Join Me As I Try To Grow Enough Food For My Family For A Year Planting Peas And Beans

So hopefully you can hear me, the wind has got up again, it's quite a stormy day today. But what I'm going to be doing is getting some of these plots ready for growing. So if I take you over this side, I can show you the brassica plot or the old brassica plot and what's going to become the new onion and allium plot. Some of the brassicas here have been attacked by pigeons. We have this covered in a bit of netting. You can see here, this top bit here, the netting had blown off and you can see this is the kind of damage you get from the pigeons. The pigeons come along, they peck off all the flowers, they peck off all the leaves and it just strips it down to the bare stalks. This is what it would have looked like if it was protected and there with it not being protected, it's just stripped bare. So what I'm going to be doing in this part of the video is I'm going to be getting the area ready for the beans and peas. So this year it's going to be here. Last year it was this plot but we're rotating everything around in a four-year rotation. So this year we'll have the peas here. We also tend to have some spare salad crops and root vegetables here because we don't really have much space elsewhere for them. Because we've got the big potato plot over here and the whole lot is covered in potatoes normally so there's not enough space for other root vegetables with them. So we tend to put some of the root vegetables over with the peas and beans. So what we're doing here is we're building the wigwams. We've got this lovely tall willow over here on the side and I trim this back every year. I'll actually put a video up, a link for the video of me pruning that back when I go into a bit more detail. And what we do is we make these wigwams. These support the peas every year. They don't need to be this tall but it's just nice to have a bit of structure in the garden. The peas, they only grow up to about this height to be honest. They only grow about a meter in height. And if you're interested in how I've made them, I have made a video about these in the past and I'll link that now. Basically we tie most of the structure just with willow sticks even with the top ties there. We just wrap willow sticks around them and that gives us support for the peas to grow up. This area is pretty much done. What I do need to do is I need to rake a bit more soil across. For some reason this area has become a bit more sunken and the bit in the middle is a bit too tall. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to level the ground a little bit. I need to also rake off a lot of the mulch. We keep everything mulched when we can. We cut back on our weeding and it also helps lock in the nutrients and as the mulch rots down it also means we get a nice compost forming. So this is some of the last year's mulch and underneath you'll be able to see how beautiful and rich our soil is. It's always full of loads of worms as well. We've managed to really improve this soil over the years with seaweed and also compost. So you can see here it's now a really rich soil that we've got and as you can see there's plenty of worms under there. All of our soil is absolutely full of worms. You have to be careful not to cut them open when there's so many but as you can see it's really nice rich soil. It was originally quite sandy but now it's a really rich soil. Lots of compost and organic matter and plenty of worms and life in it. So I'll be raking back all of the mulch here levelling the soil a little bit and then I need to put in some space for the runner beans and also the broad beans. So with the broad beans they don't need much support. They are self-standing so they don't climb onto anything but with the winds here as you can see the strength of the wind we're getting today and this isn't a particularly stormy day. This is just a bit windier than average. It's not like it's not a named storm or anything so it's not terribly windy today but you can see even because we're here on an exposed section of coast it is still very windy. So this section here I will have some posts which we can tie string around just to hold the broad beans up so they don't get flattened and then for the runner beans they need support so they'll be getting some very high stakes about the height of the wigwams about two or three meters in height so they can grow up and get nice and tall and have plenty of support and because we grow a lot of them there'll be some of the biggest sections in this bed. So the idea is this whole section from down here right along to the end will be one row for the runner beans and then just to the right of that because the path is this kind of middle bit where the post is just to the right of that will be the broad beans and they don't need as much space as we don't tend to grow quite as many of them and I'll just show you the peas and bees now before I plant them out and show you how they've done. So we've currently got them here in the broken greenhouse normally this would be nice and warm and I'd start maybe hardening off some more tropical plants in here but this year the storm has broke a lot of the glass out so at the moment it's not any warmer than outside it's just a little bit more sheltered from the wind you can still see the plants are blown around the wind so it's still a windy area but it's just a bit more sheltered so I've been hardening off the peas and beans in here so I think we've got, I'll check the labels we've got munch too here on the right hand side we've got normal garden peas at the back there and we've also got a load of broad beans as well so I'll hopefully be planting all of these out today and if not today I'll be doing it the next time I'm over at my parents garden and we'll need to keep these well sheltered these desperately need to be planted out now but it's amazing that it's only been about three weeks since I planted these seeds and they've already grown up this much so phenomenal growth that's because they were in the polytunnel for two weeks the last week I've had them here just to slow down their growth and harden them off a bit so they'll be a bit better acclimatized to the outside environment and what I'll probably do soon is I'll sow another crop of peas because it looks like we could do with a few more peas for the obelisks we have there and also we like to have a succession of peas because they only crop for a couple of months and then they're finished these will be finished probably by about July time it leaves August, September without any crop but if I plant some more peas now what it means is a few weeks after these are ready we'll get another crop that'll be ready so I'll do a successional sowing of peas probably another week or two so I'll just get started now I'll clear the site, level it off a bit and then start making up the supports for the peas and beans so it's actually a few days later now I didn't have time to finish it off in that afternoon so I'm going to finish it off today but I can show you what I've done in the meantime so what I've done is I've got all the willow cuttings that I've taken off from the hybrid willow we've got over there and I'm going to use that for the runner beans so you can see they're all in the ground at the moment roughly where I want them to be what I need to do is I'll need to put a really long willow cane right over the top here to tie them all together so they stop flexing around the wind and give them some rigidity and also I need to take the height down quite a lot some of these are probably about five or six meters in height and that's too tall now the runner beans could actually grow up to that height and runner beans can grow really tall but the problem is there's no way we can harvest runner beans if they get to that height so we take them down to around about the two meter height or maybe slightly higher just within reach so that we can harvest them easily and just keeps them a bit more compact so I'll set up the time-lapse camera and show you how I do that I'll probably just be tying it up with twine it's a lot quicker and easier than using the willow sticks as we do for the the wigwams over there and my dad's also gone ahead and prepared the ground on this side I scraped this all back last week and weeded it what he's done is he likes to put a layer of compost in a deep trench beneath the broad beans just to give them some extra nutrition and moisture so he's already dug that trench filled it with compost and recovered it so this bit here is the path where you can see the two lines and then there'll be a strip down here for the broad beans and then there'll be a bit of a strange kind of triangle which we'll probably use for carrots or parsnips so I need to put up some supports here but with the broad beans they don't climb so it's just protected from the wind and then over on this side I put a couple more obelisks in my mum's tied up the willow canes to give them some support and she's already gone ahead and planted out some of the mons 2 peas so what we tend to do here because we can still get some very strong winds and the plants can get stunted and killed quite easily what we do is we put a lot of willow sticks in the ground and that's just to help diffuse the wind a bit give them just a bit of extra protection that's also why we got these planks of wood up on the side just to protect them from the southwesterly winds that can blow through so we do have the greenhouse there and the polytunnel so that side is quite protected but there's this section here where the wind can blow right through so this is just to protect them from the worst of the winds so what I'm going to do is I'm going to plant up the rest of the peas in this section here I think we've got some more mons 2 my mum didn't put out and also some normal garden peas so I'll put them out and then I'll go ahead and I'll finish tying up the runner bean supports so I've planted up the rest of the broad beans but I've left this one just to show you how I've been doing it today so basically the broad beans I've left them a little bit too long after they've germinated and so what we've got here is quite a leggy plant so that's a bit of an issue and also the roots are coming out quite long as well so I just need to be careful with the dry weather that I keep the roots covered as long as possible and don't let them dry out in the wind so what I'm doing is I'm just digging a hole I'm not taking it out of the toilet roll at all because I don't want to disturb the roots too much and the whole point of the toilet roll is that it will rot away so I'll just put it in completely with the toilet roll bury it just slightly deeper than it was originally just because I want to give it a bit of protection because it has grown quite tall and leggy the wind is really going to damage it quite a bit and because of that what I've been doing is I've been cutting off the top two leaves here that will encourage it to branch and because it's a bit shorter it'll just be a bit more resistant to the wind so normally I wouldn't like to cut the top off at this stage because I just like them to keep growing and healthily and not be stunted with any pruning but this is just to stop them from getting too battered by the winds at this early time of year and because I've let them grow a little bit too long and too tall as they're crammed close together I need to cut the top off so that they're a bit more stable to the harsher wind conditions so that's all the broad beans now planted up as you can see I've got a nice row down here I've got these stakes in here we'll just put some wires in between them probably some twine and that will just stop the wind from blowing them over too much with broad beans if you plant them close together enough they can support each other but when they're in rows like this they tend to get blown over by the wind so that's why we've got these canes they are self-supporting plants when they get taller there's a chance that they could fall over so we'll just put a few strings just to keep them contained and then for the runner bean structure this is how I've done it I've just done numerous A-frames measured to just over two meters in height I've then got two long willow canes right at the top there willow branches just to tie it all together to keep it firm and rigid and at the base of each pole we'll put one runner bean plant and that will just spiral up the willow branches the thing with runner beans is they're a spiraling plant they don't have tendrils like the peas what they do is they spiral around things so what you want is a long thin stick for them to come up and they can spiral around things as long as they're not any thicker than this it should be fine but it can spiral out fairly thick things so they shouldn't have too much issue climbing up these we might need to just encourage them when they first start to grow but once they get attached and they start spiraling around they should be pretty well attached and we'll get a nice crop of runner beans on here and now I've also done the peas over here as well these are just the garden peas I'll need to give them some sticks just to protect from the wind and also some mulch to keep the weeds down and also keep the moisture in now the peas they climb in a very different way they have these tendrils and so they're like these long whips that grow on the end of the leaves you can see one there it's very thin so it might be hard to see on the camera but these once they touch something they wrap around it and they secure to something so you can see on this plant here it's a bit like fingers that once it touches something it wraps itself around and then they just keep spiraling to tighten and it pulls the whole plant towards it and it can grab onto that and hold on but the problem with the tendrils is they don't work on very thick cane things so with these canes for example these are too thick for the tendrils to crawl around it needs to be about a pencil thickness or thinner for the tendrils of a pea shoot to work on so that's why we got these small sticks and we got these smaller sticks on the sides here as well because with peas they can't grab onto the thicker objects like you can with the runner beans so it's important to have lots of thin things for them to climb up what works really well is twine so if these are struggling later on the year I might just add a few bits of twine up here just to give them a bit more support let's say with these peas here I'll give them a good water same with the broad beans and they will probably grow quite slowly for the first few weeks they've just been moved they were in a sheltered location it's not as exposed as it is here so they're going to go into a little bit of shock they're going to slow down also the ground is a little bit cold at the moment so they're not going to grow much the next two or three weeks but once they get established and the temperatures start to rise again they should grow quite well and we'll get some really quite rapid growth from these they don't need very high temperatures to grow so even come May time I'll be expecting quite a bit of growth and with the broad beans as well because they've been cut off at the top all the energy they've got coming from the sun at the moment will be going into root growth and then it'll take a couple of weeks until they can form new buds to start on the leaf and shoot growth again in the next few updates there won't be much change with these they might even look a lot worse and there's a chance we could lose a couple we do have a few spare peas in case we lose some of the pea plants so I might have to replace them if they do die off the broad beans we don't have any replacements but I could always sow a couple extra beans just in case so that's about it for this update I'll see you guys in the next one which will just be in a week or so and that'll be about the fruit garden which is just coming into bloom it's looking quite nice at the moment with all the blossom