PLANTING UP A MASSIVE RAISED BED! / JUNE 2022 / EMMA'S ALLOTMENT DIARIES

Good morning everyone, welcome back to my allotment diaries. My name is Emma, these are my allotment diaries. I'm keeping my voice down today because there are a lot of people here. It is about, it's going to be about 25 degrees in London so it's going to be a really hot sunny day and that's when everyone likes to come down and do all the jobs. So now I like to come down and do all my jobs as well so, oh god, knocking everything over. My shed is slowly getting messier and messier which means it's getting busier and busier at the allotment plot. I've got lots to plant out today including these lovely salad leaves which I brought over the weekend. I've got some onions to go out, a cucumber, some cauliflower which I didn't actually get around to planting out yesterday. But first of all I need to sort out a couple of crops which are flopping over. The tomatoes, the potatoes and the broad beans which all just seem to have given up on life a little bit so I've got my twine today. We're going to twine them up as best we can I think and keep them going a bit longer so that's the first job of the day. My broad beans just seem to be flip flopping, flip floppering everywhere. I'm not sure why. They've got some great blooming beans on them. I'm gonna have to pick those today but what we need to do is tie them in. I'm not sure if that strategy was the best one. I just basically tied a piece of twine around the whole bush just treating it as one big bush now. I'm not sure if that is the best way to Right so next is my potatoes which again seem to be flip floppering everywhere. I'm not sure why all the plants are being so lazy this year but unfortunately it's meant that a couple of the potatoes have been unearthed and I think it must have been the wind or something and it's just forced the potatoes up which isn't good because we don't want the potatoes to get the light while they're still growing. There's one. Oh I've lost it. Oh my god I just dropped it straight there. Where's he gone? There he is. There's one. Tiny little potato. Now it doesn't look green or anything. He's very small though but he's been unearthed and we don't really want that so I'm going to tie them back up and then earth them up a little bit with a bit more compost I think because I think they've got a bit longer in them. Right same strategy I think just because that's what we did before that's what we'll do again. It didn't work as well this time. Oh it's a little bit better. It might be all right. What I think we really want to do is earth them up a little bit more because they're not ready to harvest yet because they've not got flowers and the foliage is not dying back it's still very green and luscious it's just falling over basically under its own weight so we'll earth them up hopefully they'll just sort of be all right. I don't think they're going to take that much longer they are early potatoes so I don't think they'll take that much longer we will earth them up now. That may very well be too little too late for the potatoes and obviously I won't eat any green ones because I know they're poisonous but I've done what I've done they're looking good they're looking healthy and it's one of the only things that's actually growing well on the plot so I'm just going to do everything I can to That's them done let's move on to the polytunnel. Oh wow tomatoes are doing so well this year. They are so massive and I can see even more flowers coming on them they're absolutely huge so once again my job today is going to be to tie them in properly and then take off some of the suckers which I can see starting to grow. I'm also going to top up the compost for my little cucumbers which aren't doing too well I've got my new cucumber to come out here now so maybe he'll speed them along a little bit. I tried to replant this tomato but I don't think it's going to root. This is one of the suckers that I pulled off we'll see how he goes I don't know sometimes they come back. They are crazily strong plants tomatoes and they do sometimes just come back from the depths of death and you're just like how did that happen but we'll see we'll see. I just remembered that I brought some marigolds and I was planning on putting them around my tomatoes because marigolds deter whitefly and whitefly can destroy all your tomatoes. I don't think it's never been an issue for me at this plot whitefly but I do like marigolds and so I'm just going to plant some marigolds all around my tomatoes. Why not? So yesterday I dug up all my onions and garlic and some of them had this white stuff on it and I wasn't sure what the heck it was it looked like it rotted or something well apparently it's something called white rot and it's like a fungal disease that lives in the soil and if you get it on your onions it means that you can't grow onions or anything from the Allium family again in that spot because the fungus is still living in the bed so I think that's probably what I've got here and for that reason I'm not going to grow onions or garlic or anything like that again in this bed I'm going to move them next year to somewhere else and see if that solves the problem. It's a bit of a an annoying thing to happen but you know I was expecting it to be honest I mean these are the biggest onions I've ever got out of the plot before. A lot of people saying that I pulled them up too early I agree with you I know but I could just see that they weren't doing that well under the ground like they just didn't look that healthy so I wanted to like use the bed for something else. What I'll do is I'll hang them up somewhere else and we'll plant something else out in this bed now. Right can you see me down there? What we'll do is we'll plant out some lettuce some kohlrabi and some cauliflower we'll make it look quite pretty and we might be a bit deluded doing this because the slugs and snails are going to see it as the the feast of a lifetime but we'll whack it in anyway with a lot of hope and positivity see what comes of it. I want to do a bit of a pattern with it actually make it look quite quite pretty and then what I'll do is I'll just net the whole bed yeah let's just do it let's just go for it let's just have some faith that the slugs and snails are just all going to stay away let's just believe let's believe together. So what we've done is we've got our red lettuce in the middle surrounded by the green lettuce which should grow really big and nice then we've got our pak choy along the front and the back and then at the edges we've got our cauliflower which you imagine it being a great big cauliflower sitting along like that. We are in a deluded mood today because this is all going to be gone next time I get here but we're going to try so what I'm going to do is strut it all and put down some organic slug pellets and net it net the whole thing and we'll just see how far we get with it but at the moment it looks pretty looks pretty so there we go right strutch on last thing to do is to put the net on Emma versus net part two who will win this time it's looking good this time I'm actually finding it quite easy there we are fantastic god blimey look at that why didn't it go that easy yesterday why why you know what in terms of actually protecting my crops the second they go out this is the best I've ever done ever ever we are completely stroked up we have got a net covering absolutely everything that doesn't need to move until they get bigger I mean we are stroked and netted to within inch of all of those crops lives so if they all get eaten or get get just die I don't know what to say anymore I'm not a gardener anymore because I haven't got a clue how to protect plants if I've done all this and they still die that's it I'll throw the towel in to be honest I'll just grow everything in a pot but yeah I've got a good feeling about it and it's all planted up so job's done right I don't know if you've noticed that I'm just getting redder and redder throughout this vlog because it's so freaking hot today I've been here since half eight it's now half eleven I need to go home and have a shower I absolutely stink of sweat thank god you haven't got smell-o-vision over there I think I'm going to take these onions home and plant them in a pot in my courtyard garden and see how well they do in a little pot because now I'm a little bit worried about the old white rot situation so I'm going to try them in a pot at home and see if I can get some onions out of them as opposed to putting them anywhere else in the plot and I've got some more plug plants on their way which I've had to order I know that a lot of you said in my last vlog that you are getting really disheartened with your plots right now I really hope that you do hang in there because I feel the same every single year last year literally everything got eaten I mean everything over and over again and the only thing I could do is just keep sowing keep trying keep protecting and just keep doing it and eventually I did get my pumpkin arch and everything but I didn't get much else so I won't lie to you I didn't get much else other than pumpkins last year this year I'm just continuing to whack it in the whack it in method is like a continuous process you can't just whack stuff in and then that's it you've got keep whacking stuff in all year round I really hope you hang in there I hope that things get better for you good luck with it all if you do enjoy these vlogs I'd love for you to subscribe to my youtube channel and I will see you in my next vlog which will be on Friday see you Friday guys bye