No dig garden in August, new plantings, fruit and summer pests

Welcome to Homeacres August tour. We're starting by this beautiful plum tree. It's a Victoria and third week in August. It's the 18th today. It's the time when they're known for coming ripe and falling and quite a few things are early this year after the heat. I'm going to give this to Nicola to finish as he's filming and you can see when they start to fall, windfalls, that's a sign that they're ripe, but also they've been softening and you just feel, ah, there's a nice one. Or you could shake the branch like this. There you go. Look at that. Six or seven just fell off that one branch. So we're going to be eating quite a few plums. This tree is 10 years old. It's on quince A rootstock and good, good for eating over as much as a month. Whereas this one, Koh's golden drop looking a little bit worn on the skin, but it's a beautiful plum that does not come ready yet. And that's why I value it actually, um, middle of September, even as late as the equinox and they start to go bright yellow and it's more like a gauge, you know, really strong, deep flavor. We're going up this side where we don't often pass on the tour. Before we show you the grass a bit, you can see how dry it's been. We've had until two days ago, we'd had five millimeters of rain only in six weeks. That's one fifth of an inch. That's really unusual for us. And then we had a storm of 29 millimeters, 1.2 inches. And it's amazing how quickly the grass grows green, but also you can actually see here the lines of dry grass. And that's where there's concrete foundation still from greenhouses that were here. This was a nursery before I bought it. And then it all fell down. There's a lot of glass in the ground here, but you can just get that evidence. And now we're coming to the vegetables. I've managed to fit my garden around the, the old concrete, but being no dig, you know, you don't necessarily know or notice or be bothered by legacies in the soil. Everything here is a second planting. So already we've had lots of spring and summer harvests, and I'll tell you what they all were just so you can get an idea of the progression. I'm not following any rotation, but it's what happens to work timing wise. Like this was spinach, overwinter spinach, finished harvesting early June. We transplanted these chicories late June, and then these Brussels sprouts began life amongst carrots. So this was a bed of carrots sown at the Equinox and Brussels sprouts transplanted in June between them, no new compost. Here we had spinach and I inter sowed parsnips there on the 4th of June. These kale we interplanted between lettuce. We've already had from that strip where the kale is 62 kilos of lettuce, and that was the sixth year in a row of lettuce in that bed. We're doing some no rotation trial here. This was eighth year in a row of potatoes preceding the leeks, and they gave 58 kilos more than normal. And the leeks went in straight after the harvest around five weeks ago, multi-sown in early April. This was broad beans before the cabbage, spring onions and spring cabbage before the French beans and kohlrabi and fennel before the calabrese. And so all these plants have been in a little while, but they're all summer plantings and we have needed to water them quite a bit because of the exceptional dry weather. And like today here, for example, this bed was onions. This gives you an idea of how we're doing the planting, how small the transplants are. They're around two weeks old only. There's salad rocket and mustards, the whole bed, and we have flea beetle still lurking at this time of year. I'm going to show you that later in the video, some damage from them. And that's the reason for this mesh cover, because I want to sell these in the salad mix that we sell. And if there's too many flea beetle holes, well, we just can't sell them. So all being well, these will make nice, clean rocket. Normally at this time of year, the flea beetles diminish with the autumn rains, really, or late summer. Hasn't really happened yet, but I'm hoping it will. Oh yeah, that's right. Here, I can just show you a bit of homemaker's soil. It's amazing in places. Wait, look at this, almost white. It doesn't happen everywhere. And that smells really strongly of lovely mushroom, very agreeable odor. And plants grow quite well in it. You know, it's not affecting plant growth. If anything, it might be better actually. It just happens that we used a bit of extra woody compost there. That's tentatively where we see it and here as well. See these white bits of mycelium. You'll see I'm putting quite a few flowers on the ends of the beds. And I do love that. There's just for beauty as much as anything, but they do bring in a lot of insects. There's French marigolds, dwarf ones, zinnias, whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten. It's a new one. I'm trying a small white flowered zinnia. There's this one you've got to be careful of. I cut it back already for being a Benariensis. Seeds everywhere. A special type of salvia genus down here. Look at that. There's a nice little bumblebee, not a honeybee, that one. And then on the rudbeckia, I often do see quite a few insects. I like this one just because it flowers strongly in the autumn when other flowers are not so common. And behind it, the asparagus is in its 10th year now. And you can see there's very strong folias there. So we were picking this asparagus for a couple of months until roughly the longest day. And then you stop. And within three weeks, you have this forest of ferns. And they're now photosynthesizing to reinvigorate the roots ready for picking next spring. There's quite a few things here a bit different to what we normally see. Like that's broadleaf sorrel there. And beyond it is sea kale. And here we have some onions for seed. So actually, this is one onion plant. I find that so interesting. It's like multi-sowing in reverse. So you put in one onion and you get four stems. And then each of these stems has a lot of onion seeds on potentially. And if I find one, there's some nice little buds here. So these inside there are the onion seeds. And yeah, you can see they're just starting to go black. But I was checking before there's three or four. It looks like three actually in each one. You see the little black seeds there. And I was squashing one. It's still soft. So there's no rush to harvest these. But I'm just wary of mildew. And that's what's going on here actually. A bit of downy mildew on the stem. And if the wet weather was going to go on, or damp weather we've had just last two days, I might cut them and hang them in the shed. We'll see. See how it goes. But potentially, there's a lot of onion seeds there. And there's more than one onion, because you need quite a few for cross-pollination. This is a different type of sorrel called buckler-leaved. And really lovely flavor of lemon. We put that in the salad bag. It's perennial. That's 10-year-old clump. And the raspberries. In the sixth year, sixth summer now, this is a beautiful variety called Joan J, which makes these very large fruit. They've suffered a bit of sunstroke in the recent heat. We had temperatures in the low 30s, high 80s Fahrenheit, even actually up 93 Fahrenheit. 34 was our hottest. And I was watering these. I've seen bees on them as well. They're still flowering, some of them. But raspberry doesn't like it too hot. And it likes moisture at the roots. So they're good this end where I've watered, not up there where I haven't. And there's another plant that loves water. And I've just struggled to keep it watered enough. I haven't got a big supply of water here. I've got a tap. Basically, I'm on mains water. I'm buying water by the meter. It's around £3.50 a meter, I think. And even at that price, it's probably cheaper for me than drilling a borehole, although I'm thinking about that. Almost got there. And so, yeah, is this pattern of weather carrying on? Nobody knows. For me, it's still just weather, strong weather changes. And look at this, these beautiful bolotti beans. The summer's been good for them. We're not picking them. The idea here is to have dry beans. So in fact, you can eat them at this stage. If I just pick one up. I was talking to a chef earlier on today, actually, and she said they, in their pub, they really value them a little bit more mature than this. But you can see they're starting to color up. They're both beautiful and really tasty. And you can eat them at this stage. They don't need cooking for long. But I value them as winter food. So we let them dry on the plant and then harvest them dry late September, early October, even the whole lot in one go. They're quite tolerant of being rained on a bit once they've got dry. Winter radish. So here's another nice planting of summer. There's so many vegetables you can plant in the summer as succession plantings. And these are following lettuce, like the carrots beyond as well. And they were sown roughly middle July, planted just a week ago in dry heat. And Adam said he planted them and came back an hour later. They were all flat on the ground and he'd watered and then watered again. You know, they need in heat like that. You've got to keep piling on the water. And having said that, I've hardly watered the celeriac here. It's a bit of a trial, actually, just to see because, you know, celeriac does like water, but I'm intrigued how well it survived. You can see the leaves, you know, they're strong and green. But the roots are not very good. So we're just starting to water now. These are going to have some water, both from the hose. I use the water, but actually after a storm we had two days ago, put some on here to make the most of that. And we've been watering the lettuce every day, partly because with lettuce at this time of year, mid-August, there's a horrible pest that you can get. And look what it does. That's just today that happened. Like a day ago, it was like that, and it goes to that really fast. And that's lettuce root aphid, a little gray aphid that you can barely see. And they're eating the roots in mid to late August. And they suddenly arrive. And we've had it on one, two other beds and I've managed, I'm really pleased actually for this time of year, that's a good bed of lettuce. But watering helps the plants to come through it. A lot of these plants have probably got those aphids on their root, but watering means they can keep going and we can get a harvest. So I'm just hoping that not too many are going to do that. And it's one reason why I grow endive at this time of year as well, not exclusively, because the endive does not get the summer pests that lettuce does. It's coming into a season now, endive, and these plants we picked on Tuesday, we're taking off the outer leaf like that, and they're quite bitter. I'm not saying that's delicious, but it's nice in the mix. A healthy bitterness to go with the lettuce. And there's new endive planting behind, scarol and frizzy. That's the frizzy endive I picked. And likewise, these chicory, which you can see are just starting to heart up a bit, that will make a radicchio. They look sort of all innocent and green, and then suddenly they start to color like this and look gorgeous. And that should make a nice big red heart in about a month that we take apart to put in the salad bag. And those lettuce that were quite small, that's because we picked them on Tuesday. Whereas these ones we're going to pick tomorrow morning in a few hours time. The outer leaves, we take off the outer leaves every week, and this will be the fifth pick. And we can get as many as 15 kilos from a bed like that of around 16 meters on a weekly basis. So again, that's really worth watering. That's my main cash crop. Whereas this is a winter vegetable here. That's swedes, gill feather, and marion, normal swede, brussel sprout. So we've got a lot of winter vegetables coming on. The carrots under the mesh, they were inter-sown between lettuce, and they'll come ready in November, all being well. So the mesh again is pest protection against carrot root fly. And these runner beans, we're again not picking, so you can see they're swelling up. So they're for a dry harvest. That's a variety called Tsar, which makes a beautiful white bean. Czar. I'll put a lot of these names in the video description, because we're actually trade secret. We're just uploading this straight from the phone, partly to give you the immediacy of how it looks right now. We usually wait a couple of days, because we're getting foreign subtitles on, which we pay for to like Spanish and Portuguese and things. And I know some of you appreciate those. Look what's going on here. It's flea beetle again, and this is a really graphic. Yeah, there's not as many actual flea beetles. This is flea beetle damage. In case you're wondering, for those of you who haven't seen it, you know, or if you've seen it and you don't know what it is. So they start off with making little holes, and as the leaves grow, they get bigger holes. And then, yeah, what I do actually quite often, it just makes the plant look better. These leaves are not, these are pretty redundant for growth now, these older leaves. And that goes on the compost. See, I'm not afraid to compost that and leave the nice healthy ones. And further up, actually, you can see some Savoy cabbage, which are not so affected. This is calabrese here. There's a few caterpillars as well, but they're not moving. We put on the Bacillus thuringiensis soil bacteria yesterday, and that makes the leaves inter-adjustable to caterpillars. And then you can compare these ones with purple sprouting broccoli that follow beetroot. And we put a mesh over these, and the mesh is clearly effective against the, no, it's not stopping the flea beetle completely, but it's making quite a difference. And yeah, they're growing more, but it's not a totally fair comparison because the calabrese, which are so damaged, they were interplanted between onions, which meant it wasn't really practical to put the mesh over. Having said that, these will recover, especially if we keep them watered. We gave them a little bit of water this afternoon with the hose. It's all hand watering. And, you know, it didn't take much water. You go, just a little bit around the roots, just keeps them ticking over. So I'm never using a sprinkler here. It's, you know, not watering the pathways. But then we had 30 millimeters of rain suddenly, and that really helped to bring things through a bit. And we do a lot of watering here, obviously. This is a nice 10 foot wide, 15 foot long polytunnel. I'd recommend this to anybody if you've got enough space, because look what you can do in the summer. And this is only one half of the year. In the winter, this is full of salad and leafy greens, spinach, kale, you could do chard. And this is a nice heirloom tomato. It's one that I keep the seed of every year. It's not easy to find anymore. Yellow brandywine. And you don't get many fruit. You can see the plant's not enormous. I've just noticed, actually, I need to, the weight of the fruit has been pulling it down. This is totally unscripted, but I'm showing you how I do it. Should have done this before. Just winding it gently around the string to keep it upright. And it is something to bear in mind, actually. When these tomatoes grow, there's a side shoot I want to take out. And I've stopped it at the top. Have I stopped it? Yeah, that's just another side shoot. That's where the main growing point was. Because I don't want these tomatoes to actually grow anymore. Oh, there's another side shoot growing on the end of a truss. You have to watch out for these. We're only seven weeks away from these finishing their life, sadly. And then it will be for winter. So that's leaving enough on the plant to get ripe fruit right the way through. Peppers, I've never stopped them like that. But in our climate, this is quite a rare thing to get a beautiful red pepper. And these are really sweet. It's a variety from Bingenheim seeds called Liebstapfeln, which in German, I think it means love apple. And yeah, they're lovely. Really sweet. And here there's a lovely tomato, which also came from Bingenheim. And that's Sonnenherz, which is a kind of yellow ox heart. And if you don't know ox hearts, I do recommend checking them out. I mean, look at this. These are all grown without feed, by the way. No feed or fertilizers. It's compost marks that we put on in May. About an inch and a half, three and a half centimeters. And that does for the whole year. And these tomatoes have very dense flesh. So you can slice through that and all you get is flesh. You don't get many seeds, but you get enough. Yeah, really good flavor. Whereas here is Sungold. I can maybe show you this plant actually, because you can see what we've done in the way of taking down the stem. So it was growing up there. And that means you've got, this is a well-known thing that many people do. It's not my idea, but the first year I've done it actually. And you've got all this stem doing nothing. So you can lower it gently down. And then the working part of the plant, you could call it, where the fruit is and the leaves is within range that you can reach. And then up the top, you can see that it's partly because Sungold is a very tall plant. So it wouldn't be all tomatoes you need to do. And it's still side shooting. And it's just, this reminded me, I've not got in here and I thought I had to take out the tops. So that was the top of the plant trying to grow. You don't have to take out that much. You could take out that much, but this is what you do when you top a plant, stop it growing anymore. There's a side shoot if you left it on. But now the plant is like that. So if you think now between the 18th of August and 10th of October, that's got time to grow fruit and ripen them. And in our climate and timing, this is about the right time for doing this so that you get mostly ripe fruit and not too many green ones. And yeah, actually one other variety I could mention, it's Burner Rose and that's on this side. This I believe is an old Swiss variety and I'm finding it incredibly prolific. We've picked loads of fruits off these plants. I mean, look how many are in that truss there and many more to come. Another side shoot. But yeah, I'm really pleased with these and the flavor is amazing. I know a lot of people in Europe rave over these and I think it was Bingenheim I found the seed actually. And these old heirloom tomatoes, once you've got them, you can keep the seed. They don't cross pollinate. Well, they're not meant to actually. Occasionally they do. And I've kept seed of this and it's come through so far. And then look at these aubergines. I mean, it's just incredible. This is one plant that needs warmth more than we normally have. And this is one of the best summers I've had for aubergine. And it's a variety called De Barbentan. I've grown it before and it hasn't always done good stuff actually. When it's growing like this, we picked a few already, not too many, but they're going to keep going. You see there's loads of little ones. But I would just mention, look at these thorns. Be careful there. I'm selling a few and I cut them right there to reduce the number of thorns. But even so, anybody picking up carelessly, you could get quite pricked actually. But worth it for the flavor and productivity of these plants. And then just to finish on melons, it's interesting comparison here. A few different varieties, some growing on the ground and some growing up a string. And with Alessandro Spicy Moustache, we were just doing yesterday actually, we've done a long video on how to grow melons. So you're going to see that won't come out for a few months probably. You can look forward to that in the winter. Right, how to grow them from seed and different ways of growing them. And I do like growing them off a string like this. This one's coming to an end. You can see a lot of the leaves are dying from mildew now. They don't all. Some varieties do more than others. Oh yeah, look at that. Not showing how ripe it is. I was going to cut it, but I don't need to. That's the reason why some people put supports, undermelons. I find that's just an unnecessary job. It doesn't matter at home. If you're selling them, it might be different. We eat most of these at home. I sell a few actually. But even if it fell on the ground like that, it's not like an apple. It doesn't particularly bruise. It's quite strong skin. And I'm just going to finish by cutting this open to show you. And it's a variety. Yeah, it's weird. These fruits, that to me looks like an emmium. I'm afraid I got in a muddle with some of the labels. I'm pretty sure this is going to be orange flesh. Yeah, it is. Just to give you an idea, it's Charente melon. What I can't convey to you, and I wish I could, is the aroma. Oh yeah, it's like, wow. You know, this is one of the joys of growing food like this, because this is a flavor you cannot buy. And I started the video eating, I'll finish it eating. I hope you've enjoyed the tour and thank you for coming around.