ALLOTMENT JOBS, Pruning Tomatoes, Autumn seed sowing and tidying up the plot

Look at my like neon, neon yellow hands. I'm sort of happy to live in my little fantasy world of trying to figure this stuff out. It's just so nice to see stuff growing. Everybody should sow a mystery tray of seeds. Good morning everyone, happy happy Friday. It is a gloomy autumnal day here today and I could not be happier about it. The only thing that I'm not that happy about is the humidity. It's quite humid, it's a little bit kind of hot and sticky. That's how I'd describe it. It's a bit hot and sticky. We've got all the clouds giving us overcast. It's a little bit gloomy. It's starting to rain, then stopping and starting and stopping. So it's very autumnal and I'm here for it. I love it. I'm so happy that we're out of summer. Not that I wanted to wish summer away or anything, but I was very much looking forward to this time during summer. So I feel like I need to kind of live up to that now and fully embrace it and be happy about it. I discovered what the noise was in my shed. Remember I thought I had a rat. The cat last time, oh my gosh what was the name? Mavis. Mavis the cat did come in here and she didn't find anything. I feel like if there was a rat or a mouse or something she would have sniffed it out. She would have found it or she would have done something. Anyway this morning I got here and there was a fox, a baby fox, in front of my shed and it went round the side and as it went round the side it hit the shed. It hit the side of the greenhouse as if something was inside. So I think it's the fox and I think the fox lives next to the greenhouse. Let me show you. I think the fox lives in here. I think the fox lives in here. This is every single year I think about getting rid of this, cutting it all right down, mulching over, really sorting it out and every year I forget that the fox literally relies on this for its den. I don't know if you're going to be able to see in there but in there is a fox's den 100%. There's a little, I can see like a groove in there where he's been sitting. It's sort of been carved out you can see. Maybe you can't see but yeah basically that is where the fox lives with his cubs. Yeah so I do try my best to be very sympathetic towards the wildlife on my allotment plot and I think it's sometimes it can be quite frustrating because I feel like things die, things get eaten, things get ruined because I'm allowing wildlife to kind of run free a little bit but at the same time I don't, I sort of have no regrets because I want to be sympathetic to them. It's their home as well so I have this sort of ongoing battle between me and wildlife and I think whereas some people might think well let's get rid of the wildlife completely, let's put a fence up, let's get rid of the fox's den, let's put down you know slug and snail pellets, let's just cleanse it of all wildlife. I'm sort of the opposite. I want to kind of encourage wildlife and hopefully just get a really nice balance and unfortunately that does mean that sometimes things get ruined here, crops get eaten, things don't work out the way I want them to and I get frustrated but at the same time I wouldn't have it any other way is what I'm trying to say. Right tomatoes look great. I'm going to do a great big harvest today and then I'm going to trim off all the rest of the leaves. We are kind of getting to the point of no return with tomatoes now and what I mean by that is the is only going to be getting colder. The days are only going to be getting shorter so the days of the tomatoes are numbered even though it's trying its hardest to give me more flowers. I don't know why you're bothering me. I'm sorry it's the end of the road so today we are going to pick as many red tomatoes as we can and then strip the plant all the rest of its foliage and see if we can get some of these some of these green tomatoes to develop and if we can't we will end up picking the green tomatoes. I do love them in a chutney anyway and they are absolutely delicious. I still don't have any mealworms for Einstein. They're quite pricey mealworms you know they're quite expensive. It's like that little bag that I got was £5.50. I don't know if you can get them cheaper. I mean they're literally just worms. I don't know why they're so bleeding expensive. I will get him some more soon I promise. For now I've just got the bird seed so let's go feed him let's see if he comes down and then let's have a little look at the seeds that we planted. Let's start with that. There he is yeah okay I see you I see you I see you whoa whoa whoa whoa sorry sorry you just swooped. I wasn't ready for you. It's just seed today though Einstein. I hope you're okay with that. Vegetarian again. Yes vegetarian again. I'm sorry about that. You might like it I don't know. You might like it yeah. What do you think? It's just bird seed yeah. Oh you don't mind it now. I think I just saw a frog. I think I just saw another frog. I keep seeing things sort of jump out the corner of my eye. It could be grasshoppers there's been a lot of those around this year or it could be a frog. I'm also slightly concerned there is another leak in my pond. Somebody did point this out to me and I wasn't too worried when we had the extreme heat because I thought well everything's drying up. I'm not surprised the pond is completely drying out but I feel like it should be filled up to the top now because we've had quite a lot of rain and it's sort of not which makes me worry that it's draining a little bit. I know it looks quite filled up which is fantastic and it must mean that if there is a leak it's very very small but I would have imagined the water to sort of be reaching the very very top of this now and it's not which is making me a little bit worried. I'm just concerned there's a leak in here. I don't know what's making me feel that way but I don't know. The more I look at it the more I think there's probably a small leak. What's most frustrating about that is this stuff here. This is actual pond liner that I've spent money on. I actually bought two of these because remember the first one I punctured myself with a big when I was trying to break the ice up but this stuff is really quite expensive and I bought two of them to try and make this bleeding pond and this is the second time I've sort of got a potential leak in it. Last time when I had my pond I literally just used ground sheet that I'd pulled up from under the ground and it was a little bit thicker but I didn't get one leak in it and it was just ground sheet. It wasn't pond liner. Now I've got pond liner getting a load of leaks in it. Anyway I shall keep an eye on it and we shall reassess later on. This is great. Look at this. All my radishes coming up. Perfect time of year to sow radishes. Look how neat my rows are. Well done. The only thing is the cat's been sort of doing a bit of a dig in here but she hasn't done too much damage so I'm just sort of going to cover those holes over but yeah look how fantastic they look. Brilliant. Just so nice to be putting something in the ground and actually seeing it growing and not sort of seeing it disappear into nothingness again you know. It's actually sort of growing basically. It's just so nice to see stuff growing. Also got our brussels sprouts they're doing okay actually. We've got a lot of Californian poppies coming up which literally I barely got any this year because of the heat wave and look at them all coming up now. Wow. I don't think they'll get time to flower to be honest before the frost comes but they can give it a go. I'll let them get on with it and then we've got the kale under here. All the leaves are growing back now. I've got them netted so that was definitely pigeon damage and the leaks are doing really really well. I think down here this is where we planted our turnip seeds so let's see how they're doing. Wow. Okay I think I only planted these a few days ago. Absolutely brilliant. I don't know if it's picking up on camera underneath these. These are here for the cat because I don't want them digging up these because these they will die if they get dug up but look they've all come up. I've just sort of scattered them so we can just have a great big pile of turnips here but how brilliant they've all come up. I'm so pleased and I have a feeling some cornflowers are starting to germinate which is so funny. It's the wrong time of year for you guys. You need to, I don't know if that's a cornflower or if these are cornflowers but I feel like these are probably yeah because we're getting quite a lot, quite a lot of germination. I think the cornflowers are giving it their best again. So I thought what I would do today because it's just started to rain again is a little bit of seed sowing. So there's still a few seeds that I really want to start. There's not too many seeds that you can kind of get going at this time of year now. It's a little bit, it's getting on a little bit now towards the end of sort of September, mid-September but there are a few things you can sow. Onion seeds being one of them and I'm also going to start a few cabbages. I've got an array of seeds here. So I've got some cabbage pak choi white stem. They should do quite well I think at this time of year. I've got a couple of different onions to sow. So I've got onion guardsmen and onion rosa lunga di ferenze. Okay cool so we'll just start those. I'm not really an onion seed starter if I'm honest. I tend to sow them from sets but I'm going to give it a go from a seed this year because I've got so many packs now I feel like I should start sowing them. I've also got some summer cabbage calybus. I feel like it's probably not the time of year to sow this but if I plant it out into my greenhouse it might do okay, we'll see. And then I've also got these mystery brassica seeds which I've just found. I actually don't know what they are, they're not labelled. I thought we could just sow them. Such good compost this is, such good compost. It's that Amazon stuff again, Grow More. It's just so fine for seed sowing. All right and I'll stick the seed pack sort of on the side so I know what it is so I don't have any labels with me. Now we've got our onions, very strange looking seeds. I know that I've got white rot here and I shouldn't really be growing any alliums but I did sort of have some semi-success with the garlic this year in a new raised bed so I'm thinking if I get those lovely new raised beds at the front outside my shed maybe I can get away with sowing some more allium based things in there so some garlic and some onion and it won't get white rot because it's not going to be in the soil is it because the soil will all be brand new and that's sort of my theory. I'm sort of happy to live in my little fantasy world of trying to figure this stuff out. I also think it's so great to get advice and I really genuinely, genuinely always appreciate the advice that I get but I'm very much a learn myself and if something in my head makes sense I have to try it. I have to give it a go even if you're all telling me it's not going to work. I have to try it because it makes logical sense in my head and I just won't learn. I'm not a learner by being told, I'm a learner by doing and figuring it out and it going wrong. I need stuff to go wrong to learn. It's one of the reasons why I don't think I would ever be able to complete a gardening qualification and which I know would really help my career. I know it would, there's magazines that won't let me write for them because I don't have a horticultural degree or qualification but I know that I would be really bad at it because I do not retain information through a book. I have to physically do stuff to learn it. I need to be practical, I need if practical qualifications were around when I was younger I'd have done all of my GCSEs and stuff would have been practical because that's the kind of person I am. And then this one here I'm going to call my mystery, my mystery seed tray because what we're going to do is we're going to stick in the summer cabbage to a few of them and then we'll get our mystery brassica seeds. I can tell that these are brassica seeds, I know what brassica seeds look like, I just can't tell what brassica seeds they are. They're quite small so it really is a bit of a mystery. I think everybody should sow a mystery tray of seeds, keep the fun alive at the allotment plot. Have a bed where you have no idea what any of it is. It'll just be really fun to see it all come up and go cool what's that? All right we'll have to give these a bit of a water. All right let's sort these tomatoes out then. All right got my little Sainsbury's bag. You can always tell if a tomato is done because it just literally pulls off the vine so so easily like literally you just have to sort of lift it up and it just comes off. There's sort of no resistance to it and that's how you really know that your tomatoes are ready. They should also come off with the green thing on top. If they don't then they're probably not quite ready. Wow there's just so many. Just a quick warning if you ever decide to grow tomatoes yourself at home, the orange ones or yellow, yellow or orange tomatoes, they are prolific. Anytime I have ever grown orange, any kind of variety, orange or yellow, I mean my goodness they are literally, they just do not stop producing and so so delicious. But honestly like if you just want one tomato plant, grow an orange or a yellow one because they just won't stop producing the entire summer. Right I think I'm gonna start pruning them and cutting them all back now. Okay this is the time to be really ruthless because your tomato plants are not going to grow any more than they already have. It's just too late for them now. Okay are you ready to see it? I feel like I've done it all wrong. I feel like at least a lot of the foliage is gone which I think is a really good thing. You can see a lot more of the tomatoes. The plant was all folded on itself so I've done my best to untangle it. Let me show you what I've done. Ta-da! What do we think of this then? So we do still have a few leaves on it but these leaves are like really small, you know like really really just like three or four leaves. The only thing is the plant is sort of folded down on itself so it's never going to look sort of as good and as neat as everybody else is. I feel like a lot of this is really like exposed now and it's not got any foliage. I've taken off all the growing bits so anything that had new shoots coming off is now gone. So hopefully all the energy can now just go into developing these fruits before I have to take all the plant out and that's sort of how I want them to look. Look at my like neon, neon yellow hands from all of those tomatoes. Oh my goodness the pollen from those flowers really does get everywhere and it really sticks to your hands doesn't it? Look at my rhubarb which has regrown, come back to life. This I just didn't think anything would happen with it because I put it in I think last year and we had the heat wave and I just didn't get around to sort of watering it and looking after it but it's actually look it's growing back on its own, I can't believe it. Got some really nice new leaves in there. I love rhubarb. I think what I'm going to do actually is turn this into a rhubarb bed so I might get some more rhubarb to plant in here and just literally have the whole bed. I've got my main crop potatoes coming up over there now but I think all of this should be rhubarb because I do love it. Also there's my potatoes, I'm actually filming in the afternoon on the same day that I pulled up these potatoes so trust me I will be taking them home, they've not been sitting there, it's the same day. Sorry if that's a little bit confusing, I tend to try and hide things when I'm just here like on the same day to make it look like it's another day but unfortunately at this time of year I have to just come down whenever it's not raining and today looks very dry so I'm having to film multiple vlogs in one day but anyway just forget I said that. These are my other main crop potatoes also doing really really well now. All they needed was a bit of rain but yeah they're growing fantastically, they look nice and bushy, not too tall like the other ones were. Yeah these all look really good so these are hopefully going to be harvested for my Christmas potatoes. I'll have to see how they go but they're looking great so far. Anyway oh look at the sun, the sun is finally coming out. Ah nice to have a little bit of sun at the end. I hope you've enjoyed my vlog today, I will be back again on Sunday with a home diary or on Monday back at the allotment plot. Thank you for all your advice on the water situation, I've got it in hand, I've ordered the things that I need and I'm going to be really sorting out the water collection on this allotment plot next week so if you are interested in seeing how I'm going to be collecting water, tune in to the allotment diaries next week. So thank you so much for watching, have a wonderful gardening weekend and I will see you when I see you, bye!