JOBS FOR YOUR AUTUMN ALLOTMENT

Hey guys, how are you doing? My name's Emma. This is my allotment plot here in South London. In today's video I'm going to be sharing some autumn jobs that I'm going to be doing this autumn time on my allotment plot. I hope you find them helpful. If you do, do hit the like button and the subscribe and leave me a comment below to let me know what autumn jobs you're going to be getting up to this year. Without further ado, let's get into it. Autumn on the allotment plot really is all about slowing down, taking stock of what worked over the summer months and what maybe didn't work and starting to put in those changes for next year. In gardening, it always seems to be that you are constantly planning for the next season. So it stands to reason that in autumn time, we need to start thinking about the spring garden. But that doesn't mean that we have to stop planting anything outside. I like to start my autumns with a good tidy up, clearing away all the weeds and just starting to get some order back into the plot. So for my allotment, every autumn I plant in some new tulip bulbs and some daffodils as well. The daffodils go in towards early autumn time and then the tulips you can plant out as late as February and they will still give you a spring flowering. But it is always such a joy to see all the spring bulbs come up, so I plant new ones in every year. I've also been busy sowing some other things directly this autumn, so carrots, brassicas, radishes, turnips and also it's a great time to get your broad beans in. I want to whack in my broad beans. I brought these ones which are the aqua dolce, which I always plant because you can plant these ones over the autumn winter and they'll survive the winter months. So they're a really, really good variety. I always get loads of broad beans from this variety. Aqua dolce is my favourite ones. You can plant your broad beans in the spring time or you can plant them in the autumn time and overwinter them. Last year I planted them directly in the autumn time, so literally put the seed into the ground, which is what plant directly means, and they did amazingly. I got such a good crop in the spring summer time and I had minimal problems with pests, which apparently is an advantage of planting them in the autumn winter and I didn't really know that. I did get some sort of black, is it aphids? Black aphids. I did get some pests on them, but not as much as the ones that I planted in the spring time directly. So planting them earlier in the autumn winter reduced the amount of pests that I got on my broad beans and gave me an earlier crop. So I'm going to do it again and I'm going to put them in to this back bit of my allotment plot. It gets lots of sun. It's a very big bed and these are very big plants. They can get four, five foot tall. So this is what I'm going to put in now. I'm going to use a stick to make some holes so I know where to plant them. So I'm going to make the holes first and then we're going to put the beans in. Right, so the official way that you normally plant in broad beans is in zigzags. You can see I've sort of made these dots as zigzaggy as I can. So I've got two zigzag rows and I think that's so that you can support them easier because the way you support broad bean plants is to put two sticks in either side of the row and then run twine across and it supports the whole row. And I think it's to do with supporting them, but I can't quite remember. You just drop them in. Don't worry too much about what way they're supposed to go. Just drop them in the hole. They'll figure it out. Autumn really is a great time on the allotment to start doing all of those jobs that maybe you've neglected a little bit over the spring summer. Spring, summer on the allotment can be very busy and it's all about growing things, looking after it, protecting it, harvesting it. In the autumn time, it's a chance to slow down and look at all those jobs that maybe you've neglected. And for me, that always means sorting out the compost heap. It's a great time to think about your compost because there is so much natural material around that you can put into it now to help it out. You've got all your crops that are finished that you can chop up and throw in. You've got the fallen leaves, you've got apples from trees. So it's a great time to whack it all into the compost bin, give it a chop and a mix and just see what's going on in there really. And if you have managed to make any of that magical compost, now is a great time to use it over your beds to mulch them. Mulch them over as thickly as you can and it will add all the nutrients and goodness that your beds need and that they lost over the summer time. I've come to absolutely love this tree. Not only do the birds love it, it also, it changes so beautifully with the seasons. It gives me unlimited leaf mulch, leaves every year, which I use, I collect up and I use over beds and in new growing beds. I don't really leave it to rot down actually, the leaf mould. What I do is I tend to collect it up, keep it for maybe a week or so, and then use it to mulch over a bed. The only thing to remember and bear in mind, if you use leaves as part of your growing beds, is that leaves, they do not contain many nutrients. There's not a lot of goodness in these leaves. They're dead. They're brown. It's a brown material. So on their own, they're not nutrient rich. What they do do is add really good structure to your soil. When you make leaf mould properly and let it rot down, like over maybe two or three years, it takes to make it properly. The texture of it is so good and it retains, I'm trying to educate here, it retains so much moisture and it adds such good structure to your soil, but not nutrients. And that's the thing to remember. So if you use leaves, be sure to use something else nutrient rich, compost manure, something like that. And now we're going to do one of my favourite jobs and collect all the leaves up. And, but also, we can do this. This is another good thing they're good for, doing this. Throw yourself a little confession party. You want to get involved. Here you are. Throw yourself a party. You made it. It's autumn. Autumn is definitely not the time to start neglecting the wildlife. The wildlife actually need us more than ever at this time. So it's a great time to start feeding the birds if you're not already, and to start thinking about creating some natural habitats for wildlife over the colder months. They will really thank you for it come the winter time. Right. So although I'm taking quite a lot of the leaves and I've just fallen around my pathways on this little bit of grass area here, I'm actually going to leave a lot of them around the tree because I've got leaves all in my hair. Not because of that, because animals, insects, mammals, birds, creepy crawlies, whatever other name you want to call them. They love to hide in them and it makes a great habitat and it makes a great habitat for them for the autumn time. So it's a good idea just to leave some piles. I've got my hedgehog house under here. So I'm going to leave the leaves around the hedgehog house. I haven't checked on the hedgehog for a while. I don't even know if I've got one. Here he is down here. See, this is my hedgehog box. I had him out in the open and then a lot of people commented and said, no, put it somewhere hidden. So I put it under here in the hope that it would kind of grow over and look, the tree's grown over exactly as I, I hoped it would. I don't know if, I don't know if I've got a hedgehog, but there's a very clear entryway that he can use it if he wants it. Um, no, there's a lot of spiders in there, but then I suppose he eats those. So if there's any hedgehogs around here, there's a perfectly good hedgehog home for you there. Another job that I do every single autumn time is take care of my greenhouse. This is a polycarbonate greenhouse and the panels do sometimes pop out, especially over the spring time when it gets very windy. Now's a great time to do some maintenance jobs on it as all the tomatoes have been cleared and it's pretty much empty. So I will tape up all the panels again, give it a really good clean, get all the grime off of the panels and just generally kind of take care of it. And then I've got a really great clean space in here to start some seeds over the autumn time. I always start my sweet pea flowers in the greenhouse in pots, um, and then they can go out early spring. So it's just a great time to sort out the greenhouse and also clear out my shed as well, which often gets very dirty and infested with spiders. So while autumn might be a great time to get some proper maintenance jobs done on your allotment plot, make some really big, crazy changes, it's also a really great time to slow down. It's been a really difficult spring summer this year, so if you've struggled, you are not alone. Make sure that you do take some time over autumn just to relax and just enjoy your allotment. Hope you found this video helpful. If you did, do hit the like button, give me a subscribe and leave me a comment below to let me know what autumn jobs you're going to be getting up to on your allotment plots over this autumn time.