replacement is even better.

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