PLANT THESE NOW!! / ALLOTMENT GARDENING UK

Good morning everyone, welcome back to my allotment diaries. My name's Emma, these are the allotment diaries. Thank you for joining me today at my allotment plot here in South London on a lovely lovely day. It's gonna be sunny, blue sky is a little bit windy but we can cope with that. It rained all last night but it's gonna be very dry and lovely today so we've come down to do a very important job which is to plant out our early potatoes, something I look forward to doing every single year. Always grow potatoes, such a great, eat my hair, such a great crop to grow, long growing, takes about three months, they just sort of take care of themselves, just great harvest. Grow potatoes basically, this is your advertisement to grow potatoes. All of my seedlings at home have been eaten by slugs and snails and so I'm really glad that I've sort of over sowed here because I might be able to take some of these plants home. I've got a lot of flowers growing here and a lot of my flowers at home that I've planted, well I've sown, all the seeds I've sown have been eaten and I love flowers and I love growing flowers every year from a seed. So I'm so glad I've got loads of germination on my sunflowers right now which is amazing. My first batch of sunflowers doing great but also down here we've got some broccoli. I kept saying these were calabrese, I don't think they are calabrese. I think calabrese is that sort of cross between a cauliflower and a broccoli but this is just broccoli. I'm actually getting some broccoli. I'm kind of thinking because it's in the greenhouse you get a slightly earlier crop of them but look, look at this, isn't it absolutely gorgeous and no damage at all to it. It looks fantastic. I've got another one over there so these are just doing really well today. I am so pleased. I don't feel quite ready to pick them today. I want them to get a bit bigger than that and so I've brought some potatoes with me to plant out and I've been chitting them on a windowsill. I'll show you what they look like when we come to plant them later. I think the birds are waiting for me so we're gonna feed the birds and then I might go and grab some more wood chip just while it's there and while I'm here I might as well go and grab a big pile of it and just dump it down on a pathway somewhere. So we'll do that first and then we'll do potatoes. Right, I think we'll start with the birdies. I can really hear them singing away. I think he's waiting for me. You're a bit early, I haven't put it down yet. Give me a second. There you go. He's probably spotted another one. So he's grabbed one quick and then he's gone. There's the other one. There he is. Oh my goodness, what a lovely day. I knew it was gonna be nice today and sunny but my gosh it is beautiful. It's not cloud, actually it's a lie, there's lots of clouds in the sky but they're very small. It's practically a clear blue sky in my eyes. This is absolutely amazing. I think it's like 11 degrees already. It's just beautiful. It's like summer. I know all the Australians watching, because there's a lot of Australians watching, will laugh when I say that, but 11 degrees at like half eight in the morning is amazing. And these chips are also amazing. So what a day to be at the allotment plot, honestly. Right, the question now is where to put it because everywhere has now got a layer of woodchip down, which is excellent. It means I can sort of spread it a little bit thinner and sort of make somewhere look nicer. Maybe I should just finish this sort of pathway or maybe do in front of the greenhouse maybe. This area here, I walk here a lot so you can see it's sort of getting very sort of battered down. So maybe it'd be worth topping up here because I can see some weeds and grass sort of growing through and that's just because I'm compacting it as I walk through it and it's creating a growing material. So yeah, I think let's just do in front of the greenhouse here. Yeah, look at that. So much better. So much better now I've done that. I think high traffic areas are going to be my priority for topping up. This is where I walk a lot and down through the archway as well, so this is where I need to be focusing on. I think it looks great. Right, potatoes, potatoes. Here are, oh, they've all fallen out. Fantastico. I had them all in an egg box. They've all fallen out on the way here, of course, but they have been sitting upright in an egg box like this on my windowsill at home. So like that, basically. And what's happened is over the last few weeks they've got chits. That's a chit, that little growing bit. Now that is the leaves and that grows up above the surface and turns into leaves and this is just a bit of a way of getting a head start on your potatoes really. You don't have to do this but I do it every year. It's quite fun, makes me feel like I'm doing something useful. What I will do, you can see there's a chit on the side as well, what I'm going to do is take that one off and just have the one so that it focuses on going up like this. So I'll look at the potatoes and I think which is the healthiest, happiest looking chit. I think it's that one. Take off the other one. Again, you don't have to do that, you can just leave them to sort it out themselves but I just I like to just, I feel like I'm helping them. You know me, I like to fuss with my plants. That one's fine. See that one there, it's got a chit either side so I just take one of the sides off so it knows where it's going basically. The variety I'm growing are Red Duke of York, First Early Potatoes. So these are really good for like salad potatoes, a potato salad and stuff. They're basically, the potatoes would be quite small like new potatoes which means that they won't store very well and so it's best to harvest them as and when you need them, when they're ready to pick and they will be a smaller variety and it's a good idea to use them pretty quickly once you've harvested them. Now if you want to grow a potato that's going to store really well, it's better to grow a main crop variety so like your Maris Piper, King Edward, Desiree, those sorts of varieties are main crop and they will store a lot better and for longer. They're also bigger so they're like your baking potatoes or your Christmas roast potatoes. These ones, early and second early varieties, they are a little bit smaller, a little bit harder to store and sort of need to be eaten fresh and they're more kind of like salad potatoes. So that's the difference, you can grow all of them. I grow all three. I grow early, second early and main crop. I just put them in at different times of the year. They take different lengths of time to come to harvest. So early potatoes are the fastest, they take about three months. Main crop take the longest, they take about four and a half months, which isn't actually that long when you think about it. None of them are really, really take that long. Another good thing about growing potatoes, I'll just say it now because it's windy outside, is that they help to break up the soil. So if you've got a bed where the soil is quite compact, if you stick in potatoes as they grow, they will help with the soil structure and to break up the soil, which I love about them. So that's another good reason to grow potatoes. There are many good reasons you should grow potatoes at your allotment. They are a fantastic crop, you get a huge harvest and not many problems with them. I think I've had some beetles once which kind of ate some of my crop, but other than that I don't really get a problem with potatoes. I haven't even really experienced blight. A lot of people do get blight with their potatoes, same way that you get blight with tomatoes. Never really experienced that, so they're quite an easy crop for me and maybe they'll be an easy crop for you too. Whack them in is what I say. Right, we're gonna go out, choose a bed, whack them in. Right, I think this is a good bed for the early. It's got really good soil in there and it is a bit shady. Potatoes can cope with a bit of shade, so we're gonna whack them in here. What I'm gonna do is make some trenches in this bed with my shovel and then I'm gonna plant them into that and leave a bit of a mound of dirt either side of them. And this is the trench method, the earthing up method, the earthing up method. If potatoes, as they're growing, reach the sunlight and sunlight hits the potato, they turn green, they turn poisonous and you can't use them. So I like to just sort of cover them over as they start growing. Make sure they're all tucked up under the ground. It's just something that I like to do. I like to make sure I can use as many of them as possible. A lot of people disagree with that and say you do not need to earth up earlies and second earlies, but I do it as a precaution. You do you, Glen Coco, always. So we'll start by making some trenches. I should have brought a hairband. What am I doing? Start about there. Dig and scoop. Dig and scoop. Dig and scoop, that's what it is. Dig and scoop. I'm just piling it up there. I'll take out the bindweed as well. Right, there we go. There's our little trenches like this and I've gone about a foot deep, but I won't be burying them a foot just yet. I'll be burying them half of that level and then using the rest of it to earth them up later on. So that's what it looks like right now. Then take our potatoes, chitz up and just place them about that far apart, so maybe a foot. That's about a foot apart, so I'll get three in each row. That looks about right to me. We want to give them enough room to get nice and big, but we can also get away with about three plants I reckon. Right, so then what we'll do, we'll cover them over, but just using half of that. Oh, there's a peg. That's really weird. Okay, we won't use the peg. Just use half of the mound that we've got there and I'm just covering them just so they're covered like that and I'll give them a little pat. Make sure they're nice and tucked up. As soon as they start to grow and they go to about that big, probably two or three inches tall, I will just cover them over again just to make sure the potatoes stay under the ground. There we go, the potatoes are in. lot about potatoes and I'm very eager to get all of that across in one video and I hope that you found it helpful if you are growing potatoes. I'm gonna go out now and do some weeding and the sun's been out so that means the weeds are out. So we're gonna do a good old weed. I am thinking next time when I come down, I think what I'm gonna do is just plant out these peas and the pea structure because they're drying out too quickly. I can't keep up with these pots. They're fantastic and they're no plastic and I love that, but I'm not here enough to keep them watered so they're just drying out. All of the cosmos that I've got in there has died because obviously there's so little, whereas if you compare that to the plastic pot, they're doing so much better. So unfortunately, I think, you know what, plastic is not the devil. If you reuse it and you don't keep throwing it away and buy new stuff, you just reuse it as many times as you can. You know, some of these pots are broken and I'm still using them. They're holding, you know, the compost okay. So as long as you keep reusing it, I don't think it's the end of the world, but it is a bit frustrating because I really wanted to use these in like egg boxes as well, but I just can't. They just dry out too fast. Right, let's get out and do some weeding, I think. So the last time that I was here, I think in the last vlog, I sowed my parsnips in this bed and the second that I stopped vlogging and I went to leave, I saw a cat sitting in the bed digging, doing a poo and then burying it, which was not very convenient, seeing as I'd literally just sown all my parsnips. So I've done my best to cover over the bed. I've got some garden mesh down here. Unfortunately, I did find another poo in here today, so I don't know how he's done it, but I've put all this sort of garden mesh down and then in there, there's sort of that wire stuff that usually goes over my archways and I'm just sort of hoping it deters him from digging in this bed. I don't know why he's chosen this one, he doesn't dig in any other bed. He seems to just really like it in this one, but I've done my best. And then I've netted over this one, which has got all my cornflower seeds in, because I was a little bit worried he'd do the same thing in this bed, because it looks a little bit like a nice new cat bed, doesn't it? Cat litter tray, cat toilet. I don't really have a problem with cats normally at the allotment plot. There's a new cat, there's a new cat in town and he just seems to use everything as a toilet for some reason. So this is the first year I'm having a problem with cats at the allotment. I do have problems with them at home, because everybody seems to have a cat where I live and they just come into my garden and dig everything up and poo. I love cats, I do like cats, I just don't like it when they dig in my beds and poo everywhere, you know? I don't know if we could like make toilets for cats or something? Is there like, could we just find a cat toilet or something? I don't know. Anyway, I'm doing my best to protect the seedlings and stuff, but I forgot to tell you about that, so I thought I'd let you know that it's not all smooth sailing here and I do get problems with stuff. I do try to tell you about it when I do get the problem, but sometimes I just forget. Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this vlog today. I will be back again on Sunday with a home diary, or you can come back to my allotment on Monday, so I'll see you when I see you. Thanks for watching, guys. Bye!