September Allotment Harvest / Homegrown Garden

Hello, welcome back to my allotment. It's now the middle of September and it is the prime harvest season. It's come to that time of the year where I'm actually in the kitchen just as much as I am on the allotment and with all the crops that I'm harvesting I'm now preserving them, freezing them, drying them and preserving them in as many different ways as I can so that I can continue to eat them throughout the winter months. I've got a lot of crops to harvest today so I thought I'd bring you along for the journey as well. I've got my main crop potatoes to harvest from those buckets, I've got all my remaining tomatoes to pick from the polytunnel, my apple tree behind me, that is absolutely covered in fruit that I need to pick today. I've also got lots of chillies and we'll see what else is ready as we go. So get your truck ready, it's time to harvest. Well now first off I want to harvest my main crop potatoes. I believe this bucket has the variety called Cara in it which is one of my absolute favourites. It makes great big baking potatoes that you can roast, mash or chip and I grow them in these 20 or 25 litre tubs that I get from my local nursery. All I put in them is one seed potato for a main crop, the compost and a little scoop of blood fish and bone to act as the fertiliser. Obviously I water them throughout the growing season. I've cut away the foliage a few weeks ago because I was a little bit worried about blight and by doing that it actually helps to toughen up the skin of the potato a little bit which means it's going to store much better in the long run. So it's time to tip out the tub and see what we've got. Well I can't see many yet, oh here we go. These are a great big size, oh my god the size of these. So it just goes to show that you really don't need to grow main crop in the ground to get some great big jacket potatoes. I mean look at these, absolutely massive. Well I'm pretty pleased with that but let's see what's in all the others. This one's another Cara. I can see a few slugs that have been lurking on the bottom of the pot. Hopefully these guys haven't caused any damage. Look at that, some more great big Cara potatoes. These are probably some of my biggest I think I've harvested from buckets before, especially that one. And one of the best things about growing your potatoes in pots is that you don't get any of that fork damage. So if you were to dig these up with a spade or a fork, quite often you'll shove your fork or tool straight through them and damage your potato, which is the worst thing that you can do. And so they come out really clean. These are generally pretty pest free and they're still a great size. I'm just overwhelmed with how much better it is for me personally on my soil to grow them in pots. We've got a little bit of scab damage and that's caused by the dry conditions. It's just a skin blemish, nothing to worry about. Still perfectly edible, still going here. What else have we got here? This is just crazy. We've got some more waffers. Oh my God. Seriously? So if anybody ever tells you that you can't grow main crop potatoes in containers, you can prove them wrong. Now when it comes to storing your main crop potatoes, you want the skin to dry out a little bit first. So some people prefer to leave them in open air just to get a little harder skin on that to help preserve the lifespan of the potato before you put it into storage. And some people like to store theirs in hessian sacks away from direct sunlight, somewhere dark and cool. For me personally, what actually worked really well for me last year is to reuse these tubs and half fill them with the spent compost and then put the potatoes back into the pots and then top it off with more of this spent compost. And what that did is it kept them cool, it kept them dark and then I just store the container somewhere in my home that doesn't get much heat or direct sun. And that worked really well for me last year. But you might also prefer just to chip them straight away and then freeze them, however you like to enjoy your potatoes. But it's safe to say that I am really, really pleased with this year's harvest. But it's nice to be out of the wind for a moment because it's turning out to be quite a breezy day out there. So I'm now in the potty tunnel, I've got all of my ripe tomatoes to pick. I'm going to leave on the ones that aren't quite ripe because fortunately for me I don't have blight and that can completely wipe out your crop in no time. So I'm really lucky, I know a lot of people up and down the country do have blight affecting their tomatoes and their potatoes. It's pretty late in the season now, the days are getting shorter and it's going to take longer for these tomatoes to ripen. But luckily for us in the UK we're having a bit of an Indian summer. It's getting quite warm despite being the middle of September, so that's really helping to ripen the last of these fruits. I particularly love to use the cherry tomatoes in chutneys. As most of you know I don't usually eat them raw unless it's in a salsa, so I do a lot of cooking with tomatoes. I'll make lots of pasta sauces with my big Amish paste varieties. I make lots of chutneys with the cherry ones. Yeah, my kitchen is going to smell like vinegar for the next few days, as I'm going to be doing a lot of preserving. But yeah, I love this time of the year, so it's time to get picking all my tomatoes and see what we've got at the end. Well I do still have a few tomatoes remaining on the plants that I'm going to leave here to ripen, so long as we don't get blight. If I get any signs of blight I'll be removing them, even if they're green and ripening them at home. But it's been a pretty good year for tomatoes. I've got quite a few kilograms here that's going to keep me busy in the kitchen over the next few days. The galena variety is a new one that I've grown this year, really impressed with it. Quite a prolific plant, gorgeous colour and flavour. Yeah, it's been a pretty good year. Next up we've got some chillies and some peppers to harvest, so if you've got a hand free I wouldn't mind because this is starting to weigh quite a lot. Now the very last thing that I'm going to harvest today is my apples. And one little tip that I have for you, if you have an apple tree or any sort of fruit tree that gives you big juicy fruits, go to your local supermarket and ask if you can have some of their cardboard packaging that they use for the shelves to store their fruits in, because these are absolutely ideal for packing, storing and transporting all of your fruit. Now I know that my fruit tree is ready because it's always ready around my birthday and if you twist and gently pull off the fruit from the tree it should really easily come away. If you're having to use any force at all then you might need to wait a little bit longer. I'm not sure if I'll get a chance to pick them all today but we'll see how far we get because it is starting to get a little bit late. Just look at it, it's such an epic harvest and I couldn't be more pleased. We've got a great mix of tomatoes, some raspberries, chillies and peppers, a huge crate of apples. I didn't get time to harvest them all so I'll be back tomorrow to get the rest. My beautiful yellow galena tomatoes with some matching yellow courgettes and of course my cara main crop potatoes. I've got plenty here to keep me busy in the kitchen over the next few days and I've still got yet more to harvest so I've got lots of beetroot and celeriac to come and of course as we go into winter there's the parsnips as well. But I don't want to be harvesting all my beetroot right now because I've got so much here to keep me busy and I don't want the produce to spoil before I have chance to preserve it. Otherwise you know you just run the risk of losing all that freshness, all that flavour and all those nutrients and we want to keep it as fresh as possible when we preserve it. So yeah I'm absolutely thrilled with my harvest today. Thank you very much for joining me, I really hope you enjoyed this video and hopefully I'll see you soon on the next one.