(gentle music)
(gentle music continues)
- I'm showing you the results of close planting
and succession planting in one bed,
which measures 1.5 metres wide or five feet,
five metres long, 16 feet.
This bed,
in this one year already, 2022,
we're now mid-October,
this one bed has already given 82 kilogrammes of harvest.
That's over 180 pounds.
There's a lot more to come
'cause we'll carry on harvesting
for about another six weeks or so until winter.
It's actually part of my trial beds here.
It's the no-dig bed,
which I compare results of with the dig bed.
I'll refer to the comparative growth occasionally,
but what I really want to concentrate here is
how you can grow so many vegetables close together
and successively.
And part of that comes from the fact that it's no-dig,
which means strong soil health,
excellent maintenance of soil fertility.
This bed has had no extra compost
since we put two wheelbarrowfuls on it last December.
So once a year,
we put the compost on top.
That's the application of fertility for a whole year.
And for the succession plantings,
which have happened since May
and then through June and July mainly
and the odd one in August and September,
we don't put on any more compost,
and I don't use any feeds or fertilisers.
So it's very simple,
and it's about encouraging the soil life to do the work,
making nutrients and moisture available.
We do water though.
Sometimes the weather's very dry, even here,
temperate climate, 51 north, oceanic.
But this year we've had a very dry, slightly warmer summer,
so we have been watering,
and that does make a difference.
But the no-dig soil holds onto moisture very well.
So I'm now going to start from this end
and show you, in succession, each planting,
tell you when it went in, what it followed,
and do a little bit of harvesting,
just give you an idea of how that happens.
So roughly, I've set this up to be in rows,
which are 30 centimetre, 12 inches apart.
And so for example, on the 11th of June,
four months ago,
I sowed parsnips and I transplanted celery.
The celery was already six weeks old.
And then, later on,
24th of August,
I transplanted these endive,
which we've picked once,
and two weeks after that,
I transplanted rocket.
So what I'm doing is just filling up any gaps as they arise.
And here there were three rows of lettuce,
which we picked leaf by leaf through the spring
over 12 weeks
and got 13 kilos of lettuces from that area.
So let's cut a celery.
I just want to show you how I harvest
and also how I clear after the harvest.
So celery will grow
from the roots if you leave too many in.
So I'm cutting just under the stem
of the celery plant to remove enough root
that it won't regrow.
I'm leaving all that root in.
So my pattern of harvesting with no-dig is to leave
as much root as possible in the ground,
and then I'll trim off the excess,
(cutter slices)
the base of them.
That means I can take off these older leaves,
which are getting a bit of disease called Septoria,
and that's pretty normal
for celery which are as old as this.
Most of what's there now is good.
And there you've got a nice celery.
You could use the leaves as well.
This frees up space a bit so that you can see the parsnips.
And I'm intrigued by these
because I've not yet harvested one,
and they have struggled a bit this summer
from being very close to this dahlia.
Beautiful flower,
but it's very moisture-demanding,
and we've watered this end a lot
because otherwise,
these, I think, these parsnips are going to be small.
So, let's take a slightly bigger one here maybe.
Oh, crikey, no.
(Charles laughs)
They really are small.
I didn't even need my trowel.
That is a bit disappointing.
That one's a bit longer.
Well, there you go.
So that's what happens if you sow parsnips late
and in slightly dry soil.
But actually, those, I bet you anything,
they'll be delicious.
There's just not much of it.
Okay, next up, endive.
These are a type of endive called Scarole,
which is larger, not frizzy leaves.
And this is how I harvest them.
(endive rustling)
And in fact,
there was over a kilo of leaves
on these plants just 10 days ago,
(endive rustling)
and I harvested to
(endive rustling)
this size.
That's leaf seven,
leaf eight, leaf nine.
It's pretty much a leaf a day.
That's how much harvest has grown
in the first half of October,
10 days.
Phenomenal.
Endive are really good for autumn harvest.
That's why they're a great succession planting
because you can sow them.
These were sown late July,
transplanted 24th August,
so that's late in the year already.
And these followed beetroot, actually.
We had eight kilos of beetroot here,
and we've also had carrots and fennel.
I'm not doing rotation
because with no-dig,
you've got such healthy strong soil,
you don't need to worry about that.
It means you're much more free to plant
what you want to plant at the right time of year.
Salad rocket here.
We've harvested the outer leaves once so far.
So this is, I'm not using a knife.
Regular picking of the outer leaves enables the plant
to regrow more rapidly.
It's around two weeks
since we harvested this one to about this size.
So again,
at this time of year,
you can see a nice continuing set of harvest
from a plant that's only been
in the ground five weeks at this point.
Very recently, on a course day here,
we popped in some chervil,
and that was just to demonstrate planting.
Actually that,
I don't think that will make it before winter.
But if you did want to overwinter a herb,
chervil is a really good one,
and you can transplant it as late as September.
This lovely kale went in between onions.
So on either side of it I had a row
of multisown onions,
which has been in the ground since middle of March,
so in February.
Harvested July, end of July.
And before that,
about three weeks before,
I popped in these five kale plants.
And at first you couldn't see the kale.
You can do that.
That's called interplanting
'cause these, when they went in, they're little.
They don't need a lot of space or moisture,
not like they do now.
So then the onions are harvested,
and they've suddenly got space to grow and they do.
And we took off some of the early leaves,
which have got quite diseased
like a lot of brassica plants do in the summer.
And now we're harvesting by removing lower leaves
like this,
(kale crunches)
and we just keep working our way up the stem.
And they keep growing from the bottom.
These would grow through the winter but not very much.
So we'll probably finish most of the harvest sometime
in December,
and they've got just about the right amount of space to grow
'cause we had a row of onions,
and then I gave it a little bit more space
before we transplanted chicory.
And this was peas here actually, tall peas.
Gave about five kilogrammes of pods.
Peas are a great vegetable to grow
in the spring, early summer,
but not so much in the autumn.
So in the autumn you've got different options,
like the chicory for radicchio, and the fennel.
So this chicory is an interesting one
because it makes beautiful hearts if you get a good variety.
This variety's called 506 TT.
I don't know if you can hear that sound.
(chicory rattling)
It's quite firm.
So I'm going to cut one just to show you how they are.
So you can see these outer leaves, they peel off,
and then,
you're beginning to see the radicchio.
I'm also going to pull it first actually
because these roots.
I pulled out a bit more root than I would normally like to.
But if you leave them in, they do regrow.
Some people don't mind that.
I don't want it.
I don't want the regrowth of very small little bits of leaf.
It's your call.
So that will all go to compost.
And I'm cutting off now all of that bottom growth,
and that reveals this beautiful chicory
with, I think, a little bit of slug damage possibly.
If I take off one more leaf,
you'll see this beautiful chicon.
These are an amazing harvest because they store really well.
There's no rush to eat that over the next month,
even two if you want it in the middle of winter
when it's cool.
And you sow them in July,
so it's a brilliant succession crop.
I don't sow these in the spring
because they only bolt if you do that.
So certain vegetables lend themselves really well
to later sowing and planting in the summer.
And fennel's another one.
So these bulb fennel were sown
in modules in the greenhouse,
like I do it, late July,
transplanted here
towards the end of August.
And they went in when there was no space at all there
because that was cucumbers.
And the cucumbers were sprawling everywhere,
we were harvesting them.
We had about nine kilos from two plants
that were right there where all the fennel are now.
And the cucumbers followed cabbage, I think it was.
I lose track of it
'cause there's so much going on in this one bed.
And that's all right,
I had space to put the cucumbers in.
And cucumbers start to finish,
and they get powdery mildew,
which is fine.
They carry on cropping.
It's normal for them to get mildew late August,
early September.
And that makes a bit of space.
I popped in the fennel plug plants.
And now the fennel,
not long since the cucumbers have gone,
I put a little short video actually about that
about how we just cut under
or through the stem of two cucumber plants,
lift them up, and suddenly you see the fennel.
And because it's got its roots down,
it's had time to do this already mid-October.
So it's around six weeks since I cleared the cucumber.
And again,
you could cut it just quite close to the surface.
I'm going to go a little bit lower down
towards the root system a bit to get out about that much
of the root developing.
Again, it would regrow.
I want to leave most of the roots in the ground
'cause that nourishes the soil.
When people are digging,
they don't mind how they do it
'cause they're going to dig it all anyway.
But with no-dig,
I really want to look after the soil,
but I also want to make sure I've taken enough
of the plant out that it won't regrow.
And then a little bit of a trim.
Here, you've got options
about how many of the lower leaves you take off.
I might normally take that one off.
Actually, this is an indication
that fennel's ready to harvest,
when you see this kind of thing happening,
which is sideshoots coming out of the base.
And there you go,
another harvest.
So this is what we have on the end of the same bed,
and actually, just moving location there,
I realised I'd forgotten to pull the carrot.
It was a very speculative sowing I did on the 29th of June
of some carrots,
just before the cucumbers overshadowed them.
And actually they're right here.
I just want to pull one now
'cause I haven't got around to harvesting any yet,
and I'm curious to see what they might be like.
It's actually not too bad.
So it's obviously not a huge amount of food,
but it's been growing in the shade of a cucumber,
and it's just an example of packing things in a bit.
You don't always get the biggest harvest,
but you get more to eat.
These are amazing plants, Amsoi, Indian mustard.
'cause they grow so fast, so big.
So they've been in the ground since 6th September,
so that's roughly five or six weeks.
And this is already a second harvest.
They're quite spicy, pungent,
and very nice in a stir fry.
And they're a classic example
of a plant that grows way better
in the autumn than in the spring.
In the spring if you sowed this,
it wouldn't give you much harvest,
rather like pak choi.
Before it went up to flower,
it would get a lot of flea beetle damage,
those little holes you get on brassica leaves.
So this is what you want to sow,
like salad rocket, pak choi,
mizuna, mustards, all of them,
from August and even into early September.
The celeriac here are strong,
but they're not as big as they would've been
if they hadn't had the shade of potatoes over them.
I put them in here late May
between potatoes that were growing where the leeks are now
and spinach that was growing right there.
So the celeriac hardly had any room to move, so to speak,
and it was a bit too overshadowed.
That slowed down its early growth.
You can see they're fine now,
and they're growing okay.
And that's a medium-sized celeriac,
a very worthwhile harvest.
Very interesting comparison too with them,
how they're so much smaller on the soil
which has been dug behind me.
A lot of people say they have difficulty growing celeriac.
I do wonder if that's some of it, you know,
just stop the digging.
No-dig,
I've always had consistent results with celeriac.
We'll harvest these probably in about a month.
They slow down, but they're still growing.
Mid-October, it's still mild, 17 centigrade,
mid-60s by day for another week or so.
They're packing it in actually and growing quite a bit.
The leeks likewise can still grow quite a bit more.
And partly, you can see that
'cause the leaves are so lovely and dark green still.
That shows the plant's still swelling.
Having said that, you can start harvesting now, leeks.
And what I do with the multi-sown clumps
that you can see there,
so we sow four seeds on average per cell in April.
Pot them on in late May,
keep them growing
into quite a big little clump of leeks,
which goes in after the potatoes.
So this piece of ground
where the leeks are already gave 13 kilogrammes
of potatoes, Charlotte,
in July.
So with succession planting,
do bear that in mind
that you're often planting into dry ground
because something else has grown before
and taken a lot of the moisture
if it hasn't rained very much.
And overall, you can see from what I've shown you here,
the incredible bounty you can have even
at this time of year.
Like in my garden here,
I've got no empty space yet.
There's a bed behind me which looks empty,
but actually that's planted with garlic since last week,
and that had courgettes in.
So we just follow, follow, follow.
Soil never needs a rest.
That's a lie,
if you ever hear that, basically.
It's from people not understanding how it works, I think.
You know, soil is not like us.
It doesn't go to sleep at night.
Well, it does a bit actually 'cause it gets dark,
but it's not that it needs that rest.
And like in places in the world
where you have 24 hours daylight,
everything just keeps growing, basically.
So as soon as it's light,
soil is growing.
It can grow,
and that's good for the microbes.
Microbes are what powers the growth here.
The no-dig,
you're allowing all that to happen.
So you just keep planting, keep planting.
You don't need to worry about rotation.
Have transplants ready.
That is a fantastic way to improve your strike rate
with succession and succeed even more.
And you can keep cropping right the way
through your growing season.
Wherever that is in the world,
these actual plantings will vary a bit according
to your climate,
but this is giving you some ideas
of what you can do in a mid-latitude climate.
(gentle music)