September Tour - vegetable's sweetness| Edging| Rhubarb and composting| Charles Dowding

Harvests, how do you know when vegetables are ready? Loads of examples here. This is actually the September tour of my garden. And we're starting in the conservatory of the house with lots of vegetables harvested, a lot of them quite recently, some a bit while back. Storage is another aspect of harvesting. And I've got examples here to show you, hopefully not to be too intimidated by things going wrong because this wonderful looking celery, I've left it too long, basically. And in there, you can see how there's some leaves going, some of the stalks actually going rotten in the middle where my fingers are. And if I was trying to sell that, well, that wouldn't work, but actually I'm gonna juice it so I can cut out the rotten bits. There's nearly always a way of using things that are not quite perfect. And, you know, there's some mystery vegetables here. Like these, don't know how many of you grow these radicchios and they're from chicory. And I'll show you some in a minute where they're not quite ready. How do you tell when they're ready? You can feel that they're firm and then you can see the beautiful leaves in there as you take these outer leaves off. And that's what we put in the salad bag that I sell here. So you can see there's a mix there with all different kinds of leaves, also like chard and end even, lettuce, rocket and so on. And then these cabbages are just beautiful at the moment, but they're not always that perfect looking. This was one of the nicest. We'll see some when we go around that got a bit of caterpillar damage, but you can nearly always get a nice heart. Cauliflowers, well, if you leave them too long, the same with calabrese, they will start to open out and lose their quality. So there's kind of a moment of perfection with most harvests which is sometimes hard to achieve, but if you miss it, don't worry. Or if you catch it a bit early, you'll just have a slightly smaller harvest. And then in terms of storing, I'll just quickly say like onions, garlic, these were harvested June. Onions harvested a month ago in August and these harvested quite recently, different types of squash. I store all of these in the house here because they keep better when they're warm and dry. And so do the loofahs. So this is first harvest of them. And that's one that I've peeled already. Take off the outside skin. Actually, it helps to soak it a bit. I was tapping, let's see. Yeah, there you go. That's loofah seeds. So when you harvest a loofah, you get free seeds for next year. And it's a lot of seed harvesting this time of year. So that's marigolds, dwarf French marigolds from the polytunnel amongst the tomatoes. We'll see them in a minute as well. And very easy, especially in a polytunnel where it's all dry to harvest seeds. And garlic is a seed. You know, you're planting the cloves, in fact, but that's, sometimes people talk about seed garlic and that's what it is. So we break the bulbs into cloves. And just today, we've been planting some. Start planting garlic around the equinox. The beans, today also we were treading on some of these beans. Put them on a sheet on concrete and you walk on them because they're brittle. They tend to snap open and then you get the bolotti beans in this case out. There they are after some winnowing. And then there's same process a few days ago to get these sardines. That's a runner bean, a white seeded runner bean, white flowering as well. Not such a good quality this year because we've had a wet summer. And these pods of the runner beans actually don't resist the rain so well as the bolottis. Can recommend the bolottis a lot because they're definitely easy to grow and get the quality. And then, how can you tell how sweet your harvests are? It's sometimes said that sweetness is a sign of nutritional quality. I'm not quite so convinced by that. There's a bit more to it than that, I think. But what I'm doing here is I have a portable refractometer. I'll show you how that works in just a sec. Before that, I need the garlic crusher to get juice out of this beetroot. We've been doing tests earlier this afternoon just to see how sweet all these different vegetables are. And, well, the results are a bit surprising, actually. Always, yeah, that's why sometimes it's good to measure things. Often it's not possible for various reasons, but if you can, the way this works is you get enough juice out of this ref- Oh, crikey, there's a lot of juice in this red beetroot. There's plenty there. And then you flip the top back down there. Splattering everywhere. And I'm gonna look through the reader and there's a line, a blue line there. Oh, I've kind of got a bit of beetroot juice on the inside of it. It's making it hard to read the line, but I can if I hold it more to light. And that beetroot, wow, it's sweet. It's 11 degrees. So actually that's the same as it happens as the golden beetroot. So we've got a table here of all the readings from earlier. And not surprising, something like apple, 15.5%. That's a Lord Lamb one apple. You can tell it an apple's right when the green goes yellow like that. It was green before. Also, if you get insect damage, I get a lot of that codling moth going and then it tends to rot around there. That makes the fruit sweeten more quickly. So if it's not damaged, actually it would store for longer, but it's 15.5%, it's good sugar reading. But coming down there, we've got two types of cherry tomatoes, there's some gold, the orange ones. See, they're less sweet than the beetroot. And so is the garden's delight, 8%, 7%. And then carrots, 9.5%. So there's a carrot that I took the juice out of to get that reading. Tomatillo, oh, sorry, tomatillo, 5.5%. Well, it's not too surprising, it's just not bad reading. Quite acid as well. Beetroot, there we got the, I haven't put it in yet, but both of them just around 11. And look at this one at the bottom. The sweetest of all was garlic, 28.5%. And actually I tasted the juice after measuring it. I was just saying, where is this sugar? Cause you don't really notice sweetness in garlic, at least I don't. You do as it's roasted, I think it comes out more because it's so pungent when it's raw anyway, that you don't really get that sweetness apparent. So let's head on out and have a look. And please don't be daunted if you're looking at these harvests and they all look so perfect and plentiful. You know, my garden is pretty big. Actually I'll go up here. I employ one full-time guide, two or three part-time people. There's about 110 hours of work goes into 1500 square meters of garden here. So, you know, we're putting in quite a bit of time. It's a market garden, which is not making a profit, but it's subsidized by my other work, which I'm very happy about, because I want to, I use it as a teaching garden as well. You know, doing these tours, for example, a chance to explain things. And here's some of the chicories for radicchio. So that lovely firm radicchio I showed you, you can see they start off like this, much more open and then gradually fold in. How do you know when that's ready? Well, it will get quite a bit tighter and actually swell up more in the middle there. The outer leaves won't look so healthy anymore. And that's a sign that the middle bit is getting better. It's a little bit the same for cauliflowers. So here's a cauliflower plant that's been here since 17th of July. So that's three months in the ground. No, it's not, it's two. It's not much more than two months. There is actually, I can't quite get in there yet. I'd looked earlier and there's the tiny little purple cauliflower in there. And that's a clue, if you can see that much, that within maybe two weeks, we'll have a cauliflower. So that at that stage, you start keeping an eye on your plants as harvest approaches. This is end of harvest time with tomatoes. This is the Sungold and that's the Gardener's Delight that we were looking at just now, cherry tomatoes. And you can see how they've gone up so much, especially Sungold. So I've dropped the stems down by feeding extra string at the top actually, because I'm keeping the working end of the plant within range. And they're only gonna be cropping for another two weeks about. We're 28th September today. Yeah, barely that. 10th of October, I reckon, is the cutoff date. There's not enough light anymore to make the fruit sweet. So we clear them all and plant winter salads. And they're all germinating in the greenhouse right now. And we've even planted a few actually there. There's some red chard and red Russian kale. So they're the first plantings of salads for winter. And the tomato's finishing. I just noticed here some late blight on the leaves. And that's another sign really. It's nothing too dramatic, but that is what blight looks like. Some of you might not have ever seen it. Probably many of you have and regret it. But at this point, in plants like this, it's not a worry because the nights are getting cooler. The spores don't propagate very quickly. The leaves are dry and I'm not watering the roots anymore. So I stopped watering these tomatoes two weeks ago. And that stresses them a bit and encourages them to put their energy into ripening the last fruits. Cucumber's also approaching the end. There are still some reasonable cucumbers, but they're nothing like they were. And the leaf size is much smaller than it was. It's incredible how with the drop in light levels, you lose the quality of such a warmth-loving plant. Other plants are doing fine, but this is a summer plant. And it's the same story for the watermelons here. Oh, there's the loofah, for example, as well. So, you know, they're just finishing. Whether these green ones will make it, I don't know, to be honest. It depends a bit on the weather. But within two weeks, that's gonna be harvested. And I'll need to, I hope, finish the harvesting inside. This watermelon, though, this does look ripe. Kind of sounds hollow. It's also lost most of its leaves. So if you've got this situation where you've got a fruit but hardly any leaves healthy anymore, there's basically no way that it can get much sweeter. I'm just gonna show you what's inside to give you an idea. It's a yellow, oh yeah, wow. That is really nice and ripe, actually. That's done well, because this is the second flush. We've had three really big watermelons from these plants. And, oh, I can't resist just doing this. So there's the fruit. And actually, the seeds there, if it was more ripe, they'd be going a little bit brown. That's really good. That's sweet. What I noticed was, I harvested one a few days ago and left it in the kitchen for a while. And the seeds actually went more brown. They carried on, the seeds carried on ripening after harvest. And here we've got a different type of watermelon. And I'm saving seeds for this one, but watermelons do cross. So it could be interesting to see what they grow next year. This is a completely different type of harvest that's completely coming into season now. So it's winter radish. I mean, look at this beautiful. It's a variety called Bora, which I sowed on the 23rd of July. So that's not much more than two months ago. I'm gonna twist it out. It's not very long, but you can see it's got a really good size to it. And we made some beautiful kimchi from radish like this last year, as much as anything for the color. It's purple right the way through, really exquisite. If you can find seeds for that, I'll put some seed recommendation suppliers in the video description. And then edging. A lot of you ask about how we keep these edges tidy. Just so happens here, we never got around to picking up the edges yesterday, or a couple of days ago, even actually, which were cut. So it's using this half moon, called a half moon edger. I will actually make a proper little video about this, but you can use it to cut along. No dig garden here. We actually don't need to spend much time weeding because they don't grow much. We've got more time, therefore, to do things like the edging, which actually is important because it's amazing in a damp climate like this, how much a grass edge like that will just spread and spread in if you don't cut it back every so often. You'll be surprised if you haven't tried that before. But the edger means that you can then just pull out the grass. We put that on the compost heap. Sometimes use a trowel to lever out a dandelion if there's any of that. This is another, well, more a winter harvest, actually. So that's Jerusalem artichoke, we call them. They are related to sunflower, and you can see the lovely yellow flowers on top, helianthus. Oh, I'm keeping an eye on that sky. Do you know what? It's gonna rain at any minute now, I think. The harvests here are beautiful interplanting that has worked so nicely. It's chervil we put in not much more than a month ago between the lettuce. So these lettuce, we carried on picking. So we're taking the outer leaves like that. You can take them down as small as that, even. And each time you harvest the lettuce, the lettuce regrows a bit less and the chervil gets a bit bigger. So initially you could hardly see the chervil. The lettuce were much bigger and now it's the other way around. So that's sort of relay happening and you're getting more harvest for space and a quicker establishment if you're planting as well, actually. These plants, on the other hand, have been here a long time. So the kale went in late June from a sowing on roughly 4th of May. And that's cavolo nero with dazzling blue at the back, actually, that's two very lovely varieties that grow quite tall. And we harvest them from the bottom. And these are amazing kale, actually, because what you do is you take off, you don't eat the stalk. So you're taking off this outer, just the leaf. And yeah, it's a great food. Very, very strong flavor if you haven't tried it. The asparagus will soon be going yellow. So that'll be coming into harvest next April. That ground will be empty. Quite tempted to sow a bit of mustard maybe underneath. And here we have an incredible plant that's done. This is some of the best rhubarb I've ever grown. It's just been favored by the weather this year. The rain and warmth this summer. And quite often people say you shouldn't eat rhubarb in late summer, autumn, because it's bad for you. You know, I've heard variations on that. Actually, you can. And, you know, you take your harvest here. I mean, look at that. Just beautiful. If this has happened, you can harvest rhubarb as late as September. This time last year, this rhubarb was almost dead. Well, not literally dead, but all the leaves had died back because it was such a dry summer. Rhubarb loves moisture. So, you know, we've had enough rain to keep it going longer than normal. So, in that sense, you know, you never quite know what you're going to harvest when. And how do you keep the fertility up? Well, we are going to look at the compost heaps at the end, but I just, in passing, want to mention this. You know, what is this? Believe it or not, this is pure wood chip. That's wood chip now, oh, nearly five years old. And it's been through a 12 millimeter sieve just to take the big bits of wood out. But even since February when I was looking at, when it'd been through the sieve, it's degraded quite a bit. And we use some of that even in a potting mix. This is coming towards winter and it's two different types of beetroot. There's the more normal sort of red stem beetroot up there. And this one is an old fashioned one called Cheltenham Green Top. And that's because, of course, if I can get it out, it goes quite deep. See, it's a long one. Because I've transplanted it, it's not got its normal fine top root, but it's a pale color, both leaves and beet. And it's so sweet. It's one of my favorites for that. I haven't grown it for a few years. I'd rather forgot about it, actually, but this is how I found some seed. Something different. This is where we're still harvesting lettuce. So they've been in the ground since roughly mid-August, so in late July. And you can see the difference between harvested this morning and taking the outer leaves and harvested about a week ago. Different varieties. And this is where I cut the beautiful calabrese from, or broccoli, which was on the table, which weighed close to a kilo. And you can see there's more harvesting them tomorrow morning, actually, the three horseshoes piping back on. And further up that end is also broccoli sown at the same time, planted at the same time, 17th of July, but that one will crop in April. So just showing how sometimes you sow and plant things at the same time, but you get a totally different harvest period. This one, autumn, we'll finish before winter. We'll take out the plants. Those, we need to look after the plants. We'll put a bird netting cage over to keep the pigeons off. At the moment, we don't have pigeons, luckily, but we will do in the winter, probably, when they start getting hungry. Oh yeah, look at that slug. So, you know, sometimes I go on about slugs a bit, I know, but basically we're keeping the garden slug-free by giving them minimum habitat. This one was under a stone. I mean, fair enough. But if you keep, I'm keeping the numbers low. You know, basically that's how this is working. There's always going to be some, and that's fair enough. And then I just want to show you these because, yeah, look at that beautiful node to carrot. But what I've been noticing is a few of these have carrot root fly. And you can tell that it's easier to see, actually, once you've washed them. This one looks all right, I'm pleased to say. I'm nervous of this pest because these carrots are for winter. And if we get any carrot root fly in there, it damages the root and then the root starts to rot and then they don't store. So you can still eat them in the shorter term, but they're just not so good for storage. This is one of the last plantings. We're still doing a bit of planting. You could still be planting spring cabbage, spring cauliflower, spring onions. If you've got transplants, it's a bit late to sow them. They'll crop next spring. These seedlings you can see coming up here are not for eating. They're mustard, so cover crop green manure. And I'm a little bit nervous about this. This is holes that Adam did to pop in rye seed. Almost looks like something he might have had a little nosy in there to eat the seed. I'm hoping not. But I think I might sow some in modules to have as spare transplants. So what we're doing is this is four lines of rye, for grain, for bread, with the mustard in between. Last autumn, we noticed that discouraged wireworm. We had a bit of wireworm problem on the rye. And so this is a bit of a trial. The beauty of the mustard is that it's killed by frost. So this is a cover crop of green manure that you don't have to dig in here, that classic bit of awful advice. So you can sow that now. White mustard it's called, Sinapis alba. And that will grow bountifully before say December and then be killed by frost of maybe minus four, minus five. Whereas vegetables like this survive the frost. Spinach is so frost hardy. This spinach has been in the ground for only five weeks, literally. And you can see we've harvested, I was harvesting some this morning, taking off the outer leaves, not taking, not cutting, just removing the outer leaves. And then you get, you can see how it's regrown towards the end of the bed. That was picked about two weeks ago. We started picking and we're working our way up. We'll get to the end and we'll start the other end again. For about another five or six weeks. And then the days will be pretty dark by November. It doesn't really grow much more. I think we survive and it could well crop next spring if it does all survive. Oh, I'll quickly mention too, pest damage here. Some of you might find this useful, alarming. Guess what did that? That's deer. They love chicory endives. They'll just chomp out the heart like that. And that was two nights ago, actually. Probably we'll need to put a bird netting over this bed, but it's another job and it makes it harder to harvest and go in there, you have to take the netting off. I might just see if I can wing it, but if the damage gets any worse, we'll certainly put. This kind of net it is actually, that's bird netting that we use against birds and rabbits. Very useful stuff. Some of you might have seen a video that we made about onion seed. And here's the last ones. We've actually taken quite a few already. Do you hear they're coming out? That's basically what I do. I'm not worried about getting every last seed out. There's so many here. But if you give them a gentle tap like that or rub when they're dry, so that's probably a job for tomorrow. We'll be in here and tidy that up, harvest the last seeds and then need to winter them. And these are all squash that grew where we've just sowed the mustard and rye. And that was through black plastic. That was new ground. It had been weedy pasture only seven months earlier. We grew the squash through the plastic. You can see that in some of these earlier tours. That's Crown Prince there mostly. And we'll need to bring them in the house. These onions too. I'm quite tempted to bring these in my house and put them in the spare bedroom. Because what I find is, that's the ones that we haven't sold before then. Because they do store better in the dry warmth and the squash definitely do. But they're in here for the moment because we've run out of room in the house. Compost making is going nicely in the pallet bays. We're up to 55 nearly centigrade temperature. So that's enough to kill the weed seeds. And this is where some of the lovely squash came from that we saw in the conservatory. This was the Marina di Chiochia, two plants. And then there was Oregon Sweet Homestead. And we harvested them all and then found those two up there. So that's a Marina di Chiochia, this one here, which it's run its stem right the way up quite a few meters up the bed. And the Oregon Sweetmeat Homestead, that's what it is. And they're not quite right. How do you know when they're right? In fact, if you look at this stalk and this one we could harvest actually. It's starting to go quite brown, certainly hard and firm. It's any time from now. If the weather's not cold, it's fine. They don't mind a bit of moisture, but actually most of, well, not quite all. Like there's another one there and the leaves are still green a bit. So any time from now, in this case, whereas the butternut's up there, as usual, very late. So we'll see. This is different ways of harvesting endive and chicory, where we've got chicories for heart, like there's sugarloaf and Trevizo and Palarosa. And this is endive, scarol and frise, which we're mostly taking the outer leaves off. So that way you get more heart leaf that will regrow more quickly. Whereas if you cut them like we did here, just to see actually, I had a few spare ones. So I'll just see what happens. And we didn't cut too low, but they're regrowing very slowly. I don't really think they're going to make it. And there's the difference between cutting and picking. And obviously the cutting's quicker. If you've got a lot of plants, well, fine. But if you want to get more out of each plant, picking the outer leaves, actually you get a bigger harvest altogether. This bed is where the Borlotti beans came from that I was showing you. There were four teepees there and each one is giving around two kilos of beans. So I'm really happy with that. So it might be seven altogether. Say that's seven kilos of dry beans from that area. Today, Adam planted garlic there, quite close spacing, about 10 centimeters, four inches apart, about one foot, 30 centimeters between the rows. Then put the compost on top. That's Homeacres, roughly a year old, actually. Some of the nicest compost we've got because it's a little bit older. In fact, you can see the difference between those two beds. That's basically just difference of age. It's very same, similar ingredients to compost. That one's around six months old, no more. And then that's another six months, it goes to that. And I never use a sieve, so it's going on quite lumpy. We're heading up to the time of year now when you can start putting on compost as ground clears, but you can still be planting like the garlic there, for example, or the mustard I showed you, if you've got spring cabbage and so on. And don't worry if your compost doesn't look perfect. You know, that just happens to be some of the nicest. So we've sown mustard on top as well. So we'll have the mustard growing up and then the garlic will grow through it once the mustard is killed by frost. Look what's here. There's a caterpillar. And we actually have sprayed the Bacillus thuringiensis. I think it's getting indigestion actually, because it hasn't moved much, I've noticed in the last couple of hours, which is fine, actually. You know, there's some damage. This is where, you know, don't worry if you see often outer leaves looking really poor, you might well find that you've still got a very nice harvest in there. This is where the superfine mature compost came from. So we've got, we actually had to move it in here because we'd run out of space. So that's what it looks like. There's well over a ton of that beautiful compost there. Probably don't need to use quite so much when you're spreading it. Compared to, this is where the less mature came from. This is the current heap. And it's that thing of adding some green, some brown material. So green is harvest rejects. Oh, crikey, look at the temperatures. Yes, it's going up. That's 70, that's plenty hot enough actually. But that one way we can reduce the temperature a bit is brown. So that's soil and woodchip, mostly woodchip, a bit of soil in there. And the woodchip we put through the sieve. So it's old woodchip, year old nearly. And I mean, there's another mostly brown, that's the pods of the bullotti beans, for example. So they're all going on. And I'm not wetting them. We put dry cardboard on as well, because in this climate, we've got so much moisture going on with green leaves that the issue is more trying to keep it a bit dry. And just to finish off, I can show you different stages of compost here. So these bays, these are big. These are not bays that probably most of you would want to have this big. Do look at my other composting making videos. Can you see, I'll show you the Dalek, the conical plastic bins and the pallet bins that we saw, more suitable for smaller gardens. If you can fill a bay within two months, I would say that's about the right size for your garden. We're filling these this year though, in four weeks, because we're really going for it. And with the weather we've had, it's just been loads of stuff to come in. And with the woodchip that I'm getting hold of, it's brilliant. And this is two months old. So you can see it's still steaming, still warm. But Tom turned this in here two days ago, actually only. And you can see how wet that is. It's a little bit on the wet side, actually. Turning really helped. You know, this is, that's what turned into that beautiful compost you saw on the garlic bed. I'll give it another few months, but we'll probably be spreading this before it's as mature as that. You know, you've got, these are all possible options. This is one month older. So here you'll see the difference. And it's drier. It was, it's interesting, actually. It was pretty soggy when he turned it. But this one is looking quite a bit drier. And you can see it's starting to get a bit more fibrous. And there is quite a bit of woody material in here. You know, classic brassica stalk, that kind of thing. Which is good, because that's helping to keep a bit of air and in the heap, solid sides. That's all good. No worries there. So I hope you've enjoyed the tour. I'll see you here again in October, but also do enjoy your harvest in a spirit of happiness and abundance. And have a look at the video, if you haven't seen it before, that I made with Eric Berg, where we're talking about health from the soil. And for me, that's what's going on here, because this is no-dig garden. You get super abundance of really good microbes.