PICK N MIX SEED SOWING! / SEPTEMBER 2022/ EMMA'S ALLOTMENT DIARIES

Welcome back to my allotment diaries, my name is Emma. These are my allotment diaries, this is my allotment plot. I'd love for you to subscribe to my channel if you want to find out everything I do to it throughout the year. If you've got maybe a first allotment plot or something or you're just interested in vegetable gardening from a novice, a complete beginner, join my channel, subscribe to me. I've just been confronted by the spider from hell Why? We don't know, we don't know. He's not the biggest spider I've ever seen but the fact that he's on my shed door, I mean why? Is that even a good place to catch flies? That's what I want to know. Think about that mate. It's gotten really really really cold today in the UK, like all of a sudden my kids were just like where are our hats and gloves this morning? I've decided it's a good day to start planting up the polytunnel. I think the polytunnel needs some stuff in it over the autumn winter. A lot of you are saying that I should take it down because I think it will fly away. I think it might be all right, I'm going to whack some stuff in there. I now have this strawberry bed here for free. If you saw my strawberry planter video, my strawberry planter is just there, everything's still alive in it. I've now got my old strawberry bed is like completely free so I'm going to try and put some brassica stuff in there but not today. I think it could do with a top up of compost, I think it needs some new compost in there because it's looking a bit low. So the stuff that I've got to plant out in my polytunnel are this, I think this is cauliflower, all year round cauliflower, so this should do really well in a polytunnel. I've got this which I think is kohlrabi, which hopefully won't get eaten by slugs but I'm not, you know, holding my breath. And then some of this and this and this is, it could either be normal kale or dwarf kale. I didn't label them, I grew two different varieties. The dwarf kale was supposed to be for my pots at home because it doesn't grow very big and the big kale was supposed to be for the plot but I forgot to label and I don't know which is which so I just brought a selection of all of them. Maybe one of them are grown, maybe they'll all get eaten, we don't know yet. So first thing we're going to do today is plant out in the polytunnel. So in here all summer has been my tomato jungle which I got rid of about a week ago because it was just all flopping everywhere and I wanted to get some stuff out. I've still got some marigolds in here and I'd like to keep those as long as possible. And just down here I've got my, what are they called, radishes which have suddenly popped up out of nowhere. So we'll try and leave some of these. I've obviously still got a few rogue tomatoes popping about. I've had this down so let's get this up. This is my weed membrane and this was basically to stop the blight from getting the tomatoes, so keeping the tomatoes away from the dirt basically. But the soil should be quite good under there I think. And then what I think we'll do is dig it over a little bit. I'm continuing to grow in the autumn winter time because I still like to get down here. So I think having a polytunnel and using it in the autumn winter to grow some autumn winter veg is like perfect for me. It works for me really well. A lot of people do just sort of close up their allotment plots at this time of year and what that basically means is that you mulch over the roots and that. Beautiful. You mulch over all your beds and you cover them with something like a plastic membrane kind of thing or a ground sheet or something and you just cover it all up. A lot of people do that at this time of year and that's fine if that's you because if you don't want to get down here when it's cold and it's raining and you've still got stuff to look after then you know just close your allotment plot up cover it with something and leave it till the spring time. There's nothing wrong with doing that. I personally just love being able to have the option of coming down here as much as possible and autumn winter veg doesn't need quite as much looking after as like spring summer veg. It does tend to be quite long growing and it does tend to look after itself. Blind weed that can bugger off. Right okay it's buggered off. Good. So in terms of seeds because I thought we'd just whack out as much as we can really. I've brought as many seeds as I could physically think that would might work. So I've brought leeks which I've never been able to grow but we'll see. The all year round cauliflower and I've brought that to whack out too. Got some more kohlrabi which is this pink thing. Never managed to grow one of those so that'd be interesting and cabbages. Mooli. Mino early. Don't know. It's long and white. They look nice. Let's whack it out why not see what happens. Who knows. Who knows. So let's see how many of these we can whack out. So we do have quite a lot of room for seeds that can sort of squeeze in all around here. So we'll start with the back. I reckon we can get a row of what should we do. Let's do the bigger stuff at the back. So let's do the cauliflower and cabbages at the back and then we'll have the kohlrabi and then we'll have the lettuce and the radishes at the front. So right back here and I do sometimes sow my brassicas from seed. I actually grew all of my purple sprouting broccoli in my first year just from seed. You can only try. So we'll do a row there and we'll put a row in there. Because my soil in here is quite dry see it's just blowing it's literally blowing all over the place like dust. I'm going to water the rows before I put the seeds in. It's debatable whether you actually need to do that or not. I think in gardening everything is always up for debate so whenever I do this someone will say oh you don't need to do that and if I don't do it somebody else will comment and say you should have watered them before you put the seeds in. So everything is up for debate and you've just got to keep trying. It's up to you really you find what works for you. Is there ever a right or wrong really? As long as it grows it grows right? Right I've decided what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a pick mix. So what I'm going to do is in the back row I'm going to sow cauliflower and then over the top of that I'm going to sow cabbages and then when they come up and I thin them I'm not going to know which is which. I'm going to get cauliflowers and cabbages galore and it'll be really exciting. So it'd be exciting for me anyway. Right this is how I amuse myself. Such fun. So in goes the cauliflower. Loads of it. Absolutely loads of it. Just like millions and millions of cauliflowers. Thousands of them. Sad how excited I get by ideas like this. So cabbages literally over the top of the cauliflowers together working in harmony like best friends. They can't believe their luck. Look at them. All the seeds mingling, asking each other's names, where you're from, what are you, never seen you before. This is so exciting. Right don't tell me these vlogs are not exciting. We'll cover them all up together. Oh my goodness in the same drill. This is bonkers. This is bonkers gardening with Emma. And then just to make things even more exciting we won't label it and we will forget and we won't even know what they are when they're coming up. Oh my goodness. Monty Don would be spinning in his grave wouldn't he? If he was dead. Wanna grow. You'd think that wouldn't you? You'd think one would grow. You'd be wrong. Right these are a bit of a protection technique and these work quite well at stopping the slugs and snails as well as birds and also incubating them a bit which hopefully should give them a bit of a growth spurt really we hope. I mean I've done this before and it's it's worked okay um so that's what we're doing basically for protection. I just thought I would come down and get some wood chip. There's quite a big pile here today and just wood chip around my polytunnel really and stop any weeds. It's always good to grab the wood chip when there's some here because it does go so fast. So I've just noticed behind me here these are my French beans that I grew ages ago and they didn't do anything. I've just noticed a couple of teeny tiny beans on them. This is as close to a French bean that I grew this year. That's it and it looks like it's going bad now because the weather's got so bad and so cold and this is about as much as I've got from this entire plant and then on this one here I can see ah the tiniest tiniest little bean. This is as much as I got from the whole plant. I really can't tell you why because I just don't understand it really. I think it's so much easier to have an attitude of just whatever grows grows when you have an allotment plot because when I got so like hung up on my pumpkins it turned this whole journey of growing my own food into this complete nightmare and I was so stressed about it. As it happens the pumpkin archway does need to come down pretty soon because it is pretty much done. You can see that all of my leaves are just dying back. This could be milgie or it could just literally be a natural progression of the plant because it is just one pumpkin plant and I did rinse it. I mean the pumpkins I've got on it just hundreds hundreds of them and so they all need to be picked pretty soon. These are my favourites the ones that are hanging so cute um but yeah I think next time I come down next week the pumpkin archway is going to be no more. The only other thing I'm a little bit annoyed about is that my potatoes didn't come up um and these were my Christmas potatoes that I planted upside down by accident and I appreciate they're upside down but I thought some of them would grow. I'm You see what I mean about lucky dip how exciting this is that's a radish oh wow that's a really beautiful one as well I don't know what variety that is white ice or something icicle one that is gorgeous I didn't know there were radishes there we go we've learned something today but where are the potatoes that's what we need to know where are the bleeding I'm sure I planted some kind of potato in this bed I know they were upside down you literally cannot find a potato I just want to dig the entire bed up now and try and find a potato there's no potatoes I can't find one potato in this whole bleeding bed but there are um radishes which is quite exciting and carrots and nasturtiums and stuff but what I'm going to do is resew all of my potatoes I think um and sew them the right way up this time hopefully um and that's what I'm going to do I hope you enjoyed the vlog today if you did subscribe to my youtube channel I'm going to be back next week for lots more autumn allotment vlogs um if you've got any video suggestions for me I did one on Wednesday about top 10 mistakes to avoid on your first allotment plot so if you've got any video suggestions like that I will get around to doing them over the autumn time let me know in the comments below and I'll see you next time thanks for watching guys bye