July No Dig Garden Tour- Peak Harvests, New Sowings & Watering Tips.

Ah, come and look at this. Amazing. This is the season of second early potato harvest. And these are Charlotte from my own home safe seed, which, as you can see, are doing really nicely. And yeah, all that for one plant. So we're gonna put these in sacks now, in paper sacks, even leave them out in the sun for a day to get really dry. And then they will store for a long time. In fact, the last Charlotte potatoes, 10 months later, even though they're second early, they do store well. But if you've got main crop, don't worry, they're not quite ready yet. And behind me, you see we're having fantastic squash growth in the warmth that we've had. And those squash have not been watered. No dig really helps to conserve moisture. Having said that, there's a lot of plants here that I am watering. So I'll be giving you some tips through this tour. This is the July tour, the season of peak harvest, and also many things you can still sow. Since we were last here, we did a tour in June, and the asparagus was being picked. And that's how much growth it makes in less than a month since I stopped picking them. And this is a weed. Guess what? It's asparagus. So one of the most difficult weeds for commercial growers of asparagus is asparagus, because they can't spray the herbicide. It's not a problem here. Obviously, this is organic. So we're just pulling out the asparagus seedlings as they come. So if you get too many asparagus growing close together, you end up with a lot of little spears. You just want a few plants for big ones. We are doing a lot of new planting. So under this cover, our beetroot, for example, and they went in about two weeks ago. And I put a cover on for two reasons. One is to, in this case, keep rabbits off, because we've got a few rabbits here. And another one is actually, the covers do conserve moisture. Here in this bed of carrots that was sown five weeks ago, the issue was not moisture, it was some seed quality. And there's a patch of lovely green at the fire, and that was a different seed compared to these. And if you get something like this, a poor germination, well, I'm just going to hoe these off and replant with a different vegetable. It's getting a bit late to sow carrots now. It is possible, actually, just A-S-A-P. This is a beautiful bed of lettuce. We planted on a weekend course here, actually, 21st of June solstice. And all the group just joined in. I was dibbing holes. They were popping in the plug plants. I plant really small, so it's very quick. And then everyone helped water, and we put the cover on. Only took the cover off this morning, actually. And we're starting to pick these lettuce now, and they're very abundant. But I have been watering. So a bed like that of lettuce, and also new plantings that we'll see in a minute, we're giving them a lot of water because they are mostly water. Even these beetroot had a little bit. I don't water beetroots a lot. Enough to keep them going, really. I don't know when this long spell of dry weather's going to end. This has a bird netting on, which that's very useful against rabbits and deer, if you have that problem. It's enough, I find, to keep them out. Obviously, meshwood as well. And this mesh is supposedly against insects. But actually, sorry, you can see, I'll pull it back a bit, just so you can see what's going on there with flea beetles. Truly shocking. They are so, so strong this year, so many of them. And all of that is flea beetle damage. So it's not killing the plants, but it's going to compromise their growth a lot. And we need it to stop soon. Flea beetles normally do much less damage from about the middle of August. So we'll see. And then these new plantings, so this is radicchio, endive, also some lettuce, second planting. We're watering them every day, actually, for about the first week, because of the intense sunlight and dryness of the soil. And because the soil is so dry, like here, this bed was broccoli. And I took it out, ooh, two and a half weeks ago. And on that same day, I sowed carrots, and I draw drills in the soil like that. You can see there's a nice mulch with compost on the soil. In fact, you still see the broccoli roots there. And I watered the drills and then dropped the carrot seed in there. And then I didn't do anything, any more watering for a week and left it. And then the carrots did start to come up, and I was really pleased about that. So I watered them a bit more. I forgot about the rabbit. And there's a little rabbit here. I'm quite surprised we haven't seen him this morning, actually, he lives in the squash. And hopping out and saying good morning, I forgot about, you just grazed all those carrots off. So they all gone, and so I re-sown. So again, water, water after sowing this time, and mesh cover on against the rabbit. And every three days or so, I'm putting more water on those lines. So for getting plants going, watering is, you need it. And it's quite an issue. We just have a hose. I don't have an irrigation system here. It's a little bit tight this year. This is the driest year I've pretty much ever experienced, actually. Certainly this time of year, so intense. The heat levels have been here quite high. We've been up to 36 and a half degrees one day. 90s Fahrenheit. These runner beans is an interesting one for water because you can see how they're not setting. All of these potential beans are not. And every time, there's one, this little truss has one bean on. And that is related to water. It's not misting the flowers or anything. So I haven't been watering these until five days ago. And I realized I'm just gonna have to, to get some beans. But it's a good time to start. Once your plants start to flower, they don't need water so much before, but when you get into the fruiting stage, that's the time to give water. And lo and behold, the pyramid, it's finally finished. It's only just finished under a week ago. And it's got these beautiful doors that are sliding on copper, sorry, brass wheels underneath. So the whole structure is made without any metal or anything like that. It's all copper and wooden dowels. Sam is doing some bindweed removal here. So this is classic. Look at this. All of that's good to compost by the way, but that's how much he's removed this morning. You can see it all coming out there. Cause this, this clearly was a lot of bindweed here and it's only four months since we put the cardboard down. So the cardboard's now decomposed under the compost and the bindweed able to push through. But from my experience of doing this over many decades, if you keep on the bindweed at this stage, using a trowel like you see there or hori hori to get out as much of the root as possible, you don't get out the parent root that's still there. And it gets more tired as you go. And within two years, it's gone. Because this whole patch here, this was solid bindweed in the first year and still in the second year, but getting less. And suddenly in September, 2022, it just stopped and the roots had run out of energy. So there's still a little bit, it's mostly around the edge. And like these celeriac, we've needed to remove a bit of bindweed. They're looking good. I'm happy with what I'm seeing there. We've watered them a little, but you don't need to water celeriac massively at this time. I reckon it's best to start towards the end of August when it's really starting to swell, if it hasn't rained by then. So watering is such a big factor, but it is really helped by no-dig. No-dig doesn't mean you don't need to water, but it really reduces the amount you need to water. And the compost helps with that. Compost is not peculiar to no-dig or anything. You know, if you're digging, you still need to use compost, organic matter. This is how we make it. So, oh, this is dry, actually. That's some old weeds and stems that Adam chopped up with a lawnmower. You can see the lawnmower does a great job of making the woody bits smaller. You don't want any bits of wood longer than that, really. Well, wood, that's the sort of woody stem. So it's a mixture of green and brown. I do roughly three quarters green, one quarter brown, but that's not written in stone. It could be half and half green and brown. If you put more brown, it just grows a bit more slowly. Here we have tree leaves of brown, so they're just a little layer on top there to keep in the moisture as well as the plastic. And this heap actually finished only two weeks ago. And so you can see it's looking pretty nice. That is plenty moist enough. That's without watering, but I am now actually just watering my heaps a little bit, which I don't normally do. I'm just thinking I need to water that one. And here we have compost that is eight months old now, and Adam turned it from the heap on the right into there. And you can see how beautiful it is. It's feeling really light in my hand as well. That's a very good sign. It's like humus. And we'll use that in the autumn, or the compost, if it's as good as that, you can also sieve it out and put it in for potting mix. Plants, seedlings love it. Here the onions are different stages of maturity. So that's long red Florence near us, which are still green, starting to go down. So we'll probably pull them towards the end of this week. Whereas the classic round red onions up there are still growing basically. So I haven't watered them, but I'm just waiting for them to drop. And you can see how these as much earlier, that's Rose de Roscoff. It's a yellow onion. Well, it's pink actually. It's got a beautiful pink skin, very beautiful onion. And the water here is what Adam has just put on from washing salad this morning. So we've been selling salad and we use the washing water wherever it's needed really, which is most places now. These tomatoes are coming on nicely, quite unusual for the UK in my experience to have in the middle of July tomatoes, anything like this, and even sun gold ripening already. It's always the first one. Oh yeah, this, more flea beetles. I just thought I'd show you this to reassure you. Because I know that many of you got flea beetle damage on brassica seedlings. This is just about okay. What you don't want is too many of the new leaves like there to be hit like that. And I thought these covers would do a better job. They did last year. This year, somehow it's worse again. And up there, I've got a Thermacrop cover, which I found last year worked really well. It's a slightly denser mesh. But the Sweden kale under there are looking pretty, pretty hammered actually. My main tip and what I'm doing is raise your brassica plants to be larger. So I'm potting them on to seven centimeter pots. We can see that in a minute. I just mentioned the desiree, sorry. So that's desiree main crop potato. And you can see how that's still pretty green. It would be more green if we'd watered them. We haven't actually watered these, but if you got main crop potato, it would benefit to water them if you can do that, if you have enough. And likewise here for any new planting. So this is leeks. It was a very late sowing of leeks. I'd never sown leeks so late. I think it was like the 20th of May. That's muscle root and another one called bladder. We'll see how they do. Cause they're pretty small for July, but these are not to harvest until next spring. So they've got plenty of time yet. And they're multi-sown like I do for a lot of things. Beautiful tomatoes now, but they are struggling from the heat. Tomatoes don't like it so hot as cucumbers and melons do, but they're hanging in there. I'm watering them twice every two days. So I watered yesterday morning and I'll water again tomorrow morning with the overhead line. You can water tomatoes overhead. That's totally fine. Cause there's no risk of blight at the moment. And it actually helps the plants to hydrate a bit. You know, they're so struggling to find moisture really. The beef tomatoes have gone a bit crazy. The ox heart here, you can see very beautiful fruits. But this variety called Sonnenherz, it has long intervals between trusses. And so you end up with this really tall plant, which is already reaching the top. So then I drop it down a bit, but then that means the fruit before they've ripened are on the ground. And so you have to work out how to handle that. It's not the easiest variety. A really good one that's much more compact is Orange Wellington, which is, it's an F1 though, so you can't save the seed, but these are home safe seed that does work. And the melons have really loved the heat. As you can see, they've been prolific. There are some really nice varieties here. This is Malaga. I mean, just look how it's made these four huge melons on one plant. And you don't need to support melons. You know, this is one of many bits of false information that are out there. You can see how they have really tough stalks and they hang. The only time they're wrist dropping off is when they're ripe. So actually it doesn't really matter by then, but if it did happen, you just pick it up, but you can tell when they're ripe. By looking at them, you'll see a bit of cracking around the stalk, a bit of going yellow there as well. But before that even, you'll get the most wonderful aroma of melon. So, you know, there'll be a morning, probably in about two weeks, actually, not for a while. I'll come in here and I'll smell it before they've actually ripened and then I'll look for the right melon. And we have different varieties here. This is Ogan, for example, that's slightly smaller. I'll be able to hopefully get a few more fruit on a plant and you can grow them on the ground. So that's one that's just planted to crawl on the ground. You don't have to grow them up strings. It's very efficient up strings though. And yeah, it's just nice with plants how there's so many ways of doing it. And same with aubergine. So here I allowed two stems to grow from the one main one by selecting a side shoot that was strong and that becomes another main stem. And you do need to then keep removing the side shoots. Like there's one, you know, it's not obvious. You look at that, but there's the side shoot and that's the main leader. So I keep doing that and that keeps two main stems. It's just quite productive. They're starting to crop. They're not brilliant, these aubergines though. And they've had a bit of disease on their leaves. And I think this is called a winia, it's a bacterial rot possibly from wetting the leaves too much, which I've been doing because I know that aubergines like moisture and that discourages the red spider mite. But having said that, I had used a red spider mite predator, Phytosilis. And that's been really effective this year. The melons are much greener for it and cucumbers too. Red spider can be quite devastating. And these cucumbers are having a bit of a pause at the moment. They've cropped very prolifically in that. Just getting going again. And these I do water a lot more even than the tomatoes. So especially in the middle of the day, if it's a really hot day, like most days, I'm just holding a hose for only about a quarter of a minute just to wet the leaves and take the stress off the plants in the middle of the day. The flowers have been amazing and dahlias just coming into their own. There's one gorgeous dahlia up there, the crimson one, which I grew from seed six years ago and it's still going. And here's an interesting combination which I hadn't tried before. I don't know how this is gonna work out, but we have squash. Went in a bit late actually, because this bed was broccoli through the winter and spring. And Celtus. I was given the seed at Chelsea by Lucy, she grows veg, to try. I grew it 43 years ago and didn't like it then, so I haven't grown it since, but I'm giving it another go. So what they do is they're slightly bitter leaves. You can eat these leaves of Celtus, but generally one doesn't, but they make a stem and that's the bit you eat. It's like a delicacy. So we'll see. They were sown only two months ago, so they're very fast growing. In the greenhouse is where I do all my propagation and this is a chance to explain what you can sow now. There are so many things you can still sow in the middle of July. It's just possible to sow beetroot. If you do, you don't need big cells and you can just pop out plug plants like that. These need planting, they should have gone in. I was hoping for rain. It's not gonna happen, so we'll need to water a lot. And cabbages, brassica seedlings, I raise in trays like that and then prick out, but you could sow them direct into small module cells. These are the ones I designed. You get them from Container Wise in the UK and actually all over the world, they're available. So we'll prick those out. And likewise, celery. And I had a problem with the celery. I was demonstrating on a course a week ago and left this tray out on the table and then it didn't get any water the following day. And so I lost a lot of seedlings, but there's still quite a few there. So those little seedlings, they're ready to prick out. But you can sow celery now just, but don't delay on that. You can also still sow French beans. These are sown in module trays, but it's very effective outside. Just this takes the stress out of watering for 10 days or so before you pop them in. It's easier to water things in here. A lot of brassicas you can still sow, like broccoli for next spring, purple and white sprouting. Also, Navona, for example, or Romanesco cauliflower, really good. And this is what I do if you want to get them a bit bigger before planting. So a plant like that started in there and then it goes into a seven centimeter, three inch pot roughly. And that's homemade mix with no feeding. So I don't feed any of these seedlings. So, you know, all those beetroot, the amazing growth, that's not fed. It's getting a good mix. And that goes back to the compost that I was saying. You know, your own compost, the worms, especially by the time the worms have eaten a bit, it's just incredible how much goodness it has. These are endive, really good time to sow endive. Either the frizzy or this is broadleaf scarol type. Lettuce, it's getting close to the last call for sowing lettuce. This is Maravilla de Verona, really nice variety. And, you know, that is ready to go and you can see how nice developed root system they have. So you can do some serious propagation at this time of year. Even I sowed quite late, it's a bit late now, but early July, that was red cabbage, which I then pricked out into that tray. And they'll go in the ground. Well, will they? Normally in two weeks time that I'd plant them out as quite small seedlings, but I'm thinking we might need to be potting them on because of the flea beetle damage. So all of those things, you can also sow fennel and kohlrabi at this time. Brilliant time for both of those to get lovely harvests in the autumn. That really helps to keep your beds full. You know, we're getting gaps. It's water is the main, probably the main limit on what you can do, but see what you can manage. And if you can just keep plants growing, really surviving through this dry spell, then come the autumn, hopefully it rains and you get more abundant growth. There's an amazing watermelon there. It's so small from so many leaves. They're just starting to develop. There's two watermelon plants there. And I just wanted to show you in here also the, that's an oak and melon which grew on a string, but all of these other ones are growing from the same plant like these leaders coming out and making fruits on the ground as well. So, you know, that's another option for melons to grow them up and grow them on the ground at the same time. And they're just a bit more rapid here in the greenhouse warmth. And these, I'm pretty confident will ripen first. This is Malagro again. And at this stage last year, I was starting to lose my leaves to red spider and they were all going yellow and eaten. And this, you can see how green they all are now. So I'm really happy about that. And that's both helped with the further development of melons. They're a bit later actually as a result. They'll have better flavor because you need melons to ripen when the leaves are still green. And that's why late melons, as we go towards the end of September, they don't really work because you haven't got much green or photosynthesis happening at that time. So make a note next year, if you haven't got them this far on. These were sown March 27th. So it's before the end of March to sow melons in heat and get them going really early. Tomatoes, I sow a little bit before that. These were 10th of March. It's pretty much my sowing date for everything here. And you can see how, that's Orange Wellington, lovely fruits and it's not too tall a plant. When do you, or how much do you de-leaf? So there's a leaf you can see it's starting to go a bit more yellow. I usually see that as a sign that I'll take it off. And it's not doing so much for the plant anymore. Yeah, I'm not manic about de-leafing. I like to keep quite a few leaves on the plant, but it does help also when you de-leaf to see the trusses. And a lot of these trusses, particularly the beef tomatoes, I shorten to not have too many. Otherwise you get loads at the bottom and not much going up because the plants kind of run out of juice. So tomatoes, I find a lot of time is needed to grow great tomatoes, which I like doing, but it's certainly a consideration in a market garden. These celery have been incredible. That's from a February sowing, roughly 20th February, Victoria, and it's very good variety. And further up, we have a later sowing. It was 1st of April and planted in May. And you can see there, they've got a way to go yet. It's just going to be a nice relay, I'm hoping. Well, this is the dig no dig trial beds. And that's the dig bed, has the same amount of compost dug in as the compost that I put on top there, same amount. And so far this year, we've had 31.3 kilos of harvest from that bed and 36 kilos from the no dig bed. And that's pretty consistent every year. We get about 10%, 12% more through the season from no dig. You're not seeing a lot of difference that end cause it's all new plantings. Here we've got some more established plantings. In fact, the onions we're going to pull today. So this is the Rose de Roscoff multi-sown. So all of that is from one little module cell sown late February. And you can look after a lot of onions that way. So, you know, one of those trays of 60 times four, you've got over 200 onions in a small space to propagate. It's very efficient and using not much potting mix either. And these went in the ground on the 9th of March. So they were pretty small when they went in, I mean, truly small and yet it works. But what they do is I put a fleece over something like that and to cover them for the first six weeks or so. And they're the last of the first plantings, which is harvesting light. For example, we have peas there where the kale is now. This was spinach, either side of the celeriac. And in fact, the celeriac is showing quite a difference. See between the no dig and the dig. And what I noticed in the afternoon here is we water both these beds the same, but the dig bed, the leaves are wilting more. It seems not able to get hold of so much moisture for the plants where the soil has been disturbed. And I think it's from the mycelial and bacterial networks being broken by the digging process. Any kind of cultivation, forking as well. You know, don't go into that either. Broad forking is not no dig, just leaving soil alone. You get these amazing results, beautiful growth. That's Keoghia beetroot and a flaming barrel. Interplanted with spring onions actually. That's another grow together combination. You can find them in my book. And so you harvest the spring onions before the beetroot need quite all the space. And to finish, I can't resist showing you this beautiful corn, which has sprung up so fast. Was sown 10th April, planted 25th, fleece over, which protected it against the frost of May the 11th. And it's just kept growing. We haven't watered it until five days ago. So it had first watering then. Again, I feel that, you know, really shows with no dig and how good the structure of the soil is and how plants can access the food and moisture they need very easily. We did just water it now because we, as with the runner beans, you know, as you get close to harvest, it really makes sense to water. And I'll finish with a question. What are you sowing now? And what is your favorite variety of what you're sowing? It'd be nice to share that. And a lot of people read the comments, these videos, which is great. And I'll chip in with a comment myself.