Join Me As I Try To Grow Enough Food For My Family For A Year Spring Fruit Garden Tour

Hello and welcome to Gardening at 58 North. So this is another update video on my series about trying to feed my family for a year. So it's the middle of April now. I'd like to give you a quick overview of how things are doing. In this video, I'd like to focus more on the fruit side of the garden and give you an introduction to the fruit production area and just how it's doing at the moment. Spring's quite a nice time. It's when all the blossoms in and it's looking quite nice at the moment. So first of all, this isn't really fruit. It's more technically a vegetable, but you eat it like fruit. This is the rhubarb patch. It's just coming out of dormancy now. It does tend to be one of the earlier plants that comes up and even a bit of frost doesn't seem to harm it. So that's the rhubarb patch. I normally feed that with a high nitrogen feed to encourage really large, big leaves. And then we can eat the stems as rhubarb. And once the plants are a bit more established, these are still not that old, these plants. What we might start doing is putting a bucket over one of them and forcing the stems extra long so we get that extra long succulent stems. At the moment, we're just cropping them selectively because they're not very big mature plants, but you should see later in the summer, they do get quite big leaves and they are relatively well established now. And then along here, we have a huge number of raspberries. The raspberries start at this corner and they go down probably about 10 or 15 meters of raspberries and these are autumn cropping raspberries. So what you would normally do with an autumn cropping raspberries, you cut all the stems down to the ground in winter. It grows up in summer and then flowers in autumn and you get a really late crop of raspberries. If you prune them like you would a summer fruiting raspberry, where you take out the two year old stems and leave the one year old stems, what it does is it gets a double crop. So it doesn't crop quite as heavy in autumn, but because we've got so many here, if we just had one crop a year, it would just be far too many at one small period of time. So we actually double crop them. And what happens here is last year in autumn, as you grew out the new stems, these were last year's stems, they grew up and you can see some old fruits here. So we had an autumn crop of raspberries. This is last year's stems. And what they will do now is put out lots of new shoots and you can see they're already starting to flower really quite early in the year. And these will be ready for harvesting June, July time. So we'll get a crop in June, July, quite a really, really quite a big crop of raspberries. And then when the new stems come up, the new stems will do a crop around about probably September, October, but it can last into November, December sometimes if it's not too hard, the frost, not too windy. So we get a nice long season of raspberries. It's a massive patch of them as well. So these do really nicely and they can grow up over two meters in height. You can see this one is here, it's quite a tall one. They do well here. And as they're woodland plants, they don't mind a little bit of shade and shelter from the willows. The willows will grow much bigger over the summer. I cut down every other willow every two years. So every year we cut them back, but they're still on a two-year rotation. So you can see here, these are the ones that cut down this winter and these are the ones I'll leave to grow this year and they'll be cut down next year. So we're going on a two-year rotation. So this will be a lot fuller, a lot shadier later in the summer, but the raspberries don't mind a bit of shade. They really are woodland plants. So they'll still crop quite well. The other side of the garden behind me is all the vegetable section, production area. This is more like an ornamental part of the garden. So we've got like lounges, got a chalet. We've got borders, mixed borders of herbaceous and shrubs and lots of flowers as well. And then just a large section of lawn. But as part of the ornamental garden, we've also got what we call the woodland garden or the orchard. And that's this section here where we get a lot of fruit trees. And this eventually, my plan is to make it into a woodland area. So it will be really quite full of trees. The trees will get much bigger, shade out the ground. And then I'm going to have a real mixture of different woodland plants to give year-round flowering. If you're very careful with your woodland planting, you can actually have flowers nearly year-round in the woodland area. Spring will always be the best, but you can pretty much have year-round flowering. So this is probably one of the best times of year to show it. I might give you a quick update later this year when the apples are also in flower, but I'd like to show you now when the spring bulbs are in flower because later on they'll be finished when the apples are coming into bloom. So I'll give you a quick tour of the apples. We've got four apples in total, a small one we just planted here, two larger ones there where you can see the tree rings. We've got a cherry in the background. There's a small apple at the back, which I'll show you as well. We've got a damson there. And this, we don't really know what it is. It's either a damson or a plum. It's never fruited for us. It came with the garden, but we'll find out one year when it does fruit properly for the damson or a plum. I think it's more of a damson, just the way it's growing. And we also have some fruit bushes. So we have some red currants and we have some gooseberries as well. I'll just give you a tour around the garden. So this section here, as I say, eventually will become a lot shadier and we'll have a lot more woodland type plants. The most recent addition are these primulas here, or more correctly called polyanthus. These are the cultivated variety with numerous bright colors. And you can see there's quite a few dotted around there. I'm probably going to increase the number of primroses in here. So as I say, these are the polyanthus, more like the cultivated bright colored ones. I'll probably put some more native primroses in here, maybe some cowslips as well. And that will just make it a bit more natural. Dotted in here this year, so as I'll be making an update video on once they actually flower, are camassia. So there's some camassias here. There's probably about 12 of them. You can see a tall one round about there. And we've got a couple more coming here. These are really late flowering spring bulbs, probably May, June time. They come up with lots of leaves at first and then they grow really tall, probably a meter in height and they'll be covered in nice flowers right at the end of the spring flowering season. So once all the other spring flowers are finished, they'll be coming into their own. Now we did also have a lot of crocuses here. Crocuses will finish, so there's not much to sow, but I can always show you some photos from previous years. Now we could do, we'd put in some more crocuses in. You can see there's a few here and they're just dotted around. There's also some other early flowering bulbs. But at the moment, what's looking the best is probably the fritillaria. So these are the snakehead fritillaries. These are dotted around. These do quite well in damp meadows, but even though we've got sandy soil, they're still doing quite well here. And they've got that lovely kind of checkerboard pattern. They come up each year and they seem to be doing quite well. We've also got quite a few grape hyacinths. I didn't purposely plant too many, but grape hyacinths always become a bit invasive and take over anyway. So I suspect the grape hyacinths will take over a lot more of this. And then we've also got some, probably some hybrid or Spanish bluebells, I don't think they're native bluebells, dotted in here. I haven't planted them and I keep removing the flowers whenever they flower because the problem with bluebells, especially if it's the hybrid type or the Spanish type, is they just take over everything. And this whole thing has been covered in bluebells and we won't have much variation in flowers. So I'll be taking them out when I can. You can see here, this is the original clump. This was only probably one or two bulbs a few years ago, but now it's a massive clump of bluebells and it will look great later on in the season, but it does take over everything. So we're gonna try and reduce the number of bluebells so that we do actually still have a nice selection of different flowers. We've also got some nice little blue ones down here. I'll put on the name, I can't remember off the top of my head what they're called. But there's a real good selection of flowers, some daffodils as well, and some tulips right down at the bottom of the tree there. Although tulips, to be honest, aren't great in a woodland garden because they need a lot more bright sunshine later in the year when the trees are in flower. What you want for a woodland garden is either woodland plants or you want spring flowering plants because a lot of the spring bulbs, what they do is they have their leaves up before the leaves are out on the trees and before it's shady. So in a woodland garden, you get a lot of sun over winter and early spring and then come mid to late spring and summertime, you get deep shade. So if the plant has its life cycle earlier on in the year and its leaves are dying back by summer, then it should do quite well in a woodland garden, even if it isn't a woodland plant naturally. What we'll be doing is we'll be increasing a lot more bulbs in this area. At the moment, it's really just this kind of narrow strip down here. We're gonna expand it to the whole area eventually and put a lot more woodland plants in. But for now, we're not putting too many in until we get some more shade in the canopy and it becomes more like a woodland environment because at the moment, it's still a bit open and exposed for most woodland plants. So when it comes to the trees, I say there's a dams in here, which is just starting to come into flower. It's quite a young one. So it's not doing a huge amount at the moment and it does need thinning. You can see the wind has damaged the top a few times and it's a bit messy. This one over here, I have pruned a lot in the past. This year is probably the best year it's ever flowered. You can see a lot of buds. It hasn't got many open at the moment. It does look like there'll be a lot of flowers later on in spring. So hopefully, if this doesn't get blasted by the wind, we'll get a good crop on that. Coming down here, I think these are red currants or black currants. We've got a couple of different ones. I can't remember the exact color they are until they start fruiting. We've got some currants there. Coming along, this is a contorted hazel that I had in my garden. And this does produce hazelnuts. So that'll be kind of a nut tree. We've got another currant here. Along here, we have a flowering cherry, which we will be getting rid of this year. This has been here since my parents moved in about eight or nine years ago. And it's actually shrinking every year. It gets smaller and smaller. Basically, you can see all these dead branches. Every winter, it loses more branches than it regrows in the previous summer. So this has actually been shrinking over the years. So we'll be taking this out. We've given it as much chance as it can have. It's just never really done well. I don't think it likes the climate here or maybe it's too exposed. So although we get these really beautiful blooms and it does look really nice, we will have to probably remove this and replace it with something that does better in this climate. So coming around, what we've also got here is an edible cherry. So this one, this is probably the best flowering it's had so far. I would like it to actually flower a little bit less and put more growth into actual stems and get a bigger tree because it has been a little bit slow in growing since we planted it. You can see the number of flowers is just a bit crazy, especially when you look up there, all those flower buds coming on. It's just going a bit mad for flowering. And I want it to put a bit more energy into leaves and stems because although it will crop quite well this year, the eventual size will be slowed down. I want it to get to a bigger tree so it can get a bigger crop in the future instead of having a heavy crop right now. So this one might have a slightly stunting rootstock. I can't remember off the top of my head what kind of one we went for, but most of these apples that we've got here, especially these two apples, that one over there and in the corner, we didn't put on a dwarfing rootstock. They're quite a vigorous rootstock because we want large apple trees as it's a large space. And I'll show you another apple in a minute, which is on a dwarfing rootstock, which has really stayed small. The problem with a dwarfing rootstock is you need to keep them watered if it's dry and they don't like grass around the roots. You can see even the ones that are on a strong rootstock, we have actually mulched them because the grass is a bit vigorous. It takes up a lot of the moisture and also the nutrients from the soil and it'll stunt any trees that you have. So we are building more. We need to build another tree ring around this one. We did have one around here last year, but the grass and weeds have started to grow in. So I need to redo that probably next winter, but we're trying to keep the grass suppressed at the moment. And one way we do that is we use a parasitic plant called yellow rattle. So probably about five years ago, I bought some yellow rattle seed. I sowed it in autumn and a few came up in this corner over here. They've been slowly spreading throughout. You can actually just about make out what they've been doing to the grass. So what yellow rattle does is it has its roots and they go into the roots of the grass and it parasitizes it. It takes out water and nutrients from the grass, which weakens the grass and strengthens itself. So the good thing with yellow rattle is it only parasitizes grasses. So what that means is the grasses get weakened. And normally what happens with lawns and grassy areas is the grass dominates, especially if it's rich soil, which our soil is quite rich. It will dominate everything. And it means any other plants that try and grow in the grassy area will be outcompeted by the grass, even trees sometimes can be outcompeted. So you need to really weaken the grass. So what the yellow rattle does in weakening the grass is allow the other plants to grow through and you get a lot more biodiversity in your lawn. So I don't know if it shows up in the camera, but there's kind of a yellowy grassy area here. This is where there's the most yellow rattle and the grass you can see is maybe a little bit shorter. Over here, it's less yellow and a bit more lush. That's because there's a huge amount of yellow rattle over here, which has just germinated and it's starting to weaken the grass already. So I can show you here, this is probably one of the richest areas for it. You can see all these little seedlings coming up. This is the yellow rattle plant and that's really starting to suppress the grass. You can see where there's really dense areas of yellow rattle, there's very little grass at all. It's really outcompeting it. And also, if you look over to where the yellow rattle is growing where there isn't any grass, the yellow rattle is a bit yellow. It isn't looking as happy because it hasn't got any grass to feed off of. And so it doesn't grow as well without that grass. So it's really rich here. Loads of it over there, but every year I scatter the seeds a bit further. And even though there isn't many in this area, when you look closely, there are actually quite nice healthy plants just coming up from underneath the grass. You can see some there. So that really helps to just increase the biodiversity of the area. Another interesting plant we've got here is a Cardiocrinum giganteum or giant Himalayan lily. It's a bit exposed here for it. It would do a lot better in a woodland garden, but it did survive last year. And this year it's actually going to flower. What it does is it grows for about three to five years as a small plant. Every year it gets a bigger and bigger bulb. It builds its bulb up until it's big enough to flower. It will then shoot up probably about two meters in height, sometimes three meters in height. They're really big flowering. Lily's the biggest in the world. They're putting out 40 to 50 massive white vanilla scented flowers. And then the main bulb will die at the end of the year. But as you can see, there's already some small young bulbs coming up from the side. So although the main bulb will die, it'll have a few daughter bulbs come off the side and then they will grow for three to five years, slowly building up their strength until they're big enough to flower. And then the cycle just continues. So that's going to flower this year. It'll be really exciting to see how that looks. It will be quite a sight. We'll have to see if it gets destroyed by the wind because it could be quite windy in this site. Hopefully once the trees leaf up and the willow leafs up a bit more, it'll be sheltered enough. It is a relatively sheltered spot once everything's in leaf. And hopefully it doesn't grow up too quickly that it's tall before the leaves come out. So I'm hoping this will survive any of the winds. And a couple of other plants we've put in here is we've put three hostas. So there's one there, there's one here in that clearing and one over there. There's not much to see at the moment. And the shoots are only just coming up. Hostas are quite a bit unusual. What they do is they sit there dormant for quite a long time in spring and you might see a few buds and they don't seem to be doing anything. And then within about a week or two, they'll grow to their full size and then they'll sit there all summer with their leaves and they won't grow much more. They'll just put a few flowers out later on in the summer. When they do come up, they come up really fast, almost overnight. And then they're just gonna sit there. But they do look quite empty for a while. But these will come up and shade some of the grass. These are great woodland plants. As long as you can keep the slugs away from them, they will do quite well. So they'll be coming up later on. And I will be putting more perennial woodland plants in here as the years go by and we get a bit more shelter from the trees. And coming along here, we've got a small apple tree. This is a good example of what happens if you get a severe dwarfing rootstock. So these are probably some of the most popular types of apples at the moment. Basically when it comes to apples, it doesn't matter what variety of apple you have. Whatever you graft the plant onto determines its eventual size. So what happens with most apples is you choose a variety you want. You then graft it onto a rootstock. The rootstock is a different plant. It's still an apple, but depending on the rootstock depends how strong the root system is. So the stronger the root system, the bigger the plant will be. But most people want an apple tree in a small garden that will crop heavy. So they'll go for a really dwarfing rootstock like M27. And what that does is it keeps the plant really small. It restricts the amount of nutrients and water it cannot take from its roots. So what it does is it thinks it's a mature tree. It doesn't really put any growth into getting any larger and it puts all its energy into fruiting and flowering. So you can see this one, for example, it's got loads of flowers coming on it. Every single branch is coming into flowers. It's not coming into growth. So with apple trees, you tend to get a few shoots which flower and a few shoots which turn into growth and become stems and leaves. But with a dwarfing rootstock, it'll pretty much stay this size for its whole life. It'll get to its optimum size, which this one is at at the moment, and it won't grow any larger. It'll just fruit loads every year. So I'll show you some pictures now of how many apples this can actually crop. And you can get a huge amount of apples in a small space. But if you have got more space, you're better going for a stronger rootstock so you can get bigger overall crops. Because although this looks amazing and it's going to have loads of apples and it's not growing any shoots and putting all its energy into apples, if you had a larger plant, when they eventually get to their full size, they'll also crop almost as heavy as this. So this is perfect if you have a really small space, but if you've got a larger space, it's normally better to go for a slightly bit more vigorous rootstock. So going on, we've got a few more currants down here. And in this corner, we've got some gooseberries. So we've got gooseberries on the right there. We've got some gooseberries on the left as well. And then we've got a comfrey patch also. We don't tend to eat the comfrey. The comfrey is more just as a fertilizer and as a mulch. So you can use this as a fertilizer. If you soak it in water, it kind of rots down, becomes a nice organic, natural liquid feed. It's also great for the bees. This grows right up over the height of the wall, almost two meters in height. It's very vigorous. Whenever we're cutting new beds, we end up with loads of spare turf. So we've made this turf wall just to kind of contain it, to stop it spreading too much. Now, some of it is escaping. So we do try and cut that back every year, but that's just to keep it contained. The main advantage with comfrey is it has a massive tap root, which goes down at two or three meters in depth. It gets really deep. It then taps into the nutrients low down in the ground, which most plants can't obtain. It brings all that nutrients up to the surface, puts it in its leaves, and then harvests its leaves and use that as fertilizer. But because it has such a deep tap root, if you plant it somewhere, make sure you never want to have anything else growing in that spot. Because the root is so big and has so much energy stored in it, it's almost impossible to eradicate this plant once it's in the ground. It is possible, but it is very difficult. So make sure you really carefully choose where you put a comfrey plant and keep it contained. And if you can, try and get one of the hybrid ones that don't set seed. If you have ones that set seed and then they spread the seeds everywhere, it can be a real nightmare to keep under control. So try and get a sterile hybrid. And it is quite a useful plant to have in the garden. Just bear in mind that you need to have it somewhere that you don't mind if it's going to be there forever. So coming around, we've got nice paracanthra just for berries for the birds and nice flowers in spring. And then we've got a lovage plant here. We used to have two lovage. Now this is a really nice tasting herb. It goes really well in soups. This will grow absolutely huge. We used to have two of these, but it was just too big. These are really monstrous plants. So this only started sprouting, I think probably only two or three weeks ago, but you can already see it's actually a meter in height. So it's already massive. And once this plant puts on its flowers, which grow about three meters in height, it'll be right up there in the sky, a huge plant. So if you do grow lovage, bear in mind, it is a monster. You might buy it as a small nine centimeter plant. Within two or three years, it'll be three meters high when it's flowering. A really big plant. So we've reduced that down to the one of them now instead of two. And even this one's enormous. So at some point, we'll probably need to start taking off sets from it and shrinking the size of it before it gets too big. It is a nice flavored herb, but it is just a monster. So I'll probably give you guys an update in summer to show you how tall the flowers are. And it's always quite popular with bees and wasps. In fact, even though it's not flowering at the moment, there does seem to be a wasp resting on it at the moment, probably sunbathing as it's quite a cold day. So then over here, we also have another current. This one's kind of dying. I need to do a bit of remedial work on this. Basically, there's a bit too much grass around its roots and it needs a bit of a feed and a regenerative prune. So I might do an update on that at some point. But that's pretty much the woodland garden. And this is where we get a lot of fruits. As I say, it's mainly apples and cherries. Cherries are starting to come with the flower. Apple are just starting to bud. And this apple is a good example of what I was talking about where you have shoots that flower and shoots that grow. So the flowering ones tend to come out earlier. You can see they're coming out here. They don't put on much growth. These are last year's flowering shoots. They're also called spurs. So if I show you this, for example, this one here, the spurs from last year, they only grow about a centimeter or two every year. They flower, they fruit, and they don't put any more growth on. But if you get a growing shoot like this one here, this has actually grown a foot. So this is the height of it now. Last spring, it would have been down at this height. And looking at this tree, you can tell by the buds that have burst and ones that haven't burst that this is gonna have a lot of growing points. So this is a much more vigorous root system. This plant is still trying to get to its eventual size. Once it gets to its maximum size, it will crop much more heavily. It will slow down its growth. And it'll be like that small, dwarfing rootstock at the back there where it will just be putting on lots of flowers and not really getting any larger. But until it gets to its final size, this will actually crop a lot less apples than a plant that is on a dwarfing rootstock. And it's the same with this one over here. This one is a little bit bigger though, so it's getting a bit closer to maturity. And because of that, you can see there is quite a few more fruiting spurs on it. But again, you've got these long shoots coming up. So it's growing a foot or two each year, trying to get to its eventual size. And then it'll be a really heavy cropper once that finally comes. So as part of this video, I'd also like to give you an update on the polytunnel and how everything is growing in here. So I'm going to be sowing a few more seeds today. So mainly the ones I'm sowing, it was too cold to sow earlier or they've not really germinated properly. So if I look down here, you can see Brussels sprouts, red cabbage and ammy have not really germinated at all. Also red cabbage and green cabbage, not really had any germination. So I'll be redoing them. I'll also be pulling out a few of these. We've got things like the tree spinach here. It's the plant that I really like the color of. As you can see, you get a really gorgeous kind of purpley pink color on the new growth. This is now big enough that I can transplant that into individual pots. So I'll be doing that in this video. What I'll also be doing is I'll be planting out these plants here. So to replace the ones that haven't grown, I'll be sowing a couple of different cabbages. This looks like a red cabbage, but I think it's actually a green cabbage. We've got a red cabbage there and we've got a giant cabbage I'm going to try this year as well. And some more cauliflower because the cauliflower didn't do too well. So I'll be sowing them. When it comes to Brussels sprouts, it looks like I might need to get some more seeds. So those will be just to replace the ones that didn't germinate this season. I'll hopefully fill the space that they should have been growing in with a fast maturing plant, probably like a salad crop or kohlrabi. Kohlrabi is quite a quick cropping Brassica because we've missed the season a bit on that. But I'll still be planting these later, just a bit later than normal. And although they won't get quite as big this year, we should still get a crop come autumn. And the other plants I'll be sowing is some more sweet corn. So we don't have a massive lot of sweet corn. We already have quite a few plants growing, but I wanna sow them every few weeks so that we have a crop throughout the season instead of just a massive crop all at once. And then in the polytunnel here, the temperature is just starting to get warm enough that I can probably start thinking about putting tropical plants out soon. We've had some particularly warm weather recently outside, about 17, 18 degrees for a few of the days, which to be honest is like mid-summer temperatures. It should be much colder here in April. It should be more like 10 or 12 degrees. So it's been remarkably warm. And that's meant that here in the polytunnel, it's been about 20 or 30 degrees and the soil is starting to warm up now. So, and what I'm going to do is not plant these directly in the ground yet because it'll probably still be too cold, but I've got a couple of dwarf beans which will be going in the bottom of the beds. And I've also got some cobra beans which will be climbing up a structure. So I'll be sowing them. So I'll give you a quick tour of the polytunnel. Everything grows amazingly fast here. Outside, nothing's really happening still. It's just starting to wake up in the outside garden, but it's still a little bit cold. So looking at the tropicals, these are the ones you saw last week, the tomatoes, these are growing really well now. Since they've been transplanted into bigger pots, they've really taken off. They've been warm enough inside this enclosure with the heater at the bottom that they've been doing well. Also, the sweetcorn's looking pretty nice. This will be ready for planting really quite soon. Once we get a bit later in the year, probably May, I'll then plant them in the beds. Even though it's warm at the moment, we can still get a cold spell in late April, even early May. So I want to wait just a little bit longer just to make sure and make sure the ground is warm. So going forwards, another part of the fruit is the strawberries. So we've got loads of strawberries here. As you can see, they're covered in flowers as well. So these will be cropping quite early. We do have a few strawberries outside so we can have a later crop around July, August. These ones should crop probably June, July. As I'm talking, you'll probably see various frogs jumping around as well. They've all come out of their kind of dormant kind of hibernation period. I don't think they fully hibernate, but you see a lot less of them in winter. So you'll probably see quite a few frogs hopping around. We've got at least 11 or 12 at the moment in this polytunnel. And we've also got some more strawberries on this side as well, which are growing quite well, loads of flowers. So it looks like we'll get a really nice strawberry crop this year. They do crop very heavily. Strawberries seem to do really well in Scotland, especially if you give them a little bit of extra heat with polytunnels, they do crop very well. And there is actually quite a big commercial scene further south in Scotland for strawberries. So looking at the crops here, the lettuce has done phenomenal this year. There really hasn't been too many slug issues. I think because of all the extra frogs we've got at the moment, the frog numbers are getting really good. And so they seem to be keeping on top of the slugs. We also have slug traps, but slug traps aren't actually catching too many slugs at the moment because I think the frogs are doing a pretty good job. So we've been harvesting a huge amount of lettuce, probably enough for four to six people to have a small bowl of lettuce every day. It doesn't look like a big area and it's not huge. It's probably only a meter and a half by about 50 centimeters. But because it's so warm, the soil is really high in nitrogen. It's a very rich soil. And because we've got decent day lengths at the moment, we're having quite long days. Now it's April. This is growing phenomenally fast. And as the cut and come again crop, you've pretty much got unlimited lettuce at the moment. So we're cropping this regularly. This will keep going for another month or so until it gets too hot in here and then it will all go to seed. And we'll then have to have the cut and come lettuce outside in the garden in cooler temperatures. So on the left here, we've got a lot of the seedlings. I think I gave you an update on these. So the leeks are looking good. These leeks that I sowed in January are almost ready for going out in the garden another couple of weeks and they'll probably be planted out. The other leeks, which I sowed much later, I think I sowed them around about March time. They need probably another month or two until they're ready to go out in the garden. We've also got a lot of sunflowers that are doing well now. So I can hopefully plant these out soon. Some of them have got some rather unusual leaves. I'm not sure why, but they're looking quite good now. They were looking a bit unhappy in the last update. I think because there wasn't enough nitrogen in the soil. So I gave them a balanced feed and that's really perked them up. They're looking much better. The honesty flowers though, these are still looking pretty weak. So I'm going to give these another high nitrogen feed. I might even give them a pure nitrogen feed instead of a balanced feed to see if I can give them a kickstart because they're looking a bit weak. The kohlrabi as well is doing quite well. I might sow another crop of kohlrabi soon just so we have a successional harvest because these, once they're in the ground, grow so quick and they fatten up so fast that they'll be ready quite soon to harvest, probably only a month or two. But some of these have also died off from slugs. You can see if there's one there that's been completely eaten off by slugs. Another one there that might come back, but I'm not too sure. Even though we've got this propped up, it's harder for the slugs to get to. We've still got slug damage on them, unfortunately. So I will need to hopefully sow a few more of them to keep this harvest going. And up here, we've got some kale and other plants. Again, we have had some slug damage. These were actually in the mini greenhouse until this morning. So that's why they're looking a bit leggy. It was a bit low in light levels and high in temperature. So I've taken these out into the normal polytunnel now. They should be getting more light. They should perk up and look a bit stockier soon. And then coming into the rest of the beds, this is where some of the sweetcorn is going to go because it's a much higher bed. Because it's a polytunnel with a curved roof, we get the extra height in the middle. So that's where the sweetcorn will go. So I need to stop preparing that bed soon. At the moment, it's just mulch so that we've got a bit of organic matter working into the soil. But mainly just to keep the weeds down. So I'll need to dig some compost into this and some slow-release feed, and then plant out the sweetcorn in a few weeks' time. And then on the right here, this is starting to look quite good now. We've harvested lots of the radish. So we've been having pretty much unlimited radish, probably for enough for like four people for the last few weeks. A lot of the radish was also harvested from around about where the lettuce is. But we need to increase the harvest rate here because summer's starting to go to seed. We had a few warmer days. Another one's really quite large. Some of them are underground as long radishes. So they actually, some of them look bigger than what they look like on the surface. But underneath this radish crop here, we've got loads of rocket coming through. I need to do a little bit of weeding today because the rocket has got a lot of weeds starting to compete with it. Once the radishes are finished here, we'll have a lovely rocket crop. So we'll have some spicy leaves for our lettuce. Over here, I'll probably put some tropical plants out soon because to be honest, the perpetual spinach, it never really took off. We've got the one plant there. I don't think anything else germinated. So we'll have a little bit of perpetual spinach from that one plant. But once the radish is finished, there's not gonna be anything else to harvest. So I'll probably plant that up with something else. We've got the pond here again with numerous frogs. We don't have much frogs from this year, but we got loads of baby frogs from previous years. And as I say, they do seem to be keeping on top of all the slugs and snails a bit better this year. So hopefully as they get bigger, their appetite grows, we're gonna have even better control of the slugs and pests. Then over here at the end, we've got the Japanese mustard or Chinese cabbage, a few different names for it. I'll be planting this outside maybe today if the soil is ready. This can handle lower temperatures. So that should be okay outside. And it's got quite tough waxy leaves. So it does pretty well, even in slightly harsher conditions. So that'll be going out soon. I think that's ready. If I don't put it out now, I will need to put it into bigger pots because it's starting to get a bit starved in nitrogen. You can actually see the leaves are starting to go yellow because of that. And then over here, we got the mixed bed of lots of different plants, pretty much. We've got the radish, we've got purple top turnips, very small salad turnips, and also some lettuce. This is just the lettuce that can harvest as a whole head instead of the cut and come again lettuce. We're just about to start harvesting the radishes in this bed. You can see we've got, I think the radishes are, it's a bit hard to tell the difference between the radish and the turnip before they really start to grow up. But there's a real mixture here. You can tell once they've got the stem, the turnip down there has that kind of purple stem. The radish, I think these are white radishes in this bed. And we've got all the lettuce coming through here as well. Loads of lettuce plants. So once all the radish and turnips are harvested, we're gonna have a lot of lettuce in this bed. And then further along, we've got the beetroot bed. Now this, we definitely need to start harvesting the radish and turnip soon because it's starting to smother out the beetroot. If you saw in the last update, they were just starting to come along. You can see that that's where they are now. But I'm a bit worried they're gonna get smothered. So what we'll need to do is make sure we harvest these ones extra early. They should be ready for harvesting pretty soon. You can already see, we've got some of the long radishes starting here. They are like carrots. So they will be a lot, there's probably about two or three times deeper than what you can see there. Maybe even more. These are the long carrot-like radishes in this bed. And then at the end here, we've got the spring onions. This isn't as overcrowded with plants, but the problem with the spring onions is they do take a while to get going, even though they are early, quick maturing plants. You can see, got a few spring onions there, but we've got loads of radishes coming up. So we'll get these radishes harvested soon. So you can see, they really do have very long, deep tap roots, this variety. So we'll get these radishes harvested soon. That'll free up some space for the spring onions. Makes it come on nicely and give us a good crop. So that's all the seeds now sown. Hopefully it doesn't steam up too much on the camera, but it's quite hot and humid in here at the moment. So I've done a few more sweet corns. They're just in here. The rest of this I showed earlier in the video. And then going forwards, I've got quite a few more plants sown down here. So these are dwarf beans and also French climbing beans, a variety called Cobra. And I've also separated out the tree spinach here. You can see it's not looking too happy at the moment. It's been transplanted, but that should perk up in the next few days. And then we also harvested a few of the radishes as well. So I'll probably see you guys in a few weeks time. At that stage, I'll hopefully be planting out some more plants into the outside garden. And depending on how these beds are looking and how the temperature's looking in the weather forecast, I might also be planting out some of the tropical plants, such as the peppers and maybe some sweet corn as well.