Join Me As I Try To Grow Enough Food For My Family For A Year Planting Up The Polytunnel

Hello and welcome to Gardening at 58 North. So in this video, I'd like to give you guys another update on the vegetables and the vegetable garden here as I'm trying to feed my family for a year. So it's been quite a few changes since you last saw it. The weather's really improved in the last few days and it's got really warm and sunny and it's been a great combination of rain and sun. So everything's growing really well now. So I'll actually start off in the polytunnel today. It's hard to believe, but it was actually torrential rain about half an hour ago. The sun suddenly come out and we're getting to that time of year now where it's almost impossible for me to actually film in the polytunnel. It just gets so warm in here and so hot that the lens steams up all the time. So it's very hard to get a clear image. And also we get a lot of dripping on the inside of the polytunnel because we've actually got the polythene the wrong side around. So it actually collects a lot of condensation. So I'm doing a little bit of filming now. Hopefully it's cool enough. Got both the doors open, but it's already getting pretty hot and steamy. So in this video, we'll make sure things, I'm going to be planting up a lot of the beds today with tropical plants because we've got milder temperatures at night now. It's going to be around 10 degrees minimum most nights, about 15 degrees in the day. So it's a nice stable temperature. And in the polytunnel here, it'll probably be about 12 during the nighttime and then probably up to 30 or 40 during the day. So it's now time for me to plant the tropicals out. And also check the ground temperature in here. It's about 15 in the polytunnel. It's still about 10 degrees outside, but in the polytunnel it's ready for planting. So I'll quickly show you what I'm going to be planting today and talk about the plants and give an update on them. So this year for the first time, we're going to be trying some melons. So these are the melon plants here. They've been growing in my conservatory. I need to put some kind of structure for them to grow up. As you can see, they're climbing plants. They've got these long tendrils, which wrap around things and they use that to grow. You can see here, this one actually has a perfect example of how it's wrapping around and it kind of supports itself, but it needs to let that framework for it to hold onto something. So I'll be making some kind of framework for that. We've also got lots of other plants that I've brought over. So there's a few chili plants here. I think these are the small Apache chilies. So these won't grow very large. We've also got a few different types of tomato. We've got Tumbling Tom, which I think is this one at the front. And then we've got a Sun Gold at the back there. That's a nice cherry tomato. These will be going in the greenhouse. We've also got a couple of large chilies here. These ones, I think they grow about a meter in height. I can't remember the exact name of them. And then we've got two trays of butternut squash. Some of these will be going back to my house. The rest will be planted in the polytunnel. These give a really nice late crop in the end of the season. We've also got some courgette seedlings down there and we've also got some cucumber. So they're all going out in the polytunnel today. At least the bigger plants are. The tomatoes don't need to be repotted and grown on a little bit longer until they go in the greenhouse. Over on this side though, you can see how well everything's been growing here. And the tomatoes are actually right at the top. Desperately need repotting. So these will be going in the soil today. Same with those tomatoes there. I'll put them in the greenhouse. And we've also got the sweet corn as well, which is looking a bit yellow and sorry for itself. That desperately needs to be planted. So we're planting that up. Coming down here, there's also some cobra beans which are ready for planting. So I'll be putting them in the polytunnel if I've got time. And the second lot of seeds that I sowed last time, which didn't germinate in the first batch, have germinated well. So I'll be potting them up into individual plant pots ready for going outside in probably a few weeks' time. So I'll give you a quick tour of the polytunnel. To say it's absolutely roasting at the moment, even though the tunnel's doors are open. There's a nice through draft. It's 22 degrees, but in the sun it feels really hot. And with this humidity, it really does feel warm. So looking forward here, we've got a few seedlings of tree spinach, but you can see they're a bit stunted. As I said in a previous video, I've been using my own garden compost, but it's a bit low in nitrogen. So everything's been a bit stunted this year. I think I need to start adding a bit more pure nitrogen feed to the compost to make it grow better. This is an example. It's a self-seeded one, and there's a lot of self-seeding in the garden, which I'll show you later. It's not supposed to be in this pot. This is supposed to be a tuberous begonia, which with the amount of weeds, you can't really see it. But as you can see, this is really starting to grow well. Much better soil. So going forwards, the strawberries are looking great. We've got some really good set on the fruit. On the ones here are looking quite lost. Not quite as much fruit, but if I turn around and show you the ones down here, you can see all those fruits starting to ripen up. So I'll probably give these a tomato feed today just to make sure they got plenty of potassium, and that'll just help the strawberries grow better and ripen up nicely. So really good strawberry crop. Quite happy with that. Going forwards, we've got the leeks. They're not quite ready for going out yet, but they're almost big enough. This bat's second bat will need a few more weeks. The sunflowers, they desperately need planted. I should have planted them a little while ago. So I'll probably be planting them today if I've got time. Same with the kohlrabi. These are the kohlrabi here. They're ready to go out. You can see the leaves are going a little bit purple. That's partly because it's a purple variety, but also there's a little bit of stress on some of these plants. It's probably getting a bit hot in here for them now. So these will be going out if I can. Also, you can see here lots of other sunflowers that need to be put out. And we've got various other brassicas like kale and cauliflower. They're also at perfect stage for now planting in the garden. So if the soil's prepared, they need to go out in the next week or two. And then I'll give you guys a quick update on the polytunnel beds. You can see there's a few empty patches. So the empty patches I'll be planting up today. This lettuce has been cropping amazingly. It's probably been feeding about six people a day because we've had a few visitors over and I've been eating it, my parents have been eating it. So there's been like, I've been having almost a bowl of lettuce every day. My parents have probably been having about two bowls of lettuce. So constantly cropping really heavily. This will keep cropping well for another couple of weeks and then it'll probably go to seed with the higher temperatures. Coming along to the rocket section, this is where the rocket wasn't germinating very well and it was a bit slow to get going. But now you can see it's basically a full patch of rocket. It's looking really nice. So we're harvesting this quite readily now. Again, this won't last too long. I think there's one that's already starting to get a flower, you can see there. So we need to harvest this as quickly as we can because rocket, once it gets warm, goes to seed and then that's the end of the rocket patch. So we'll be harvesting this soon. And this whole bed will be planted up probably within two or three weeks with more tropical plants. Now, when it comes to the middle bed, that's still empty, just a few weeds. What I'm going to do in this video is weed it, pull back all the mulch and plant this up. So at the end, we'll probably have some taller plants so they don't sit anything behind them. Something like the cobra beans or the melons. Then further forward, we'll have some slightly shorter, but they're still very tall. And they'll be the sweetcorn. So we put the sweetcorn in the middle bed to get the extra height. The problem is if we put them in the side bed, the tassels on the top where the male pollen is touches the top of the polytunnel, it gets very wet. The pollen then doesn't spread down to the rest of the plants and we don't get very good set on the cobs and we don't get very good pollination. So we tend to put them in the middle and they seem to pollinate quite well there. So they'll be going in today, hopefully. Further along, we've got the frog pond. I'm here in the morning, so they're all trying to warm up at the moment. And you can see, this is their favorite spot in the morning because it's really sunny and they just kind of sit there sunbathing. There's probably, I think, six of them there at the moment. Hopefully you can see all six. Some of them are kind of hiding. But certainly a lot of frogs and they've been doing the job pretty well this year. There seems to be a lot less slugs in the polytunnel. So what we're going to do is we're actually, at some point, going to make a pond outside as well. So these frogs never really venture outside, probably because there's no pond. We'll put a pond outside, hopefully increase our frog number there because they've done such a good job in the polytunnel. It would be nice if they could do a similar job outside in the garden and we get some more protection against slugs and snails. So coming around to this bed, this is looking pretty good. It's a little bit congested at the moment, but we have been cropping a lot of radishes out of here, really long radishes that look like carrots, long white radishes. You can kind of see one here. It's sticking out the ground a bit, but it's probably about three quarters or maybe even more underground. So there's a lot more than it looks like in that small bit of radish there. There's also purple top Milan turnips, which are just starting to fatten up. You can see they're always a bit later. That's some down there. They will be ready probably in another two or three weeks. So they will be harvested. And then what we'll be left with is lots of lettuce plants in this patch. These are the individually harvested lettuce. They're the ones that form the heads. You can see this one already. It's starting to curl over and form a head. So they'll just be large individual lettuce. Not quite as heavy cropping as a cotton come again lettuce, but these are nicer, crispier texture. So just for a bit of variety, we'll have a different lettuce in here. Coming along, as I say, it's all looks very overgrown. This section here, once it gets thinned out a bit more, we'll have a lot more beetroot coming on. Now, hopefully we haven't smothered them too much with all these other plants. We do need to thin this out a bit more because I'm a bit worried that we might not get a beetroot harvest if these don't get thinned out a bit more, but we'll see how the beetroot do. And it's a similar story with the spring onions. They are coming along nicely. The ones that aren't smothered, you can see some decent sized plants there. And along here, this is just a stray strawberry plant. We didn't even plant this one. It just kind of popped up. They do spread quite readily in this polytunnel with the runners in autumn. Down here, there is a lot of spring onions as well. You can see under there, but they're looking a bit pale because they're a bit smothered at the moment. So hopefully these turnips will thicken up soon and we'll harvest them. You can see they're just starting to thicken up, but if we can harvest them soon, then we can get a bit more space for the spring onions and also the beetroot. And then down the end here again, we've got that Ansetti banana and then lots and lots of strawberries. So that's about it for the polytunnel for now. I'll now give you a quick tour outside and show you how the outside garden's looking. So it's hard to believe when you see what the weather's like now. We did actually have torrential rain this morning, only about half an hour ago. And now it's cleared up, beautiful blue sky, but everything's really wet. And you can see, it really shows off how nice our soil is now. When the soil's wet, you can really see how dark it is. This soil was already quite good when we arrived, but it just needs a lot more organic matter added to it. And so it's now a really nice dark soil, really good texture, lots of organic matter. So it's a little bit sandy, but it's really nice rich soil. So everything does grow quite nicely in our garden now that we've amended it. This section is gonna be the brassica section. We're still adding some more compost and cardboard just to add organic matter and feed. And I'll just give you a very quick tour so that the video doesn't get too long. I'll just show you how some of the plants are doing. So you can see here, we've got the onions. The onions have really taken off with this rain and this warmer weather. They're leafing up really nicely. So these ones, we planted at the correct time of year. The other ones were a bit late this year. So you can see they're a lot smaller. And one interesting thing in this patch is we had the tree spinach round about this section. It self-seeded last year and it's pretty much covered the whole vegetable patch. So this area has already been weeded out. We've taken out all the tree spinach from here. There's a few nice opium poppies in the middle here. We just grow them for ornamental reasons. So if they self-seed, we tend to let one or two grow because they're really nice. I'll show you some pictures of ones from last year. They just add a bit of color to the vegetable plot. There's also some honesty plants which have self-seeded. So even though I've grown lots from seed, we're actually just gonna leave them because they're gonna look quite nice. But as I say, all these weeds here, they're pretty much all the tree spinach seedlings. You can see it's just an absolute carpet of them coming up there. So we'll probably leave one or two or we'll transplant them to a better location. But nearly all of this needs to be weeded out. Otherwise it'll be a forest of tree spinach and we won't get any onions. On the left, we've also got the garlic here which is looking quite good. Some of it's a bit stunted, I'm not sure why, but most of it's growing quite well. So we should get a good crop of garlic. This section here, we're doing a bit of an experimental plot this year. This was potatoes last year. This year we're gonna go for Jerusalem artichokes under-planted with pumpkins. And so we've got a few Jerusalem artichokes just coming up. Basically, we just cover the whole plot in cardboard and then grass clippings. It just keeps the weeds down. It makes it very minimal when it comes to weeding. And it looks like we might have one or two potatoes coming up. It would be best for crop rotation to remove these, but we might leave them this year because we've not had too many issues with the potatoes so far. And we will be crop rotating it further. And then on the left, we've got the legumes. So we've got peas and beans. So we've got the peas here, which I planted Susan showed you recently. These are looking pretty good. These weren't too stunted by the wind or anything. Sometimes these get badly hit by the wind, but they're all growing quite nicely. So I think we'll probably get a first pea harvest in about two or three weeks' time. And we've also put some of that Japanese mustard in the middle there as a salad crop. And we're planting more of that out in the garden here and there. But I will also be sowing directs with some seeds of lettuce because the lettuce, it's gonna be too hot for the lettuce in the polytunnel now. So it's now the season for growing it outdoors. And as well as peas and beans, this is where we also put some of our root vegetables just because we don't really have space in any of the other beds and we don't need a whole section devoted to peas and beans. So the parsnips will be in this corner here. And I think we have carrots. The carrots aren't sown yet. They'll be in that corner. But there is parsnips in this section. And then this is, as I say, the runner bean support. I'll be sowing these seeds soon. You really have to wait with runner beans in this climate. You have to wait until about June or maybe even mid June before you really plant them outside because the ground is so cold. They just sit there and they get stunted. And if they get stunted, they don't really take off even when the weather does warm up. So we'll be planting them out much later in the year. But once they get going, they grow so quickly, they will easily cover this whole section by the end of summer and we'll still get a good harvest. And then on this side here, we've got the broad beans. These were the ones I sowed in the previous video where they were a bit leggy because I'd left them too long before planting. So what I had to do is cut the tops off to prevent wind damage. And so what you can see is happening now is there's lots of new shoots coming from the base. And that's what I was hoping for. When you cut the top of them, they normally shoot up from the base. So these are looking all right. There's a little bit of rust on some of them, which is a bit of a pain. You can see there, that kind of orangey rust. We have had quite a bit of rain recently. Hopefully as the temperatures warm up, we maybe get a bit more drier weather. Hopefully that rust resolves itself and we don't lose the crop, but they're looking okay. They're starting to recover nicely now. So I'm hoping they'll be fine. And then we've got the greenhouse as well. Now the greenhouse, we have fixed this side. We still need to fix the back. There's still some missing panes. So at the moment, it's not really quite warm enough for the tomatoes, but we do really want to plant the tomatoes in here. What we've done is we just covered the ground in cardboard and seaweed to try and keep down the weeds for now. But we need to fill in these missing panes here. And then we can plant this up with tomatoes. This will be the main tomato area. Basically we had a lot of blight building up every year in the main polytunnel. So this year we're not going to grow any tomatoes in there. We're just going to grow them in the greenhouse and prevent the cycle of blight every year. So we're planting this up soon. Maybe not this video, but hopefully in the next video. And you can see here, this is our lemon verbena. This always grows massive and we have to cut it back every year. It wouldn't grow outside very well in our climate, but in the greenhouse, it does well. Normally this would be quite green and bushy by now, but because the greenhouse glass is missing, you can see it's only just starting to re-sprout and it's a little bit slow going. But if you like lemon flavored things, this is probably one of the most intensely lemon flavored plants I know of. It really smells and tastes like lemon syrup, but it's a really kind of tangy, citrusy lemon taste. Really quite an unusual flavor. So this is me now getting the greenhouse ready for planting. First of all, I've taken off all the old mulch and then I'm just putting a layer of our own garden compost on the soil. So it's ready for digging in to increase the organic matter of the soil. Now what I'm doing is just making sure that compost is evenly spread out throughout the surface. And then I'm going to cover the surface with some bloodfish and bone, which is a slow release organic fertilizer. And then some wood ash, just to make sure it doesn't get too acidic and make sure there's plenty of potassium and phosphorus in the soil. And now what I'm doing is I'm just digging into the soil to make sure it's well worked in and mixed around. So now that the ground's nicely dug over, I'm just raking it over nice and flat. I'm then sowing some coriander seeds, which I then throw into the ground with the rake. And then I very quickly plant it up with the tomato plants. So this next scene is in the polytunnel. It's a pretty similar process. They go ahead, they clear all the mulch. There's also quite a few weeds in here which they also need to clear. And then it's just a case of doing the same again, putting a layer of compost, layer of bloodfish and bone and ash, digging it well into the ground, making sure that it's well distributed throughout the whole soil. So there's not any parts that are too rich in feed, areas that are really poor in feed. And then I'm just going to rake it over again, make sure it's nice and level. I do change the level slightly here because it tends to sink occasionally in one side and not the other. So let's rake it over a bit, make sure it's nice and level. And then again, it's ready for planting up. So at the far end there, I've built a framework for the melons to climb up on, and then I'm planting out the melons. And then for the rest of the bed, it's sweetcorn that I'm planting with the exception of the end closest to the camera where I'm putting a few cucumber plants as well. And I don't capture on this time-lapse, but I also put the mulch back onto most of the bed to make sure the weeds are kept down. So next I'm going to go into another section which I'll be planting up with chillies and sweet peppers. Again, it's a very similar process. Weeding it, compost, bloodfish and bone, and ash. And then I'm just planting out the peppers. And then later on, I also put on some dwarf beans just to fill in the gaps because the peppers take a little while to get established. Now this next scene is outside in the Brassica plot. So I quickly hoe off the weeds, make sure there's no weeds on the plot. I use the bloodfish and bone like previously, but my dad has also already enriched this with seaweed and has already put down the wood ash, which is why you don't see me putting any wood ash down. And then I'm just planting it up quickly with kohlrabi, which will be a very fast maturing Brassica plant, which will give us a crop quite early in the season. So that's everything now planted up. Now looking at the beds, we still have quite a lot of empty space. And unfortunately, there wasn't enough peppers grown this year for me to fill the rest of the beds. So I'm going to have to think about what I'm going to fill the rest of the beds with. I might go for dwarf beans or maybe something like courgettes. I need to have a look at what I can plant at this time of year and decide what to fill the beds up with. But I'll show you what I have planted so far. So over here on the right hand side, I put all the dwarf chilies. So there's five dwarf chilies here. These are Apache chilies. They only grow about a foot in height and they don't even grow a foot in width, but these do crop very heavily and they're very small, spicy chilies. So one plant is normally enough for one person. And because they're small, I've put them really quite close together. At the back, we've got a couple of larger chilies as well. They grow about two or three foot tall. So they'll fill up that whole space at the back. You can see this is a couple of days later than when I planted them up. So you can see the lettuce is really shot up, desperately needs harvesting. Further along here, the rocket's doing well also. And then this section is a mixture of sweet peppers and chilies. So the three at the front that look a bit yellow, they're chilies. And all the other ones at the back are sweet peppers. These will give a nice crop in this area. I've also put in some dwarf beans as well, just to fill the space. They won't grow too big and they'll give us a crop of beans before the peppers get to their full size. They really do crop quite early and quickly. Then we've also got the butternut squash there. I forgot to show you, but there was also a butternut squash right next to the chilies at the far end. That's the plant just down there. The idea is we put one at each end, we grow them both towards each other. And at the end of the season, they take a while to get to their full size, but they do grow quickly. And all the beds at the bottom will be full of butternut squash leaves. And the peppers and the chilies will be a little bit taller than that, apart from the dwarf ones. So we do have to be careful with the dwarf chilies. But all the other ones will be taller than the butternut squash and we get a really nice late harvest of butternut squash. It's the same here with the central bed. We've got the melons at the end and I put up this support for them to climb up. Now this won't be big enough. So what we'll probably do is we'll probably trail them over some of the rafters here of the polytunnel. This is what some of these sticks were for last year. So we'll probably do that again. It just depends how tall the sweet corn gets. Normally the sweet corn gets a bit tall. So it depends on the time of year as well. So if it comes to late in the year and the sweet corn's finished and we've harvested it, I will grow the melons up and over the sweet corn or even use the sweet corn as a support for the melons because it can grow through there. Although if the melons get to the top of the trellis before the sweet corn's ready, what I'll do is I'll probably trail it over this way and over that way over there to make sure that it still has somewhere to grow but it won't be shading anything out. Only thing it will be shading is this far corner and also the pond, which is probably a good thing because that will keep the algae down in the water. So in the middle here is all the sweet corn. I've mulched it. I will be trying to mulch all the beds later on. It just helps a lot with the weeds and it also keeps the moisture in. And as the mulch rots down, it adds a lot more organic matter to the soil and feeds the worms and the microbes. And down here, what I've done is I've planted up a lot of dwarf beans. So you can, it's a bit more difficult to see where the mulch is. There are some dwarf beans in there. Dwarf beans here are much more obvious where it hasn't been mulched. So again, the sweet corn will take a little while to get to its full size. That will just give us a little crop before the sweet corn's ready. And then over in this section, we've got another butternut squash that will grow that way. There's another butternut squash at the base of the four melon plants down there. And then we've got two cucumber plants. So these are okay for now, but they will need support as well. So I'll be doing something very similar to what I did with the melons at that side. And I'll be creating some kind of support for these to climb up. And then the last parts that I've planted up in the polytunnel here are the cobra beans. The cobra beans are a type of climbing French bean. Although they do crop well in our climate outside, they like a little bit warmer conditions to runner beans. So we tend to grow runner beans outside and we grow our French beans indoors in the polytunnel. And these get really good crop. We get massive crop from these. Really fast, vigorous growing plants. So that's an example. I think it was about three days ago I planted these and none of them had any of these shoots coming up. It was just the original leaves. And you can see that one there has already grown probably 10, 15 centimeters. So again, I would need to put some supports in for them, let them grow up something. And then as for the other beds, I'll probably be planting up with courgettes and other plants as the season progresses. But that's all for the polytunnel for now. Next update I'll show you, depending on the weather, we should have phenomenal growth. At this time of year, once we get long days and warmer temperatures, things really do start to grow very, very fast here in the polytunnel. So go to the greenhouse now and show you that. So this is the greenhouse. And I had wanted to plant this up a little bit earlier, but we had to fix the glass in the greenhouse because all the panes had come out. And that's why some of these tomatoes are looking a little bit leggy. Normally I would have had them a little bit shorter when I plant them. A bit more like the ones down here, but the other ones just grew a bit too quickly and didn't have the ground prepared in time. So that's why they're looking like they are. But they should do well in here. We normally get a decent crop. I have planted them a bit closer than normal this year. What I'm going to try and do is normally most years we get a little bit too much leaf and not enough fruit set. What tends to happen is we don't pollinate them enough. And so they don't set enough fruit. And so all the energy goes into leaves and stems instead of into fruits. So what I'm going to be doing this year is I'm just planting them a little bit closer together. That will restrict the amount of nutrients they get. I'll also be giving them plenty of high potassium feed. So it encourages fruiting and doesn't encourage shoot growth. And what I'll be doing is I'll be making sure they're well pollinated either by opening the door more regularly to let bumblebees in to pollinate them, but also trying to shake the plants every morning to try and get them to self-pollinate. With tomatoes, if you shake the plants, that's enough and they can self-pollinate themselves. But without any kind of shaking, the pollen can't transfer from the male part of the flower to the female part. So you do need to give it a little bit of assistance. So we will be doing that. And I'll also be putting up more string. You can see this is a string from last year's crop. You basically just wrap the tomatoes around the twine and then they kind of support themselves. They just need a little bit of support to keep them going. They're fine at the moment, but once they get a bit taller, they will need some sort of support. They're a bit like a rambling vine. So they're not true climbers, but they do need support. And in the wild, they would just kind of crawl through other plants and use other plants as support, or they would flop over onto the ground and set root and just keep growing. So we do need to give them a little bit of support, especially when they start to crop and the fruit gets heavy, they will fall over. So they'll definitely be putting in more string to support them later on in the season. That's the tomatoes for now. They're looking quite good. As long as the weather doesn't drop too much, they should be fine. The coldest in the forecast, I think it's about seven or eight degrees here in this location. So they should be okay. Here in the greenhouse, it was kept slightly warmer. If we do get some colder nights, what I might do is put some of the water bottles around the plants. That just absorbs a bit of heat during the day, lets it out at night. We also have a couple of big black containers, which are full of water to store some heat. And there's also a row of plastic containers in the back full of water to store the heat. But the heat storage capacity in here isn't massive. It's not like the polytunnel where it has the active ventilation system to circulate the warmth. In here, it doesn't work quite as well. So we'll see how it does, but I should think that we're late enough in the season that these shouldn't get too much cold stunting. And you can tell that they were definitely ready for planting because the lower leaves are looking a little bit yellow. So what we should notice is all the newer leaves now that they're in the ground and the roots get established, all the newer leaves will be dark green and the plant will look a lot healthier. And it might take a little while for these to get rapid growth because the ground in here is still quite cold. Unlike the polytunnel, which has that fan system to warm up the ground, this doesn't have that. And also it has only been glazed for about three or four days. So the soil here is very similar to the soil temperature outside, which is probably around 10 degrees at the moment. So I'm expecting slow growth to begin with, and then these should really take off in a few weeks once the ground is warmed up. So that's all for this update. I'll see you guys in the next update where I'll be getting the brassica plot ready and planting out more Jerusalem artichokes.