PULLING UP THE EARLY POTATOES!! / ALLOTMENT GARDENING UK

Oh wow, he just looks like he's in such a bad mood with me. Good morning everyone, welcome to Friday's edition of my allotment diaries where I just dilly dally about on my allotment plot here in South London, film everything I'm getting up to and then upload it to YouTube where you are currently watching it right now. So I hope you're enjoying them, if you are consider hitting the subscribe button, it really helps out my channel, gives it a bit of a boost. You can also leave me a comment, give me a little like on the video or even hype me, apparently that's some new YouTube thing. You get three hypes a week I think is how it works. So if you go to the comment section I think there's somewhere that you can see hype and then if you give my video a hype it really gives it an extra boost but you only get to use three hypes a week. So if you want to give all three of your hypes to my videos that would be wonderful but you can share them with other creators, anyone else that you're enjoying watching. Also please give me some recommendations because I make these vlogs, obviously I love creating them and making them but I also really quite enjoy watching YouTube. Most of the YouTubers that I watch are more kind of like lifestyle YouTubers, so people who kind of live in the countryside and they have a vegetable patch alongside their kind of day-to-day life and so they do like baking and stuff, a bit like what I do on Sunday's vlog. I can't find many allotment vlogs or any ones that are like a little bit more lifestyle based like I feel like mine are. There's so many like practical ones like how to, how to grow sweet corn, how to do your potatoes or whatever it is but there's not many like lifestyle ones. I just want to see what someone's up to on a day-to-day or weekly basis at their allotment plot and just see them doing like pottering around doing jobs and that's what I like to create and that's what I like to watch. So or maybe just start a channel, maybe just start a YouTube channel and start showing me what you're up to on your allotment plot so that we can just kind of share with each other. Last few days I've really struggled with my hay fever. Yesterday the weather was so warm, it was sunny the whole day and I didn't come down. I actually find it really difficult to get to my allotment when it's super hot and sunny because I find I get here and I'm so hot and sweaty I just can't do very much so I tend to wait for these cloudy days so I can come down and actually get some work done. But my hay fever has been horrendous recently, pollen count's been really high and I've really struggled. Also what's been struggling is all my seeds because I didn't water it yesterday. So I think we better get, I think we better get some water on these little seedlings. Right that's the first job I think. Also I do believe it is feeding day for tomatoes and pumpkins, well what little pumpkins we have left. So I think we'll just get these fed so that's about five litres. We'll do 40 millilitres of this tomato feed stuff. Absolutely reeks, kind of smells like, how would I describe that smell? Vinegar I think. Just watering around the base. I will double water because the first lot of water is just going to kind of sit on the surface. So now I'll just come around and feed again. I don't know if you can see this but that's the first watering. Because it's been so hot the top of the soil dries over so when you water it the water doesn't go through the soil down to the roots it kind of sits on the surface and then it kind of dribbles off or just rolls away from the plant. So doing a second water makes sure that the top soil is now wet so it's more likely to kind of absorb down into the ground where the roots are which is what you want to be watering. Look at this. I've just noticed while I'm nattering away I've got some tomatoes growing. Oh my goodness how fantastic. What beautiful looking tomatoes. No idea what this variety is but how exciting. I think I chose some really exciting varieties of tomatoes didn't I? I think I had a gardener's delight which is a bit boring and then a cherry red. I think there was one of those big beef tomatoes. Anyway they're all tomatoes and I know that much so as soon as the tomatoes appear I will pick them. I think last year I planted my tomatoes out really early kind of like the end of March beginning of April and I ended up getting a harvest the whole summer long. It's not the first crop that I've sort of planted out super early. I also plant out my sweet peas in February and I get early flowerings of sweet peas. So all these timings on plants are kind of subject to your interpretation and how risky you feel like being on your allotment plot because I honestly believe that they're all off now. So when we read the back of seed packets and stuff like that and it says when to plant stuff out I the weather is so up and down and the last day the last frost date is so sporadic like we never know when the last frost date is really going to be now so um sometimes it's just worth the risk. That's what I'm saying take a risk why not life's too short. Right we've got some really horrible like fine rain out there which is so annoying it's going to make my hair poof up like it's going to be so puffy. I like moniker from friends basically. Look at the weather app. Look at every single day after today. Why am I here today? Why did I choose today of all days to come? Slightly annoying. Hopefully it just sort of stops in a second. I have brought with me some more runner beans. These are Scarlet Emperor beans and they're from Seedcraft the subscription seed box where you subscribe and you get a box of seeds every month they send me one for free and they kind of sponsor this channel basically. I'm going to sow some more runner beans because even though I've got quite a few growing they're not doing as well as I hoped they would do. I sort of end up having a mini nightmare a mini breakdown over this archway every year convinced nothing will grow over it. Normally the runner beans are sort of a sure thing and they are starting to get up there but the problem is is really early on in their little lives they got munched right down to the ground. They are starting to grow back now but obviously they've been damaged so I don't know how healthy they're going to be. You see this one here so it's been munched completely pretty much back right back to the stem and it started to throw off sort of a side shoot and starting to grow again because I didn't pull any of them out when they got munched I just left them however I don't know if that's going to get much higher up the archway because it sort of looks a bit flimsy and it's obviously not its main stem. There seems to be quite a lot of nasturtium here as well which I'm not sure I really want I don't think this really climbs does it? If nasturtium plants climbed oh my gosh this archway would be so easy every year it would just all come up on its own and cover the archway with nasturtiums. I wouldn't mind that I think that would be beautiful but um I don't think they do climb they kind of turn into great big bushes so right we'll whack in some more seeds this is definitely the time of year to start whacking seeds into the ground any seeds that you've got any seeds look at those aren't they lovely lovely seeds so I was going to say beans they're sort of bean seeds um so exciting run of right we'll just whack a few in every year I worry about this bleeding archway this one seems to be coming back so I think we might have we might have some hope with him this is my shining star of the pumpkin archway so far actually getting flowers as well it's amazing why are you holding on to yourself hang on a second mate come on I want you to go this way oh look look he's starting to get his long tail his long like vine and so that I will kind of train up the archway that way so this one is um this is the best pumpkin so far but hopefully not my only pumpkin and the others need to get a wiggle on and my little's need to hurry up as well right my lovely cornflowers here seem to be having a little bit of trouble on one end and I'm not really surprised it's because this bindweed is insane look at how it's completely taken over my fence that I made I sort of made this sort of wild fence what's it called a dead hedge that's it using lots of logs and the bindweed has just taken over the whole thing which I did kind of expect to be fair unfortunately it's taken over my cornflower bed too and kind of pulling all the cornflowers down which is not ideal so I'm going to spend a bit of time now just trying to get the bindweed off of this bed like guys you can have all of this you can have the dead hedge but you can't have my cornflowers oh poor things I feel like they're being held prisoner the bees aren't happy with me they're going to have to just suck it up for a minute because I am actually trying to help these flowers oh there's got to be a better way for next year there really does so over the autumn time I'm going to work on this area again I'm going to see if I can keep all that bindweed away this time so it might be that I have to rebuild that fence again which is a bit annoying I think maybe I just underestimated how powerful this bindweed would be it's really just coming up everywhere do you know it's one of the biggest reasons why I see people giving up their allotment plot is because they can't handle the weeds on the plot and it's not their fault because the weeds that they've got are really horrendous like bindweed or like horse is it horse mare or horse tail um but there are some weeds that are so invasive they will come back year after year and they are almost impossible to get rid of bindweed is the one that I suffer with the most on this allotment and I do my best to get rid of it um ultimately there's not really anywhere for me to put it so it ends up going in my compost and it ends up just sort of coming back coming back again but the thing with bindweed is you only need to accidentally leave a tiny tiny little bit of root in the ground um and it all comes back to life again the next year and the roots can go down sort of six foot so you really need to kind of extravate excavate excavate dig up your entire allotment plot with like a digger or something to get rid of it properly so it is an absolute blooming nightmare and it is one of the worst weeds in my opinion it's unstoppable it's everywhere and what it does is it binds itself around plants I mean not just plants anything it wraps itself around and around and around like this and it gets up higher and higher and higher and you can see you know how it's wrapped itself around these um poles so like look at this poor sunflower it's got the bindweed wrapped around it and it's pulling the sunflower down to the ground so that the bindweed can get higher and it wants to get higher because it wants to get all the light and all the energy from the sun so that it can be the thing that survives so it's basically wrapping itself and using my sunflower as a way of pulling itself up it's all right sunflower I'm coming to the rescue now but this is why bindweed is such a nightmare it's not because it comes up everywhere it's because of what it does to your plants and how horrendous it can be and how it can just like take over the entire plot and destroy everything you know so how am I going to keep you up there now then all right cool rescued from the evil clutches of the bindweed how lovely are these cornflowers oh my goodness me aren't they just gorgeous I actually might pick a bunch today I'm seeing so many buds on here I know they're going to get hundreds of more flowers so I might pick a bunch with my sweet peas and take them home there's something so beautiful about the colors of cornflower the blues and the purples and the mauves and the really light lilacs oh my goodness sunflowers seem to be sulking a little bit why are they facing that way is that where the sun is oh no you're joking you know that sunflowers face the direction that the most sun comes from and um it seems to be away from my allotment plot oh no I had this lovely vision of them all facing my plot uh and it looks like they're going to be facing away so we will see the back of sunflowers this year fantastical it just looks like he's in such a bad mood with me right we're just pausing gardening activities for a minute because it has decided to pour down with rain which is absolutely fantastic look at my hair just getting poofier and poofier honestly look at that why is my hair just it cannot cope with any kind of moisture at all at least everything's getting a water so that's one job off my list today excellent right so june is quite a good month for sowing out lots and lots of seeds but specifically carrot apparently if you sow your carrot seeds in june the soil's warm enough for them and also you're less likely to get carrot fly for some reason i don't know if that's completely true or not but that's what i've read so i've got some early nance too and just behind my carrots where some of this some of the seeds are starting to germinate but i kind of disturbed them i'm going to whack in some nance um and hopefully we'll get some more carrots because my carrot game seems to be pretty strong this year a lot of the carrots are germinating they're doing really well i've got carrots growing at home i love carrots so let's just sow some more right so this is my carrot bed you can see it's doing actually really really well and just behind it there's a few carrots that have just started to germinate unfortunately i disturbed them all because i used the soil in here to sow something and to put into pots i didn't realize that they were starting to germinate so we shall re-sow so i'm just gonna ruffle ruffle this up a little bit around the carrots that are germinating and try not to kill them and then we'll just sow them sort of directly such tiny tiny seeds and then we'll just sort of ruffle them over to make them covered again and hopefully that'll just add a few seeds to our carrot bed basically if you want to see how well your carrots are doing you can kind of just dig a little bit dig a little bit around them like that so good news that is a carrot uh it's probably not quite big enough yet because he looks quite thin so then you just sort of quickly cover him up like nothing happened nothing happened mate and then what we'll do we'll come back in a a few weeks and try again and see how big they are right i really want to harvest some of those potatoes today that's really the main reason why i came down i wanted to pull a couple of the plants up and see what's going on under the surface so i think we'll go and do that is it raining no it's stopped right let's quickly go right here we are the early potatoes you can see they're probably not quite ready to pull up yet but we do have some flowers which is an excellent indicator that we've got potatoes under the ground right they have been growing for the designated time which i think is about nine to ten weeks i think they have been growing for that long so it's it's worth taking just a couple of plants up see what's going on and then we can leave the rest don't have to harvest all of your potatoes in one go you know we'll go for this one oh wow oh wow i forgot i grew these oh my goodness look at the color oh they are fantastic oh my goodness look at the color on these these are absolutely brilliant absolutely brilliant there's loads here there's absolutely loads i tell you what they definitely can grow for longer because some of them are quite small so i will leave the plants the rest of the plants a bit longer but they are fantastic look how many i'm getting from one plant oh my gosh that's absolutely amazing early potatoes don't tend to spread so so deeply don't tend to go so deep they tend to spread out as opposed to going deep that's my experience with them anyway but well let's have a look sometimes if you dig i'll look there's one oh fantastic look at that color isn't that just gorgeous oh my goodness absolutely lovely i think that's a lot from one plant and i think i've got how many have i got in there about 12 plants and they can definitely do with getting a bit bigger some of these are very small but they're also very well developed little potatoes super happy with those so i'm going to take those home make a little potato salad for lunch i think what a color right i'm gonna have to leave the vlog there on account of rain i had no idea it'd be raining this much today uh sorry about that so a little bit of a shorter vlog we did get out and do a few bits in fact i got everything done that i actually wanted to do today so that's a good thing so i've just found the packet it's red duke of york hence the fact that they're red um but they will be normal inside um but yeah red duke of york take between 10 and 12 weeks of growing time i reckon it's just about been 10 weeks so we'll leave it a couple more weeks and then hopefully we'll get an even bigger better harvest um but yeah that's exciting so i'm going to make a potato salad that will probably be in my sunday vlog not this week but the next sunday vlog hope you enjoy that um yeah i will be back again on sunday with a home vlog or monday with an allotment vlog thank you so much for watching have a lovely weekend hopefully the sun comes out for us all see you next time thanks bye