June No Dig Garden Tour - Harvests, New Plantings & Growth.

Middle of June, so much to see here. I want to show you everything that's going on in the garden and this is where so many things start growing. So we've been propagating like lettuce big time recently because I just do two plantings a year. But you can sow lettuce at any time until the middle of July is good, whereas beetroot for example is another great sowing at this time of year in June. You can see some coming up already, they were sown only four days ago actually. Different varieties mature at different times, so don't worry if they don't shoot out of the blocks. And then brassicas, sometimes we've potted them on like these brussel sprouts because I'm going to do some interplanting between carrots with these brussels going in later this week. Do check out my Grow Together book for that those kinds of ideas. And leeks even, so that's my main normal early to mid-April sowing of leeks and multi-sown, so we've got between two and four in a pot, seven centimeter pot. But everything starts in these module trays, including that's the late sowing of leeks. I've not done this before, just to see. They were sown about two weeks ago. They take a long time to come up and yeah, I don't know if we got the date on there. Yeah, so it's probably getting a bit late for leeks now, but there's still a lot of things you can sow including swede and purple sprouting broccoli and so on. And then the growth in here is phenomenal, but actually I think we'll have a look in the polytunnel to see the undercover growth big time. We're going to look in the tunnel in a minute. But on the way, I want to show you this cherry tree, which is finally, it's been here two years and this is the best time, best crop it's had. And Adam worked out to just secure this piece of mesh to keep the birds off and it's working so far. These cherries are nearly ready, actually. We did try one just a minute ago and they're probably about a week off being at their best. It's a variety on a dwarfing rootstock, so it doesn't grow too big. The polytunnel has taken off now, as you can see. Cucumbers this end, tomatoes that end. I alternate them each year and the cucumbers have been a bit traumatic. Some of them died in the cold wet weather we had in early May and that's the ones that are smaller were plants I luckily had in reserve and you can see that the bigger ones are the ones that survived and they're not yet cropping. I've not harvested a cucumber. I let them get quite big before I'd take any fruit Small plants, it's a bit too much for them to cope with, whereas the aubergines here, I'm doing a double shooting method or double head. So I'm taking out side shoots like this, lower down, and even that's a side shoot, believe it or not, near the top because that's the main growing point. Same on this side and actually I'm thinking I'll put another stake in. I'm slightly improvising as I grow because they, aubergines and peppers actually, they're quite challenging to work out how to train them. Whereas melons, it's a bit more straightforward. So you've got here like, I take off all the laterals or side shoots up to here in this case and that will now grow the first melon and I've already taken out the side shoot that was growing, the shoot that was growing on the end of the side shoot like this. So that one comes out because the melon is there. And then I just let the plant grow as many melons as it feels it can. It'll self prune later on and it'll probably make four decent melons, which we'll see in a later video, I hope, if they work it out. And some of them are growing on the ground. So that's an ogan melon, which I found actually do quite well like that. So that's much less pruning and time needed. They just sprawl on the ground and just get your fruits later. Well, a bit sooner actually, potentially. Well, the tomatoes have been stressed a bit by the heat in here. It was very hot two weeks ago and that's this leaf roll and that's one reaction. Not all the varieties. If you notice behind there's sakura, particularly the nearest one of the further bed is very resistant to indoor heat. So that makes beautiful red cherry tomatoes. Whereas this one is a beef tomato called Sonnenherz. They're really beautiful tomatoes and that's from Homesafe Seed. In between the tomatoes, I've put marigolds, always that partly to look nice. They secrete limonene also, which deters aphids. And along this edge, we just put a bit of grass mowns to cool the soil a bit because this side catches the afternoon sun. This polytunnel is not aligned classically as east-west. And so it gets very hot on this side in the afternoon, which is why it's very good for the melons and the watermelons as well. So I grow them here rather than over there. Tomatoes are amazingly cool tolerant actually. But having said that, in our climate, we've just had two weeks of June when there was not much sun, 42 hours, in fact, in the whole two weeks of June. Apologies for the noise. I don't know how much you can hear it, but we've got a lot of building work going on at the moment. We'll see in a minute. This is poppies for seeds and you can see they make these. These are still swelling. They make big heads, which I use for bread making. Really good just to put on top of the bread. But they're also a very beautiful poppy. You can buy them from Real Seeds website. And now this is what I still call the new area because this field I bought only five years ago and it's full of bindweed at that time. Now there's none because we really were on it for the first two years. Thorough mulching followed by regular removal of new bindweed with a trowel. There's a bit up the far corner, we'll see. And like, so with no dig, I'm always curious to see how these carrots are doing. You never know with a carrot until you pull it. But yeah, look at that. Fantastic. This is a variety called Romance. It is an F1 hybrid and it was, I do find they give much generally longer and straighter roots. And I sowed it on the 28th of February, which is kind of crazy because that's before my normal recommended date. But you know, that's how I find out what things work and what things don't. And partly I got lucky. We had a mild spring. So that's in less than four months they've done that. Yeah. Nice harvest. Oh yeah, that's all right. I just meant to check carrot root fly because these haven't been covered for six weeks and it's always the worry at this time of year, will the carrot root fly arrive? And they cause damage in the roots. But in fact, I'm not seeing any there. They look really clean of it, but I think they will arrive soon. So we'll harvest these before too long. And likewise, the beetroot, I haven't covered them, but look what's happened here. And this is deer damage where they are eating the tops of the leaves. So we're actually going to put a, just a mesh cover over these beetroot to reduce that. And it's why, it's this mesh here or netting, I should say. That probably could be mesh actually, but this one, this is bird netting, which is very simple and cheap way of protecting. In this case, it stops the deer eating the chard because they, the deer we have just love red leaves. They seem different wherever you are, but that's, that's my problem. So here we have second plantings already because this was spinach, now finished. And it's where we transplanted lettuce yesterday. So you can see the transplanting method here. We're putting the plants in quite deep, not filling in the hole. And that helps to keep the roots moist because we're getting a lot of dry weather now through summer. And you can have periods when, you know, they could suffer, but that will keep them going. And these lettuce will crop in about three weeks time onwards. Minty's made an appearance. Hello, hello, hello. This was garlic here interplanted with beetroot. So you can see that's worked quite nicely. The garlic wasn't brilliant though. We had quite a bit of allium leafminer, some rust, but the beetroot were doing fine. That's golden beetroot. And it's interesting how the golden leaves are not getting eaten by the deer. So that's a positive. These kohlrabi, quite extraordinary. Look at this one. It's a variety called Kolibri and it's on my Premier Seeds Direct recommended seed varieties. You can see that on their website. And it was sown late February, transplanted around the 25th of March with a fleece over for the first six weeks. And they are such beautiful plants, the way they float above the ground. I just love how they're here on their stalk. And yeah, they always look a bit romantic like that, but in fact they do need harvesting. Coming up through later June, kohlrabi like fennel also tends to rise up to flower. So be wary of that. I won't leave those in the ground for too long. Here there's a very nice second sowing happened already. If you look at this, you think, wow, that's a nice bed of lettuce. But if you look closely, you can see the carrots that we sowed, let me see, 15 days ago. And they appeared after about 10 days, which is pretty classic for summer sowing of carrots. In 10 days you should expect to see those first tiny leaves. And if you don't within say now 15 days, there's probably something wrong with the seed or with the weather, whatever. Different seeds take different lengths of time to come up and you know, even 10 days can seem long, but that's normal for them. Parsnips is 15 days. We'll see some in a minute actually. Broad beans, I've had too many. I never mind this, it's not exactly a problem, but either I need to have a broad bean feast or some kind of preserving or you can keep some for seed if you've got broad beans. Although if you're on an allotment, they would cross-pollinate with other varieties. So yeah, keeping seed, something you need to do, know a bit about. Do check out, I've got a video about seed saving you could look up. The asparagus here has been cropping okay. It's not the best variety, this one, ginger limb. I prefer to grow them from seed. These are from crowns and it's just coming up to the final pick. In fact, there were two varieties here, which two plants, two crowns, which failed. And so I put in some new ones last summer and they were grown from seed just last February. So that's what they look like when they're really young and you don't pick them for three years or so. You can see that in my how to grow asparagus video. Rhubarb has been very good recently. We had a spell in early June, the first two weeks of June we had 60 millimeters of rain and that really helped all these plants in particular. April and May were pretty dry and you can see the before and after of picking. This is such a good variety. It's Timperley early mostly and you can see I've taken out all the big ones. I'm selling them actually. This is market garden so it's not like one could eat that much rhubarb. And all the beds that you're seeing have had some compost in the last year. So this is compost making. About a half to two thirds of the compost I use is my homemade and the other part I buy mushroom compost or green waste or animal manure, even wood chip actually. So this is a heap that's just finished. Adam finished it this morning. Final layer of vegetable waste even including apple thinnings like we're thinning the apples. And then on top you put a few leaves and a tiny bit of green waste compost just to make a bit of a brown layer on the surface. And this is pretty warm now that one's about 65 centigrade 140 Fahrenheit even whereas this one has really cooled down and actually have a look in this one. You can see what it looks like before it's turned so we leave them to sit for maybe six to eight weeks and then when they're looking like this pretty decomposed, in fact I was expecting to find some worms here but oh there they are. It's usually at this stage that the worms arrive like that and that's a sign it's going to become amazingly good compost if you see them. It needs to be moist not too wet so we keep the plastic cover on but then this will be turned into there. It's classic three bay system with pallets and eventually in say eight weeks time that will also be turned into here on top and then by October November we've got a lot of lovely compost and we'll put a sort pallet collar or an extra frame on top before turning that one into there. Many options in compost making. I'm running a compost making course here actually in the afternoon next Wednesday 24th of June and you can find a link in description. It's a good time of year to really get into making compost because there's so much stuff you know we're trimming hedges and we won't cut all that long grass up there. That I'm deliberately leaving as a wild area but you can see those hazel trees in the further distance and eventually they'll be coppice so that's another source of green you know wood green wood is actually a really fantastic addition for compost making. I'll say more about that in another video. Well here we have fantastic cabbage which were planted in let me think roughly the middle of April. This is an F1 hybrid called Dutchman. I haven't grown it before I'm just curious to see I want to see how it makes really nice hearts and we haven't yet hit the season of butterflies big time you can see there aren't any here. If I saw them I would be spraying Bacillus thuringiensis but only it's only a brief period when there's a lot of caterpillars only on the brassicas and up here's a different variety of cabbage so you know in the in the world of cabbage there's just so many options. This is golden acre which is not hybrid I love it for it's a longer season of harvest and it will make really tight heads and they're more rounded and I am de-leafing some of these so like for example here taking off leaves like that before they get too yellow and then they start to give a habitat and so a lot of that will go on the compost heap and I did again we'll put a link up to a video I made about that kind of thing. Yeah that's one reason they look so perfect because they've been de-leafed and I like the garden to look really good like that because it just makes everything look so lush and the same with the flowers on the end you can see the sunflowers it won't be long before they come out and zinnias as well we have in these marigolds pretty much everywhere this is a beautiful grow together combination which is celeriac and leeks so the leeks will mature sometime in September it's an early variety called jollant while the celeriac come along a bit later and I'm very heartened to see ladybirds like that we're seeing a lot of them actually all over the garden now so I'm never treating aphids in any way except waiting really for the ladybirds to arrive and the hoverfly and all the other predators if you use pesticide you know you kill the predators so with aphids my main remedy either is to water plants more that de-stresses them less interesting to aphids or we had mesh cover over these for six weeks just until they established because I found with celeriac that really helps them to it reduces the aphid pressure and helps them to get going well here we can see ah the bindweed that I mentioned this is uh um some of my gang have been along here this morning removing the the bindweed and I asked them just to leave this one bed just to show on the video ah dandelion as well that's classic so we're getting in invaded by new dandelions there from seed which is why I've managed to pull this out quite easily I'm absolutely not leaving dandelions anywhere there's millions in all around this garden but I don't want them in the flower in the in the vegetable beds um but the bindweed is a bit of another matter because you know by the way you just flick out but one like this I really should have a trial here that's what we normally do but I'm curious to see whether it might pull out quite a bit no I don't think it's going to with a bit of help with my finger it might you hear that scrunch and that's those little roots breaking so they're coming off a much deeper root lower down which you never remove because I don't want to go thorough digging here but this regular removal of the surface growth of bindweed really slows it down and if you can keep on it through a year from this point it was a lot worse than this two years ago you can get rid of it completely so that that motivates me to keep going on this but you see there's quite a bit here the other beds have been done in fact this variety of squash is um how to put it the seeds don't have um holes or husks so you can eat them as pumpkin seeds I can't remember the name of it but I was given the seeds in Sweden when I was there and I'm really keen to try that and then we got some butternut which tend to be slower and if you look at the butternut compared to the crown prince there the crown prince are clearly much bigger as you'll just mention here to my shirt um this is from my range on tmail website so if you have a look in the link we put in the description you can see there's a whole range of these different colors different designs some for men some for women some for children uh really good modeling on that website by albie the no dig kid while potatoes here I don't know if I can find any uh we we've earthed up with compost and in fact if you don't do that you can see what's happened here a classic uh where they're reaching light they go a bit green uh that one's still edible I won't throw that one away but hopefully most of the potatoes are covered in compost oh yeah look at this oh wow yeah if you wanted you you could you could just do that at this stage and that and then just push that back you know you've got an early harvest of this is actually a second early called charlotte and the classic thing with new potatoes you can see the skin is really soft still it's it's just rubbing off these will be absolutely delicious because at this stage potatoes have more sugars in that's why early potatoes are so yummy and then gradually that turns more starchy and these these will mature slowly for another probably about three weeks until until normally second or third week of july when we'll harvest them pull them put them in paper sacks keep them in in an outbuilding or a shed and by december they'll be sprouting a bit rub off the sprouts so that you can keep these basically until now even we're still eating until recently until last week we were eating last year's charlotte harvesters in july storage will make such a difference if you get it nice and the the leaves look a little bit um it's going to say not pretty you know they they had a late frost may the 11th that's only five weeks ago so they've looked a bit ropey since then but actually i'm heartened to see the potatoes are good here we had broad beans and they've just finished so this patch was finally cleared this morning and one little thing i'll do after you see here they they pulled out the plant a bit more than i would like really so i would tread that down i actually walked on this bed yesterday uh just to get it all firm so with no dig you want you want firm soil it's not about the soil needs to be loose and fluffy plants need firm ground to anchor in but you saw with the carrots how nicely they come out and how easily they go down into it and we're not putting any new compost on it this time of year for the second plantings they're all going into what's here already from what was spread last november so those were beans sown in november here we're doing a little trial and i'll just pull this back now actually just to show you the that is wool i was given some sheep wool by uh i can't remember their name i'll have to put the link in the website again but there's a company in cambridge who who you know farmers can't get rid of their wool now it's just incredible they can't sell it i should say uh i suppose so much synthetic fabric being used anyway so we put wool on the bed before it was over winter spinach that hadn't had compost put clear the spinach twist this out put the wool on and then a combination of homemade compost and green waste compost on top just over an inch you can see which is a bit variable but that's the wool there basically the wool is all along the bed under the compost and the reason for having the mesh cover on is because birds love this they love to come and peck at the wool to make for their nesting but i'm thinking now that because these plants have got so big we'll remove the cover you can see wow that's one plant of crown prince and mesh does help plants to grow in its protection against wind so it's really good from that point of view but there comes a point where it's bursting out so this will come off now uh it does it means we haven't got a perfectly fair comparison but there'll still be some indication what what i'm finding with wool is like this bed had wool under the compost under the lettuce and those letters have been just sensational we've been picking from them uh for seven weeks already uh still going strong variety saragossa long-lived batavian so yeah check it out you know wool as a it's giving off nutrients oh yeah minty's pointing me to the next bed um i'll just mention also how this one here this lettuce bed we planted yesterday yesterday morning that was three foot high pea plants which we'd grown for shoots and finally rising to flower and so adam cut them at the base with his sickle uh clear them to compost and on the same day we transplanted these lettuce so you can have very rapid turnover and no dig really helps with that because it's the ground's ready all the time these broccoli by contrast will actually go on a bit longer and it's a good variety called sibsley which is quite tender stem so you can see where i cut the main head and then you get these lovely long side sheets and all of that is edible and in fact the stem or stalk is is probably the nicest part it's quite sweet so those these i hope will continue cropping for quite a while yet while uh yeah we're just checking we've come to the pyramid and tom the joiner is has done just a superb job on this you can see the quality of craftsmanship in fact if you look along this side nicola will take the camera to show you how straight and even that is because he's got he's achieved the level of perfection you need with a pyramid uh which is perfect north south orientation uh angles all completely correct 51.37 degrees or whatever it is it's pyramid of giza which involved cutting these main frame six inch square douglas fir timbers very precisely and you see how at the apex they go up actually you can't see it so clearly now because we've got the the rafters and the rafters he's putting in they also have to be cut incredibly precisely with very perfect angles there then these are temporary holding screws because you can't have any metal in the pyramid so they're going to come out once these wooden dowels have finally gone in and been glued in and then the polycarbonate cover is being secured with copper nails and that's quite quick actually so he's done just that one side so far it won't be long before the other sides are covered and it'll be good news for my planting i put these plants in 10 days ago had a quiet sunday and just really got on with it but they were open to wind and we had a lot of wind the following week they did not like it uh the tomatoes are okay but there's some watermelons up in the far corner there you can probably just see them there i think they're dead actually they didn't like that level of cold wind but once it's it's covered there's going to be a door here which i can open and two windows one on either side also for ventilation i don't yet know what what the growing conditions will be like in there but we'll see what i am interested by those is you know the whole pyramid energy uh how much energy it makes it's a really good feeling that i like that um it affects different people in different ways um i have a volunteer working here actually at the moment and she said uh she was just in there for half an hour one evening and struggled to sleep afterwards she was so energized so yeah that there's definitely a lot of energy in a well-made pyramid here i'm being branching out and we have a sauna recently arrived so uh it's just today they're putting in the wood-burning stove in fact and that's going to be exciting i've still got to oil the inside and we'll we'll do a video about that later here i want to show you uh interesting thing about french beans which is how they don't like uh cool weather so these i sowed these direct three three and a half weeks ago and they came up nicely and then it turned cold and windy for two weeks in early june and that's what's causing this yellowing and if if you'd seen them even five days ago before it warmed up a bit you'd think that was never going to work but you can see now they're very healthy new leaves and how green they are and this this yellowing is all it is is weather you know it's just that it's not a pest or anything like that so if your french beans are struggling like this uh particularly on the older leaves you know don't worry um if you can see new strong growth like here all is good it just takes them a while sometimes but it's the reason that i always say don't sow too early you know french beans runner whereas tomatoes if anything i would say plant them before you're officially recommended there's all this stuff about not before 10 degrees centigrade nights look how healthy these are they've been in the ground for about three weeks so they had a week of warm weather and they've had two weeks of cold weather they've just got their feet down and carried on so tomatoes are pretty resilient but i've got some outdoor cucumbers down there which are not looking so strong they'll make it but tomatoes cucumbers not the same at all and i get a lot of questions um very nice coriander here by the way that letting it flower like this can be but certainly good for insects uh but also we'll get some nice green and then finally ripe coriander seed and beyond them the onions just phenomenal uh amount of onions here you can see they're starting to bulb up a bit this is red barren multi-sown late february transplanted 24th of march here as pretty small little seedlings rather like the lettuce we saw you know they look nothing at first but we put fleece over that helped them with warmth and it also keeps the allium leaf viner away so we kept the fleece on till the end of may on this whole section and i'm really pleased with what i'm seeing but also compared to if you grew them from sets you get many more onions growing them like this multi-zone and also many less bolters because i'm getting a lot of questions about that what to do with bolting onions and if you go then from seed it's a bit of you need to invest in maybe some kind of sheltered cover if you haven't got it greenhouse space uh it's really worth it well here you can see another inter so this work working really well parsnips coming up between lettuce so that's all the parsnips there which i'll need to thin out um i had help with a friend we did this bed in about an hour but it's a really neat way and with no dig because you haven't got too many weeds you know if you had a lot of weeds if you're digging i think this might be more tricky um but i haven't actually weeded this bed since we sowed the parsnips but that was three nearly three weeks ago it's 18 days so 15 days to to see them so you know don't give up if your parsnips don't appear straight away so to speak and yeah that is it i just want to show you in the background of the main building work here there's a lot going on at homemakers right now and it's my house big extension but mostly on the footprint of what was their garage and a small kitchen and bathroom which was knocked down in the builder there is rob right in the middle below the chimney brilliant baxter has done a really good job so i'm excited about that it's been a bit traumatic for me actually living in a very small confined space while that's all happening but i'm totally happy to do that with the prospect of having a much bigger house coming up to the end