JUNE ALLOTMENT PLOT TOUR 2026 / FULL, DETAILED ALLOTMENT PLOT TOUR

Good morning everyone, my name is Emma. Welcome back to my allotment garden diaries. In this video I'm going to be doing a June allotment tour, so just showing you all around my allotment plot, how it's looking, what's growing in the month of June. So if you're interested in this video and it sounds like you're kind of jammed, do subscribe to my YouTube channel. I vlog three times a week here from my allotment plot in South London, and let's get stuck in with the video. So I've had my allotment plot here in South London for about six years. I had the first plot, which I'll show you in a minute, for the longest, so that I had for four years, and then I took on this second allotment plot next door, which was completely overgrown, and I've cut it all back by hand as I did with the first one as well, and I've had this new allotment plot for two years. So this one is relatively new, and the other side is relatively old, so it's quite funny to see the difference between each plot, because my older plot kind of takes care of itself a little bit. I don't feel like I have to do as much to it, but this plot is still sort of growing loads of weeds every year, and I'm still mulching beds and trying to take care of the soil, so this plot definitely requires more work than my original one. One of the most exciting things I've added to my allotment plots recently, about two years ago, maybe a year and a half ago actually, was this polycarbonate greenhouse. I picked it up on Debenhams website, which is really strange, but I was looking for a polycarbonate greenhouse online that I could order, and they had a really great sale on, so I think it was originally supposed to be about £750, and I got it for £300, which I thought was quite good. Polycarbonate means that the panels are not glass, they're kind of like a plastic, they're polycarbonate basically, and it has a metal frame. It was relatively easy to put together, a bit fiddly, and I mainly grow tomatoes in here, but I also have quite a lot of seeds on the go, and it's just a really great way of starting more seeds at my allotment plot. I'm really desperate to grow more from a seed, so I'm going to start by showing you around in here. It's a bit messy, but I'm going to keep it very realistic, so this is just what it looks like right now. I still haven't figured out what to put down this pathway yet. I don't think wood chip, because I think it will attract more slugs and snails. I'm actually thinking stones, but haven't got any yet, so we'll have to come back to this path at some point. But you see on this side of the greenhouse, I've sort of got a bed where I'm growing things, and this is where all my tomatoes go, so they're being grown directly into the ground, which seems to work really well. I mean, look at them, they are thriving. So it's a bit messy down here, but the growing bed does loop around to the back of the plot. I actually have a couple of cucumbers in here, but they're not doing too well, and we'll have to investigate those another day. And then this section here is my very messy table and all of my seeds. This shelving unit was from Amazon, and I love it because it's got metal shelves, so the light can go straight through, which doesn't really help when it's clogged up with seed trays, but you know what? I tried. I tried my best. They do get a lot of light, and I have started many seeds in here. So this is where I will crouch down and do all my seed sowing, and then I just pop all the seeds up onto the shelving unit there. It seems to work okay. I guess it's not the greatest setup. Maybe I should look at getting like a potting bench or something for in here. I think that would be quite good actually. It can be quite difficult to know what seeds to grow at what time of year, and that does just really quickly bring me to a great app that you could use to help with all of your gardening jobs, not just seed sowing, and it's the Readly app. So if you haven't heard of the Readly app, let me just talk about it for one minute. So it is an app where you get access to over 6,000 magazines and newspapers, and there are tons of categories to choose from. There is a brilliant gardening category on there with all of your favorite gardening magazines and more to discover as well. I have discovered so many new magazines on the Readly app that I would never think to look in in the shop for, and the gardening category is no exception. One of the great features of Readly is that you can backdate all the magazines, and when you're looking for jobs to do in the garden or seeds to sow, that's particularly useful because you can just find your favorite magazine, find a section. I mean in a lot of the gardening magazines they have a section where they tell you what to do that month in the garden, and if it's not the month you're looking for you can just backdate the magazine in addition, go back and scroll down, find the month that you need, and look at the jobs because gardening jobs don't change year for year really, they pretty much stay the same. You can also download your magazines and access them without access to the Internet. Another great feature is you can bookmark your favorite articles so you don't have to go searching for them again, which I think is really useful. If you're interested in trying the Readly app, and I really do recommend you try it, I have a code, a link below which will give you two months free, so you can just sign up for two months for free, you get access to all of the magazines, you can try out all of those features that I keep rambling on about, and give it a go for two months. If you like it stay subscribed, if you don't you can cancel, you can cancel at any time and it's really really easy to cancel. Use my link below, try it out, let me know what you think. Right, let's get out of here, it's about 45 degrees in here, let's go show you the rest of the plot. So if we walk out of my polycarbonate greenhouse, we are met with the archway which I have spoken about many times, it's actually an old polytunnel frame, and when I say that people can see it straight away, can you see how it used to be a polytunnel, and it just kept blowing away, the cover kept getting ripped, and I updated to this polycarbonate greenhouse, so I sort of repurposed the frame as a giant archway. What I've done is I've wrapped it in this garden mesh, it's not chicken wire, it's garden mesh, it's plasticky, but it does last a very long time, and it's a little bit kind of softer than like chicken wire, so when you're growing crops up here, like pumpkins, because I always grow my pumpkins up here, the garden mesh is quite soft for it, so it's not going to cut into the pumpkin, which I really like, it's a little bit, you can kind of see it's got a bit of give in it, so it works really well, and then I've just put some canes across to try and keep it in place, but that's pretty much all I've done with this archway to secure it. It needs a little bit of sort of care every year, and I go around and make sure all the sticks are in place, and I'll re-tie things in if I need to, but other than that I haven't, I don't really need to do any maintenance with this at all, it's really stayed standing. This is my best pumpkin at the moment, I'm not entirely sure what variety it is, but you can see how it's starting to climb up the archway, and that's what I want it to do, and so I've got pumpkin growing up here, we've got a random rogue sweet pea, which I absolutely love, this came out of nowhere, don't know why it's here, but I'm happy it is here, you can stay, and I've also got some runner beans going up here as well, in fact these runner beans have already started to get some flowers, this one's doing the best, and he's really wrapping himself up the archway and covering it, and he will send out side shoots as well, and get really nice and big and bushy. There's a bit of an array of flowers behind the pumpkins here, which I sort of didn't expect to survive, but they did, so we've got some really nice sunflowers, I think these are really big ones, and with the single head, so the giant sunflowers, we've got some cosmos which is getting nice and bushy, and giving me some lovely flowers, and then you can see just in front of everything are my nasturtiums. I think I sowed these seeds on the first year of the archway, and I put them all in the ground, and they didn't really do very much, they came up very small, and then they died back, and I didn't really hear from them again, and every year since they've come back all on their own, I don't have to sow any seeds, and they come up in all different colours, really really beautiful colours, kind of like big bright bold colours though, so you don't get, I don't think you get very pale coloured nasturtiums do you, they're always really bright and bold, oranges and reds and yellows, they are fantastic, you can eat them, you can eat the leaves, and you can eat the flowers as well, they're a little bit peppery, but they're quite nice as part of a salad. I think what I will say about nasturtiums is they're great for coverage, so if you've got like a blank area, and you don't know what to put there, put nasturtiums in, they will cover it over, and look fabulous, but they will come back year after year, they are kind of like a weed, they grow like a weed, so they self seed very easily, and they're very hard to stop when they get going, so make sure you like them, I actually have no problem with them coming up everywhere, I really don't care, I love them so much, but if you're trying to get rid of them, you might struggle, they're kind of a bit like a weed in that sense, they'll just come back, so, but what's not to love about them really, I mean be honest, they are gorgeous. Right in this bed here I've got some sweet corn growing, which is doing it really well, it's getting nice and tall, and we are starting to get some little tassels as well, which is very very exciting, this is my this is my scarecrow Harry, and he's sulking a little bit at the moment, say hello Harry, that's it, he doesn't do anything at all to scare any birds, but I quite like him sitting there in the sweet corn, I do have a couple of rows of spring onion here, we've got some peas which have started to germinate, and I need to fix this structure for them, because they're gonna start growing up it soon, and then I've got a couple of courgettes there, which by some miracle have survived a slug attack, which is amazing, and are getting nice and big, over here are my main crop potatoes, and just behind that I've got my compost area, which is totally overgrown with potato plants at the moment, so that happens every year, if you accidentally put a potato in your compost, it will just grow potatoes like crazy, quite probably my favorite thing on the allotment this year is my huge sweet pea structure, and where I've just sown like a million sweet pea plants, in fact I don't even think I sowed this many, I think it has gone really bushy because I pinched them out twice, but they are just flowering like crazy, I'm picking these every single day, they are actually starting to get more and more seed pods now, which I'm quite sad about, so I'm gonna have to pick a load today and hope I can keep them going a bit longer, but how gorgeous, probably my biggest achievement of the year actually, the middle of the allotment plot has always been a little bit complicated for me, because it's overshadowed by all of these big trees here, there's a tree stump in the middle of here somewhere, and then it's kind of like a no-grow area, so what I ended up doing with it is just putting in a load of perennial flowers, so we've got some, well not perennial, but we've got borage which comes back every year, so I treat it as a perennial, we've got some lavender, we've got some scabies over here, and I'm just trying to put in as many flowers as I can, and this here is an apple tree, and I tell you what, it just works, I don't know why it works, but it works, and it looks so beautiful. I think it could have been very easy for me to be scared of this area and not know what to do here, but actually I really relished in the challenge of figuring out what to put here, and how to make it look nice and useful, and it is useful because it's full of flowers, which is great for the pollinators, I mean I can hear all the bees behind me right now, and there's just not much you can do with an area that's right underneath the tree in terms of growing vegetables, I mean luckily it's an apple tree, so it is sort of productive for me anyway. The lavender has done way better than I expected it to do here, I don't know what I was expecting to be fair, but it just loves this environment so much, and it's just bloomed like crazy. So lovely when a plant just suddenly works and just does really well, I didn't know what to expect when I whacked these in, but they are just loving it here. Right so as we go through this archway here, which is currently holding up part of my apple tree and a climbing rose, we can see I've attached the pathway to my original allotment plot, which is the plot that I had first, so it's a little bit whimsical going through there. I love this walkway here, it does feel a little bit secret garden-y doesn't it, and I just love it, it's so fun to walk through. Now we are in my original allotment plot, so this is the plot that I took on first five years ago, it's the one I've had the longest, so let's start with the salad bed. Right this is a new raised bed this year which I have filled up. I've put in some salads there, so some lettuces. These I think are radishes and unfortunately they are flowering, which is quite annoying. Actually I'm not sure if they are radishes, I can't remember what they are, it might be rocket actually, but because of the heat it has already bolted, which is a bit of a shame, but I'm pretty sure the flowers will be edible, so we'll leave them. And then down here we've got some pak choy and some more lettuce seeds coming up, but this bed's doing particularly well. I actually have a theory that when you put in a brand new growing bed, whether it be a raised bed or a new place to grow things, the first year it always does really, really well, and it doesn't matter how much you top it up with good compost, it doesn't matter what you do to it, the first year will always give you a really good harvest. I can't tell you the amount of times when I put a brand new raised bed or a growing bed in and everything grows and I get no damage and I get fantastic crops, and I think there must be some kind of science behind that. Maybe crops just really enjoy the new, the newness of a new raised bed, I don't know what it is, but that is my theory of the new raised bed theory. It's absolutely true. This whole area of the allotment just gets messy very, very quickly, but I promise you it is quite productive. So in here we have got some broccoli, some cauliflower even, not broccoli, cauliflower. I've got all my cauliflowers in here doing really, really well. Unfortunately the broccoli bolted, I think that was again because of the heat waves that we've had, but this bed is really great for brassicas and I will be planting in some more autumn, winter brassicas very, very soon. Behind that giant borage there, which I do just allow to come up everywhere, you will see borage all around my plot because I love it and the bees love it too. These are my second early potatoes and these are my early potatoes which are almost ready to harvest. Maybe by the end of this week I'll be picking them, we'll have to see. And then in this bed down here, which looks like not much is going on, there's a lot going on, we've got some sweet corn here which is doing really well and getting bigger. This was planted out a bit later than my other sweet corn and behind that I've got some sunflowers which again are doing really well. This is the pink shed which is covered with this gorgeous clematis and it is starting to flower at last and they're just gorgeous. I mean look at how well it's done on my shed, it's clearly very, very happy here. In the middle of my allotment plot again I have the same problem as over on the new plot which is I've got these lovely big trees which I don't want to get rid of because I love them and I didn't know what to do underneath it. It's very difficult to grow vegetable crops under a tree. So what I've ended up doing is putting a mini wildlife pond here and also a bird feeding station and also some bug hotels and some logs and things. So I've just made it a whole wildlife area so that at least it's being used for something productive. My pond has been re-dug, you can go back and see those videos. It's looking a little bit sad at the moment but it is a heatwave so... The thing is about a wildlife pond is it's absolutely fantastic but it does require quite a lot of maintenance. You'd think it being a wildlife pond it wouldn't but it actually does. You have to clear it of pond weed, you have to make sure that it's topped up all the time because it can, the level could go down quite quickly especially when it's been a heatwave. When creatures are relying on that water source and they know it's there you have to make sure that it continues to be there and to be useful for them otherwise they'll suffer for it and it's not very wildlife friendly then is it? It's kind of the opposite. It's a really nice addition to my allotment plot, something that I sort of didn't think about when I first got it but I tell you what I'm really glad that I went for it and put one in because you don't just have to grow vegetables here you can make it a wildlife friendly place too. Right I'm venturing down to the back of the allotment plot here you can see that I strim the grass here quite a lot and there's quite a lot of blank space which actually seems to be in sun so I'm not quite sure what I'm doing with that I might have to reassess that in the autumn time. Down here we've got the broad beans which are sort of starting to finish now actually but just behind that I wanted to show you these my shaster or shatzer daisies which I planted in as a bit of a border and to the back of the allotment plot because obviously behind that it's all looking a bit messy over there that's not my plot but I wanted something in the way to be sort of like pretty and create a nice border and they've really come up nice this year and they will just come back year after year and they will spread as well and if they spread over this bed so be it because I love them. It's funny because as I'm walking around and showing you stuff I am realizing it's all looking a little bit overgrown and messy my only excuse is that we've had a really high heatwave this this week and it's been really difficult to keep on top of things and everything's really grown very very quickly because of it and so it has gone a little bit out of my control but I have to say that I don't mind it so much I think it's really quite beautiful just fly out of my sweet peas that's crazy I actually love all those little hidden flowers coming up in the weeds and things just sort of in hidden corners and stuff I don't mind it being a little bit overgrown and messy sometimes as long as I'm roughly in control and I know where things are and I have things growing I really don't mind letting it go a little bit I think this year I've really tried just to go with it as opposed to trying to control it so much and it's made me so much happier I feel a lot calmer here I feel like I'm enjoying my allotment again a lot more I'm just kind of stopped trying to be so on so in control of everything it's made a real difference so I would urge you to try that and just try kind of like surrendering to nature just a little bit this year and see how you feel right I hope you've enjoyed this mini allotment plot tour and maybe it's just made you think oh my plots not half as messy as hers I think I'm doing great and if that's the case then fantastic you you do you like I said allotment plots are here to be enjoyed you do your best you try and keep on top of it point is everything's growing really well in June at the moment I'm so happy with it I'll try and do another allotment plot tour next month in July and I'll wait to the end of July so we can kind of compare the difference so until my next video thank you for watching it don't forget to check out Readly and use my link for two months free and I'll see you in my next video thanks for watching bye