Polytunnel Changeover: From Summer to Winter Vegetables

Oh my word. I hate this moment. It's still summer, just early October, but this behind me, we have to scrap it all soon because I need time for my winter salad plants and greens to get established before it actually turns much darker and colder very soon. And that means all of these beautiful plants that are still cropping really well. Look at these cucumbers. I'm really enjoying these. Personally, I'm probably eating more cucumbers at this time of year than at any time. They are so tasty. And right up to the end, they're still giving so many. I've pinched out the top, as you can see there. So the plant can't actually grow any more baby cucumbers. And I'm afraid you're gonna have only 10 more days. It'll be about 10 days. We'll come back in 10 days and see us removing these plants. But still, with lots to enjoy. And some of these vegetables will store as well. On the right there, you can see some aubergines which have cropped magnificently, but they are quite coming to an end. And I think it's fair for them. You know, I think the cucumbers would go on, but so would the tomatoes. But again, I've stopped them so that you can see there's a limited number of tomatoes on these plants now, and they're still ripening beautifully. There's a lovely orange Wellington there, for example, and all the different Oxhearts. So plenty to enjoy again for the next 10 days. So you'll see how we then. Grade them out when we clear the plants and separate the green ones from the colored ones. And one thing we have been watering until recently is the basil under the tomatoes there, that's Tulsi basil. But in fact, we even stopped that now and all the tomatoes I've not watered for four weeks, in fact, so we'll see how we get the soil moist again. And we have one example here of already planted winter crops, because I find these established better if you can get them in a bit early, and that's spinach. And in fact, it has happened. Again, I'm pretty sure that's wood lice eating the spinach there. Possibly I planted it a bit too deep actually. They go for the baby leaves. You can see how that one's just pretty much lost all its little growing point. So when it comes to planting the other mustards and lettuce and everything, we'll fill those gaps. And we've got chard and kale. Clearing day has arrived. 10 days later. And we're going to take everything out of here to compost it. First, we'll pick any green tomatoes we've been through and pick the ripe ones and even the semi-ripe, which are ripening slowly in the shed. And cucumbers at the far end. We've picked also all the basil that we want to pick. So that's all going to go to compost. It will be chopped up and cut up. Marigolds, sadly, they're going to be chopped up as well. Great, a lot of compost material here. I'm just going to demonstrate quickly one. plant it's a sungold which you can see has no fruit at all on now because i stopped it in good time in august and clearing the plants this is one way of doing it if you stand on the soil close to the root ball and then you can see a few roots have come out but not too many so i just need them to get the string off in fact i won't do it all now but i'll just quickly show you what i do with the main stem and you can see how fat these stems are also how long they are you know if this had been growing to the top it would have gone way too far so we've been dropping them i'm slicing like that the bottom is always a little bit woody but as we get further up it gets easier and if you do diagonal cuts with a sharp knife it's interesting to see that slightly rotting in the middle but i'm cutting them to about this length to go on the compost heap so you're going to see a lot And then we'll see the polytunnel cleared. And after that, this afternoon, or even this evening, I'm going to put on the spray line because this soil is now very dry. This has not been watered for over a month. So it's gonna take a while to re-wet it. And it's very effective using spray to get water sinking in slowly. The gang arrived. We're gonna crack on. It's Cosimo, who's a volunteer from Denmark, and Adam, the store of Pomicus. On we go. Look at this, so about an hour and 10 minutes later, tomatoes all cleared and it's not too much else to do here, really just treading down the ground where it's a bit upheaved from pulling them out, maybe removing a few of these roots. And then we're good to plant the salads, which is the next job. But before that, we're going to remove also the cucumbers. And these cucumbers are gonna take a while not to cut the stems, just to get the strings off them. How long they've grown. They'd be fantastic cucumbers. We're just gonna pick the few remaining ones before doing that. And same story with the aubergines. So harvesting the remaining long purple aubergines and then clearing these plants as well. Marigolds to come out, basil there to come out and some basil over the other side that Adam's just starting to clear. And it's actually all going into wheelbarrow and we're gonna mow it. In fact, that's a whole nother story. You can watch out for later video. We're doing a composting trial. Different ways of composting. So we're gonna crack on now with the cucumbers. So as you can see, it's been a good clear out and I found it amazing, you know, having got used to coming in here and fighting my way through the jungle, so to speak. And now, wow, we have visibility. And also, in fact, a few days ago in the rain, we cleaned the outside by tying two large sheets together. One person either side on a rainy morning works really well too. Let more light in, basically. And there's still the underside of the polythene that Adam's going to use some kind of brush or some mechanism to get the dirty stuff off. Because for winter salads, it just makes so much difference, every bit of light. We're 51 north here, same as like Nova Scotia, Northern Canada. So it's dark in the winter. And that can be as much of a constraint on growing as temperature. So we will do a bit more clearing. Adam's raking, we're gonna mark out the beds again, To remind. us where the actual beds and paths are because you kind of lose sight of it in the summer with just two rows of tomatoes down the middle this is actually a 51 inch 1.3 meter wide bed with only a short 16 centimeter pathway between so we'll mark all that out and then turn on the water and then we'll be ready for planting next phase and just connecting this which is set to water just the tomato end you'll see it coming out in the spray in a minute We're not watering that end because that's damp from the cucumbers and Adam has put out strings. We carefully measured up the polytunnel to see where they should be because we have 32 inch, I can't think what that is in metric, pathways on either side, sorry beds, 16 inch or 40 centimeter pathways along there and then 18 inch or 45 centimeter pathway in the middle. And I'll shut both doors in a minute because there's quite a lot of wind and you can see how it's blowing the spray around. So these are nice doors. I don't use them much when we're growing things, but I can just do that. And I'm gonna leave this spray running for at least 12 hours, might be more. I'll come in and check the soil, see how damp it is, and water the other end a little bit, and then we'll finish watering by hand because with a spray line, it doesn't reach all the edges. This is three days since we cleared the tunnel and everything that we chopped up and got out of it, all the tomato stems and everything, they went in a pile over there, waiting for Adam to mow them because we're setting up a composting trial here. That's kind of another story and do look out for a video on that. But this is just to show you what you could do if you wanted tomatoes, you know, not all of those quite stemmy plants to compost more quickly. You can see how it's now very fine. And there is also it's smelling lovely as I do that actually like pine forest because there's some tree leaves and pine needles down there as well which Adam mowed at the same time. So we've got here in fact pretty much perfect mix of green and brown and I'm very excited to see how it decomposes. And then we will pick this up in two days time we're going to actually do the planting. We've been watering the polytunnels and that took quite a while and so we'll be popping in the plants Here we are two days later and wow it's planting time. So Adam and I were in here early this morning at crack of dawn. I could only just see what we were doing and we dibbed all these holes. Took about an hour to dib this many holes in the polytunnel. I haven't counted how many there are actually but it might be close to a thousand or more. Because the dibbing is quick and we pre-watered so the soil is all soft and there's no compost being put on this ground. Since April, in fact, we put it on once a year for tomatoes, cucumbers, aubergine and everything, but we don't put any on at this time. So these salads go into existing soil. It makes it easier actually for planting because there's no lumpy compost on the surface. And they are going into these holes as deep as we've made them and we push them down, don't fill in the holes. Very quick, as you can see, see what Adam's doing there. It's just popping them in, pushing them down, leave the hole unfilled, and then we'll give a good water. And I just wanted to mention too the amazing growth we've got on these module trays, so these are the ones I designed that work really well. You can see they've got 60 cells in a size of an A4 piece of paper. And just look at those rocket, they were sown on the 22nd of September and that's now 18 days. Is that right? 22 days, sorry, three weeks roughly. That's three weeks growth and these were sown a week earlier, that's four weeks growth on the lettuce. Home safe seed from this year, Grenoble Red. Just fantastic. A good compost mix in the module tray makes this possible. No feeding. Yippee! I like this moment. We've planted for the winter and everything that's in here, all being well, will survive frosts and carry on cropping until next April. So it's a reservoir of leaves for five or six months of picking in the darkest months. This polytunnel does not keep frost out. So if there's a deep frost, by which I mean, say minus 5, 23 Fahrenheit or lower, we would cover the whole, everything in here with fleece. We just keep some fleece ready for that night and day. In fact, during a really cold spell, just sitting on top and that just helps them go through it and watering. I'm watering now to a lot to make sure these are well settled in So it's on that end first, and then I'll change it over in about. Maybe an hour and a half and be on this end for two hours. It's a slightly bigger piece of ground. And then we'll need to water by hand along the sides because these spray lines don't really reach to the corners. You can find out more about all of this in my polytunnel greenhouse growing guide on my website. And one more thing on watering is in the winter, I don't water a lot. So we'll do a final pick and a final water just before Christmas and pick the plants pretty small. That gives us a bit of time off. in the Christmas New Year before they need picking again. We often start again around the middle of January, but in the whole of January, I'll water usually just once, one time in the whole month. So don't overwater your winter salads when you're in a dark and damp climate like this. That advice wouldn't apply if you're, say, in Utah or Nevada or somewhere where it's sunny every day. Lower latitude actually much brighter. Here it's 51 north, we're pretty dark in the winter. There's one more thing to make the most of this tunnel space, which I do is to plant garlic in here. It's now five days actually since we've planted and you can see how the plants have taken really well, really perking up. The garlic doesn't take any extra space, so I've not allowed any extra space for it. It just slots in here. I put it mainly between the lettuce and endive section in the middle of the tunnel in this case, because I found with the mustards and rocket, in the spring, they can get a bit big and take a bit of energy from the garlic, but the lettuce and endive actually don't take any at all. So I just simply dig a hole and drop in the clove and we get fantastic garlic in here because it doesn't get rust to the same extent, very little rust compared to outside. We've been having big problems with rust on the garlic recently. But only on the outdoor garlic, it's something to do with the early spring rain and I still don't really understand it and some years it's worse than others but in here always I get really big bulbs and these cloves are from bulbs that have grown in here for 14 consecutive years so it's a good strain you could say. So I'm just going to carry on doing that and I hope you've enjoyed the video.