September Tour - vegetable's sweetness, edging, rhubarb and composting
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00:00 with lots of vegetables harvested a lot of them
00:02 quite recently, some a bit while back.
00:05 Storage is another aspect of harvesting.
00:08 And I've got examples here to show you,
00:11 hopefully not to be too intimidated by things going wrong
00:14 because this wonderful looking celery,
00:17 I've left it too long basically.
00:18 And in there, you can see how there's some leaves going,
00:23 some of the stalks actually going rotten in the middle
00:26 where my fingers are.
00:28 And if I was trying to sell that, well, that wouldn't work,
00:31 but actually I'm gonna juice it
00:32 so I can cut out the rotten bits.
00:35 There's nearly always a way of using things
00:37 that are not quite perfect.
00:39 And there's some mystery vegetables here.
00:41 Like these, don't know how many of you grow these radicchios
00:45 and they're from chicory.
00:45 And I'll show you some in a minute
00:47 where they're not quite ready.
00:48 How do you tell when they're ready?
00:49 You can feel that they're firm
00:51 and then you can see the beautiful leaves in there
00:53 as you take these outer leaves off.
00:55 And that's what we put in the salad bag that I sell here.
01:00 So you can see there's a mix there
01:01 with all different kinds of leaves,
01:02 also like chard and end even lettuce, rocket and so on.
01:06 And then these cabbages are just beautiful at the moment,
01:08 but they're not always that perfect looking.
01:10 This was one of the nicest.
01:11 We'll see some when we go around
01:12 that got a bit of caterpillar damage,
01:14 but you can nearly always get a nice heart.
01:16 Cauliflowers, well, if you leave them too long,
01:18 the same with calabrese,
01:19 they will start to open out and lose their quality.
01:22 So there's kind of a moment of perfection
01:24 with most harvests, which is sometimes hard to achieve,
01:28 but if you miss it, don't worry.
01:30 Or if you catch it a bit early,
01:31 you'll just have a slightly smaller harvest.
01:33 And then in terms of storing,
01:36 I'll just quickly say like onions, garlic,
01:40 these were harvested June,
01:41 onions harvested a month ago in August,
01:43 and these harvested quite recently,
01:44 different types of squash.
01:46 I store all of these in the house here
01:48 because they keep better when they're warm and dry.
01:52 And so do the loofahs.
01:54 So this is first harvest of them.
01:57 And that's one that I've peeled already.
02:00 Take off the outside skin.
02:01 Actually, it helps to soak it a bit.
02:03 I was tapping it, see where, yeah, there you go.
02:05 So that's loofah seeds.
02:07 So when you harvest a loofah,
02:08 you get free seeds for next year.
02:10 And it's a lot of seed harvesting this time of year.
02:15 So that's marigolds, dwarf French marigolds
02:17 from the polytunnel amongst the tomatoes.
02:19 We'll see them in a minute as well.
02:21 And very easy, especially in a polytunnel,
02:24 where it's all dry to harvest seeds.
02:26 And garlic is a seed.
02:28 You know, you're planting the cloves, in fact,
02:32 but that's, sometimes people talk about seed garlic,
02:34 and that's what it is.
02:35 We sort of break the bulbs into cloves.
02:38 And just today, we've been planting some.
02:41 Start planting garlic around the equinox.
02:44 The beans, today also we were treading on
02:48 some of these beans, put them on a sheet on concrete,
02:51 and you walk on them, 'cause they're brittle.
02:52 They tend to snap open,
02:53 and then you get the bollotti beans in this case out.
02:56 There they are, after some winnowing.
02:59 And then there's same process a few days ago
03:02 to get these sahr beans.
03:03 That's a runner bean, a white-seeded runner bean,
03:06 white flowering as well.
03:08 Not such a good quality this year,
03:09 'cause we've had a wet summer,
03:11 and these pods of the runner beans
03:13 actually don't resist the rain so well as the bollottis.
03:16 Can recommend the bollottis a lot,
03:18 because they're definitely easy to grow
03:20 and get the quality.
03:21 And then, how can you tell how sweet your harvests are?
03:26 It's sometimes said that sweetness
03:28 is a sign of nutritional quality.
03:32 I'm not quite so convinced by that.
03:34 There's a bit more to it than that, I think.
03:35 But what I'm doing here is,
03:37 I have a portable refractometer.
03:39 I'll show you how that works in just a sec.
03:41 Before that, I need the garlic crusher
03:44 to get juice out of this beetroot.
03:45 We've been doing tests earlier this afternoon
03:49 just to see how sweet all these different vegetables are.
03:54 And, well, the results are a bit surprising, actually.
03:58 Always, yeah, that's why sometimes
04:01 it's good to measure things.
04:02 So often it's not possible for various reasons,
04:05 but if you can, the way this works is
04:08 you get enough juice out of this,
04:11 oh crikey, there's a lot of juice in this red beetroot.
04:14 There's plenty there.
04:15 And then you flip the top back down there.
04:19 It's flattering everywhere.
04:20 And I'm gonna look through the reader,
04:23 and there's a line, a blue line there.
04:27 Oh, I've kind of got a bit of beetroot juice
04:29 on the inside of it.
04:30 It's making it hard to read the line, but I can.
04:33 I hold it more to light.
04:34 And that beetroot, wow, it's sweet.
04:40 It's 11 degrees.
04:41 So actually that's the same as it happens
04:45 as the golden beetroot.
04:46 So we've got a table here, all the readings from earlier.
04:51 And not surprising, something like apple, 15 1/2%.
04:56 That's a Lord Lamb one apple.
04:57 You can tell it an apple's ripe
04:58 when the green goes yellow like that.
05:01 It was green before.
05:02 Also, if you get insect damage,
05:04 I get a lot of that codling moth going in,
05:07 then it tends to rot around there.
05:08 That makes the fruit sweeten more quickly.
05:10 So if it's not damaged, actually,
05:12 it would store for longer, but it's 15 1/2%.
05:14 It's good sugar reading.
05:16 But coming down there, we've got two types
05:18 of cherry tomatoes, the sun gold, the orange ones.
05:21 See, they're less sweet than the beetroot.
05:23 And so's the garden's delight, 8%, 7%.
05:28 And then carrots, 9 1/2%.
05:31 So there's a carrot that I took the juice out of
05:35 to get that reading.
05:36 Tomatillo, oh, sorry, tomatillo, 5 1/2%.
05:40 Well, that's not too surprising.
05:41 It's just not bad reading, quite acid as well.
05:44 Beetroot, there we've got the, I haven't put it in yet,
05:47 but both of them just around 11.
05:49 And look at this one at the bottom.
05:51 The sweetest of all was garlic, 28 1/2%.
05:56 And actually, I tasted the juice after measuring it.
06:01 I was just, where is this sugar?
06:03 'Cause you don't really notice sweetness in garlic.
06:05 At least I don't.
06:06 You do if it's roasted, I think it comes out more,
06:08 because it's so pungent when it's raw, anyway,
06:11 you don't really get that sweetness apparent.
06:15 So let's head on out and have a look.
06:18 And please don't be daunted if you're looking
06:21 at these harvests and they all look so perfect
06:24 and plentiful.
06:27 You know, my garden is pretty big.
06:29 Actually, I'll go up here.
06:30 I employ one full-time guy, two or three part-time people.
06:37 There's about 110 hours of work goes into
06:40 1,500 square meters of garden here.
06:42 So, you know, we're putting in quite a bit of time.
06:46 It's a market garden, which is not making a profit,
06:51 but it's subsidized by my other work,
06:53 which I'm very happy about,
06:54 'cause I wanna, I use it as a teaching garden as well,
06:57 you know, doing these tours, for example,
06:59 the chance to explain things.
07:00 And here's some of the chicories for radicchio.
07:04 So that lovely firm radicchio I showed you,
07:07 you can see they start off like this,
07:08 much more open and then gradually fold in.
07:11 How do you know when that's ready?
07:12 Well, it will get quite a bit tighter
07:14 and actually swell up more in the middle there.
07:16 The outer leaves won't look so healthy anymore,
07:19 and that's a sign that the middle bit is getting better.
07:22 It's a little bit the same for cauliflowers.
07:24 So here's a cauliflower plant
07:28 that's been here since 17th of July.
07:31 So that's three months in the ground.
07:34 No, it's not, it's two.
07:35 It's not much more than two months.
07:37 Now there is actually, I can't quite get in there yet.
07:40 I'd looked earlier and there's the tiny little
07:41 purple cauliflower in there.
07:43 And that's a clue, if you can see that much,
07:46 that within maybe two weeks, we'll have a cauliflower.
07:50 So that at that stage, you start keeping an eye
07:53 on your plants as harvest approaches.
07:55 This is end of harvest time with tomatoes.
08:02 This is the sungold, and that's the gardener's delight
08:04 that we were looking at just now, cherry tomatoes.
08:08 And you can see how they've gone up so much,
08:10 especially sungold.
08:11 So I've dropped the stems down
08:13 by feeding extra string at the top actually,
08:15 because I'm keeping the working end
08:18 of the plant within range.
08:20 And they're only gonna be cropping
08:23 for another two weeks about.
08:24 We're 28th September today.
08:26 Yeah, barely that.
08:27 10th of October, I reckon, is cutoff date.
08:30 There's not enough light anymore to make the fruit sweet,
08:32 so we clear them all and plant winter salads
08:34 and they're all germinating in the greenhouse right now.
08:38 And we've even planted a few actually there.
08:40 There's some red chard and red Russian kale.
08:44 So they're the first plantings of salads for winter.
08:47 And the tomatoes finishing.
08:51 I just noticed here some late blight on the leaves.
08:55 And that's another sign really.
08:57 It's nothing too dramatic,
08:59 but that is what blight looks like.
09:02 Some of you might not have ever seen it.
09:04 Probably many of you have and regret it.
09:06 But at this point, in plants like this,
09:08 it's not a worry because the nights are getting cooler.
09:11 The spores don't propagate very quickly.
09:13 The leaves are dry.
09:14 And I'm not watering the roots anymore.
09:17 So I stopped watering these tomatoes two weeks ago.
09:21 And that stresses them a bit and encourages them
09:26 to put their energy into ripening the last fruits.
09:30 Cucumber's also approaching the end.
09:34 There are still some reasonable cucumbers,
09:37 but they're nothing like they were.
09:39 And the leaf size is much smaller than it was.
09:42 It's incredible how with the drop in light levels,
09:45 you lose the quality of such a warmth loving plant.
09:49 Other plants are doing fine, but this is a summer plant.
09:53 And it's the same story for the watermelons here.
09:56 Well, there's the loofah for example as well.
09:58 So, you know, they're just finishing.
10:00 Whether these green ones will make it,
10:03 I don't know to be honest, it depends a bit on the weather,
10:05 but within two weeks, that's gonna be harvested.
10:08 And I'll need to, I hope, finish the harvesting inside.
10:12 This watermelon though, this does look right.
10:14 Kind of sounds hollow.
10:17 It's also lost most of its leaves.
10:21 So if you've got this situation where you've got a fruit,
10:24 but hardly any leaves healthy anymore,
10:27 there's basically no way that it can get much sweeter.
10:30 I'm just gonna show you what's inside
10:33 to give you an idea, it's a yellow.
10:34 Oh yeah, wow.
10:35 That is really nice and ripe actually.
10:38 That's done well, 'cause this is the second flush.
10:39 We've had three really big watermelons from these plants.
10:44 And, oh, I can't resist just doing this.
10:48 So there's the fruit.
10:51 And actually the seeds there, if it was more ripe,
10:53 they'd be going a little bit brown.
11:02 That's really good, that's sweet.
11:03 What I noticed was, I harvested one a few days ago
11:06 and left it in the kitchen for a while.
11:08 And the seeds actually went more brown.
11:10 They carried on, the seeds carried on ripening
11:12 after harvest.
11:15 And here we've got a different type of watermelon.
11:17 And I'm saving seeds for this one,
11:20 but watermelons do cross.
11:21 So it could be interesting to see what they grow next year.
11:30 This is a completely different type of harvest
11:33 that's completely coming into season now.
11:36 So it's winter radish.
11:37 I mean, look at this beautiful.
11:39 It's a variety called Bora,
11:42 which I sowed on the 23rd of July.
11:46 So that's not much more than two months ago.
11:49 I'm gonna twist it out.
11:52 It's not very long,
11:54 but you can see it's got a really good size to it.
11:57 And we made some beautiful kimchi
12:00 from radish like this last year.
12:02 As much as anything for the color,
12:04 it's purple right the way through, really exquisite.
12:07 If you can find seeds for that,
12:09 I'll put some seed recommendation supplies
12:13 in the video description.
12:14 And then edging.
12:17 A lot of you ask about how we keep these edges tidy.
12:19 And it just so happens here,
12:21 we never got around to picking up the edges yesterday,
12:24 or a couple of days ago, even actually, which were cut.
12:26 So it's using this half moon, called a half moon edger.
12:30 I will actually make a proper little video about this,
12:32 but you can use it to cut along.
12:34 No dig garden here.
12:36 We actually don't need to spend much time weeding
12:39 because they don't grow much.
12:40 We've got more time therefore to do things like the edging,
12:42 which actually is important
12:43 because it's amazing in a damp climate like this,
12:46 how much a grass edge like that
12:48 will just spread and spread in
12:49 if you don't cut it back every so often.
12:52 You'll be surprised if you haven't tried that before.
12:54 But the edger means that you can then just pull out
12:56 the grass and we put that on the compost heap.
12:58 Sometimes use a trowel to leave a dandelion
13:01 if there's any of that.
13:02 This is another, well, more a winter harvest actually.
13:06 So that's Jerusalem artichoke, we call them.
13:09 They are related to sunflower
13:10 and you can see the lovely yellow flowers on top,
13:14 helianthus.
13:15 Oh, I can't keep an eye on that sky.
13:18 Do you know what, it's gonna rain at any minute now,
13:20 I think.
13:21 The harvests here are beautiful interplanting
13:26 that has worked so nicely.
13:27 It's chervil we put in not much more than a month ago
13:32 between the lettuce.
13:34 So these lettuce we carried on picking.
13:36 So we're taking the outer leaves like that.
13:38 Now you can take them down as small as that even.
13:40 And each time you harvest the lettuce,
13:42 the lettuce regrows a bit less
13:44 and the chervil gets a bit bigger.
13:45 So initially you could hardly see the chervil.
13:48 The lettuce were much bigger
13:49 and now it's the other way around.
13:50 So that's sort of relay happening
13:52 and you're getting more harvest for space
13:54 and a quicker establishment
13:56 if you're planting as well, actually.
13:58 These plants on the other hand have been here a long time.
14:02 So the kale went in late June
14:04 from a sowing on roughly 4th of May.
14:08 And that's Cavalloneiro with dazzling blue at the back.
14:10 Actually, that's two very lovely varieties
14:12 that grow quite tall.
14:14 And we harvest them from the bottom.
14:18 And these are amazing kale actually
14:21 'cause what you do is you take off,
14:24 you don't eat the stalk.
14:25 So you're taking off this outer, just the leaf.
14:28 And yeah, it's a great food.
14:31 Very, very strong flavor if you haven't tried it.
14:33 The asparagus will soon be going yellow.
14:39 So that'll be coming into harvest next April.
14:42 That ground will be empty.
14:44 Quite tempted to sow a bit of mustard maybe underneath.
14:48 And here we have an incredible plant.
14:53 This is some of the best rhubarb I've ever grown.
14:56 It's just been favored by the weather this year.
14:59 The rain and warmth this summer,
15:02 and quite often people say you shouldn't eat rhubarb
15:04 in late summer, autumn, because it's bad for you.
15:07 You know, I've heard variations on that.
15:10 Actually, you can.
15:11 And you know, you take your harvest here.
15:15 I mean, look at that.
15:16 Just beautiful.
15:17 If this has happened,
15:20 you can harvest rhubarb as late as September.
15:23 This time last year, this rhubarb was almost dead.
15:26 Well, not literally dead, but all the leaves had died back
15:28 'cause it was such a dry summer.
15:30 Rhubarb loves moisture.
15:31 So, you know, we've had enough rain
15:33 to keep it going longer than normal.
15:35 So in that sense, you know,
15:37 you never quite know what you're gonna harvest when
15:41 And how do you keep the fertility up?
15:43 Well, we are gonna look at the compost heaps at the end,
15:45 but I just, in passing, wanna mention this.
15:47 You know, what is this?
15:50 Believe it or not, this is pure wood chip.
15:52 That's wood chip now, ooh, nearly five years old.
15:56 And it's been through a 12 millimeter sieve
15:59 just to take the big bits of wood out.
16:01 But even since February, when I was looking at,
16:04 when it'd been through the sieve,
16:06 it's degraded quite a bit.
16:07 And we use some of that even in a potting mix.
16:11 (wind whooshing)
16:13 This is coming towards winter,
16:15 and it's two different types of beetroot.
16:17 There's the more normal sort of red stem beetroot up there.
16:21 And this one is an old fashioned one
16:23 called Cheltenham Green Top.
16:25 And that's because, come on, if I can get it out.
16:28 It goes quite deep.
16:30 See, it's a long one.
16:32 Because I've transplanted it,
16:34 it's not got its normal fine taproot,
16:37 but it's a pale colored, both leaves and beet.
16:41 And it's so sweet.
16:43 It's one of my favorites for that.
16:44 I haven't grown it for a few years.
16:45 I'd rather forgot about it actually,
16:47 but this is where I found some seed,
16:50 something different.
16:51 This is where we're still harvesting lettuce.
16:56 So they've been in the ground since roughly mid August,
16:59 so in late July.
17:02 And you can see the difference
17:03 between harvested this morning,
17:04 again, taking the outer leaves
17:05 and harvested about a week ago, different varieties.
17:09 And this is where I cut the beautiful calabrese from,
17:14 or broccoli, which was on the table,
17:16 which weighed close to a kilo.
17:19 And you can see there's more,
17:21 harvesting them tomorrow morning actually,
17:23 the three horseshoes piping back on.
17:26 And further up that end is also broccoli
17:31 sown at the same time,
17:33 planted at the same time, 17th of July,
17:35 but that one will crop in April.
17:38 So just showing how sometimes you sow
17:40 and plant things at the same time,
17:41 but you get a totally different harvest period.
17:44 This one, autumn, we'll finish before winter.
17:47 We'll take out the plants.
17:48 Those we need to look after the plants.
17:50 We'll put a bird netting cage over to keep the pigeons off.
17:55 At the moment we don't have pigeons luckily,
17:57 but we will do in the winter probably
18:01 when they start getting hungry.
18:03 Oh yeah, look at that slug.
18:05 So, you know, sometimes I go on about slugs a bit,
18:10 I know, but basically we're keeping the garden slug-free
18:13 by giving them minimum habitat.
18:15 This one was under a stone.
18:16 I mean, fair enough.
18:18 But if you keep, I'm keeping the numbers low,
18:21 you know, basically that's how this is working.
18:23 There's always going to be some, and that's fair enough.
18:26 And then I just want to show you these
18:29 because, yeah, look at that, beautiful node of carrot.
18:33 But what I've been noticing is a few of these
18:35 have carrot root fly, and you can tell that.
18:39 It's easier to see actually once you've washed them.
18:42 This one looks all right, I'm pleased to say.
18:44 I'm nervous of this pest because these carrots
18:47 are for winter, and if we get any carrot root fly in there,
18:52 it damages the root, and then the root starts to rot,
18:56 and then they don't store.
18:58 So you can still eat them in the shorter term,
19:03 but they're just not so good for storage.
19:06 This is one of the last plantings.
19:07 We're still doing a bit of planting.
19:08 You could still be planting spring cabbage,
19:10 spring cauliflower, spring onions.
19:12 If you've got transplants, it's a bit late to sow them.
19:15 They'll crop next spring.
19:16 And these seedlings you can see coming up here
19:21 are not for eating.
19:23 They're mustard, so cover crop green manure.
19:26 And I'm a little bit nervous about this.
19:29 This is holes that Adam did to pop in rye seed.
19:34 Almost looks like something he might have had
19:35 a little nosy in there to eat the seed.
19:37 I'm hoping not.
19:39 I think I might sow some in modules
19:41 to have as spare transplants.
19:43 So what we're doing is this is four lines of rye,
19:46 for grain, for bread, with the mustard in between.
19:49 Last autumn we noticed that discouraged wireworm.
19:51 We had a bit of wireworm problem on the rye,
19:55 and so this is a bit of a trial.
19:58 The beauty of the mustard is that it's killed by frost.
20:01 So this is a cover crop of green manure
20:03 that you don't have to dig in here,
20:04 that classic bit of awful advice.
20:06 So you can sow that now.
20:08 White mustard it's called, Sinapis alba.
20:11 And that will grow bountifully before, say, December,
20:16 and then be killed by frost of maybe minus four, minus five.
20:20 Whereas vegetables like this survive the frost.
20:22 Spinach is so frost hardy.
20:24 This spinach has been in the ground
20:25 for only five weeks, literally.
20:28 And you can see we've harvested,
20:30 I was harvesting some this morning,
20:31 taking off the outer leaves, not taking, not cutting,
20:34 just removing the outer leaves.
20:36 And then you get, you can see how it's regrown
20:38 towards the end of the bed.
20:39 That was picked about two weeks ago.
20:41 We started picking and we're working our way up.
20:43 We'll get to the end, then we'll start the other end again.
20:46 For about another five or six weeks,
20:48 and then the days will be pretty dark by November.
20:51 It doesn't really grow much more after that.
20:52 It'll survive and it could well crop next spring
20:55 if it does all survive.
20:56 Oh, quickly mentioned too, pest damage here.
20:59 Some of you might find this useful, alarming.
21:02 Guess what did that?
21:04 That's deer.
21:04 They love chicory endives.
21:07 They'll just chomp out the heart like that.
21:10 And that was two nights ago, actually.
21:12 Probably we'll need to put a bird netting over this bed,
21:17 but it's another job and it makes it harder to harvest
21:20 than go in there, take the netting off.
21:22 I might just see if I can wing it,
21:24 but if the damage gets any worse,
21:26 we'll certainly put this kind of net it is actually.
21:29 That's bird netting that we use against birds and rabbits.
21:32 Very useful stuff.
21:34 Some of you might have seen a video
21:40 that we made about onion seed.
21:42 And here's the last ones.
21:43 We've actually taken quite a few already.
21:45 Do you hear they're coming out?
21:51 That's basically what I do.
21:53 I'm not worried about getting every last seed out.
21:54 There's so many here.
21:56 But if you give them a gentle tap like that
21:59 or rub when they're dry,
22:01 so that's probably a job for tomorrow.
22:03 We'll be in here and tidy that up,
22:05 harvest the last seeds and then need to winter them.
22:08 And these are all squash that grew
22:10 where we've just sowed the mustard and rye.
22:13 And that was through black plastic.
22:14 That was new ground.
22:16 It had been really past it only seven months earlier.
22:20 We grew the squash through the plastic.
22:22 You can see that in some of these earlier tours.
22:24 That's crown prince there mostly.
22:26 And we'll need to bring them in the house.
22:29 These onions too,
22:30 I'm quite tempted to bring these in my house
22:33 and put them in the spare bedroom.
22:35 'Cause what I find is,
22:37 that's the ones that we haven't sold before then.
22:38 'Cause they do store better in the dry warmth
22:42 and the squash definitely do.
22:43 But they're in here for the moment
22:44 'cause we've run out of room in the house.
22:48 (chuckles)
22:50 Compost making is going nicely in the pallet bays.
22:53 We're up to 55 nearly centigrade temperature.
22:57 So that's enough to kill the weed seeds.
22:59 And this is where some of the lovely squash came from
23:05 that we saw in the conservatory.
23:07 This was the Marina di Chiogia, two plants.
23:11 And then there was Oregon sweet homestead.
23:14 And we harvested them all
23:16 and then found those two up there.
23:19 So that's a Marina di Chiogia, this one here,
23:22 which it's run its stem right the way up
23:25 quite a few meters up the bed
23:27 and the Oregon sweet meat homestead, that's what it is.
23:31 And they're not quite right.
23:34 How do you know when they're right?
23:35 In fact, if you look at this stalk
23:38 and this one we could harvest actually,
23:40 it's starting to go quite brown,
23:42 certainly hard and firm.
23:44 It's any time from now, if the weather's not cold,
23:48 it's fine, they don't mind a bit of moisture,
23:51 but actually most of, well, not quite all.
23:53 Like there's another one there
23:54 and the leaves are still green a bit.
23:55 So any time from now in this case,
23:59 where's the butternuts up there?
24:01 As usual, very late.
24:03 So we'll see.
24:04 This is different ways of harvesting and even chicory
24:09 where we've got chicories for heart,
24:13 like there's sugarloaf and Trevizo and Palorosa.
24:16 And this is endive, scarol and frise,
24:20 which we're mostly taking the outer leaves off.
24:24 So that way you get more heart leaf
24:27 that will regrow more quickly.
24:29 Whereas if you cut them like we did here,
24:31 just to see actually, I had a few spare ones.
24:34 So I'll just see what happens.
24:35 And we didn't cut too low, but they're regrowing very slowly.
24:38 I don't really think they're gonna make it.
24:40 And there's the difference between cutting and picking.
24:44 And obviously the cutting is quicker.
24:47 If you've got a lot of plants, well, fine.
24:49 But if you wanna get more out of each plant,
24:52 the picking the outer leaves,
24:53 actually you get a bigger harvest altogether.
24:58 This bed is where the Borlotti beans came from
25:01 that I was showing you.
25:02 There were four teepees there
25:03 and each one is giving around two kilos of beans.
25:06 So I'm really happy with that.
25:08 So it might be seven altogether.
25:10 Say that's seven kilos of dry beans from that area.
25:13 Today, Adam planted garlic there.
25:17 Quite close spacing, about 10 centimeters, four inches apart,
25:21 about one foot, 30 centimeter between the rows.
25:24 Then put the compost on top.
25:25 That's Homeacres, roughly a year old actually.
25:30 Some of the nicest compost we've got
25:32 'cause it's a little bit older.
25:34 In fact, you can see the difference between those two beds.
25:36 That's basically just difference of age.
25:37 It's very same, similar ingredients to compost.
25:40 That one's around six months old, no more.
25:44 And then that's another six months, it goes to that.
25:46 And I never use a sieve, so it's going on quite lumpy.
25:50 We're heading up to the time of year now
25:51 when you can start putting on compost as ground clears,
25:55 but you can still be planting like the garlic there,
25:57 for example, or the mustard I showed you,
25:59 if you've got spring cabbage and so on.
26:01 And don't worry if your compost doesn't look perfect.
26:05 You know, that just happens to be some of the nicest.
26:06 So we've sown mustard on top as well.
26:09 So we'll have the mustard growing up
26:10 and then the garlic will grow through it
26:12 once the mustard is killed by frost.
26:14 Look what's here.
26:17 There's a caterpillar.
26:20 And we actually have sprayed the Bacillus syringensis.
26:23 I think it's getting indigestion actually,
26:26 because it hasn't moved much.
26:27 I've noticed in the last couple of hours,
26:29 which is fine actually.
26:32 You know, there's some damage.
26:34 This is where, you know, don't worry
26:37 if you see often outer leaves looking really poor,
26:40 you might well find that you've still got
26:41 a very nice harvest in there.
26:44 This is where the super fine mature compost came from.
26:50 So we've got, we actually had to move it in there
26:56 'cause we'd run out of space.
26:56 So that's what it looks like.
26:58 There's well over a ton of that beautiful compost there.
27:02 Probably don't need to use quite so much
27:04 when you're spreading it compared to,
27:07 this is where the less mature came from.
27:08 This is the current heap.
27:10 And it's that thing of adding some green,
27:14 some brown materials.
27:15 So green is harvest rejects.
27:18 Oh, crikey, look at the temperatures.
27:20 Yeah, this is going up.
27:21 That's 70, that's plenty hot enough actually.
27:24 But that one way we can reduce the temperature a bit
27:26 is browns.
27:27 So that's soil and wood chip, mostly wood chip,
27:31 a bit of soil in there.
27:32 And the wood chip we put through the sieve.
27:34 So it's old wood chip, year old nearly.
27:37 And I mean, there's another mostly brown.
27:39 That's the pods of the Bolotti beans, for example.
27:42 So they're all going on.
27:43 And I'm not wetting them.
27:45 We put dry cardboard on as well,
27:46 'cause in this climate,
27:47 we've got so much moisture going on with green leaves
27:49 that the issue is more trying to keep it a bit dry.
27:54 And just to finish off,
27:56 I can show you different stages of compost here.
28:00 So these bays, these are big.
28:02 These are not bays that probably
28:03 most of you would want to have this big.
28:05 Do look at my other composting making videos.
28:08 You can see, I'll show you the Dalek,
28:10 the conical plastic bins and the pallet bins that we saw,
28:13 more suitable for smaller gardens.
28:15 If you can fill a bay within two months,
28:17 I would say that's about the right size for your garden.
28:20 We're filling these this year though, in four weeks,
28:23 because we're really going for it.
28:24 And with the weather we've had,
28:26 it's just been loads of stuff to come in.
28:28 And with the wood chip that I'm getting hold of,
28:31 it's brilliant.
28:32 And this is two months old.
28:34 So you can see it's still steaming, still warm.
28:38 But Tom turned this in here two days ago, actually only.
28:42 And you can see how wet that is.
28:44 It's a little bit on the wet side, actually.
28:45 Turning really helped.
28:47 You know, this is, that's what turned into
28:50 that beautiful compost you saw on the garlic bed.
28:53 I'll give it another few months.
28:54 But we'll probably be spreading this
28:55 before it's as mature as that.
28:58 You know, you've got, these are all possible options.
29:01 This is one month older.
29:03 So here you'll see the difference.
29:04 And it's drier.
29:11 It was, it's interesting, actually.
29:12 It was pretty soggy when he turned it.
29:15 But this one is looking quite a bit drier.
29:16 And you can see it's starting to get a bit more fibrous.
29:20 And there is quite a bit of woody material in here.
29:22 You know, classic brassica stalk, that kind of thing.
29:25 Which is good, because that's helping to keep a bit of air
29:28 and in the heap, solid size.
29:31 That's all good, no worries there.
29:33 So I hope you've enjoyed the tour.
29:35 I'll see you here again in October.
29:37 But also do,
29:38 do enjoy your harvest in a spirit of
29:44 happiness and abundance.
29:45 And have a look at the video,
29:46 if you haven't seen it before,
29:48 that I made with Eric Berg,
29:49 where we're talking about health from the soil.
29:52 And for me, that's what's going on here,
29:54 because this is no-dig garden.
29:55 you get super abundance of really good microbes.
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