Hello, it's the middle of the summer season, it's all change in the garden.
I'm Liz Zorab and this is Byther Farm.
I really like this time of year.
We've started harvesting some crops, so the pantry and freezer is starting to fill up.
And as I'm harvesting one crop, I'm making
space for the next ones to go in.
It's that successional planting, one
crop after another, that helps the garden become so productive.
This year I've really focused on having plants ready to go into the ground as soon as there's
some space. So in here were some lettuces that have gone over, I'd harvested most
of them and the last three just ran to seed and so I'm going to pop some young
beetroot into here.
Now I have to be a bit careful making holes because
there are a lot of voles in this garden and they make tunnels under all of the beds.
And the other thing I've done which I'm really pleased with and it's worked
better than I had anticipated, is to get some of that successional planting done
while the previous crop was still in the ground.
Over in the area that I call the
Market Garden, the onion rows have been in but a few weeks ago, when they were ready,
I interplanted them with sweet corn/. So the sweet corn was growing in
between the rows of onions and I also put in some squashes.
So when I harvested
all the onions yesterday, the sweet corn was already well established and raring
to go and so were the squashes.
Last week I planted a few seed potatoes in this bed.
I thought I'd show you that they are already coming through really nicely.
These are looking like strong, healthy shoots and so I'm looking forward to
harvesting these in about three months time.
In this bed I had a second sowing
of broad beans, that's fava beans, which I've just taken out,
but not because I was harvesting them, because they had actually failed.
They had failed to thrive in this bed and were still only a few inches high
and had an awful lot of black fly on them.And we have got plenty of ladybirds here.
And I've seen some ladybird larvae as well so the ladybirds had
come to attack the black fly, but the broad beans just weren't doing anything
and I would rather use the space more productively and get in a few more
lettuces in this end, than for those beans to struggle on and then really not
give me a very good harvest. So I'm getting in some baby lettuce that I
sowed in June. I'm going to plant them in the spaces between these lettuces.
These are Little Gem and it won't be very long before I'm lifting these.
They're just beginning to get a heart, I don't leave them to heart up too much
because otherwise they just bolt and go to seed here, so I know that I need
harvest them when they're quite small. I'll get these lettuces in to get themselves established.
The ducks are very interested in what I'm doing today.
I have to be careful how I plant these because I have to remind myself every time,
thay actually grow to about 12 inches wide, I'm not just a few inches like the
Little Gem lettuces.
I've been asked a couple of times in the last week
about the ducks and do I let them free-range and wander through the veg
garden? And do they eat the produce?
So, yes I do let them into the vegetable
garden, but only during late autumn and winter and the early spring and this
year I shut them out of the vegetable garden at the beginning of April and I
shut them out of the food forest at the beginning of MayA
And they'll be allowed
back into the food forest in a couple of weeks time when I finished harvesting
the currants and blueberries that are in there. Because if I didn't shut them out
they would be feasting on blueberries and black currants, we wouldn't get very
many of them.But as soon as those are over, they'll be allowed back into the
food forest. They really do a good job at keeping down the slugs and snails and
then in autumn they'll be allowed back in here and I will net any beds that I
don't want the ducks to access.
Here's the strawberry bed that for the last three years I've been saying I will
lift the strawberries once they're finished and use this bed for something else.
Well time has finally come
when Mr. J and I are actually going to lift these strawberry plants and I'm not
going to save them. There are still a few strawberries to pick. And we're not going to
save any of these old plants. In the pathway over there, there are some
runners that they put out last year and I will transplant those runners to a new
place and indeed how these new runners here.
And you can do that in a couple of ways...
you can, while runners are still attached to the plant, you can fill a
plant pot with some soil and put your little baby plants into it and let that
grow on for a year and then cut the runner off.
But what I do is take these
young plants and just transplant them straight into a new bed.
We'll come back,
hopefully this bed will be transformed.
A couple of weeks ago Mr. J and I did Q and A
and live chat over on Patreon. Oh yes we did. And we had such a good
time, we did have a good time and you suggested, he suggested...
I did I did it's my fault!
He suggested that we do that on a regular basis. S,o if you'd like to join
us for those please head on over to Patreon and I'll leave a link on the
screen and in the video description. It would be really nice to see you there.
Yeah absolutely!
There's something really satisfying about seeing cabbage white butterflies
flitting around the garden, but not being able to access those cabbages.
But because I want to support the butterfly population overall, I plant some
brassicas out in the open and these are Brussels sprouts, but there's also some
kale and some cabbages. And I can see on the back of this leaf, there are
indeed, some little eggs. So a butterfly has found these, perhaps a moth, and they
can munch away on these quite happily. And the reason I want to support the
population is actually those butterflies are our food for other animals, anything
from hedgehogs to birds. Just to prove a point here comes a butterfly and it is
laying eggs.
I'm really pleased with how strong and healthy these corn plants are looking.
It's already hard to imagine how full this area was with onions just two days ago.
Mr. J has been bringing out some of the used poultry bedding that has
been stacked for quite some time. So this was from the stable where the chickens
were and I shut them out of the front half of the stable about six to eight months ago,
so this has been sitting nicely since then. It could probably do with a bit
longer, but here is, it's being used. I'm using this as a mulch to suppress
the weeds, but the other thing I want to plant in here is some flowers.
So I will be just making a
small hole through the mulch and planting down into the ground and I've
got is a whole load, in fact a veritable host. of borage plants. We've got
seedlings of both blue and white borage, blue from the main vegetable garden and
the white borage from this bed where it was growing last year and we've got
dozens of seedlings.
There we are! It's about, most of it's about six inches high,
this taller leaf is a bit more. I'm going to do the rest of them this evening when
the sun isn't so bright, so they have less likelihood of wilting.
I'll put lots of borage in here and I'm also going to put some sweet alyssum.
I bought this, it was advertised, quite cheaply, on a local group a gardening
group on Facebook. And so I will be putting some of those in and I want the
flowers in here to help support the bee population because bees absolutely love
borage flowers and also the very sweet, honey-sented flowers of the
Sweet Allysum.
So we're now heading over to that old strawberry bed to get all of
the strawberries out of there and create a new raised bed.
And so wherever you are
in the world and whatever you've got planned for today, I hope it's a good one.
I also hope join me again next time!