September No Dig Garden Tour – Harvests, Planting and Weeding

Season of abundance! Look at this. And I also want to show you wonderful things you can still be sowing and planting at this time of year. There's going to be a lot of that through the video and also fascinating difference between different types of cabbage, some growing much faster than others, which this year has been quite a factor because of all the flea beetle damage. So we're going to take a most of the garden in this video and there's so much to see. In here we're finishing in the next, within the next month actually, the tomatoes, sadly, and this is just after mid-September, it will be early October soon, and here already we've cleared watermelons and melons and just watered that this morning, took out the marigolds as well because they won't survive the winter. I'm going to plant chard and kale, which are the first plants to go in for the winter. So it's a bit like spring and we've got some pricking out there, lettuce actually, that was sown four days ago and Caroline's here sieving out some homemade compost, which is going to be mixed with grow worm compost, and I use that 50-50 roughly for potting. And then here there's, this is for house use really, not market garden garden, a bit of coriander and odd bits and pieces of spring onions and spinach. Just for salad and it's handy to have this not in the distant part of the garden. Whereas here, these cabbage are intriguing because they struggled. There's so much flea beetle this is golden acre, I mean just look at that, that's flea beetle damage there still. But it's residual and the newer leaves are more healthy as you can see. But still not, not abundant and I don't think these red cabbage for example are going to make it. They've only got two months maximum to grow in and after Christmas, after New Year, they're thinking more of making seeds and going up to seeds. So yeah, the only ones that might make it of the cabbage here is these savoys. Because savoy cabbage generally, it depends a bit on the variety, but they heart up later. We'll see. In fact, there's some kale here as well and that that has been doing better now. You can see that the new leaves are more healthy and so we will get a small harvest from the kale, but nothing much compared to what it should have been. Compared to chicories which like lettuce as well, yeah, they don't get flea beetle, thank goodness. We have this morning, we've picked a lot of salad leaves. We've picked over 30 kilos of lettuce this morning and sorry chicory and then the salad leaves, even the first rocket. And then those cabbage, if you compare them to the Chinese cabbage over there, those were sown in the greenhouse on the 50th and transplanted 12 days later in late August and that's only 20 days ago. So that gives you an idea how Chinese cabbage can grow really fast. Whether it's still possible to sow now, well, you could just but you wouldn't get a big head or heart. But because what I'm hoping with those is they have time just to make something solid for late autumn, even winter use. They store really well or you can make kimchee and many things you can do with them. These Brussels sprouts have really taken off. We have had the drought here broke on the 27th of August and we've had in that time around 45 millimeters of rain, just under two inches, which is still below average, but it was enough at least to really get things going. And we'll see. I'm worried actually still because the outlook is not for a lot of rain and I'm still watering. It goes on. I'm trying things here. So this is, you see that really mess on the surface, is Bokashi pickle, as opposed to Bokashi corn. It's not really compost, but that's food waste that's over a month old. And I was looking at it yesterday. I'm really interested how you can see you can still see the kernels on some of the cobs of corn, that kind of thing. So it pickles or ferments the food and then it can compost. Normally I'd put that in my compost heap, but this first time I've done this I thought I'm curious to see what happens if I put it on the top. Will it break down and go and will it help the Brussels to grow more? Conserve moisture as well or what you classically do is you dig it in, which I don't want to do. But I did yesterday pull back some of the soil and compost on the surface and put the Bokashi food pickle down there. It's still there now, but it's underneath a bit of soil. So that's another option. We'll see how the two do and how they compare. And then on that side we have some celeriac which we've just sowed lamb's lettuce between and then you can see just the minty on top of the lamb's lettuce just to point it out. What it meant was that we de-leafed the celeriac in order to make it possible to do that sowing. You've got more space. So the garden is full but you can still be sowing, you know, if you do things like that. Whereas with something like say the Brussels sprouts I wouldn't, even though there's space there, it's not really feasible to get seed in and the Brussels themselves are rooting so strongly now in grabbing all the moisture. Because winter brassicas, you know, they really need it. I'm really glad to have a lot of Brussels this year because the cabbage have not been brilliant and yeah, we're going to be short of food I'm afraid at this rate. I don't want to scare you but it's like where's it coming from? Parsnips are going to be really valuable. I've got a good germination here because they came up between lettuce. So we had lettuce here that was cropping nicely. And on 29th of May we sowed these again in diagonals between. I just pulled one this morning just to show you that that's one of the little ones I was just thinning to see. But you can see there's some nice parsnips developing here. That's a variety called gladiator. And we got the transition between summer and winter nicely illustrated here so tomatoes, which I need to pick, I've got to work out what to do. I'm getting a deep freeze in about three weeks and I'm thinking I might try and freeze some. I haven't really got time to make a sauce but the swedes here is brilliant winter food because you don't need to store that. That can just sit in the ground. But I've never seen such unhealthy leaves on my swedes as these again from the flea beetle mildew as well. Which is from current dryness as much as anything. You just see some healthy leaf in the middle and the little swede at the bottom. So they're showing promise. You know, I think we could have actually a worthwhile harvest there of swede, which is a dense food. It's great for the winter. Compared to tarnet, which is a much more watery vegetable. These are tokyo cross sown mid-august transplanted late august and again, they're a little bit damaged, but I think they'll make it. And for autumn leaves as opposed to roots, we've got brilliant spinach here which was sown direct in lines across the bed on the 18th of august. So that's only a month ago and we've already had a worthwhile harvest by taking like Adam did this morning, cutting out and then cutting off the leaves to go in the salad. At this stage nice salad leaves the baby spinach and that will then go on to make nice spinach as we go through the winter. Hopefully these plants have every chance I reckon of surviving until next May. And similar to the leeks actually, these are for next spring. These are not even winter leeks so much because we got them in so late. So late May transplanted early July is quite small leek plants just with my wooden dibber making a hole pop in the modules. Very easy and quick. You know with summer so busy you just want jobs that can go quickly and not take too long. And then watering just quick as well, just watering lines across the bed because all the watering I'm doing here is is by hand. It's with a hose except for in here. I've got spray lines you can see up there as well as the bees. We've just since yesterday all these bees arrived. What is this? And it's kind of like they're swarming, but there's not a swarm. There's just loads of bees and what's going on? This is funny. I'm going to contact the local BMSC. Some of you might have an idea. Actually, I should mention at this point I'm afraid that I've been so busy lately. I've not had time to reply to comments. It's very unusual for me. So apologies if you've asked a question I haven't replied. But these tomatoes will finish within three weeks and the soil in there is now getting really dry because I haven't watered for 10 days and they're not going to get any more water until we take them out in early October. We've been getting fantastic harvests of the beef tomatoes and the sun gold and sakura, red cherry and the cucumbers at the other end. Cucumbers I am watering because they still need it. And I did put up a video about this last week if you didn't see it about growing tomatoes without feed or fertilizer. Yeah, you know with no dig. This is all no dig. Just one dose of compost a year and the soil gets really active and fertile. And normally it doesn't grow many weeds. We don't spend a lot of time weeding but unless this happens. So I had Escultia California poppy flowering and that's what all these are. And I also had some poppies for bread seed. That's a poppy there. And marigolds flowering. That's young marigold seedling. And what's the actual crop here? Well, it's smaller. Unfortunately, it's lamb's lettuce. And that's a seed that you can sow. You can still sow lamb's lettuce. But it's easier if you can not have too many weeds seeds nearby. So what i'm doing is that this is oscillating or swivel hoe. Very easy to run that between the lines as long as you can see lines like this. Within the line you need to do a bit of hand weeding. So there's another poppy and California poppy and then you can see we've got we're pretty clear. There's another California but you can kind of just want to get your eye in about what's a weed and what's the plant that you've actually sown. So we'll be doing this very soon. And you can run quite close to the lines once you're confident that you can see them. You can see how nicely this hoe works. And do that on a dry day. These weeds are still small enough. I sowed these in haste two weeks ago and didn't have time to properly clean the bed before I sowed them. So that's one reason why there's quite a lot there. But yeah, when you're on top of things, you know, everything gets easier and that was just one example where I wasn't quite on top of it. Here we have more Chinese cabbage. And again, actually you can see quite a few weeds of different kinds. I'm not even sure what that one is. Yeah, there's a lot of marigolds. I'm not too worried about the marigolds because they'll be killed by frost. But basically these are not too thick to hoe between. So this is a hand weeding job and there's a little bit of bindweed. I had a group of Dutch gardeners here on Monday and they were helping to remove some of the bindweed. That's field bindweed. And I like to get a decent bit of root out and that weakens it over time. I put that on the compost heap. You can put all weeds on compost heap. They will break down. So I'm excited about these and these I am watering because this is high value crop, fast growing, whereas those have hardly ever had any water. That's chard. It's just actually a really tough plant. It's good value chard in the summer. I do chard in the summer, spinach in the winter. These celeriac have been brilliant. They're cropping steadily again. There's a little bit of bindweed there. So I'm just going to be on that with a trowel. While here these dahlias are grown from seed this year. I sowed them in April, transplanted them late May after lamb's lettuce, which had gone to seed because that's how I get my lamb's lettuce seed. I find the homegrown seeds so good and so vigorous. So much so that where I grew it and before we took the plants out to collect the seed, I mean, just look at this. Tons. So what I did was run the hoe between just to make it into a line and not have quite so many thin them out and then we'll need to do a bit of hand thinning. Or maybe with the hoe as well if there's more dry weather. Dry weather does have a lot of advantages, one being sunshine. So it's not all bad news. The pyramid has been amazing. The tomatoes have really really got going even though they're running out of time a bit. And again, I'm not watering. You can see there's an amazing watermelon over there, which actually needs harvesting because all the leaves have died. I was just eating a bit of watermelon actually before this video and noticed how the inside is growing a bit soft. And one thing I noticed is if I come in here, she nearly always comes in. You just like it in here, don't you? Yeah. She's really happy. I like to come in here and have a quick nap and get an energy boost. So yeah, it's proving an interesting structure. Here we have broccoli for next spring. And again, we've managed to just about keep ahead of the insects and the recent rain help. Whereas these collards, which were only sown in the middle of August and went in here, right, right, uh, no, it's only September when these went in the ground. Fourth of September. That's right. They were transplanted. And already they're looking good. That looks good to me, because they're for winter cropping. So they start picking a few outer leaves in November and right the way through then. And because they're shorter than kale, they're much easier to protect. In this case, we got the, that's a bird netting, but it's against rabbits, just in case the rabbits came and had a nibble. And we had similarly a mesh over these, these germinate, except some came up, about one third, what you can see there. And then when we had some rain, finally, these are the ones that germinated after it was moist enough. But are they going to make it? I don't think so. So again, not so many carrots as normal this winter. And here we have a lot of empty beds coming up and that's because we took the squash harvest up there, this looking fantastic, actually. We had just over 90 squashes from 36 plants that were in this space. There were roughly six along each bed and we didn't water at all. So for me, that was really worthwhile. Quick and simple and not much resource, just the compost at the beginning, about that much, you know, three centimetres at the most, two or three centimetres. That's, and that's how much we'll be putting on in November, December. No feeds, fertilizers. And here we're now sowing and planting these beds. It could be next February even, maybe. We'll see how it goes. The mesh cover, though, is key to this here because we've got Allium leafminer, which loves spring onions because they come at the right time that Allium leafminer here, anyway, starts flying mid-October or even before and if I can keep it out, which I'm not 100% sure, we'll get some good spring onion. Here, yesterday, so yesterday we transplanted spring onion and we sowed direct claytonia or winter purslane. So nothing to see there yet, but there's five lines. They're very small seeds. They're not easy to sow direct with any precision, so it'll be a bit of thinning there. Whereas these, yes, in a way, it's a lot easier to raise transplants if you've got the kit. These are mustards that were sown in module cells, transplanted only six days ago, very small, and then watered. And I don't think I need to cover these. I'm touching wood a bit there and a bit of spinach at the end. Whereas here, we sowed also exactly one week ago. This is the beauty of summer brassicas. One week ago, we sowed those and that is solid rocket. Again, do with a bit of thinning. You can see there, there's not much weed and that's my normal. Didn't have any crazy flowers here. There is a bit of marigold there and there's a bit of lupine from a lupine that's flowering. And next to the rocket, so this rocket at this stage, obviously, it's still very small in winter, past mid-September, so when's it going to crop? Probably late October. In this climate, you can have fantastic rocket harvest in November outside. And look at the butternut squash as well. They were sown late April, transplanted late May. And the summers can be not hot enough for butternut to be really worthwhile, but this year they really happy. There's a huge number there and they're getting really ripe. So I'm happy with that. We didn't get anything like the big number of pumpkins there, the yellow ones, but they're special pumpkin called retsa gold, which is for pumpkin seeds. They have green seeds in. And in this last bed, we have some fennel, which has taken a while to get going. There was a badger made a bit of a mess in there. That's why there's a hole in the middle, but that's sown 20th July, roughly, and transplanted mid-August. And beyond it is some sugarloaf chicory. And under here, we have some nice rocket. So this is from an earlier sowing of rocket, which was... Yeah, look at that. Whoa. Good, actually. And pleasingly clear of flea beetle damage. So this fleece has done the job. And actually, it's difficult, I find, with the wind, for it not to blow away when it's on hoops, but that's looking a lot better. We were picking some flea beetle this morning, which had the fleece directly on top of it, and the flea beetles pecked through the fleece, so... And just to finish, something more cheerful is, you know, and the whole brassica thing for winter has been pretty difficult this year, but look at these white sprouting plants. Variety called burbank. It's an F1. So vigorous, so healthy and strong compared to so many other winter brassicas. These were sown around the solstice time and grown in nine centimeter pots, transplanted early August. And here we also have sown at the same time beautiful cauliflower. These are Romanesco cauliflowers, which will crop sometime in the autumn, I hope. Do check out for all these times. You might have got the notice in this video how much I'm talking about timings and our 2027 calendar is just out. And we'll put a link in the description. It's on my website.