- Hello, and a very warm welcome back to the garden.
I'm in the Polycrub.
And in this video,
I just want to give you a load of little ideas
that are really gonna help
to maximize your undercover growing space
over the winter months.
So this awesome structure behind me is called a Polycrub,
which I was gifted after I went to Shetland
to film about their amazing community project,
where they basically have these hurricane-proof
undercover growing structures dotted all over
the Shetland Isles and the Orkney Isles.
So this arrived as a flat pack
and I employed two local carpenters to put it together
and this is the result.
Now, if you want to see
such an inspiring permaculture project,
which is inside three Polycrubs,
I did a video of a amazing woman called Susan,
who has turned her Polycrubs
into these epic kind of food forests
in such a barren windy climate.
So I recommend you check that out.
And also if you want to find out more about Polycrub,
I'll put a link down below.
So it definitely goes without saying
that my undercover staple is tomatoes.
This is my core focus.
We've got about 37 and a half tomato plants in here.
There's one tomato that's just been really odd
since the get-go.
But as you can see,
there's a lot coming through,
we've been harvesting loads.
There a load on the way.
And what I've actually done
is I've heavily cut back the leafy growth,
mainly because it's turning towards the end of the season.
What you want to do is just go through
and cut off any big leaves that are blocking light
from coming through.
And you can cut them back either to the stem
or you can just leave a couple on if you want,
and it makes a really big difference to a crop.
So if you haven't done that yet,
cut off those excess leaves.
And it's also going to help your tomatoes to breathe,
which is gonna help hopefully hold off blight
if you haven't yet got it.
The thing that makes the most difference
when it comes to maximizing your undercover growing space
for winter is using a style of intercropping
called relay planting.
Relay planting is a really clever way
to utilize growing space
and to effectively shorten the season.
So you can see I've got all these tomatoes here.
And one of the reasons for cutting off
and trimming these leaves
is to also bring light down to the base.
Now, these tomatoes are still gonna be in here
for at least another month,
but that isn't gonna stop me
starting to plant things underneath.
So the idea is,
as one crop is starting to either die off or finish
or come to the end of its harvest stage,
you already have something in the ground.
So when we cut these tomatoes at the base and remove them,
we already have plants there
that are then going to grow and occupy all of the space
that the tomatoes were taking up.
And it's just such a wonderful way
of really maximizing and squeezing an extra month
or even two months into your growing season,
which means a lot more food.
And that's exactly what you want to get
from an undercover growing space like this.
So, as I'm under this tomato forest here,
what I'm wanting to create
is a bit of a winter salad polyculture.
So I'm gonna start off
by planting these Swiss chard underneath.
I'm gonna fill it with other things such as mustard greens,
maybe some kale, Pak Choi,
but what I am doing is using these seedlings,
because if you can get ahead and put seedlings in
rather than seeds,
that's yet another way of using succession planting
to increase productivity.
One of your key focuses now if you haven't done it yet
is either in modules or sow indirectly,
get as many winter salad type crops in as possible.
This is gonna be kind of a little winter salad section.
I'm gonna do this more of a rows
rather than a polyculture.
So I've got some seeds here of mustard greens,
and I've actually got some Pak Choi,
which isn't so much seen as a winter salad,
but I really want to give it a go
of growing it undercover and see if I can get some rows.
And there's a little tip that I've got here,
which is about visualizing how much space each plant
or each crop takes up.
So all you do is you use these as dividers.
So you'll place one end at one side of the raised bed,
and then this end at the other side,
and then suddenly you've created this rectangle area.
And then you can use another one
to start breaking up that rectangle into smaller rows.
And then it just means that you can have
a little bit of an overview and you can imagine, well,
if that's all the mustard that I'm sowing,
perhaps I want a little bit more.
And so you can make adjustments
and really easily kind of plan out your space
before you put in any seeds or any plants.
That's a great way using visualization
to help you work out how much you want to grow
of a particular crop.
And you can do it on a small scale like this
or in a bigger scale in your main garden as well.
You can see just how easy it is to lay out.
And then I can put seed packets where they're gonna go.
This area here is gonna be
where I'm gonna start putting my Pak Choi,
and I can use these guidelines just to make sure
that all of the rows work nicely.
And that I have enough space
between the other crops as well,
just to make sure everything fits in nice and neatly.
So this growing season,
I guess the biggest thing
that hasn't quite gone to plan is the cucumbers,
mainly because they suffered from downy mildew.
This I think is the worst quality bed in the Polycrub
in terms of soil health.
And also, 'cause I've been finishing my book,
I haven't had much time to actually go in
and solve the problem.
So I'm gonna show you the process
of actually removing these plants off the bed
and how I'm going to rejuvenate the bed using LAB,
lactic acid bacteria,
to kickstart the biological activity in the soil
so then I can put in some crops,
get some roots in overwinter,
and then I'll be able to hit the ground running,
come spring time.
So I'm gonna push the boundaries a bit.
Usually if you have something like downy mildew,
you want to remove everything including the roots.
I'm actually going to leave the roots in
and try and treat this ground, this soil,
as best as possible.
And I'm gonna grow some cucumbers again
in here next year,
to see how those fare and to see if it's possible
to have two successful years,
well, one bad year,
but then to mitigate it, step in,
take the right action and then actually have a second year
in the same space,
just to try and not always fall into that process
of crop rotation and to really push the limits,
which I think would actually end up helping a lot of people
who have very limited growing space
and don't have the luxury of being able to rotate as much.
The biggest issue I find with undercover spaces
is just how quickly the soil dries up.
So I know next year
I'm gonna install a drip irrigation system
connected to one of the IBC tanks
just to really save me a lot of time.
But before I do anything here,
I'm gonna give this a really good soaking
around six to eight cans of water,
because moisture is such a crucial element
of a healthy soil.
And if you don't have any moisture in the soil
or in the ground, you're already one step backwards.
Now that I've let the water settle down a bit,
I've got some compost
because organic matter is another core element
of healthy soil.
I'm gonna give roughly a three centimeter layer
over the top of this as a mulch.
The reason why I watered the ground beforehand
is that this compost here is actually going to act
as kind of an insulation
to stop the water underneath from evaporating.
And in this video I mentioned about something called LAB,
or lactic acid bacteria,
and it's something I've actually been using
throughout the growing season,
but I haven't featured it on my channel,
mainly because I'm very much at the experimental stage of it
and testing it out.
Anyway, it kind of derives from Korean natural farming
and it's using rice water and really high quality milk
to propagate lactic acid bacteria,
which is known as kind of the emergency services microbes
of the gardening world.
So, whether it's going in to help with decomposition,
I think I've had really good success with using LAB
to speed up compost bins.
And I'm gonna be sharing more about that later,
hopefully in this season.
The other thing is,
is if you have ground,
whether you've created brand new raised beds.
So when we created these raised beds earlier this year,
I put in a bit of LAB and the tomatoes especially
have done really amazing from it.
But when you've got ground
that's kind of been neglected during the year,
so not enough water like on this bed,
you use LAB to inoculate the soil
where the microbes that are really gonna help
kickstart the soil life.
So I've already put water down underneath.
Now, what I'm going to do is basically water this solution,
roughly one to two teaspoons per watering can.
Mix it up and water it over the surface.
I'm going to do four cans of this
and that's just an awesome kickstart.
And then in about three days to a week,
I'm then gonna come in and transplant
a load of seedlings into this bed.
And that's then going to be the starting process
to repair the soil and to help get it ready for next year.
One of the most important things when growing salads
and other winter crops undercover
is especially during December, January and February
when the temperatures aren't really high,
there's not much light,
the worst thing you can do is overwater
because the ground then suddenly becomes saturated
and then your plants can start rotting.
There can be mold,
there can be all sorts of issues that happen.
So just really make sure you cut back on your watering.
Very often I don't have to water during January or February.
Just keep an eye out on that.
Because even though during summer,
you need to water undercover spaces a lot,
it turns a complete opposite when you hit winter.
When you start packing down the garden for winter,
one of the things that you should really do
is open up a bit of space in your undercover growing area,
even if it means sacrificing a bit of a raised bed
to create a nice space to just sit and relax
because the weather can be terrible.
It's really important that you have a comfortable space
that's in there kind of semi-outdoors,
where you can do your garden plan, for example,
you can write a list of all the seeds you want to offer,
but utilize the space, make the most of this lightness,
the airiness to create a place for winter
where you can go as your like little hideaway.