JUNE 2023 ALLOTMENT GARDEN TOUR / ALLOTMENT GARDENING FOR BEGINNERS

Good morning everyone, welcome to my allotment garden here in South London. My name is Emma, these are my allotment diaries. I would love for you to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow along on my allotment journey. In today's video I'm going to be doing a June allotment plot tour. So it's the end of June, I thought it was a perfect time to show you around my allotment plot. I've also had quite a few new subscribers and I wanted to show you my plot as it is right now in detail and hopefully I'll answer a lot of your questions and you can have a good old look at it and see everything that's growing. So let's get on with the tour. So here's a little overview of my allotment garden. It's based in South London and it's 135 square metres. They don't measure them in rods where I am, we do square metres over here. I have lots of raised beds and I try to utilise my up space as well so I have lots of archways and structures for growing plants up. I also have a pink shed which is probably one of my favourite things on the allotment and gets a lot of use so I definitely recommend getting a shed if you are allowed one. So here at the front of my allotment plot I've got two brassica beds. So this is one big brassica bed here and this is a slightly smaller one there that used to be my strawberry patch and now it's a brassica bed. So the reason why my brassica is at the front of my plot is because it gets more shade than anywhere else on my plot. That's also why my shed is at the same end as well, same reason I get a lot of shade at the front of my plot so I just thought it's best to put the brassicas in the shed in the shady area. Brassicas can handle a bit of shade and they seem to be doing really well there. So both of my brassica structures are made using blue water piping so this blue stuff is blue water piping. You buy it in a big roll and I've chopped it up and basically made a structure out of it. It's covered in butterfly nets so this is a butterfly net from B&Q which is doing quite a good job at keeping them out and on my other one this white net is insecto net which is a biodegradable net very environmentally friendly it does really good job at keeping out the frost it still lets in the rain still lets in some airflow but it keeps out those pesky butterflies and that's how I made my brassica cages. You can find a more detailed video on how I made these out of blue water piping on my youtube channel so go and hit the subscribe button and have a look through my back catalogue. This is my double pumpkin archway so I am growing some jack belittles baby boos and some french beans over the top of this archway. So my archways are from amazon I've brought two and then I've stuck them together basically using some garden mesh and wire and string and bamboo canes and anything else that I could find just to basically hold them up and hold them together. The pumpkins are really happily climbing up the garden mesh here because they send out tendrils so they can hold on and also you can see some of my french beans also pulling themselves up really really happily and here is the other side as well so we've got the two jack belittles really great little climbers which are just doing amazingly this year and then we've got the french beans in the middle who are really pulling themselves up it's going to be amazing. Around the outside of this one I have a giant pumpkin here I have a few weeds as well I'm hoping that he's going to spill over onto the pathway and then I planted some borage around and in this on this side of the archway I've got two giant sunflowers this one is doing absolutely incredible amazing I don't think I've ever grown one this big before and then I've got like a triple quadruple headed one just here underneath I think I've scattered some different seedlings no idea what they are who who knows we'll find out we've got a few nasturtium plants which aren't doing too good and also my favourite flower which is the french marigolds really good for pest control as well so over here we have a bed full of broad beans which are all being harvested at the moment I've also got a few nasturtiums in this bed as well I built a structure for french beans which are growing up here just a really simple structure again you can find it in another youtube video that I've done and they are happily climbing away all of my raised beds are built using old pieces of wood that I found so scaffold boards old floor boards bits of wood that I found lying around the pathways in the allotment plot no one was using old fence posts things like that so they're all a bit rickety they're all held together very loosely but they just give my plot that little bit of structure that I really like and I like the way that they look I mean in an ideal world I would pay and buy absolutely beautiful absolutely beautiful perfect raised beds but I don't have the money I don't think it's right to spend that kind of money on an allotment garden and these are just doing a fine job they're just doing good in fact in this bed here I've actually started to take off some of the raised bed sides and because I found that slugs and snails were just hiding under them so I've left this one here which just gives me that structure where the path is but other than that this this whole bed here's got no sides anymore and it's just doing fine it's doing absolutely fine so it's a bit of a mash-up this bed we've got our calendula flowers coming up just along the row here I've got some cosmos then we've got potatoes which is being a little bit infiltrated by the beautiful Californian poppies I don't mind that that's absolutely fine the bees love it and they're coming and pollinating all of my potato plants as well I don't know what that means but they're welcome to it and then if you come along here we've got more wildflowers so Californian poppies cosmos plant there then we've sort of got a bit of a dead space because this is under a tree so it's really hard to grow anything here and I have whacked in a couple of courgette plants which hopefully will survive but well time will time will tell so like I said before and as you can see I like to grow in raised beds because I think it gives more structure in this raised bed here I've got things like perpetual spinach rainbow chard purple sprouting broccoli sweet corn and even some runner beans I am a big fan of building my own structures and I've got lots of videos on these I like to use natural materials because I think it just looks better and also I don't have to buy them then so they're completely free building structures is probably one of my favorite allotment plot jobs so the end of my allotment plot is probably one of my favorite areas until the pumpkin archway gets going that is as soon as the pumpkins grow that's my favorite that's it but until then this is my favorite so this is my kind of flower area where I just whack in as many flowers as I can so behind me there I've got the corn flowers which um it's the first time I've ever grown them they've done amazingly I'm so happy with them and then I have this archway here which I filled up with sweet pea flowers and that's taken off as well they are beautiful beautiful flowers the only thing is that I'm getting so many I can't keep up with picking them all but I think that's probably a good a good problem to have so welcome to my polytunnel as this is my second polytunnel no my third polytunnel because the first two blew away in a storm um and I lost them forever no idea where they ended up um this is my second year of having this one and luckily it stayed put because I've really pushed it into the ground so in here I grow things like tomatoes peppers um kohlrabi I've got a bit of kale and a couple of cauliflowers I love my polytunnel it's not doing as well this year not doing as well as it did last year um I think that's because I've just neglected it a little bit I've been focusing out there instead of in there but I love having it because it enables you to grow crops in the autumn winter time as well crops that maybe you couldn't get away with in the ground I'm definitely going to put my Christmas potatoes in the polytunnel this year and hopefully it will keep the frost off of them and if I keep them all covered I might get some Xmas potatoes this year so that would be really exciting I would recommend getting a polytunnel so my polytunnel was four meters by four meters I brought it from B&Q in the sale so it was only 50 pounds I think it was reduced probably from closer to a hundred they are definitely worth having if you have the space for them on your allotment plot um they enable you to grow so much more and they're just a great thing to have I really enjoy my polytunnel particularly in the winter time when you need somewhere to do a wee if you haven't weed in your polytunnel are you even an allotment gardener that's what I want to know so now I'm going to show you an area of my allotment plot that I don't normally show you in my vlogs or on camera I think it's an area that most of us probably have somewhere in our allotment plot and if you have it you're not alone you're not the only one just because I hide this area a lot doesn't mean it doesn't exist like it's here guys and it's terrible and I am deeply ashamed of it but I just there's always a part of your plot that you just don't know what to do with or you just can't manage properly and hopefully next year I'll get on top of this but for now it looks like this yep that's right this little patch here is still part of my allotment plot um I have chopped it all back a little bit to try and keep it under control you can see I've got some ground sheets along there trying to keep it down a little bit there is a compost area there somewhere I do store my wall barrier here as well because I just think everyone I think it's abandoned no one will take it there but as you can see it's all very very overgrown and I just don't know what to do with it it's also under these lovely trees which means it's completely shaded here most of the time so really hard to grow anything here what I've done is I've tried to make a little pathway so I am sort of attempting to dig into this area a little bit and do something with it but there we go there's just a little reality check this is the back of my allotment plot that's what it looks like do I like it no am I happy with it no do I want it to stay like that no of course I don't but I don't know what to do with it and that's just what it looks like so this is my little wildlife pond I say little I mean it really is quite small it is a bit of a struggle to keep it topped up in hot weather because it does the water level does go down really really quickly I planted lots of wildflowers around it and lots of hiding places for wildlife are there any frogs no but I have seen a come and drink from it and there have been birds in here too so I'm taking that as a massive win this year more wildlife than ever it's used in my wildlife pond I think it's really important to think about wildlife at an allotment plot so if you have room and you're allowed to put in a small wildlife pond it's definitely definitely worth it and if you look after it properly it can be really beautiful too so I hope you enjoyed my allotment plot tour today if you have do subscribe to my channel leave me a comment below leave me a thumbs up and let me know that you like these kind of videos if I haven't answered one of your questions leave it below in the in the comments and I will get to it and I will answer your questions have a lovely gardening weekend and I will see you next time thanks for watching bye