(calm guitar music) - [Host] I like to be a bringer of joy. This time, I'm a bringer
of woe. (chuckles) Well, not entirely. It's the end of summer, and
in the small garden here, it has not been a grand success story towards the end of summer, compared to the rest
of the garden actually, which has been pretty good, unlike that bed there, for example, the one that we took the
sides off last November. Things have been good, but
here it's a good example of where there's a bit too many edges where slugs and snails can hide, and also outdoor tomatoes,
which I'm attempting here, not elsewhere in the garden, it's quite a nice shelter spot there, but they're just getting
blight, late blight. So I'll show you that. And so this is about partly, you know, things that can go wrong,
especially in the summer. You know, we planted this
garden up in the spring. If you look at two videos
back in this series are the actual planting, and then you'll see the
results of that in June in the last small garden video, and things were fantastic, and I remember saying, you know, the lettuce I planted there, every single one survived, 22 lettuces, no damage at all from slugs at that point. When it's colder and kinda,
it seems counter-intuitive, but when it's warmer, although plants can grow more quickly, also the pests eat more voraciously, and you can counter-- problems in summer that you don't get in the spring. So here, for example,
this lovely marigold, Dwarf French, that's in the last week, that's pretty much been
all its leaves eaten by slugs or snails, While this leaf celery has survived. I was doubting that in the previous video. So, you know, it's a mixture
of ups and downs a bit, but the main theme is
quite a lot of pest damage, like on these kohlrabi here, they were under a mesh and I thought, well, that'll keep the insects off, yeah. I think I must've trapped some of them in. But it's partly that this corner here, and getting close to this
shed is a little bit dark and you can see the gradation of growth going towards the shed is not so strong, and I think the mesh on
top didn't help actually, 'cause it does keep a bit of light out, maybe 30%, and that could
have tipped the scales a bit, but if I hadn't used it,
well, it might've been worse, so just a bit tricky all round. I'm favoring-- this has
been unusually empty now for about four weeks, actually, which is really unlike me in summertime, but I think I would have
been wasting my time planting out with-- I
wanted to plant salads, and actually the salads I
want to grow here are coming into season now. I've got some nice modules sewn, mustards and rocket and bold fennel. So they're gonna go in
here within the next week, and I'm pretty confident
they'll be all right. Obviously one can never know for sure, but I've been doing patrols
coming out at night, surprised what I'd find
and reducing the numbers, and also I cut back the
nettles there just now to again, just keep it a bit
more open around the edge. It's definitely worth trying. Red lettuce is amazing,
like in terms of how slugs, for example, don't find that
so interesting or attractive. This particularly nice
variety called Navara. I've lost a couple there,
and it's a nice flavor to it. It's slightly more bitter
than green lettuce. So the tomatoes, it's some and some, like Crimson crush here, fantastic, probably the best of the bunch. Blight resistant leaves
and stem and nice fruit, decent size, reasonable flavor. I wouldn't say it's the top flavor, but it's pretty good actually. And Mountain Magic at
the front on this side, also good blight resistance. Maybe the flavor's not quite so brilliant, but it's a nice red tomato of medium size, whereas at the back here, there's definitely-- this one, red cherry tomato called... Sorry, yellow cherry called
Dorada is pretty much a goner. Like if you look at this leaf here, all that dark color there,
that's blight, late blight, and you first see it often. There's some on this one
too, which is Primavera. You know, that's often a first
indication of blight, that. If you look closely, you can even see it's
sort of slightly moldy, but the leaf goes a bit
translucent and patchy brown. It's not so much spots or
rings or anything like that. It's a whole area affected. If you get-- if it's only
leaves and you take them off at this stage that can--
will certainly slow it down, especially if the weather dries up a bit. But if the weather stays moist, it'll probably just
carry on into the plant, and then you get these black stems like I've seen down there and up here, where the whole stem is black, and at that point I would take it out. That's what I do, because from my experience
the fruit stop tasting nice, the sap can't circulate so easily, the plant stops working properly, and it's pretty much end
of story, I'm afraid. All of this material though, I do put on the compost heap, because blight spores do not
survive in soil and compost. So this area of ground, I might well grow tomatoes
again here next summer. That's entirely feasible. This blight comes from the air, spores in the air, not from soil, and it happens when the
humidity's above 90% for 48 hours, temperature stays above 10
centigrade, 50 Fahrenheit for the whole of that time, which is why you don't get
late blight in the spring. Nights are too cool at least here, or in autumn when again,
the nights are cooling down. Leeks at least resist slugs. This was peas here, quite a large area. They cropped really
well. Finished in July. It was empty for a little while, and then we popped in the leeks, and they're multi-sewn. They were sewn in April, so they've been growing for a long time, but they would have done better for being in the ground a bit sooner, but they will make leeks. It's a variety called bandit, which should survive
the winter very nicely, and actually we'll probably-- I'll look to be harvesting
these late March, April. So this is almost going
to hungry gap time. Chicory's late autumn harvest,
assuming it grows well, and that should-- that's
to make hearts in situ, heads of bittersweet, folded in leaves. The carrots are still here, amazingly. This has gone on a bit longer than normal, about four months is that? You can get an idea. It's some nice carrots here,
and they did have a cover, fleece and then mesh, and now no cover, 'cause there haven't been
carrot root fly flying around at this time of year, but they're just starting to happen. You can also see what
happens when you leave, say, carrots in the ground a
bit longer than maybe normal. I normally reckon four months
is sort of close to limit for getting really nice
carrots, and then they stop. Well, they're still good to eat, no question about that, but they perhaps get a bit more tough and you get more issues like this, I find after a longer period of time. I dunno about that one. (chuckles) And then here, you might remember there
was some lambs lettuce going to seed, and you can see this is-- I'm removing this stem
of California poppy. That was really nice,
actually, nice flower. You can see the seedlings
now of these lambs lettuce, so they'll make little
salads through the winter. And this marigold survived. (laughs) That's nice. Red flax there, linseeds,
just for ornament, pretty. The chives have come back strongly since I cut them back, and I've been cutting them back again and keep harvesting, very
nice addition to many dishes. And here is purple sprouting
broccoli and one plant of kale, which went in late, later
than I would have liked as-- It's partly me. I've not been quite as organized here as I should have been, just
too many other commitments. Well, that's an excuse. (chuckles) Though I should've been on it more, but if you look here, you can see, dunno if you can see that. With the naked eye, I can
see a caterpillar there. This is to give you an idea of how well they disguise themselves. There's a green caterpillar
lying along that stem. There it is. That is, I think the lesser white, the smaller white butterfly, I'm gonna squash it. I won't do it in front of the camera, but I'm afraid I just
feel with caterpillars, I don't mind squashing a few. I mean, you know, they do so much damage. There's many that survive. Actually, normally I will spray these soon with bacillus thuringiensis, which makes the leaves indigestible to caterpillars only. I'll do that on all the brassicas in the garden with great effect. It's one of many ways of controlling them. It's probably the simplest and quickest if you can get the raw material. It's just all bacteria. More chicories here, and it was interesting
how there were three that I've subsequently replanted, these three small ones. They were just devoured by snails, and I came up one night, just at dusk, it was a good time to see what's going on. There were three big fat
snails sitting on top of each of those three plants, and yeah, I squashed them, and then pulled up the
plants and replanted, and there's still some
damage here, you can see, but it's not too bad now. Looks like these are gonna survive. I bet they're gonna survive, and I've been out a bit since at dusk. I'm not seeing anything happening, so the population now
is stable, I would say. Whereas they don't seem
to like these endives. I'm pretty impressed by that, maybe cause they show better. Well, actually that doesn't
really come into it, I don't think, with slugs and snails, but these are very bitter leaves, and they're a frizzy
endive called Wallone, and it's home-sewn seeds, actually, maybe that makes a difference. I dunno, but I like these. These will go on through
the autumn though. They're frost hardy as well, and you can pick the
outer leaves like that. We do that and put them in salad, but that's a bitter leaf. You know, if you don't like bitter leaves, you could put a sweet
dressing on. (chuckles) They really good for you, bitter leaves, good for your liver, so worth acquiring the taste, and bitter leaves like endive and chicory are more hardy to weather
and don't get so much mildew going into autumn compared to lettuce, partly why there's no lettuce here. Well, there's a few red
lettuce, but not too much. Broad leaf sorrel, this
has been fantastic. Keep picking the leaves,
a bit smaller than that, perfect leaf for salad or for cooking. Really nice. So the one little
patch like that is perennial. Keep you in sorrel flavor for a long time. Same with the kale perennial,
but that one we did have-- we pruned it back really hard actually soon after the last video, 'cause it's just too top
heavy and then it falls over, and you can take new
plants from the cuttings. And then the fig tree, I'll
finish on the fig tree. That's like, I don't know
what to do about it actually, 'cause it's-- every year, the little figs that might survive the winter, then get frosted in the spring, and even in that corner, which I thought might be a
bit sheltered from frost, it has not been surviving. The fruits are not (indistinct). So I ended up with this huge,
great tree that all of that, nearly all of that leaf
growth, new branches, this happened during the summer, took quite a lot of goodness from the bed and shading and everything. So have a think, (chuckles) don't know what we're gonna do about that. But we're definitely gonna
cut it back very soon. That's great material
for the compost heap. And I hope you've enjoyed
having a look around here, and, you know, take
strength from my failures. You know, I'm a good
grow, a good gardener, but it doesn't always go to plan here, and don't beat yourself
up if you've had problems. Really don't, you know, we
all have difficult times, and the joy of gardening is that you've always got
another bite at the cherry. You never know what
the weather's gonna do, so there's always that
element of surprise, and it might be better than you thought instead of worse than you thought. I'm looking forward to autumn, and I'm sure things will improve, and you can catch up and
see how it has turned out in our next video, which will be sometime middle to next week. (calm guitar music)
