AMAZING ALLOTMENT ADVICE FOR BEGINNERS / JANUARY 2022 / EMMA'S ALLOTMENT DIARIES

Good morning everyone, welcome back to my allotment diaries. My name is Emma, these are my allotment diaries. I would love for you to subscribe to my channel, just hit the link below. Come and follow me on Instagram, on Facebook and come and read my blog as well. I've got a blog called thepinkshed.co.uk so I've got lots of new blog posts on there all about having my first allotment plot. So this is my third year growing on my allotment plot. I'm a first time allotment plot holder but this is my third year so I don't know if I can use that excuse anymore. I'm definitely not an expert. I have learnt quite a bit over my two years, mainly from making a load of mistakes. So I'm hoping that these vlogs will kind of help you if you're new to having an allotment plot or what have you. Maybe I'll make the mistakes so you don't have to. So it's Monday morning. I love coming on a Monday because lots of people come at the weekend and I get to see all the progress that they've made over the weekend and then I get to come in a week and do all my progress. This is the best time for me to come here really in the week. Checking there's no one around to watch me talking to the camera. Right, I just wanted to do a little bit of like a mini kind of end of January plot tour to show you where we are with things. I've had a few successes and a few things have kind of gone wrong which I'll explain. So at the beginning of the plot something very exciting is happening which I think we'd all appreciate knowing about right now and that is that my tulips are all starting to break through the soil. It's such a great time of year when you start to see the tulips sort of emerge from their little sleepy beds and I seem to just have so many. They seem to have been clumping and so you can see here how like I've got little clumps of green coming up, little clumps and I think what's happened, I think, and don't quote me on this because I don't really know, but I think what happens is that the bulbs create more bulbs, a bit like the gladioli bulbs did with all the mini bulbs on them. It's alright, we'll wait. And then they sort of throw up new shoots and it's sort of like in a cluster so it'll be interesting to see what the tulips do this year really, I'm quite excited to see what they do. So that's tulips, strawberries we won't talk about because they're fine and then down here I've got my onions and garlic. Don't know, don't know how these are doing, I mean you tell me, you tell me. Is it okay for them to be bent like this? I sort of feel like they're probably going to be fine and this probably just happened in the storm or in the frost or whatever, they've sort of broken but I don't know. I can't really tell you how these are doing because I've got no clue. I have a feeling they'll be okay to be honest with you, I've just got a feeling, I think they're a lot stronger and I think anything that you can actually plant in autumn, winter time I think can usually survive frost and stuff because that's the idea of them, otherwise why would they say plant them in autumn, everyone knows winter's coming. Broad beans I don't know either, these sort of did so well and then we had like really bad frost and I don't know, I think a lot of them have got frost damage, you see here that might be frost damage and you see here on this leaf how it's curling up a little bit, I think that's frost damage and also obviously slug damage too, see this one seems to have shrivelled up and died completely, I do definitely still have some, I might have to stake these, stop them from flopping over all over the place. I've got the garlic that I got from Seedcraft which is doing great, amazing. This garlic is actually a Scottish variety of garlic, I don't know the exact variety but I know that it is from Scotland and obviously it gets very cold in Scotland so this garlic is designed to survive sort of nuclear attack really, nuclear frost attack and that's exactly what it's done, it's done so, so well. It's so healthy and thick and strong and the frost has not affected it at all, so if you're looking for a nuclear sort of garlic to grow, I think go for the Scottish varieties. Just a quick tip for any new allotment holders, I wear a nice coat to the plot because I have to do the school run before but I keep a dirty mangled coat here to change into so that my real coat doesn't get too dirty, someone told me that on my first year and one of my first videos they suggested I do that and I've done it ever since so I thought I would pass on the advice. Right. Of course you have to shake it out the spiders first, especially if you've got a shed like mine. You probably can't see me there, I think you're looking at the ceiling aren't you? Anything interesting going on up there guys? No? Oh god. So many questions about my pumpkin arch, now this year I'm actually doing a pumpkin grow along so you'll be able to grow your pumpkins alongside me, we can start at the same time. I'm doing it on this channel and I'm also doing it over my Instagram account and we will be starting in March. Now what varieties do you need to buy if you want to grow pumpkins up? I would suggest personally Baby Boo and Jack Be Littles, now if it's your first time ever growing a pumpkin arch those two varieties are probably enough. From one plant I probably got about between 5 and 7 pumpkins per plant, I grew 6 plants so you can imagine that's quite a lot of pumpkins so you don't need to grow that many of them. This year I'm also adding patty pans, though I have heard that that's more of a bush and less of a climber but I will try it anyway, and I'm also going to add, I don't know the name, a kikikiri, or something, a kikikiri is that how you say it, but it's like a knobbly looking pumpkin, apparently it tastes really nutty, so I'm going to add those two varieties to my arch this year as well, but if you're starting out like I said Baby Boo, Jack Be Littles, fine. A lot of questions about my archway, this is the perfect time to be building your archway and building all your structures at your plot because there's not much else to be doing, so I'm going to go and talk you through my archway. So I went to Wilko's and I bought two archways and they were £10 each, I have heard at the moment that B&M are doing them for £5 each, so I don't have a B&M near me but you might. This is one, so you can see it's like a ladder, can you see the black things going over like this? It's like a ladder. So this is one archway, and then down here, this is the second archway, just again, just like a ladder. This is how far apart I've put them, so you could probably fit one, two, three more ladders in between, so there's one arch there, one arch there. So, I built my archways, this takes time, these archways are not easy to build, there's lots of A, B and C parts, so don't worry if you get frustrated with it all, just do your best, okay? Do your best. So I built my archways and then what I did is I sunk them down into the ground so that the first bar is along the ground like this. What that enabled me to do was to peg this down, or put bricks over it, to anchor the whole thing down, excuse the crows, just ignore them, to anchor it down. I did the same with this one except that it's now eventually snapped, that's not good is it? Look at that. There's me trying to tell you how to do it and mine's completely snapped. Anyway, okay, hopefully you're following so fast. Then what did I do? I put canes, I put canes or long sticks between the archways and tied them in with twine. So just along like that, tied in, and I followed the ladder round and put more and more sticks in. There's a stick, oh no, there's a stick, there's a stick, let's play a game of find the sticks. There's a stick, look it's just a stick, it's not even a cane or anything, it's just literally a stick. Then in between all of this I put chicken wire, there it is. Somebody asking what type of chicken wire it is, I don't know, it's just green. This is the chicken wire, I don't know where I got it from, I think I got it from B&Q or somewhere. It's just green, it's the green stuff, it's not too sharp and it's quite mouldable, see what I mean? You can just push it in any direction you want. And I just covered the entire archway with the chicken wire. Why did I do that? Well firstly because I wanted to give my pumpkins something really strong and robust to grow up. And I know that wire, anything that's wiry isn't going to snap or anything like that. So growing it up the wire would be easier and then if I forgot to tie it in it would sort of find its way. Remember pumpkins have got loads of tendrils, so little bits that come off like that, and they're looking for something to cling to, so the more you can give them to cling to the more they're going to cling on. By tying the archways together with the sticks and then chicken wiring the whole thing I've essentially created a massive structure like this. Imagine the wind trying to blow this over, it's all tied together, so I've made it long. So the laws of physics, I don't know much about physics, but what I do know is that when you make something longer like this it's harder for the wind to blow it down, so it's pretty strong even though it's rickety, does that make sense? So get making your arches now, if you're following me along and going to make a pumpkin arch this is a good time to do it. And that's all the advice I've got on pumpkin arches. Good luck! I've been doing this for about an hour now, just under an hour. What have I been doing? I've been clearing this area here because this is where my polytunnel is going to go. I thought I'd leave it for a bit and let the robins come and eat the worms, that's what they've been waiting to do, for me to bugger off. I've found a ground sheet under here which I've got to get up, or I've got to do something with because that's sort of where my polytunnel's going to go, the door's going to be facing me this way, so it's going to be like that, two by two metres, so I need to get a little bit of that up at least, but this here, this is all what was in my compost, I know there's a lot of rubbish, I hate that, I always find rubbish whenever I dig on my allotment plot, it's just an ongoing problem, but this is compost which has been made basically, so I think I'll use this as my base in the polytunnel, I've got quite a lot of it, so there's no point not using it, if you know what I mean. It's really hard work doing that, but like I said, little and often, and it'll all get done. I keep finding ground sheets, somebody said that I should put one over my new raised bed to keep the heat in so it's ready to plant in, I think I might do that now. What that'll do is warm up the soil a little bit earlier so that it's ready to plant into whenever I'm ready, I think it's quite a good idea, so I'll leave this over it I think. It's funny because every time I come down here at the moment I feel like I'm leaving the plot in a worse state than when I found it, but I think it's all part of the process, and slow and steady wins the race. If gardening teaches you anything at all, if you're new to it, if you learn anything at all from gardening, it's patience. Good things come in small packages, seed packets, patience, patience, patience, you have to just slow and steady, little jobs at a time, if you've got a new allotment plot, and it's a lot, it's a lot, it's so overwhelming, I know, I've been there, but just doing little things every time you come will add up, and by the time it gets to spring, your plot will be perfect, it'll be ready to plant in, and it'll just be great, and it'll be so worth it, so worth it. So I hope you enjoyed the vlog today, if you did do subscribe to my channel, I will be back again on Friday with hopefully a nicer, neater looking plot, and you'll be able to see the process happen before your very eyes. See you next time guys, thanks for watching, bye!