SHOULD I HAVE PULLED THIS UP?! / ALLOTMENT GARDENING FOR BEGINNERS

[Music] morning guys welcome back to my allotment plot here in South London my name is Emma these are the allotment Diaries I'd love for you to subscribe to the YouTube channel uh if you're not already so you don't miss any of my lovely allotment videos that I put up three times a week right I have a bone to pick with one of you out there cuz somebody somebody left me a comment saying and I quote Oh Emma it's so sweet that you think there's an actual spider season don't you know that spiders are out all year round all the time yes yes I do know they're out all the time but there is a spider season and the spider season has begun and anybody who says otherwise is very clearly not afraid of spiders because if you have a spider phobia like I do I think it's what is it Arachnophobia oh I can't even say the word givs me heart palpitation just saying that word but if you do have a fear of them you will know that this time of year this is when all the spiders start making their webs across everything because I walked through about four webs this morning that just made across Pathways they all for some reason just come out of this time of year and the big ones in my house have been out I found two tarantula sized absolutely vile just horrible horrible creatures and I'm not no I I wouldn't kill spiders I've never killed a spider well I have that's a complete lie I have killed a spider before but I try not to you know I do try to remove them because they're still creatures and stuff and they do something for the planet I don't know what they do scare me usually but yeah they they all come out this time of year and they all just you know it is spider season is is my point it's the point I'm trying to make I've completely lost to my trail of thought but yeah it is spider season cuz I keep bleeding walking into them don't I and that's the bone I had to pick right is the pumpkin still alive that's the big question of the morning yes it is it's sitting on there and now you know what I did not do I did not put something soft under it and it's sort getting cut into with this which is very annoying cuz it's a very big heavy pumpkin um also I seem to have another one but it's sort of hanging don't know what to do about that it's not I mean I didn't realize it grow this big should I Loop it back on itself maybe actually maybe I have to Loop that back on itself right okay there's lots of flowers too right oh hello oh it's the bird hang on a sec all right hang on a second then you got to just be a little bit more patient cuz I'm going to freak out and I'm going to throw it right now it's yours now yes there you are good boy going in going in I don't think it's Einstein you know I think it's too small to be Einstein I think it's one of Einstein's babies you know and I think potentially Einstein has passed on his wisdom that this is a safe place and this is a feeding station and now this new Robin is just like really comfortable to come here cuz he looks smaller and younger than Einstein unless Einstein's just had some surgery done or something I don't know I don't know [Music] spider season see spider webs everywhere right can you see that he's got a little blanket on him now um so that this sort of wire mesh won't sort of push into him and give him like little ridges and grooves and stuff which could make him rot could it be that all the bees are out just pollinated yeah they are yeah they are loads of bees here they love this one look it's loads of them oh my God there's actually hundreds of bees oh my God is this a bees nest or something why is there so many bees is it normal to have that many bees in one flower there's like six of them that's crazy bees are like buses you wait months and months for a couple and then six come at once [Music] [Applause] [Music] right so done a little bit of a weed little bit of hoing little bit tidying up everywhere now at the back of the plot here somewhere somewhere I planted some more main crop potatoes um oh here they are not looking the best this was one of those weird sort of miscellaneous beds where I didn't quite know what to put in it and if in doubt I always say whacking potatoes because potatoes are not only great you know for like getting a crop out of but they're also really good at like breaking up the soil so if you've got a brand new bed and you put potatoes in it just helps with the soil really but as you can see the plants they've not done fantastic so I'm not I'm not expecting a lot from them but I think what I'm going to do is pull them all up clean this bed up and then have a think about what I'm going to do here next year cuz this this bed here just didn't sort of work really it's sort of a nothingness bed know love pulling up potatoes you never know what you're going to get it's like a box of chocolates isn't it unless you read the label and then you know exactly what you're going to get never quite understood that saying like a box of chocolates I'm a label reader me right let's get these up that's about what I was expecting actually okay cool oh my God it's actually one oh know there they are there they are okay not too bad not too bad all right we'll take those right next potato plant here ooh very nice very nice potato problem is there's so many weeds it's just real little dinky one lovely more luck over here this looks like a potato plant doesn't it right come on in up you come absolutely nothing oh hang on there we go a potato cool another one and I'm not going to lie this is not a great potato Harvest is it this is not great oh no this is what we have so far which I'm not going to it's not bad you know what it's not bad but that's sort of what I would expect from one plant not four so what we're going to do is we're going to [Music] dig oh no right through him first thing I do right through a bleeding potato oh darn [Music] [Music] it there's one [Music] [Music] okay so as sort of half expected to be honest not the biggest potato Harvest from this bed what I've done is I've cleared the bed now and we're going to shut it down for the Autumn time what that means is the next time I come I'm going to lay down a load of cardboard over that bed top it up with some compost and leave it over the Autumn winter I'm not going to cover it with any tarping or anything because I just don't like to cover my beds I quite like them to kind of be exposed to the elements somebody did tell me a very long time ago that if you don't cover your beds over the Autumn winter it's actually really good for the soil it's something to do with them like frosting over and then like unresting and then having like all the elements like the rain come down into the soil and everything it's just supposed to be good and obviously it's easier and looks a bit prettier than covering it with tarping but if you want to do that I mean there are tons and tons of people at my alotment site here who come with their plots with um ground sheet or top Walling whatever you want to call it over the Autumn winter and in the springtime they just pull it away there's no weeds underneath they can just start planting straight into it helps to heat up the soil earlier so it's like it it's up to you basically there's so many do this or don't do this in gardening But ultimately it is up to you you do what you feel comfortable with soil is soil Gardens are Gardens so you just you do you Glen Coco you do you [Music] so these down here and I haven't spoken about these for a very long time these are my past nips I saw the same variety every single year and I cannot remember what they are but they're big ones basically big big parsnips and I absolutely love sewing them I sewed them from a seed in February this is what they're looking like now September so thing about parsnips and also this this is also for Sprouts and broccoli and other kind of brassas as well if they Frost over and it gets very very cold in the garden they actually taste sweeter this is because they turn their starch inside them into sugar when it gets cold in order to protect themselves it's like a um an inbuilt antifreeze that the plant has so it turns all its starch to sugar then we pick it and eat it and obviously sugar is really sweet and so it sweetens the vegetable that's the one thing that I know about parsnips now if you do want to pick your parsnips before the frost which I think you probably could now I mean they do look I'm we're going to pull one up in a minute and see if it's ready what you can do is you can freeze it in your freezer straight away put it straight in the freezer and it will do the same thing it will turn it starch into sugar and then when you go to cook it it will sweeten the vegetable and it will taste sweeter that's something that I just sort of learned and picked up along the way of my gardening knowledge also the same is for Sprouts as well so if you pick your Sprouts before the first Frost put them in the freezer and they will turn the starch to sugar you get sweeter tasting Sprouts if you like that if you don't want it sweet don't do that obviously just eat it right what we're going to do is we're going to pull up one of the parsnips and see how they're doing because I've sort of neglected them this is how well plants do when I completely neglect them guys maybe I should learn a lesson here and just neglect all of them always a good idea just to pull up one of your plants if you're not sure what's going on under the ground and it gives you an indication of what all the others are doing as well so let's get him up right the trick to get a pass knit up is to push down and then pull up that's not going to work oh no absolute disaster right that's definitely not what you want to happen when you try and pull a pass knit up oh no how on Earth do I even attempt to get that out we're going to should we dig him out maybe we should dig him out now oh mate you are stuck in there right this is not a tutorial on how to get a pass net up because this is so wrong this has not gone right oh that's a surprise we got the whole blatant thing out I don't know how we managed that but we got the whole thing out okay good I mean he's very small so he's obviously not ready yet I like him to be a bit bigger than this but he's looking good he looks like a very nice par snip so there we go oh I tell you what the smell of a fresh par snip is just reminds me of Christmas I always had these at Christmas time oh lovely [Music] the white fly this year I've never had so much white fly before on any of my plants it literally looks like it's snowing I was just going to say they're dropping off like flies they are flies they're white flies I don't know how much damage white fly can do the only good thing is there are look at that there are other bugs eating the white fly I just had a little look at my Sprout plants cuz they're covered in white fly as well but but they're still alive and I've got these little green aphid things on them these little green things I think are eating the white fly so you know like when you leave a bug and it becomes too much of a bug look there's another one there when you leave a bug you know something comes along and eats them something's like oh yeah that's dinner it's all about sort of trusting the process but you do lose a a few plants in the process you know you will lose a few right I'm thinking trying to put my sensible Gardener's head on I I think this really does just need to be covered with something and I think maybe I'll use the netting from the other one because it's a bit bigger put smaller netting on that one I think I think it needs something on it so what we'll do is we'll do the old Switcheroo trick the old switcheroo [Music] quickly quickly queue every single butterfly in the vicinity quickly laying their eggs on my uncovered crops like quick quick quick [Music] quick good [Music] right there we go I mean it's it's quite late cuz we've already got white fly and everything in it but hopefully that deters anything else from getting in there might even stops and slugs and snils I don't know I don't know if I've made it tight enough and then on this one over here I've had to use two different materials so I have used the and they're both from andom at home and garden this is insecto net which you can see is a very fine net it stops butterflies and everything from getting in still allows the wind in and the air flow and the rain and everything the one next to it this is fleece because I ran out of net um you can see it's just a different material it's like a translucent sort of fleece basically and that will stop any Frost as well which we're not worried about right now but it will also stop the um butterflies getting in and any insects so it's got two on doesn't look quite as pretty as it did before but they're covered and it does the job [Music] thank you for all your feedback on the allotment planner it's going to be released in October I've had quite a lot of feedback of people saying that the only thing that they really didn't need in the planner was the daily planning sections so the Monday to Sunday um daily planning sections they said that the boxes were a bit small and they just didn't use it and that in in its place it would be more useful to have like a journal note taking section section where they can just jot down anything so I think what I'm going to do is take the planning out so the the weekly Monday to Sunday planning out of it and instead I'm going to put some lined sort of Journal paper and I might like label it like week one week two week three week four and then it's just kind of you're free just to jot down any notes anything that you want to I think it might be a bit better the idea of the planner is to kind of make allotment life feel easier but I guess if you're feeling like you're planning dayto day maybe it can be a bit stressful some people especially if you can't complete it on that day and then you feel like you sort of failed you know so I really appreciate your feedback on that thank you so much and really hope to create a planner that's going to really inspire you and motivate you and keep you on top of your allotments for next year so stay tuned for that it will be out in October and I will be sharing a video um with the planner in detail showing you what's on each page and you know just the planner in more detail nearer the time so thank you so much for watching today I will see you again on Monday have a lovely gardening weekend bye