The Garden in October 🎃 Harvesting Pumpkins and some BIG NEWS

I have a confession to make. I have done very little composting in my composters this year due to a decision I made early on in spring. At the time I had quite a detailed vegetable garden plan which I shared with you. I use an online app that I have recommended but I did not factor in where I was going to plant my pumpkins this year. And so what I did was I carried on sowing the seed, growing the young plants and then when the time came to plant them out where was I going to put them? I'd run out of space. And so I decided to plonk them down here at the end of the composting area into some finished compost that was still left over in here and they have thrived. This one here growing on top of the dead hedge on the back side of this area is called Lakota and there are a couple of these. There's also Turk's Turban and a third variety that I can't quite remember but today it's time to harvest them, take them inside the poly crop where they will cure. There's also quite a few other things that I need to harvest and I also need to share with you some pretty big news. This squash has made it very easy for me to show you the best way to harvest one of these guys from the vine. Most people would imagine that you would cut right here on this main stem but if you do that, that can introduce rot. So what you do instead is that you cut the vines, you create a t-shape by slicing it on one side here and then on the other side and if you make a cut like that what you have here in the end is the squash with the stem still attached here. I'll cut off this extra leaf as well and when I put this into the poly crop to cure over the coming two three weeks this bit will shrivel up but that main stem will be protected. So this is the ideal way to harvest your pumpkins and your squash. Growing pumpkins and squash begins for me at the end of April when I sow the seeds into small pots. I grow them undercover and harden off the young plants before putting them out in early June. Then they grow all summer long and produce gorgeous fruit that will store well for months if the skin and stems have dried and hardened. That's what happens when we cure them after harvesting. Hey Maggie, you good girl. Good girl. I've got quite a few of these, not as many as I had a couple of years ago. Do you remember when I had that entire far bed planted with pumpkins? That was a bit over the top. This is the perfect amount for us for the winter. There are three varieties. Turk's Turban which is a really good eating variety. It's also quite interesting to look at. I also have Uchiki Kuri which are the perfect size eating pumpkins. Very sweet fleshed. There's only a couple of them. Maybe next year I'll grow a couple more plants. Then of course we've got Lakota and there are a couple of those as well. What I'm doing is putting them out here on this pallet that I've moved into the polycrop. I'll just be spacing them out a bit and I'll be leaving them in here for about two weeks, maybe three weeks. It's quite warm in here, quite dry in the places that I'm not watering. What's going to happen is that these stems are going to dry up and also the skins are going to firm up as well. Any kind of wounds or cuts will be able to heal and that will extend their storage. All of the stems I cut just like I showed you except for this one. Actually I did cut it in the t-shape but when I was pulling it out of the dead hedge it snapped so I'm going to keep a really close eye on this one. My polycrop, this hard shelled polytunnel has once again been an incredible space to grow heat loving crops in including tomatoes and eggplants, sweet peppers, cucumbers, melons, so much. And as you can see there are still plenty of tomatoes. This is my absolute favorite cherry variety. It is called honeycomb and I've never tasted a sweeter cherry tomato. It is gorgeous. It is an f1 hybrid so I don't save the seeds but you can actually propagate these from cuttings. You find some new growth like this here you can propagate this over winter the plants and basically save money on having to buy new seeds. Beyond the pumpkins I've got a small patch of sweet peppers. They're kind of getting to the point where I need to harvest the rest of them and take them down for the winter but I do tend to leave the fruit on the plant until I'm ready to eat them and that way they stay fresh. And the only thing that happens is that they change color so these green peppers are starting to go kind of a mottled purple brown. These over here are a heritage variety that are lime green when they're ripe but over time they will change into this kind of orangey color. These are gorgeous as well. The cucumbers have been extremely prolific. You can see there are still cucumbers coming on strong here and I think over here there are a couple hiding as well. We've not been short of these this year. I have grown a couple of courgette plants so zucchini plants in the poly crub this year and I don't I don't know what I do but I can generally get any variety that I grow to vine like this and I thought that this was a normal thing but apparently it's not. Anyway there's a couple left at the very end. These will probably be the last and they're a decent size. I need to cut those before they're too much bigger and funny story this plant over here I had a marrow on it an accidental one. I let it grow. I actually nourished it and helped it to grow quite large and then allowed a second one to grow large too and then I harvested them last week and took them to my local produce show and I got first place for both of them. One for heaviest marrow and the other one for a marrow. I'm growing some really interesting crops in this bed alongside the exact same tomato varieties that I'm growing over here and I'll get to that in a second. It was a little bit of an experiment but behind them I have the cucamelons which were extremely prolific but I'll be honest they were not to my taste. They they look great but they don't have much of a sweet flavor. They're also called the Mexican sour gherkin and I think that pretty much sums them up. They're quite sour. They're pretty good for fermenting and probably pickling but not for fresh eating in my experience. We've got some more of the honeycomb cherry tomatoes and then down here on the bottom I have sweet potatoes and I have been growing a Japanese sweet potato variety for the past three four years now and then saving tubers and growing them again and you can find them all along here and this year I also got a sweet potato from the supermarket a purple variety and I planted it here so we'll see if it does anything. Another thing that I started from the supermarket was lemongrass and I've got two plants one here and I've put the other one in a pot over here and I have them in pots just so that I can keep an eye on them and move them around but I have them here in the poly crub because they love heat and humidity. You've got to think about a plant's native habitat and environment if you want to help it to grow and then on the far end I've got my patch of eggplant the aubergines that we love so much. They are a variety called money maker and that one's a little bit of an older one. They are prolific and honestly if you've got a warm place a greenhouse or a poly tunnel these are the ones that you probably want to grow because they are just so easy. Look at how beautiful that is. I think I need to make a big batch of eggplant parmigiana. Gosh this is what it's all about these beautiful colorful harvests. Gardening is hard work it's very hard work and you have to keep at it year after year no matter what the weather is like. This year fortunately it's been really lovely really great warm weather but last year was a washout and I know that some of you are in regions that are very arid or are experiencing drought or too much rain or just some sort of imbalance and it can be disheartening when you encounter summers like that and especially if you have summer after summer after summer there's always something going on and it can lead to people giving up on gardening. You have to have that hope and you have to enjoy the actual gardening aspect of it rather than just the the harvest for you to keep going at least for me. The garden itself needs a lot of cleanup at the moment. In my last video I was talking about my problem with self-seeding weeds aka wildflowers and that's because I have a wildflower and wildlife friendly gardens but it's not a big deal. They pull up really easily out of my no-dig beds and I don't know if you can hear in the background but we have a storm going on right now and it has knocked over a lot of things. We did pick all the apples yesterday just to stop them from being blown about and left all over the grass but asparagus has knocked over there are a few other things and so the coming week is going to be mainly about cleanup also harvesting some of the potatoes that are still in the ground, cutting the last cutting of lavender flowers which are out there, quite a few other herbs need harvesting and drying as well and then in here in the poly crub this is where I'm going to be overwintering a lot of pots also our garden furniture just like last year. Earlier this year when I planted out the tomatoes I ran a little bit of an experiment on either side of the poly crub. I'm growing five different tomato plants and they're all the same varieties. What I did was I planted these ones out a couple of weeks before these ones over here just to see if I would get an earlier harvest. Well I can report that it was barely any significant difference in the time that they took to harvest so I think that I will just carry on planting out my young plants as I have been doing rather than a little bit earlier. There has been so much change recently, some that I'm going to tell you about today and some that I'm going to have to cover in a different video. The first one is that in the past couple of weeks we have nearly doubled our pet counts. So initially we had the cats and we added Josie our German Shepherd last year or two years ago she's almost two and we decided it was time for us to get another dog and we wanted to get a friend and companion for Josie and so about a month ago we brought home Sol, Solomon, our new German Shepherd puppy and he is adorable. He's in his land shark phase of life right now so he's trying to chew and bite and kill everything. He's adorable though and so sweet and he's growing so quickly but unexpectedly two days after bringing Sol home it was a dark morning pouring with rain and I heard a kitten crying outside, outside our bedroom window here at the house. Josh didn't believe me, he thought it was Portia outside. Checked, Portia was inside so it wasn't it wasn't any of our cats and I swear it sounded like a kitten and I looked all around the neighborhood I could hear it but I couldn't see it. Anyway, didn't see or hear anything of it for a couple of days and then I spotted it and then I decided I'm gonna borrow a cat trap see if I can find it, catch it, find it a home and I set it up and I'm not even joking you 10 minutes after setting it up I caught this kitten that's how hungry it was it was starving and so we brought it inside gorgeous fluffy little black kitten that we decided to keep in the end and we have named him Smudge. Josh came up with the name it's funny it suits him though and we thought that was that. A few days after that, two three days after that I heard another kitten crying this is no joke and we saw that one too eventually and it was another black kitten so I had to borrow another trap and this time I set the trap up I lured it towards our garage with some food it again it was pouring with rain and I caught this second kitten five minutes after setting up the trap and we brought her in and initially we were thinking about rehoming her but she and Smudge bonded and we couldn't tear them apart we've named her Fern and the other funny thing about the entire situation is that Josie our German Shepherd almost feels like they are her kittens or her puppies she is so protective of them she is in love with the kittens so we have gone from having four pets to now having seven and so yeah that's been going on that it's having three babies in the house crying lots of lots of cleaning up after them and feeding and all of that oh my gosh it's been hectic the other thing that has been very hectic is I've been doing a lot of DIY so decorating inside the house lots of painting because we have decided to put our house on the market I know I know it's a it's a bit shocking also for me we weren't planning on doing this we were we're planning on staying here for about 10 years before looking for the next place but something has popped up and I'm gonna have to cover that in a different video so thanks so much for watching and you will definitely be hearing a lot about what's going on and what I'm going to be doing to prepare for that and what I'm what I'm going to do and my thoughts on leaving this beautiful garden that I've created it's been such hard work and the idea of starting a new garden is both exciting and a bit daunting I will see you in the next video bye for now