Rescuing An Abandoned Kitchen Garden

A very warm welcome back to the garden. I have slightly abandoned my kitchen garden this year because of so many other different projects happening around the site and so today I thought let's see how much order I can return to this space of a little bit of chaos. I do like wild but I admit that this is a little too wild for my liking and so I'm gonna see what is possible today. It's 10 o'clock in the morning, done my admin and it's time to tackle and the first job is just clearing out all of the plants that don't need to be here anymore of which there was a lot so I expect to make a lot of compost. Now just before I start the great reset which has kind of begun, I did a nice potato harvest here the other day. I should probably mention what my goal is today and it's to create as much of a blank canvas as possible around the space where I can create more compost, I can add a little bit more fertility to the garden and I can plant out a load more things because at the moment if I just leave it this way I'm actually going to be sacrificing some food and I need some food so yeah that is the rough goal and also some things haven't quite worked out so that's okay. I might as well turn this bolted cauliflower into compost oh this here is pretty cool, these are uh leek baubles so I'm gonna actually save these and plant these and see what happens. Sadly this season has seen a lot of cabbage white butterflies and that means a lot of cabbage white butterfly caterpillars which unfortunately have kind of shredded my asturian tree cabbages so what I'm going to do is I'm going to remove the worst of the affected leaves and I know because they're short-lived perennial they're actually going to bounce back and come back strong. It's not going to look pretty at first but it will be worth it and there's also other things that need to be cleared out here like this, let's see if I can grab it, probably not actually, this is a borage plant that needs to come out, whoa, oh and it's hiding some onions, quite a few onions actually, that's nice, very cute. In here there's a bit of a problem, I've got this beautiful chicory that's kind of folded over and is flowering and I've got more chicory coming off a different stem so I'm going to keep the one that hasn't started flowering so I can enjoy those flowers soon but I am going to have to remove this other one because I do want at least a little bit more access around the garden so sometimes you have to sacrifice things and I pick this one but the flowers, hopefully you see that in the backlighting, this beautiful blue, love it and I'm also going to go in and remove this other tree spinach just so it brings a bit more light into this area and makes these dahlias stand out. Sometimes I'm removing them by cutting at the base, sometimes I'm bringing out the whole root system, goodness me these are great compost ingredients at least and I can just about make my way through now and sticking to the theme of dahlias, this here it's called Hugh's dahlia but it isn't me, this was given to me from an allotment holder because it came from an allotment from a guy called Hugh who sadly passed away and he had a load of dahlias and the way that it works with this asparagus it just feels so nice and elemental and it looks gorgeous so I'm very happy with this, it's just starting to really come into its own and now it has a little bit more light to really to really show off, ow, you see if a garden gets to this stage where you're getting hurt as you're trying to maintain it, it's a good sign that it needs some attention it also sears me right, ow, this will do for now, I'll come back to this corner in a bit, tame it down, I still just want to kind of in the vibe of getting rid of the big things and the south facing border needs a lot of attention, that's going to be a massive transformation Now I'm placing all of the compost material in a pile in front of the compost bins, I might have to double handle it a bit later because I am debating exactly what I do with this, whether I do a compost pile on one of the beds actually but I've got some ready-made compost that I could put over some of the beds so it's a bit in the way, it's in the entrance but because it's such a tiny confined garden there's really not any other place so I think sometimes you get just so dedicated on efficiency and stuff and I'm like sometimes you've just you've just got to do it and it doesn't matter if I have to double handle this, what matters is that there's a bit of space that I can at least put everything in somewhat of an organised pile to then give me time to decide what to do rather than think like oh I've got to deal with this right now it's just you know delaying the problem until a later date Now I think for this side I'm just going to, oh there's a bit of polyculture going on here, there's a run of bean growing up this evening primrose, I'm just going to pull most of these things out and just do a reset and there's some plants that I might move from the other parts of the garden into this border ready for winter and also behind here there is there is a tomato plant so that's good, nice to have some outdoor tomatoes even in the crazy shade but shade is like the biggest limitation for a lot of gardens or like forest gardens kind of thing you have to try and find that balance and sometimes it can overshoot and this example here this is what happens if you don't do anything for like two or three months really it turns into this chaos and there's an apple tree behind there that I also need to rescue and do a bit of pruning. Now I still have a huge amount of work to do so I'm just going to go into action mode that's a bit better I'm really excited this is all nicely reset if I can do that today that'll look awesome actually now after a bit of realization I notice this whole bed here is completely empty so I'm actually going to pile all of the material on top of this bed so I can access that compost bin for compost because it's easy to underestimate how much organic matter is coming out of this garden today humans tend to overestimate what they can do in a day but underestimate what they can do in a year and I definitely reckon I've overestimated what I could do today but it isn't even lunchtime yet I'm just I'm just going I'm going for it I'm about a third of the way through and it's fun it's exciting it's like wow I've actually got all of this space that I can fill with more food but yeah lots to do it's useful having walls about at the moment actually a couple of my colleagues are making a hot compost pile so I think I'll end up adding all of that material onto it which is a nice a nice noose and most of the stuff from this garden this year because I have been I have been harvesting quite a bit most of it I've actually been taking to the chickens because they love all of the green material and all of the the like the scraps and stuff and I have a load of chicken compost as well so as well as what's left in that compost bin I'm from the chickens now back here I have a goji that needs a bit of rescuing and I've nearly finished this border it's almost ready for mulching happy days so this bed here is a pollinator bed that is kind of gone over a little bit I am going to come through and save some of the seed heads of this Korean mint but it's a perennial and it'll grow back now the issue is I I need access into this garden to bring a wheelbarrow in and at the moment a lot of it is still quite congested so I'm going to start cutting all of this back to the base so it's a little bit more clear to come in and it also means that I can then access this bed behind which I think I'll do a similar thing cut most of it back to ground level and give it a good mulch all right so fennel is coming out not completely I'm just going to cut it to near the base just to remind me that there is a plant there so I can then plant up around it because if you cut right to the base you then might forget that there's something there oh I can already feel the light coming back into this area then I think what I want to do is train the blackberry a little better caught in the rose along the top or even consider keeping the blackberry more down that end and using this more as a vertical growing space or just letting the fennel go crazy again because I do love it fennel is fantastic for the pollinators I'm going to take this thing out as well it's sometimes sad losing all the structure but in the process of losing structure I'm gaining seed saving so I'm going to have to carefully extract this out of the garden and put it somewhere dry take down the structure and clear a bit around here and I reckon there's a good amount of growing potential in this bed it'll be sad to lose this structure it serves its purpose well but got to keep on making those those opportunities for for growing more things so yeah I think I'm just gonna that'll work yeah there's some self-sewn runner beans in here as well decided to come back into this crazy corner I'm going to remove these fox gloves so I'm putting on my gloves for that and also there are parsnips about and with the sunlight and stuff with parsnip leaves and also with fox gloves I don't want any problems on my skin my massive pile of compost needs needs moving soon because it's so big oh that's fun one of my favorite things about gardening is when you come across unexpected harvests and looks like elephant garlic actually a couple of rogue bulbs of elephant garlic I'm most happy with that and it means I can actually get in and enjoy these raspberries for once so I'm going to carry on working around here for a bit maybe prop these up with a bit of bamboo um deadhead the dahlias and then I've restored a little bit of order here okay I do feel that I've actually got the hardest part out of the way um I'm gonna pull these leeks out carefully because they've finished their flowering so they're just not as beneficial oh my goodness me what on earth is this it's like bulbs and bulbs of leeks I'm gonna I'm gonna dry these and I'm gonna plot these and I'm gonna see what happens because I don't know is this how you perennialize a leek I wonder if it is I mean it makes sense Babington leek is like a bulb I don't know whether that's an official leek um so interesting see sometimes you do need to just let things go a bit because cool things happen what these are huge massive right this is cool I think we're gonna have to start a new experiment definitely if you know of any ways to make the most of these bulbs please let me know um but anyway in this uh in this space here oh it's a bit stuck I've got some uh asparagus peas uh and some rocket growing but the rest of it is just weeds so I can clear this out and I can do a lot of direct sowing here so there's a huge growing potential in this in this space so in terms of the back corner uh I forgot that there's a lot of growth there I can't actually get out of the because it is so chaotic and I was just having a look around here I have got some like brussel sprouts and stuff that are a little bit hidden um but then this I don't know I think I think my gut feeling is to take this stuff out uh it's been a bit caterpillared as well but I think they'll pull through so I'm going to start to take some of this out so at least part of this bed will be um open and one of the main things that is really important this time of year if you are trying to like plant up and fill any more spaces that that exist in your garden is that to space things out a little bit more because the daylight hours are shortening so because they're shortening you need to try and uh you need to try and do something about that so by giving them a bit more space it means each individual plant has more contact with the sun uh to photosynthesize and look at that absolutely gorgeous elephant garlic so I'll put that on the bed so I don't miss it so I'm going to clear this um get this nicely reset I think the herbs are doing all right um and then we're going to tackle the corner look at that that it's massive borage plant and that's its root system that is crazy let there be light so it's a bit of a different view now compared to this morning I'm just doing a last little uh tidy up of things and then I'm going to start mulching um I'm not actually going to do the polytunnel because it's a warm day and I can just do that early tomorrow morning or something but in terms of the outside stuff created a lot more growing space opened it out some some beds or areas didn't need attention at all like that bottom corner um it was quite fun clearing around outside the uh the other end of the polytunnel though um but that'll just make it a lot easier for then sorting the polytunnel out uh tomorrow so yeah just doing a little quick tidy up um and it'll be really nice to actually hopefully get most of these areas um mulched by the end have a nice compost over each cleared section and then either wait for it to rain I can start uh or give it a good soaking and then I will plant in some and I'll also do some direct sowing but it feels so nice there's always something so satisfying about putting compost onto new growing spaces really satisfying particularly after a long day's work it's like a reward for the garden at least because you know as a gardener how important this stuff is compost is kind of like the bringer of life I forgot how nice it is to actually have access around here because I would crawl through so I could change the uh the taps because the polytunnel has been really productive this year I've been harvesting some ashes from it and I've just been swapping the tap every day um for the soaker hoses the gardener soaker hoses between both both sides of the tunnel and it's it's worked out really nicely so that's worked but it's it's nice now I actually have pathways in in the garden which means that I can walk from one end to the other at long last without getting caught or uh risking damaging a plant there we go much better so it actually feels like a bit of order has returned to what was this chaotic garden now it isn't perfect but the main thing is I have created lots more growing spaces and I've also let in light for the things that are growing and I found a few nice surprises so yeah it's uh I was looking back at the footage of what it looked like this morning and you just completely forget when you're in a space uh it's been a project for about seven hours plus the filming as well haven't had a lunch break so I'll have I'll have that afterwards um but I feel so much better now it feels good it feels like uh like um a bit I feel cleansed if that makes sense so enjoy the little before and after montage and thank you for watching and I'll catch you soon