No Dig in High Summer, Charles takes you around Homeacres' old and new beds

[Music] do welcome to homekeepers garden in somerset southwest uk it's the height of summer and i'm showing you some bits of the garden that we don't feature a lot in some of the other videos on youtube and this is a market garden so it's a third of an acre i'm selling a lot of food from here i employ one person full-time and two or three part-time helpers mainly for harvesting salads we sell a lot of salad leaves twice a week we're picking for them and we're also doing a lot of other companion planting trials and all sorts of different comparisons here like for example these celeriac this spring were struggling a bit they were suffering aphids and you can see that's the effect of the earlier aphid damage which thankfully now is they're growing away from and because of that the plants were much smaller than i'd expect them to be they still are we're going to get a bit of a crop here of celeriac but i decided to use the space by interplanting with leek multi-zone leak modules and that's one lovely aspect of no dig your ground is ready for seasonal plants at any stage and you can mix plants up i'm also doing no rotation trials like here so we have cabbages or brassica plants in the same place now in the seventh year of doing that so this this has been brassicas every summer in autumn for the last six years now this is the seventh year and likewise that's leaks in the seventh autumn summer and autumn of growing leeks they were preceded by potatoes which we harvested two weeks ago and that was the seventh year potatoes in this area gave 42 kilos of lovely potatoes pasta and disease free they're now in sacks in the shed and on the same day we transplant the leeks which was sown april raised as plants multi-sown and popped in 32 blocks in each bed because there are three strips here and this is part of a three strip trial i call it where the first strip here we fork the ground to loosen the saw loosen it 30 commas and see what effect that has compared to no dig not loosen just pure no dig and both of these strips have the same amount of compost and so far over six years of doing that the forked strip has five percent lower yet lower yield of vegetables compared to the no dig strip in the middle and then there's one more strip strip three which is also no dig and that has a different compost that's caramel compost and that's slightly lower yield or actually quite similar to strip two and this is ongoing so all the time we're watching observing learning and that's fascinating interplanting is such a nice thing that you can do in so many unexpected ways like here this was carrots and we've already had a fantastic crop of carrots from this bed and in the middle of june we harvest enough space between the carrots to be able to pop in brussels sprout plants which are basically into plants so that's two crops in one year from the one application of compost now we're at perennials corner where asparagus for example in its ninth year now we were picking it from april through may and june stop on roughly the longest day and then the plants they've done all that in the last five or six weeks amazing and then our photosynthesizing to feedback energy to the roots for next year's harvest of asparagus and down here this is what you can see there is asparagus stems from last year and in october we cut them with a scythe as they start to go yellow die off and pile them all up in that pathway up the middle and walk on them a lot and that squashes down and they rot in and it adds fertility back and people ask well what about asparagus beetle but actually no it's not too much for a problem here i do see a little bit of beetle the weather's quite wet at the moment and that is helping to reduce the numbers other perennials here include sequel in front of the black currants there the black currant bush is very low maintenance pretty regular there in their ninth year there's some globe artichoke there we've had the three big ones there's only one plant actually and there's secondary crop and then the rhubarb beyond is mainly for the spring while the raspberries are mainly for the autumn that's autumn raspberries which are about to start cropping now and i'm always looking for the easiest way to do things the quickest way and i find autumn raspberries they don't need any supports and they don't need any net here either because the birds by the time these are cropping are going to the hedgerows for blackberries and elderberries which are also fruiting anytime now this is a johnson sioux bioreactor johnson and sue from the university of texas it's aerated heat with wood chip with it's something we're trialing so i don't want to say too much about it you can find it on the internet you'll see some nice videos about work they've done with that looking for different ways to make compost this was another little compost trial using this box and it fell apart last week so we'll have a look at that in another video that we're making about different ways of making compost and now let's have a look at the main garden so yeah this main area is where i made my first beds nine years ago and my last bed which was last november i was running out of space and we made a video with kevin of epic gardening in california about creating a new bed on weeds and this very weedy corner here a lot of bindweed and brambles and nettles and ivy that's the bed that resulted and it's in this weedy corner because i was running out of space and actually since then i have managed to buy some more land the nearly an acre beyond it we'll see in a minute here i'm doing a range of cropping including some plants for seed like this spinach there which is for seed and all being well that will come to harvest in a couple of weeks and we're using covers quite a bit against insects this these were planted here these broccoli just two weeks ago and we haven't weeded since then actually that gives you an idea the wheat growth is quite slight we will take it off soon and pull out the dandelions i'm seeing there but the mesh cover is really effective at keeping insects off brassicas and in the summer i do it systematically i put a mesh cover on for six weeks the first six weeks of growth and you can see the lovely healthy leaves on these avoid cabbage for example and some brussels there and more broccoli and swedes at the end the cover will come off in two or three weeks probably around the middle of august i find and then i'll use a spray of bacillus syringes if there's any caterpillar pressure but there may not be and you can find more on that in my video called pest prevention these beans are for dry dry seed so their lotties and we haven't picked them at all and we're not going to until they dry so there's little beans swelling inside there and that's probably going to be early october i found bolotti's quite easy the whole lot dry in one go and we then pick them all on a dry day shell them out and that's food for winter as well as seed for next year and i'm growing them in teepees these are hazel stick teepees i find that acts better in the wind a prevailing wind from there because it's not like a wall it's not a line there's wind can go through and so touch wood they don't blow over i love growing flowers here so you can see the great sunflowers dahlias marigolds and that's for insects and for our enjoyment as well i just love having flowers among the vegetables they look so nice just feels right really and it's it's a nice chance to play with color a bit like zinnias just so good in these months of high summer and the snapdragons over there the anterinum that lovely dark red variety here we're at the dig no dig comparison beds so this one i dig once a year every december incorporate the compost that one's simply no dig same amount of compost on top ongoing always fascinating so far this year 37 kilos of harvest there 43 kilos of harvest there generally no dig edges it for less work one thing we did differently this year was take off the sides so last december they they were oak actually the sides are hardwood so they lasted better than if they were softwood obviously but yeah we removed them and uh it's interesting like you know that they're more high mounds if you like rather than raised beds and generally speaking i i don't use wooden size i find that they're not needed i was doing it here because it marks out the trial in a clearing precise way and i've got a string along there just to mark the side at the moment uh keep keep the beds in the place everything you see here is a second planting so we've we're barely halfway through the year in terms of cropping and the harvest we've had all finished and as soon as they do finish like potatoes here for example we planted the soy cabbage and endive and beetroot and leeks followed peas and so on it's fascinating always having these comparisons to make everything we've seen so far in this garden except for carrots parsnips garlic and potatoes starts life here so this is plant raising mostly in in module trays for popping out quite young um straight from the modules not potted on and that means that all the plant raising can happen in quite a small area this is for well you can see what you've seen you know it's a lot of plants because we're raising plants all through the year there's quite a lot of autumn salads now and some kohlrabi for example and that means that most of the space in the greenhouse is free for growing vegetables and in the winter we have salads in here in the summer these warmth loving plants including aubergines which sadly this year i've had been stricken by red spider mite and totally out of the blue i wasn't expecting it i think next year i'll need to put in um i'll buy a predator a phytocytus that you can put in at planting time which will eat the red spider because otherwise it's very well you can see the result i've lost all my plants there and it's now starting to get into this luffa plant the leaf is you can see that yellowing you don't ever see a red spider well you very seldom unless your eyesight is really good but what you see a little bit of cobweb around the stone when they're really bad and it's just starting to get into those melons a bit so i'm hoping they'll finish cropping before the red spider gets too bad in there and what i find though in here is the extra warmth of the greenhouse is really good for plants like melons compared to the polytunnel and like the tomatoes here you can see that's that's no dig no feeding it's just compost mulch um they're doing really well there at least don't care spider mite and we can see now going into the polytunnel the comparison of growth with the same plants in slightly cooler conditions under plastic [Music] so the polytunnel is quite a bit bigger area than the greenhouse and it costs about one third the price so is really good value polytunnels you see the lovely growth in here we have cherry tomatoes on one side beef tomatoes on the other i find i like the cherries for the earlier cropping particularly the sun gold there uh beef tomato we've only just started picking the first ones in late july and we're being very careful now not to water the leaves keep the leaves dry that reduces chance of late blight here the compost goes down in middle of may and that is good soul food for the whole year including the winter crops which is this base is full of salad all through the winter months of the year and we're alternating half and half in the summer with tomatoes one and cucumbers the other next year it'll be the other way around cucumbers i take off the lower leaves rather like the tomatoes even more actually i did a bit more every year um this is the working leaf up here and also i thin out every second fruit and that means like for example you can see it here there's cucumbers there there's a gap cucumber gap where i've taken it out cucumber and gap and so on and that lessens the strain on the plant so that they crop more evenly you don't have a feast and famine where they crop a lot and then stop for a while and then because i've removed space here like for the lower leaves i can bring this leader down and it will carry on growing right down to the floor actually it's just one way of doing it where you loop it over the wire and then carry on downwards i'm watering in here not too often so twice a week the surface dries out in between uh the basil takes quite a lot of water that's a very leafy plant so we're using that in the salads there's some genovese and some lemon basil there and then something i've noticed this year is the wood chip uh well we're putting bits of wood in the compost or wood prunings and it's making for quite a woody surface so this is compass that went on in may and i think these bits of wood is but just a bit more numerous than i'd like they're encouraging wood lice and that's why there's gaps in the row of marigold normally that would be full and i noticed wood lice eating the leaves of the new plants when they went in in may this year that's something to watch out for generally you know wood is great as a surface mulch on paths but i wouldn't have don't want too much on beds and the last bit of homework is old garden that we're coming to now is the herb garden here which has only been in the ground for a few months these were planted in the middle of march mostly plants from jacka mcvicar we made a video with her with her here uh just over a month ago you can see that on the channel and it's been fun you know lovely flowering plants they're really pretty the insects like them as well as giving us nice food to eat and now we're coming to the last bit of this tour which is the new area of homemakers expanding this field when i bought it in january i didn't have a very clear idea what i was gonna do with it it was all quite spontaneous and unforeseen and i did know that there's probably quite a lot of binders in this corner and that's been a feature of what we've been dealing with in terms of growing vegetables for the first part of the year because it's only four or five months since it was weedy pasture and using no dig methods we've put cardboard compost on top and then some black polythene as well because you can see how the black polish in there is really making quite a difference by keeping light off the bindweed that's trying to grow that's why the leaves are all yellow light deprivation and that weakens the parent root of the bindwe at the same time as one is growing plants here we're also doing a little trial using some wool that i was given sheep wool and that can provide quite a bit of goodness as it breaks down into the ground we'll see what difference it makes and then over there we're we're doing quite a few other things under polar thing like the potatoes we're harvesting at the moment and you can see again lots of fine weed but the potatoes pull out really easily they're they're planted not deep just the depth of a trowel through a slit in the polythene and going this way we're not using any polythene or plastic it's just hand weeding including in the polytunnel there's one little bit of plastic but it's mainly open ground and this is a new tunnel which arrived only two and a half months ago may june july yeah really not long ago and as soon as it was here we spread some more compost and put plants in and the compost mainly that we've used here is purchase compost because i didn't didn't have enough homemade to make a lot of new beds and we'll see the heaps in a minute going forward so we've used a few tons to make these beds but it's not it's not that deep actually and quite a bit of what's growing here is already second planting so for example there was broccoli before the celery there nice crop of broccoli i'm impressed actually because it's not a huge amount of not the highest quality compost it's green waste compost this was spinach before these brassicas so with the no dig the the pasture weeds have all died except for the bindweed and the plants are now rooting into the soil which has been mulched of its weeds so the soil is open now to vegetable roots if you when you put cardboard down it decomposes under any compost within three months pretty much all gone so your roots then go down your plant roots at the same time as any remaining weeds come up these are sources of fertility that i've had delivered like wood chip cow manure green waste compost and all of this is a stack of goodness which will be spreading over the next 18 months or so it's good to buy compost before you need it if you can because then there's time for it to finish ripening before because it's often sold before it's really ready to be used here again we're using mash this area had a lot of rabbits and at the moment we're not seeing many and i'm not too clear what's behind that but we do notice the rabbit problems do diminish every summer they're bad in the spring and that's what some of the covers have been about is to keep the rabbits off but this is now insects as well and this is another stretch of black plastic which is growing the squash and these are winter squash interplanted with a few sweet corn and there are a variety called crown prince which i really like because it superb flavor and the fruits develop a very hard skin which means they store exceptionally well over all through the winter so this is winter food here and if your winter squash are starting to lose quality in the leaf don't worry about that that's normal for this time of year they they start to go over a bit now as the fruits start to ripen and they they look their best in early july slightly downhill now and behind me there are more things going to happen like there's going to be a pond there my son jack is going to come and dig that when it's wetter so he can puddle the clay there's beehives arrived in the very far corner we can't quite see them because of the height of the meadow here we're leaving this i'm leaving this as a just grassy meadow wildflowers there's usually quite a few moths and insects there uh the ground's not needed at the moment i probably won't crop vegetables here and you can see there's a shed arriving which we'll use for storage and other things and yeah i hope you've enjoyed having a look around here this this area that we call the new area we feature in videos every couple of months that you can catch up and if you want to find out more about the node growing i've been describing check out my website there's updates every two or three weeks and also my online courses which you can see there and books in the website shop you

Channel: Charles Dowding

Views: 125,249

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Id: rhIRhudkiKo

Length: 22min 0sec (1320 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 01 2021