- Okay, we're going to have a really interesting time here
'cause I want to show you what's under these covers,
and some of them are thick enough
that you can't actually see
what is growing under there very easily.
And I've also put some thermometers in
to measure the temperature differences of the soil.
It's about five centimetre, two inch depth at the moment.
Midday, mid-spring, at a time when finally,
we're getting a bit of warmth.
We've had a lot of cold days, a lot of rain.
Growth has been slower than normal this spring here,
but it's just starting to warm up.
So it's an opportunity maybe to take the covers off.
And no dig is really helping,
because there's many fewer weeds than there would be
if the ground had been tilled.
And I'll just mention that I'm speaking in a summit
all about soil and love. (laughs)
The 'Heart and Soil' group are running a summit
and it's free if you register before it starts
on the 3rd of May, runs for three days.
And also, last night I was in London actually,
speaking at an event which was launching, Earthed project.
We'll put a link to both of these.
Earthed are running a crowdfunder
and it's to help get knowledge like this
to people in more disadvantaged places
who can't afford to buy books even, that kind of thing.
Online learning, basically, videos from different growers
and people about how to succeed with their harvests.
So the covers, very suitable at this time of year.
We've got different types
and this one is quite a thick fleece,
30 grammes per square metre, that,
you can see how you can't see the spinach there.
You'll see it in a minute, though.
But the temperature there is reading 13 degrees.
Here, under a cover called Thermacrop,
which the name kind of suggests it should be hot,
it's actually not.
Or not in this sort of weather, it's 10.
It's three degrees cooler than the fleece.
And then, for comparison
I put a thermometer in the open ground, no cover,
13 degrees. (laughs)
Actually, 12 and a half. 12 and a half to be precise.
Slightly less cool or less warm.
But suggesting that, as we go into spring
and especially, again with no dig,
you've got this beautiful dark surface of compost applied.
It soaks up the light really readily
and warms up quite quickly, you know.
I've been famous all my growing time, 40 years,
for having early crops, and back in the '80s,
I was the only person doing no dig then.
I think that was one of the factors.
So let's have a look.
The Thermacrop, you know,
even though it hasn't been warming up the ground much,
it does keep the wind off and that has helped.
With Nicola, who's filming,
we took off quite a few of these stones before,
just so you can see as I roll up more quickly,
'cause I want to show you also,
the difference here is really interesting between...
There's three beds, so that first bed is no dig
and it's got a dressing on top, which is old cow manure.
That's why there's quite a few weed seeds there
and we'll see them more even in the spinach.
The second bed here is a different compost on top
which is half and half green waste compost
and mushroom compost.
And the third bed here
has the same compost as the second one.
The difference though is that this one we fork
and we've done this for, this was the ninth year
of doing it now, we're in year nine of this trial.
No, it's year 10. We're in year 10.
We've got nine years' results and the effect of the forking
has been generally to depress the yield.
And actually you can see it in the lettuce here.
Interestingly, it sometimes shows up more
when you actually weigh the harvest,
because the leaves sometimes look quite same,
but they have more weight with no dig.
So this now is spinach.
That's lettuce, by the way, that was sown mid-February,
transplanted equinox, third week of March,
around six weeks ago, five to six weeks ago.
The spinach was planted at the same time,
but it suffered a lot of woodlice damage.
Woodlice love the lower leaves of spinach
where they're close to the ground,
and that is typical woodlice effect,
that sort of serration around the edge.
Slugs is more punched holes in the middle.
Probably that's a little slug,
but that's more typical of slug damage,
or that one, for example.
You know, sometimes not too severe.
That's not really a problem, but if it gets bad like that,
well, it's still an edible leaf.
It's just that, you know, if it happens a lot,
you can lose your plants, obviously,
especially when they're small.
And these are disappointing actually.
And this is more legacy of woodlouse damage.
And if you notice this compost, it is more woody.
So this is the effect of the green waste compost
that was in here, people's garden waste, shredded.
And it's not hugely mature actually, often.
Well, it is quite, actually.
It was quite mature when we put it on, probably a year old.
But you can see it's definitely...
A lot of this is woodlice damage.
And sometimes, if they get the leaves when they're small,
they just carry on being deformed as they get older.
So that's just one to watch out for.
If you've got too much wood around, do be careful of that.
You know, I'm not saying for one minute
that wood is bad as a mulch.
Like we've got wood chip in the pathways,
it's very successful, but not too much on your beds.
Maybe particularly in damp and cool conditions
in early spring and late autumn.
But again, look at this difference between beds one and two,
it's probably the most striking one here.
The forked bed is not looking as strong
as the no dig bed, hm.
We should be picking some leaves
from these three strips of both the spinach and the lettuce.
Spinach, probably this week. Lettuce, maybe next week.
Or maybe this week, actually.
Things are suddenly growing fast now.
And then when we weigh the harvest here,
we record them strip by strip
and you can find the results of the previous nine years
on my website, under Three Strip Trial header.
And all of this is part of the same trial.
And here we have turnips.
I don't know how many of you know this type of turnip,
it's called Tokyo Cross.
It is an F1 hybrid, bred by the Japanese,
I believe, after World War II.
This is what I read, anyway,
when there was the food shortages because of the war.
And it's a very fast growing, nutritious and tasty turnip.
Is totally not like...
Look at this and this is how well it works
with multisowing.
I would leave that one to grow a little bit more.
But having said that, at that stage,
they are just a delicacy, a treat.
They're sweet, they're firm, much firmer than a radish.
They're quite dense texture, so you know,
more food in there, it's not just water.
I do feel with radish sometimes, they're very watery.
This time of year, they're lovely,
'cause they're not too pungent or spicy.
And these will go, they'll lose their sort of, food quality
as we go in to late May,
particularly because these
don't have a long period of growing.
They're going to go to seed towards the end of May.
And before they go to seed, they go woody.
Woodiness in root vegetables is often not to do with size
so much as stage of maturity,
and that's why we'll be harvesting all of these
within the next three weeks, probably.
They're really going to grow now, I reckon.
And I'm happy to take the fleece off,
because you saw how the temperature is good,
it's not too windy.
And pigeons would be my only other concern.
This is a brassica leaf.
But funnily enough, they don't really eat turnip leaves.
Well, not at the moment, anyway.
Here is a different type of cover called mesh.
This is good against animals and insects, normally,
but look at the flea beetle damage to like,
to that radish leaf there, for example.
That's classic flea beetle. Myriads of little holes.
The radish will still be edible.
It's slowing down the growth, basically.
And how come they're getting in the fleece?
Well, look at this.
It's old fleece and somewhat damaged.
That's enough of a hole for the flea beetles to get in.
They're tiny little creatures
and they can wriggle in a very small space.
So if you want to keep flea beetles out, you...
even fleece rarely works actually,
'cause it often gets one little hole,
'cause it's quite soft.
But just get the finest grade of mesh that you can
and be careful handling it.
Here, we've got a different issue and it's very interesting.
There's not many carrots come up.
We sowed carrots here with the radish
and this is very poor germination.
Why? I think it's probably slugs.
I think that's a bit of slug damage on that radish leaf.
You can see there's not much flea beetle here, actually.
So the fleece has been working actually better.
This is a new fleece, so quite often we're using older ones.
And yeah, I'll be taking this off very soon.
The reason I'm not, actually, is because of rabbits.
Potentially. We haven't got a lot of rabbits here,
but it only needs one to spend a night here
and it can clear a lot of radish seedlings.
That was a very expensive F1 hybrid Miami carrot seed.
This was a less expensive
and also one year old, that I bought last year,
carrot seed from Bingenheim in Germany,
the early Nantes type.
And yeah, look at these, they've really come up nicely.
And you can see the radish actually really want harvesting.
So here we go.
They actually pull out quite easily.
You know, that carrot will be fine left in.
But if you leave them in too long,
they do this splitting quite often.
Obviously, that's edible, but better if it's like that.
And it's a really good variety, this radish.
It's called Rudi, R-U-D-I.
And it's, a particular characteristic I love
is it just grows and grows.
Like French Breakfast will be beautiful
and then within five to seven days,
it's sort of got hollow in the middle and a bit fibrous.
So, brassicas, I can show you an interesting contrast here.
And what we're going to do is leave this cover on.
Again, these, I'm not worried about flea beetles
because they're quite tough old leaves.
Well, not old but they're...
You can see there's actually not much
flea beetle damage there.
Flea beetles love, oh, having said that...
It's the little tender leaves they like.
I'm just seeing that one's been nibbled a bit by something.
And that, again, that's the problem with fleece.
You can't always see what's going on.
I'll come back later and put this on.
I just want to show you and check.
Ah, there, there's another one.
Oh, this is not looking so good, actually.
We've had a bit of a pest problem here.
Wow, okay. (laughs)
I'll have to think about that, 'cause these are cauliflower
that are obviously on a wide spacing.
If you've got plants on a close spacing,
you can afford to lose one or two.
But if they're on a wide spacing like that
and you lose a few, well, that's a big gap.
Whereas here, these are cabbages
that went in quite a bit earlier than the cauliflower.
This is what I would hope the cauliflower'd look like
in about two weeks.
You can see they're growing really strongly.
That's actually cabbage and that's broccoli.
And they're a bit yellow on their leaf, that's okay.
We remove these lower leaves anyway.
For me, that's a nice plant.
I'm looking particularly at the new growth there,
which is those leaves in the middle.
There's a weed.
And you know, this is all looking correct.
So again, what we're going to do here
is replace the fleece with mesh,
because pigeons would really love those.
Here we have celery, which is quite a warmth loving plant
and it's also got this very thin fleece on it.
This is probably four years old, this one.
25 gramme a square metre.
They vary a bit all the time, you know?
These figures, to me, seem more like guidelines
than absolute written in stone.
And this is the type of fleece thickness I really like,
because, you know, it lasts a long time,
even though there's a hole there, it doesn't matter.
For this purpose, it's okay.
This can be an issue if they start to break up.
Yeah, crikey, we need to watch that.
And actually, the cat doesn't help. (laughs)
Talk of the devil.
But that's going to stay on the celery
for probably two more weeks.
And it's, you know, it's even keeping in a bit of moisture.
Whereas when you put the fleece on hoops like this,
which we've done 'cause this is for me,
a very high value crop, which we're picking all the time
and I need top quality in the leaves.
And actually, having fleece directly on leaves in frost
can cause some damage.
We had frost about 10 days ago.
But look at these now, they're looking pretty good.
Lettuce in the spring generally don't get
too much pest damage as long as you're on top of slugs.
I mean, I haven't said a lot about slugs,
but you can see with no dig, in fact,
if you look under there, if I hold it up for the camera,
you can see that the level of take is very high.
We also have had very little leatherjacket damage
this spring, for once.
But we are actually just finding
some wireworms in the garlic, of all things.
There's nearly always some grub or pest
that's trying to eat something.
I'll just finish by showing you how we pick these lettuce,
'cause this is a hearting lettuce called Parris Island
and if you left it to heart,
you could be waiting another good six weeks
before you actually had a harvest,
and then all your lettuce are going to come ready
at the same time and you've got to eat a lot,
and then suddenly there's no more left.
So what this method I'm showing you means
you don't actually get a heart or head,
which means you don't get so many sweet leaves,
but you get a steady supply of older leaves.
I mean, but not old, the more mature leaves
from around the edge.
So in this case, I'll take maybe these six off.
You could take another one.
And I'd be quite surprised if we came back...
usually, at this time of year,
we can come back a week later
and find another quite similar harvest from the same plant,
and that can carry on for eight or ten weeks.
Just to summarise, the covers have different qualities
and also at different times of the year.
So fleece, I'm not actually using at all in the winter.
I find it's too fragile
and winter winds can damage it a lot.
Also, in winter there is not much sunlight.
It's the sunlight that brings the quality into the fleece,
'cause it converts that solar radiation
into warmth that it holds in.
Whereas in winter, Thermacrop,
which we saw is not brilliant at the moment.
If anything, it's reflecting light away.
That's superb in the winter at mitigating the wind
and we use it sometimes
on overwintered broad beans, for example.
Usually on hoops, 'cause it's heavier than fleece.
That's a big advantage of fleece, is that it's so light,
especially if you can find the 25 GSM thickness.
And I'll put a link in the video description
for this, actually, on eBay.
And then the other cover, the mesh that we saw,
is brilliant, especially coming up now
from mid-spring onwards through summer.
It's great against insects mostly, flea beetle, as we saw.
Get it the finest grade.
But against butterflies, what we saw,
that slightly damaged mesh,
that would serve and that would keep butterflies out.
So that's quite a factor in the months ahead.
We put mesh systematically
over new plantings of brassica during the summer.