- If you want to grow lots of food,
I'm gonna show you just how important autumn is
for a highly productive garden.
For any of you who watch this channel,
you know that I'm gonna say compost.
It's a given.
Autumn is the season for composting,
but there are actually five aspects of composting
you should be prioritizing over the next couple of months
that are gonna make a big difference.
The obvious thing for me to tell you
is just make more compost,
but I know this isn't always possible
because sometimes it's hard to source
enough material that you need.
So instead we should actually look at ways
of reducing our dependence on homemade compost.
What areas of the garden can we replace
our precious compost with other compost alternatives?
One of the easiest things you can do
to reduce your dependence on homemade compost
is to find a source of wood chip.
Now, you can either leave it in a big pile
to break down over two or three years
and use that as a compost alternative,
especially for your perennial plants,
or you can use a great technique,
which I learned from Liz Zorab,
and I'm actually applying in this garden,
which is to actually mulch your paths with wood chip.
Over a couple of years,
it'll break down really nicely,
and then all you do is scoop
the wood chip onto your raised beds
as a great compost alternative.
Now, of course it's autumn,
which means leaves are falling from the trees,
and these provide a really valuable resource for us.
We can make leaf mold.
It can take two or three years
if you just make a massive pile of leaves
and let them break down naturally,
but it is totally worth it
because what leaf mold provides is a way
to supplement or to bulk up your compost.
So whether it's sowing seeds, or potting on,
you can actually add a 50/50 mix of homemade compost
and leaf mold to create a great
water retaining peat alternative, and again,
reducing the requirements of your homemade compost.
Now, of course,
there's always gonna be tons of compost material
coming out of your garden in autumn.
And if you're worried about the amount of compost
you might have available for next year,
the single most important thing you can do
is actually chop up your material really finely,
'cause that is gonna break down a lot faster.
Now, another thing that you can do this autumn
is when you are making compost,
try and make the highest quality compost possible,
which means adding as many
different ingredients as you can find,
and opt for that balance of roughly 50/50
in volume of browns and greens.
And what it means just by adding that principle of diversity
and having a wide variety of ingredients
is that you're gonna have all those different nutrients,
all the different biology that are living
on the leaves as well, working together.
So when you have a really high quality compost like that,
when it's fully broken down,
you can actually get away
with using less compost than normal.
So a simple thing to remember
is the higher quality the compost,
the less compost you actually need to apply to your beds.
So this time of year in the garden is absolutely beautiful.
It is kinda still,
and I'm not worried about planting, and sowing, and weeding.
I'm just worried about harvesting and getting it ready.
And what that means is a lot of spare time on my hands.
And I think it's really important every year
that we try new things as gardeners.
And one of the things I think I've been overlooking
is the composting process that I use.
Yes, it works,
but there are so many ways of composting out there.
There's hot composting, Bokashi,
chicken composting systems, those are epic.
I have to get some kind of system like that here.
So over the next few kind of weeks and months,
do a bit of research.
Look at all the different composting methods,
and I challenge you to choose one to try out next year,
because guaranteed,
you're gonna learn something really impactful
that is then gonna really help you year on year.
If you are a container gardener,
or you're creating some new raised beds,
or you're new to gardening,
one of the most important things you can do
as well as making compost
is making natural liquid amendments
to feed your plants next year.
Now, of course,
the best way to prepare new ground,
or your pots, is adding compost,
but sometimes you may not have enough compost,
and also it takes some time for that compost to settle.
And when you've got new raised beds,
you're not going to have that instant biological life
that actually makes a huge impact
in terms of making nutrients plant available
by working in harmony with the roots.
So one of the simple fixes you can do
is when you have new soil,
and plants are struggling to take up
the nutrients that they require,
you supplement them with liquid feeds,
because what liquid feeds do
is they kind of bridge that gap.
So as your soil is maturing and developing,
and you're putting compost on,
the short term is adding those liquid amendments
just to provide extra nutrition
to keep them going and to keep them healthy.
There's definitely a lot of debate out there
about liquid feeds,
but the way that I see them
is that they're a great short term
compost alternative when stocks are low.
The other thing is that they're free.
Any way that we can create free resources
that's going to be nutrient rich,
providing a wide spectrum of nutrients
to our plants is a must,
and it's completely natural.
So what's not to love?
And this is why I've been making lots of things,
such as comfrey teas, nettle teas,
fermented plant juices,
and weed soaks to really help my containers
and new raised beds.
Another thing about liquid feeds
is if you ever see a crop looking
a little bit sad or sorry for itself,
it could be due to a mineral deficiency.
So providing a nice couple of soakings
with a diluted liquid feed of your choice
is one of the best ways to make a near instant impact
on getting that crop back up and running.
The reason why you want to create
your liquid amendments in autumn
is because you're capitalizing
on a process called nutrient banking.
Put simply, nutrient banking is creating liquid amendments,
or it can even be creating compost,
where you then hold it and save it ready for use.
And with liquid feeds,
you can store them right through winter.
So when it comes to spring,
and you're busy in the garden with all of the sowing,
and planting, and transplanting,
you've got those nutrients banked
and ready for use whenever you need them.
If you want to be all prepared for spring,
then make these three really simple liquid amendments.
The first one is effectively a weed soak,
which I learnt from Nigel Palmer's book.
It's inspired by a Korean natural farming technique,
and it is dead simple to make.
What you do is you get a bucket like this,
fill it kind of up to two-thirds of the way
with lots of different weeds, such as nettles,
dandelions, thistles, everything like that.
And then you wanna fill it,
just cover it slightly with water,
and then put a big handful
of either wood chip or leaf mold,
or homemade compost in to inoculate it with biology.
And then what you do is you cover it over loosely,
just so it can still breathe,
and then put it in a frost-free place.
And then come February,
strain out all of the solids
and then dilute this kind of one to 50 with water,
and this is going to be a really useful way
to apply nutrition to your plants.
One of the coolest things about plants
is that they all have their own unique ratios of nutrients.
We can actually be clever about this as gardeners
and use this to our advantage.
So whenever there is some kind of nutrient deficiency,
for example, the tomatoes might not have enough calcium,
then one of the best things you can do
is make a carrot top fermented plant juice.
There's a link down below
showing you how to make a fermented plant juice.
And you can make these now and bank them,
nutrient bank them ready for next year.
So whenever you're growing tomatoes, or anything else,
and they need some calcium,
you've got a calcium rich amendment ready and waiting.
The third thing to make during autumn
is a concentrated comfrey or nettle feed.
All you need to do is get your plant material.
You'll need a lot of it.
Chop it up really finely.
Put it in a large bucket or tub,
and then put some heavy stones on it to weigh it down.
Place this somewhere sheltered away from frost,
and then in around February time,
it will all kind of have reduced into this thick,
dark liquid that is a highly concentrated
liquid form of the plant,
and then you just dilute that one part to 100 parts water
and use it next year.
So comfrey is going to be ideal
for your tomatoes when they start flowering.
Nettle is going to be ideal
for any of the young growth and seedlings.
A really important aspect
of a healthy garden is respecting the soil,
which means whenever possible,
you want plants to be growing.
If they're not growing,
you wanna make sure that the ground is covered.
A really good way to do that
is of course growing cover crops,
but the only trouble with that
is that most of my beds are pretty much
full of plants into very late autumn
when it's too late to plant cover crops.
So the second best option,
which is what I think every gardener should prioritize,
if you get this one thing done,
then everything else you do is an added bonus,
is the process of putting beds to sleep for winter,
ready for spring.
To guarantee the best results for springtime,
what you want to do
is when it comes to clearing a bed in autumn,
or even early winter,
you want to cut off all of the plants at root level,
so you leave the roots in the ground.
This is both extremely beneficial
for the biology in the ground,
but it's also creating extra carbon in the soil.
Carbon is the number one
most important element of a healthy soil.
And the other thing that it does is when the roots do decay,
they allow channels for air
and water to travel through the soil.
Then after you've done that,
you actually want to keep the tops
of the plants that you've chopped off,
and chop these up really lightly,
and apply a very light chop and drop mulch
around half a centimeter to a centimeter
then over the surface of the bed.
What this is gonna do is just provide
a little bit of extra fertility.
Any leftover can go in the compost bin.
Then add a two to three centimeter minimum
layer of compost over the surface of the bed.
And then the final stage, which is optional,
is to cover this with cardboard weighed down
with something like sticks or stones.
What this process enables
is for a raised bed to be dormant over winter,
and then when it comes to springtime,
you take the covering off and it is all ready.
It is free of any kind of weeds,
so you can really hit the ground running in springtime.
After a really busy growing season,
I love autumn because it slows down
and I start packing the garden away,
but I can start also dreaming
and thinking about next season,
and a big part of that is your planting plan.
And if you're looking for ways to make your planting plan
a little bit more efficient and effective,
then watch this video.
It's gonna give you seven really important tips
and ideas to consider when you're creating
your planting plan for next growing season.