HUGE ALLOTMENT PLOT HARVEST! / JUNE 2022 / EMMA'S ALLOTMENT DIARIES

Morning everyone, welcome back to my allotment diaries. My name is Emma, these are my allotment diaries. It's happening right now, you are watching one. I'd love you to subscribe to my YouTube channel if you love my videos or if you just like them or if you've just found a couple and you want to watch through more of them, subscribe so you don't lose me. I've got other ways to follow me down below in the description bar as well. If you don't come from the UK you might not know but we are having a bit of a heat wave right now which means that it's just very very very hot. So I've come down just after a school run it's actually still quite hot but my plot stays shady till about 11am and then I get sun right through till like 6-7pm at night. So I do get a lot of sun in this plot but it's shady right now so it's a great time to water when it's shady because if you water in the hot sun the water evaporates very quickly from the soil so you have to kind of water and water and water again and again and again which uses up a lot of water. Also if you water in the sun and the water hits the leaves and then the sun hits the leaves you're more likely to kind of burn all the leaves kind of burn in the sun because if you imagine the water droplets you know when you get like a magnifying glass as a kid and you hold it up to the sun and it kind of burns the floor, hopefully not any ants, yeah you know how it like burns the floor it's kind of the same with water droplets on leaves so and it's really hard to like get absolutely no water on the leaves at all everyone says water you know the roots only and that is true but it is quite difficult to do that and so just when it's really really sunny make sure that you do water early in the morning early in the evening or when you've got some shade it's probably the best time so if you know that bed gets shade water it and that's exactly what I'm going to do now I'm going to water everything so let's get on with that one of those summer jobs. I think you might be quite happy to hear that all of the new salad bed that I planted out and the cauliflower and the pak choi it wasn't kohlrabi it was pak choi that I planted out which is even better than kohlrabi because I know that I actually like that one but it's all alive now it's early days and it's been very very hot so I'm not saying that I've cracked it but I do think there is something to be said about protecting the entire bed instead of just trying to protect individual plants so this entire bed is basically now like a minefield for for slugs and snails. You can see I've sort of strolched over the entire bed instead of just around individual plants so and also I hope that this strolch stuff kind of like acts as a bit of a mulch as well and keeps the moisture in for them but so far they're all still alive so excellent. Pumpkins were doing really well now and you can see the leaves are getting bigger which means they're protecting this important middle bit here if that gets eaten out they're dead basically so these are these can sort of survive a little bit of slug attack now as long as the slugs eat the big leaves and also they're getting spikier which means that they're less likely to be attacked they think this is really working for the birds as well the netting and yeah they're all alive not sure about this one this is a kikikuri it looks like it's got some flowers coming but it doesn't look like it's got very big a bit concerned about that but these ones are the jack belittles and the baby boos and they're doing great and my nasturtium has got its first flower which is fantastic so good so far so i am now starting to take off some of the lower leaves of the tomato plants um because they're not so necessary for the plant and a lot of energy goes into producing those so i'm removing some of the lower leaves um so that the plant focuses on making fruit for me and tomatoes for me i really like taking care of tomato plants i think they're one of my favorite plants and i don't say that lightly because i like a lot of plants do you know i mean i think it's something to do with the fact that i used to find them quite complicated when i read up about how to grow them and you know you've got a pinch of all the suckers and everything and you've got to remove the lower leaves and they've got blight problems and all this i got a little bit panicky about them but once you've sort of like got your head around a few of the rules and you sort of know it off by heart they're really enjoyable to look after i love coming in here and just like sitting here and just pinching out all the suckers and and knowing that i know what sucker is now and why it has to go off um i just find them really fun i'm really excited to get some tomatoes this year because i didn't get any last year and this year i've got flowers everywhere and i've got some tomatoes already on a vine i mean i'm the happiest allotment ever if i can get two or three tomatoes i will be amazed of course i am still just learning and i don't always get it right so for instance i saw this one here and thought this is quite a bushy plant you see here that's a sucker but he's grown and i've missed him and he's grown into pretty much a new tomato plant and he's actually got flowers coming on him and you know what i'm going to do i'm going to leave that i'm going to leave that sucker in and keep removing any of the other ones and i'm just going to allow him to do that because i've got loads of plants and it seems a shame to remove this and get rid of the flowers and i know that he'll sort of i have to remove those if i'm going to plant him on so i'm going to leave that one and make that executive decision um as the boss of the polytunnel i can do that sort of thing but yeah i'm not an expert i do miss things sometimes i they will still grow and produce um tomatoes if you don't take the suckers off it's just that they won't give you as many um but i've got loads of plants here you can see i'm i'm surrounded by plants so i'll just leave him to get on with it but yeah they're all looking pretty good in here i'm pretty happy i like it in here the flies will like it in here too i'm not really weeding in this heat it's just too hot but i am just trying to stay on top of it a bit the other day when i came down here and i had to like do pretty much the whole plot was so disheartening and put me in such a bad mood because i just felt like i just totally got like lost control of it all so i'm just trying to stay on top of it um i've probably accidentally pulled up a few of these peas actually but i think they are sort of on the way out now these ones haven't done too well i'm not sure what the problem is with it but i thought i would just show you they will start to go like this i don't know if this is some kind of fungal disease if it's some kind of blight or what it is but the whole plant has gone like this now luckily it hasn't spread to any of the others yet so i'm going to do is remove this plant and not compost it i'm gonna get rid of it another way but yeah i don't really know what's happened to it it's just quite interesting it's not massively worrying because obviously i've got so many other healthy peas um but yeah isn't it funny how like plants can just suddenly die like this so interested in the way that it is just literally just this pea plant i just find it so strange because normally when it's something like blight or a fungal infection it spreads very very quickly so i would expect to have been pulling up like three or four plants around it but it is literally just this plant which makes me think it might be a bug or something some kind of insect i'm actually curious i'm actually going to open one of these pods up and have a look what's going on inside it i find this stuff really fascinating actually like i find it slightly more fascinating when things don't work when they die as opposed to when they do the peas look fine oh falling out everywhere the peas inside look absolutely great they look fine they look green they look healthy i don't really want to eat one just in i don't want to get sick or anything but that's so interesting how it just seems to be the pod of the pea and not the peas inside interesting don't know the mystery of the peas i knew i would get my hands on at least one strawberry this year this is my first ripe strawberry i could cry i could cry because last year i probably got like half a strawberry which was half eaten by a slug and i just chopped it in half or something i've actually managed to get myself a strawberry this is my first strawberry of the summer that i've homegrown there is nothing like eating your own grown strawberries it's nothing like the ones you buy in the shops there's nothing like it because it's not been like chilled or frozen or anything like that or like carried for a long time so it's quite warm and which makes it really sweet and also you can really taste the strawberry like it's like the most strawberry taste you'll ever taste does that make sense like like it's like when you buy in from a shop you're only getting a subtle taste of strawberry and when you grow your own it's like a full like taste of strawberry and it's just there's nothing like it no wonder the birds and slugs love them so much i don't really blame them they are delicious right sort of accidentally ended up with quite a bumper harvest here so i've got my onions and garlic i've got my strawberries i've got all my broad beans and i've got an entire pot load of peas um which are mange 2 peas which this is like incredible this harvest considering i was sitting here the other day saying like the plot's gone to crap and i'm not going to get anything at all i mean all this produce that i've managed to pick and all these strawberries and a lot of you were saying that i should pick the strawberries just before they're ripe um and then ripen them at home so the slugs and birds don't get them so i'm going to do i'm going to try that basically yeah what a great harvest that i got today when i wasn't even expecting it so i'm going to go home and make lunch with some of that um that's really exciting it's made my day the plot is looking better now and hopefully with this nice warmer weather um things will get a bit of a growth spurt especially like the pumpkins um which are a little bit slow to start this year but hopefully now now the sun's out and stuff they'll get going um so i hope you enjoyed the vlog today if you did do subscribe to my youtube channel and i will see you in my vlog on monday have a lovely gardening weekend everyone see you then bye