Abundant Harvests in our No Dig Garden in Portugal - End of Summer Tour

Hello good morning and welcome back to the garden. It's been a while since we've been down here and we really felt like we needed a break from some of the building work in the house and so we are having a day off of building and a day on of gardening. We've got quite a few bits and pieces to do. There's lots of harvesting because we're kind of nearing the end of summer and the end of the fruiting crops. We've got a few things to plant and a few things to update you on as well. So when you do the tomatoes, the wheelbarrow is there for waste. I don't put them in the bucket because I don't think it will all fit in the bucket. Probably not then. That's not bad. Let's finish all my leftover potatoes. Oh there's another potato plant. These pole beans aren't really pole beans. No I didn't think they were either. They look very small. So our earlier season tomatoes did amazingly well. These late season ones not so much. I don't know mixed luck with tomatoes this year. The ones behind me were our first batch. Many of those were from plants that we bought and they did really well. We got them going early so it meant we had a nice harvest early which we've turned into pasta sauces and stuff like that. The ones over here we did from seed and they took forever to get going but they did eventually grow and we've managed to get some nice fruit just now. These ones were a bit of a backup plan. They were some small plants with some small cherry tomatoes on already but the plants didn't look in great condition but they were on I think they were on special offer or something at the garden centre so we were like we will let them fulfill their tomato destiny and we'll put them in the ground but they'd never really got going and I think they've just been attacked by the sun. I think we have got some blight around as well so these ones did not do so well. The first harvest we got off them was really really sweet, really tasty, so I had high hopes but now not so good. You've done an excellent job with the herb garden my love. So what did you pull out of here? A couple of different kinds of basil which we'll use to make pesto but I've left enough so we should still get some fresh basil in the next few weeks. This one that's done right down to the ground is a Thai basil because I think it's not going to do so well. Trimmed back the two echinaceas, the calendula, the lemon verbena. I have not touched the thyme and going to take out all the chives that I can tidy these guys up. Yeah the herbs have done really really well. We put in some tiny plants in here earlier in the year and they just grew huge. We've had loads of fresh herbs which is something I really love to cook with. The other day I actually took a whole load of chives even though it looks like there's still loads left and we chopped them up and froze them so it's a really great way of preserving herbs so they still have that kind of freshness. You can do the same kind of thing with parsley. Basil doesn't freeze very well. All the kind of woody herbs like rosemary and thyme and stuff like that are good for drying. I think we're probably going to dry some of the lemon verbena as well although we've still got loads of it in a jar on the shelf. So if you have any suggestions of what to do with lemon verbena please let us know. I actually had some on a chocolate cake recently and that was very tasty but we've got loads of it and I really shouldn't eat that much cake. No, just three small ones. Is it an asparagus Christmas tree? Can you explain why this plant has got berries on it and none of the others have? So someone, one of you lovely people out there, left a comment to tell us that this is a female asparagus plant and the ones that don't get berries are the boys and you can harvest the berries and dry them up and then you can grow from seed again and if you let them all drop then a lot of asparagus plants will come up where the berries have dropped and gone into the ground so I'm going to try it and see if it works. I mean we don't really need any more asparagus but I like trying things so we'll give it a go. I guess we can give the seeds away to friends if we don't need them. Yeah exactly. I'll just pull the fronds off because it's easier. But yeah there's lots. We did the same I guess with our coriander plant. We let it go to seed. They actually dried mostly on the plant and then we're going to harvest all those seeds and use them in cooking. Or make more coriander plants. Maybe we'll make them have a coriander plant. Look at all those like that's a lot of asparagus babies coming. Asparagus babies. Right let's see about these Fresnos. There's a lot of chilies my friends. So chili-wise we've got some hot padrons which we've left on the plant to go red. We did a load of those last year and they were really really tasty. Turned them into sriracha along with some cayenne peppers. We don't have any cayennes this year but we do have these Fresno, orange Fresno chilies. They're kind of like a jalapeno but a bit more rich in flavor and I don't know how many we just got off that one plant but many. Looks like some of the spinach is already bolting. No really? Yeah. Maybe put the spinach there in the under here then it won't get as much sun. Well I've started here now. Well why don't you do half and half then? Let's do half and half. We can experiment with having some of it in the shade. There's two varieties as well isn't it? Three I think. Oh three. It was a long time ago I see with that. How far apart? 15 centimeters. What did you say about the loofah? Some of them are suffering in the sun. So turns out when you put loofahs on a trellis they do really really well. We have four plants here. We did lose the cucumber plants that were planted next to this trellis, two voles, but all the loofahs have taken off. They are still flowering though mostly just male flowers now and when they started flowering, because I know how difficult loofahs are to grow, I was hand pollinating so I was out here every morning taking off a male flower and going around and pollinating the female flowers. I don't think I needed to but you know I was guaranteeing success because check out these guys. It seems there's two varieties which I didn't know about but look at that. Look that's the size of my arm and I can't get one hand around it. There's a joke in there somewhere. Yes there is. That one's the biggest I think, though it was not the first one to come out. I think this one was the first one. There's just so many of them. I've counted about 16 or 18. I think it's too late in the season for a couple of these little ones but I don't really know because sometimes we have a really hot sprint in sort of late September, October, so we're just going to leave them all in case they all do really well. I mean there's another one as long as my arm and these ones came on really late but in the hot part so they've just grown really fast. And so what's the idea? You leave them to dry out on the plant and then it's a back scratchy washy thing? Yeah exactly and we'll video when we harvest them out but basically they will dry on the plant. You take the husk off. Inside there is this long, the thing that you would know as a loofah that you've seen, and inside of that is a whole load of seeds which you then seed save for the next year. But the inside part, which is the the loofah sponge, you just cut it up into pieces and use it for your dishes or in the shower or anything else. I'm actually going to try and make soap next year and then I'd like to find a way of encasing the soap in the loofah so that you can have kind of a sofa and a rope in a loofah in the shower. Oh this is another big one. He's touching the ground so I had to move him the other way. Oh wow yeah. He's big. So a success? Yeah I am very happy with this. It's not tall enough so we may have to make some adjustments if I want to make grow loofahs again. I think this trellis will come in really handy for peas though when these are done. Maybe that's what we'll plant along here. So there we go, a nice morning of gardening and a pretty impressive harvest for the end of the summer. And actually there's still more that could potentially come out in a few weeks time. A few more tomatoes, quite a lot more peppers. We've not had many beans so far so there should be quite a lot more of that to come. We've got some sprouting broccoli, a bunch of cabbage, red cabbage, white cabbage, parting cabbage, loads of stuff. Anyway that was a nice break from being stuck in the house doing a load of dusty building work. I hope you enjoyed it too. We certainly did. So we'll see you in the next one. Bye for now. Bye bye.