PLANTING SPRING BULBS AND GARLIC / OCTOBER ALLOTMENT GARDENING FOR BEGINNERS

Good morning everyone, welcome back to my allotment diaries. My name is Emma, these are my allotment diaries. I'd love you to subscribe to my YouTube channel if you want to see what someone gets up to, not very well but you know I'm trying my best, on an allotment plot in South London. So here we are in October. I'm doing one of my absolute favourite things today which is to plant my spring bulbs and my onions and garlic hopefully if I can find a spot for them. So I've brought with me a load of bulbs and I actually just went to Wilko's. I find Wilko's to just be the cheapest best place to buy spring bulbs and garlic and potatoes and all sorts of things. I've gone for a big variety of different tulip bulbs this year. So I have got I think all I got was tulips actually, yeah I just got tulips. I think I planted out some daffodils last year which will probably come up again. So I've gone for the Fosteriana orange emperor, beautiful. I've gone for the double double-headed pink ones which I think are called double late finola so they'll probably come up a bit later but there we go. I've gone for the yellow ones which are the fringed crystal stars. You can see that they've got a bit of a fringe to their their petals which is quite pretty and then I picked up this massive bulb this massive basket of bulbs, 30 tulip bulbs and they are the triumph ones. These are very typical tulip bulbs. If you see tulips about and they're the stereotypical kind of tulip, look a bit like that, they're probably the triumph ones and they're just bog standard tulips, really pretty colours though. So I'm going to plant those out. Also got myself some shallots. I've done onions a few times so I found these shallots. They're supposed to be smaller. All of my onions grow really small anyway so I thought if I grow a shallot. Oh it's Rocky. Hello Rocky. Hiya. Hello. Did you hear me? Right under my chair. Yeah. Hiya. What you been up to? Hiya. Hiya. Pooing in my beds have you? Oh Rocky that's not a flattering camera angle. These are my bulbs, rocks, rocks. Come on. Please don't eat all of my bulbs. This cat is just becoming, oh such an unflattering camera angle rocks. Come on. Rocky. Where were we? We were talking about shallots. Oh you're a nightmare. Right we were talking about, not that, not that rocks. No. No. What? Oh Rocky. My shed's not safe. As if it's my fault. As if it's my fault. Right where were we? Oh my goodness Rocky you just get me in such tears. Right I also picked up some garlic which is the sativum casablanca. I think I've done this before but anyway we're going to whack that in too. So. Cats huh? As if it's my fault. As if it's my fault. I didn't ask him to come in there. Right I seem to have left the plot in a bit of a hurry last time I was here. Is that what I did? There's like tools all over the place and I know that this is the work of me. This is not a thief or anything. This is me because my wheelbarrow is half full as well. With leaves that I was supposed to take home. Now somebody did tell me these Romanesco um cauliflower slash broccolis you can eat the leaves and they're delicious and I was going to take the leaves home and I sort of whacked them all in that for my reel my Instagram reel and then I left him. So there we go. Right so before we get into the bulbs and the the garlic and stuff I just want to show you what's happened to my sweet corn here. Once again it's been stripped you can see and somebody said that this might be a fox. I can't imagine the fox doing this. It just doesn't seem like fox behaviour to me. Not that I'm a fox expert or anything but it just doesn't seem I just can't imagine the fox doing that. It just doesn't seem to be that articulate and stuff but the other ones are okay. I mean look at this one I'm actually getting an actual sweet corn. It feels like squirrels to me but I don't know. What do I know? I've got another one there the crazy hairdo. Fantastic. Now I love putting in loads of spring bulbs and having loads of things growing and loads of flowers growing in and it's not just to feed the pollinators and the early pollinators who are desperately looking for something to eat at that time of year but it also my allotment plot in the springtime is usually quite flat and there's not very much going on and the tulip bulbs and the daffodils and the crocus flowers they're usually the first things that kind of pop up and spring to life and it makes me really excited and happy to come down to my plot so if you have room on your allotment plot do consider putting in some spring bulbs even if it's just in a corner of your raised bed or just in a little row or just somewhere or even in pots if you can actually look after them but yeah do consider putting some in I think it just makes such a difference to your allotment plot and it's just it's such a joy to see them come up I always get very excited every year. So I'm using this I think I showed this in my tools video and it's a broken handle to something it might be a spade might have been a shovel might have been a fork something like that but I'm using this because it's a really good bulb planter I can just stick it straight into the ground another thing that you could do if you're being particularly like pedantic about it all is you could measure six inches which is about how deep tulip bulbs need to go and you could either sort of cut a line in or draw a line on it and then you know exactly how deep it's going to go I'm going to kind of guesstimate because that's what I do but yeah a good rule of thumb with bulbs to know how deep they have to go is you take your bulb and it has to go about three times the length of that so imagine putting three bulbs on top of each other talk about demonstration that's about how deep it needs to go about that much which is about six inches right so it needs to go three times its depth into the ground deeper is usually better and that's why I guesstimate because I just do it as deep as I can tulip bulbs always like to find their way to the light the way to plant them is pointy end up this is where the roots come out this is where the flower comes out however if you do if you're not sure plant it on its side because it will find its way and if you do plant it upside down they will just bend themselves around to the light because plants know what they're doing guys more than we do and they know how to find the light and in nature not everything falls perfectly into the ground the right way up and things still grow so don't get completely caught up and worried about what way it goes if in doubt with anything plant it on its side that's it right let's do this it's quite a good idea to make the holes before and then put all your bulbs in you can sort of see where they're all going to come up as well and don't be afraid of planting tulip bulbs quite close together because they do kind of push each other out the way and they look really good when they're all kind of coming up in a big clump together and so yeah just a quick tip make your holes before think about where where it's all going to be and what's all going to come up to about here and then bury them all can't really go wrong with tulips they are very self-sufficient you know they look after themselves so i like the idea of them all coming up in a little row here because it's just in front of my pink shed so i planted in this bit here the yellow ones and also the mix of purple white and pink kind of a fuchsia kind of color i don't know purple and white and yellow together i think it looked really nice i'm just envisioning myself coming out the shed and then just seeing a little row of all different colored kind of tulips i think that'd be really pretty but let's wait and see if the fox gets them or not who's that you're not rocky excuse me how's that it's not rocky right so we're going to stick our shallots and our garlic in this bed here in the front of my shed i think it's just a good spot to put it all in i'm going to put the shallots in two rows and then the garlic in two rows next to it um so we'll do that we'll just whack it all in right so shallots don't need to be planted very deep it's between one and three centimeters so the way i'm going to do it is i'm going to make a drill in the soil like that and a drill is just a line in the soil it's no more complicated than that it's a line in the soil okay there's my line in the soil about two and a half centimeters deep i'm going to estimate that guesstimate it i actually guesstimated a half can you believe it right these are the same as tulip bulbs they go pointy end up that end is the roots pointy end up but again if you get it the wrong way around they will figure it out themselves have faith in the plant whack them in about that far apart from each other um which is supposed to be about 15 centimeters about that much apart okay here we go i'll give you a bird's eye view so think of them a bit as being quite tall plants but they're not very thick these aren't going to get much bigger than sort of that it's a shallot so as long as they can all sort of go next to each other like that that's what you're thinking when you're thinking of spacing you're thinking how big's the plant going to get so they're kind of tall and they don't go out that much so i think they're quite sociable plants onions i think they like to be close to their mates so give them a happy life in the soil all right what we're going to do is we're just going to go along our drill and just just cover them in soil give them a pat like that some of them are sticking out the soil that's okay because they're shallots guys they're okay we want the bulb to not be too deep because we want it to be able to sweat oh god don't do that that's just stupid my understanding of it is that we want the shallot to be able to grow and the onions same for onions as well we want to be able to grow and push the soil away so if they're really far under the soil and it's all compact around them they're not going to be able to swell that much so keep them on the surface and give them a chance of swelling and getting a bit bigger so i'm just going by what people told me before having a little bit of him sticking out like that is all right he'll be all right hopefully and he'll be all right he's got a little bit of him sticking out it's not too deep in the soil yeah he's got a good fighting chance all right sort of do the same to the garlic so we've got to break this open and then that's what you plant little cloves like that i think it is pointy end up and then that end down so that's where the roots come that's the end where the garlic grows and the entire garlic bulb grows from a clove which is quite amazing isn't it i find that fascinating so just whack them in same as the onions under they go they can all go under though they're all right i don't mind i don't think garlic is fussy doesn't seem like a fussy just can't imagine garlic being fussy i don't know why because it sort of goes in everything didn't it put garlic in everything how could it be fussy when it goes in everything once again hope for the best it's all you can really do so last thing i wanted to do was have a little look in the polytunnel because last time i was here or the time before that i think i planted out a load of autumn winter stuff in the polytunnel and i want to see how it's doing so i can see some green actually oh my goodness oh wow oh my goodness i can't believe this look at those rows oh my goodness i can't believe how well everything has started to come up this is absolutely amazing i cannot believe that look at the rows the perfect rows if only we'd labeled them i think i can remember though i think i put the cabbages and cauliflowers at the back oh my goodness look how many have come up i remember scattering and thinking uh about about four will grow amazing and then here i think is what kohlrabi something else oh no no no rocky absolutely no i'm so sorry no no no no no no no no no cannot let the cat in here no oh rocky no don't do this to me i'm sorry i can't let you in because my perfect rows of vegetables these rows are so perfect i am just i am so thrilled i don't even want to like thin them i'm too scared of killing them oh my goodness oh my goodness some of these are still alive as well oh we dared to dream we dared to dream and it paid off guys i wonder if these radishes are ready to pick yet no not yet gosh these are coming up really well as well aren't they this is a this is a miracle polytunnel this is this is a miracle tent a tent when anything is possible what a fantastic end to the vlog i hope you enjoyed it today so we planted out some tulip bulbs some garlic some onions and it's time to get your stuff out as well if you are wanting to plant spring bulbs you do have until like january i think i planted tulips in january once and they still grew in time for spring so don't panic too much it's just i wanted to avoid all the rain and we've got quite a lot of rain coming so i don't know when i'm going to be able to get down here so that felt really good to get that out i hope you enjoyed the vlog today if you did do subscribe to my channel i will see you in my next one see you then thank you for watching bye