13 Sowings of Summer and Autumn for second crops and full beds

Keep replanting second cropping, but how do you know where and when to pop in each different vegetable? Today is the 1st of november and look how full and lush the garden is here and yet everything you're seeing Is a second planting made in the summer Following a harvest that's already been taken So this was carrots before and that was garlic before and where the carrots are was peas before and so on Many vegetables crop in just half a year And that means if you get going decently early in the spring you've got the chance in the summer to Get another lot going and have abundant harvests in autumn and winter So you need a bit of knowledge to do that check out resources like my sowing calendar Which has all the dates of potential sowings because each vegetable Grows best from a different sowing date. It's not like you sow them all in april end of job That would be easier, but you can really do a lot more if you find out the best time to sow each one and then What's going to finish when that needs a bit of background knowledge? I actually Have made an online course seed to harvest where each vegetable I show When to sow it when to plant it and when it will finish And that's a useful piece of knowledge because that means you can fit the pieces of the jigsaw together Before all that it's good to decide what you want to eat And thanks to no dig which is happening here you don't need to do a four-year rotation That's my conclusion after decades of doing this the soil stays healthy and in good heart Fertility is plentiful And we're going to look at a few examples now of different vegetables and how they respond to this approach Like for example here we have the brussels sprouts that are cropping amazingly now But this bed has already given a lot of carrots this year and our interplant. That's another little trick I'm going to show you pop things in between something else that's going to finish soon and then you can make more use of your precious space These cabbages of different kinds went in after spinach. So the spinach finished harvesting early to mid-may And these are cabbages therefore been in the ground since then around six months actually and it's a red variety called granat this one you can see how variable they are and i'm actually going to pick the smallest one just to illustrate and Take some harvest as we go around it just be a nice example if you know You keep cropping all through the year. There's a kind of dance going on here choosing one thing then another thing and Harvesting this one just pull back the outer leaf There we have a really tight head And not too much insect damage. I might need to do a bit more trimming on that one And also when i'm doing this harvesting it, there's a slug for example, so i've got a compost bucket there This is a chance to tidy up And get ready for the next harvest and it so happens the next harvest is already underway, so Seven weeks ago. I got some corn salad or lamb's lettuce seed and that's what's coming up here And I just broadcast them. It's just not too thick. It's always tempting to sow too many. I just scattered a few seeds between the cabbages And how can that be so easy? Well, it's partly thanks to no dig again That you can see there's not many weeds here and we've hardly weeded this bed haven't needed to I would weed if there are weeds always But when you get your beds really calm Well composted on the surface and you've got rid of perennial weeds at the beginning see my other videos for that Then you're in a really good place because you can do these follow-ups and succession crops into plants so easily Like behind me that spinach went in Middle of august after broccoli and you can see that in a video we posted just a week or two ago and then behind that is broccoli, so The spinach followed broccoli that was cropping the summer then behind that is broccoli That's going to crop next spring and that followed broad beans. So that was broad beans sown autumn the year before This is why you need a a good framework of sowing advice like the calendar or sowing timeline on my website Because it's good to familiarize yourself with all these possibilities And broad beans overwinter really well here anyway mild temperate climate Crop early enough in the summer that you can get those going and the other thing that Features in this video is propagation in the background raising transplants all the time in my greenhouse undercover in module trays, for example Again, see some of my previous videos on youtube about that propagation Because that buys you time and so these cabbages were growing for four weeks before we planted them while the spinach was finishing So there's many ways of increasing your harvest as well by doing that Florence or bulb fennel is a brilliant vegetable to grow in the second half of the year It doesn't take long between sowing and harvest You can also sow it in late february early march to transplant late march and harvest in june before it flowers So summer it flowers therefore these sown around 10th july Kind of miss the flowering season and they're swelling up in the autumn They're in their growing time. So these went in the ground on the 30th of july about two weeks old And you see here i've even managed to get a multi. So I do that Sometimes you don't get quite such a big fat bulb And not every bulb is a winner Some of them are a bit long and thin Actually these i'm pretty impressed and i'll just trim off the bottom bit and then Even take that one off actually a few of the outer sheaths start to rot. That's Nothing to worry about. It's quite normal. This is all good to eat Actually, if you want to make a stew or something with a bit of fennel flavor or stock I'll just take a bit of it off but that's our lovely harvest of fennel and then on this side is Lettuce, which we've been cropping Continuously every week for eight weeks now and that went in after onions Onions are a great first part of the season harvest You don't want to be sowing them in the summer, but get them going early Or even the autumn before and then you've got time after their harvest or even just before actually with an interplant To grow something like lettuce or many other vegetables So There's a lot going on here like This planting was made just two days ago Incredibly late for the time of year coming into winter And it all came about through propagation actually that I had some leftover plants And it's a piece of advice i'll always give raise more transplants than you think you will need Because you'll be surprised at how you might find somewhere to pop them and what's going on here is that we We've had two crops already this year. There was cabbage and cauliflower in planted early spring harvested mainly in june And then when they finished by the 20th of june the bed was clear no more compost But we've so direct french beans dwarf french beans two lines down the middle of quite a narrow bed And they were good. They cropped heavily mostly in august september And then they cleared and the bed was actually empty for a while because I was thinking to sow some broad beans And they decided not to so it was still empty And then i've been looking at these spare transplants and there's things like spinach and lamb's lettuce and salad rocket multi-sown just two days ago At the far end there's some claytonia winter purslane. So these are all plants that survive cold This is the kind of bits of knowledge you need so it's not like i'm worried that they might freeze because they will survive that If there was a freak deep freeze they won't survive it, but i've got nothing to lose. I had spare plants an empty bed We pop them in using a long handle divver They pop easily out of the module trays and it happens quickly and then you could call this a cover crop green manure What is a cover crop? It means keeping the ground growing something during the growing season and in a normal year The growing season would be almost finished, but maybe it's going to stay mild through november. There's growth can happen That's adding roots as well as leaves that's organic matter carbon for the soil So it's adding goodness fertility just through growth Photosynthesis bringing in sun energy into the soil you could say And here we have carrots a very late sowing of carrots I didn't know if these would make it but it looks like they're going to ninth of july These were sown and this was peas. So summer peas Finished clearing them early july. So these on the ninth I think we could have thinned these ones a bit more. Oh dear. Actually god, that's not looking good Uh, this is first time i've had a look at these. So Oh, this is even worse. Oh, no Okay, so not everything works Hoping these might be a little bit better Uh, it's a variety called solvita, which uh, it's first year i've grown it. Oh, no, they've got root fly Root fly is a horrible pest and it Oh crikey these look as though they're actually completely scammed I'm going to pull a few more just to double check You can see how wet the soil is but again with no dig it drains well Right. Okay. Well in principle, that was a good idea sewing carrots on the 9th of july, but we have been having a bit of problem actually with autumn carrots here and It's gonna get a bit further. We've got different varieties here. That might be better No, it's not and then there's some yellow Yellow carrots, which at least are looking more vigorous But I suspect they'll have root fly. I'm going to clean these up actually and then you'll see what was here so Carrots is a half season crop when it goes. Well, you can get a nice harvest and we've had this mesh on And what i've noticed recently it hasn't been so effective at keeping out the root fly So i've got to rethink my strategy for growing late carrots Cenariac has a long season of growth, but the first two months of it are in a greenhouse under cover the propagation phase Because it starts slowly from being a tiny seed. So these were sewn middle of march transplanted 10th of may Between garlic so the garlic was here in rows across the bed That's how I normally do it and that allows you to slot things in between About a month before the garlic harvest harvest of garlic was 10th of june And the garlic from that some of it's still in my conservatory We'll eat it as and when so it's a beautiful vegetable from that point If you garlic one harvest and you've got nearly a year of eating And meanwhile your next harvest is getting underway And these are not the easiest vegetables to grow. Uh, as you can see that's on the right and it's a variety called prince and we're coming towards the end now because partly they're getting a A leaf disease called septoria and that's pretty typical for the time of year first november I can put up with that because they've done most of their growing so These will be ready for harvest quite soon. I'll just show you one way you can harvest them Kind of by pushing like that and cutting underneath Once you hear that scrunch, you know that a lot of the roots are breaking So what i'm looking to do is leave a lot of the roots in the ground. There's also a dandelion there We haven't been able to pull it out during the Growing season because it's right in the roots of the celeriac But yeah, there it is dandelion That's pretty nice example of no dig. Actually. You can see how that's a lot better than the carrots were And right here we go so then you just um trim off the The bottom bit this one is weighing over a kilogram And that's a lot of food because celeriac it has a lot of dry matter That is why or one reason why it Grows slowly. It's not full and lush like say a cucumber or courgette which grows so fast Uh, there's a lot of food in there and I mean i'm really happy to harvest this And if you think that this bed already has grown to garlic this year, which was transplanted or planted the autumn before it must be said and Yeah, this is it now for this year on this bed i'm not going to try and grow anything else uh, but we're also going to have a look at the brussels sprouts because they also overlapped so They started life as seed sown on the 8th of may in my module trays the ones I designed cd 30 60 I'll put a link at the end of the video and then They outgrow them before they're ready to go in the ground or before we're ready to receive them So I pop them on I pop them into seven centimeter pots Of the same compost multi-purpose compost and they're grown to plants about that high By the 18th of june in this case, that's when they went in the ground But meanwhile this had been growing carrots, so I sowed the carrots on the 11th of april with fleece over After two failed attempts because it's like these ones came up beautifully Fantastic crop of carrots and the first thing I did with harvest was to harvest enough about that size hole To be able to transplant the brussels sprout in there So for a while, you hardly see the brussels sprout is surrounded by carrot leaves and then as you harvest more carrots You start to appreciate the brussels plants really getting going and no we've harvested some already This one here. I haven't actually harvested much, but i'm just taking off these little bottom ones first because Don't wait for the little ones at the bottom to grow They don't grow any more than that They they grow sequentially up the stem and once they're mature wherever point it is that They're not going to grow any bigger and it's the ones that near the top that I can do the growing So I just keep picking and picking you can do it with two hands get around the stem and Before long, you've got a nice bunch of brussels And then when do you stop picking when you see they're not looking quite so yellow and they're not just not quite so swollen anymore As you've got again picking options here over a long period right the way through till february march According to variety. This is bridget f1. It's a really good variety And yeah, what not to like about this overlapping. That's one of the things I find most joyful With no dig particularly in how you can do it without too much difficulty With these late summer plantings we're really looking ahead. This is for next spring So behind me the spring onions they were sown around 30th of august right at the end of summer And transplanted very small into a bed Newly spread with new compost because we're looking ahead now This compost mulch is here right until the spring and through next summer when these spring onions will mature in april and may So that's a variety called white lisbon, which is a very nice open hole native spring onion it's not actually called winter hardy there is a winter hardy type, but it's Um, not quite such a nice onion So i'm gambling a bit if it's a really cold winter these could suffer actually we've had a few cold winters and they've been all right So that's something you can have up your sleeve for late summer early autumn And as we then go into mid-autumn A really great vegetable to plant is garlic this believe it or not This is sewn or planted with garlic when I say sewn it's seed garlic seed garlic doesn't mean literally seed It means cloves of garlic that come from bulbs that you select. This was my own homegrown garlic We select some of the nicest biggest ones break them into cloves pop them in the ground sometime in october Even now in november you could still plant these And so they're in rows across just like before where are they you're probably wondering because this is mustard So what we do is a joint thing on the same day This was beans there actually borlotti and runner beans for dry seed and we've taken the harvest that finished around the 7th october I just noticed there's a borlotti bean self-sown there coming up Which tells you how warm it's been unusually warm because they need warmth to germinate And then the mustard is sewn after we spread compost. So we spread compost after planting garlic Oh, here's the cat finally And so the garlic Is in the ground you put the compost on top not a lot maybe that much the annual dressing It's about an inch to two and a half centimeters And this is mustard is synapis alba. It's a white mustard very fast growing So if you think this was sewn on the 11th of october actually 21 days three weeks I've seen it grow that much already. I cook it up to here and then what about the garlic and then It's killed by frost is the mustard. So then the mustard dies and you see the garlic. That's the plan Anyway, we should have enough frost here to achieve that And there's one last thing I want to show you Uh, there's a really nice planting that you can do in the summer This bed was onions transplanted in late march from multi-sown module cells around the middle of july the last onions came off and then I had some cabbage plants ready and kohlrabi transplants as well These were sewn around 6th of july those a little bit before that late june transplanted here on the 22nd of july So that's just over halfway through the summer and all this has happened since then following a crop of onions So getting the time is right and everything like that. No ground preparation in terms of no more compost or anything like that Just a bit of weeding not much. They had a cover on and look at these kohlrabi Um should just mention the cabbage are a variety called wintessa And we did feature them actually in a video when they were very small seedlings that was in august back in the late summer And the same with these they were here I don't think you saw them much in that video All of that growth has happened In the second half of summer and kohlrabi are just so beautiful Again, I could leave most of that root in actually if I just trim that they get a bit woody at the bottom But that doesn't mean they're woody at the top. So actually i'm going to cut it there And that's going through if they do If they are a bit difficult that tells you it's going a bit woody at the bottom. So you just need to take off some of that Fibrous outer sheath and you've got a lot of lovely vegetable to eat Maybe take that one off and that one And there's the one that's a little bit eaten. There you go kohlrabi. So All everything i've showed you is it's not difficult to do but it's about doing it at the right time and being in tune with your garden keeping an eye on those spaces as they arise and Not being afraid to raise too many plants and put them in where you just feel it could work Into plant as i've been showing you and check out my calendar of sowing dates that has the information you need You just hang it on a wall Keep looking at it the advantage of having it out on display and that will remind you of the sowing dates particularly in the summer July august it goes really fast and you can do a lot of new sowing then have fun with keeping your garden really full and productive