The weather is warming up, there’s more and more to do in the garden, and Nikki is feeling VERY MUCH behind…
These informal, unscripted vlog-style videos are a chance for the team to share some of the fun things happening in their respective gardens – and are filmed without a teleprompter in a single take.
Read the full transcript here:
Hey everybody, happy Sunday. I hope that wherever you are and whatever you are doing, you are safe, you are well, and you are with people you care about who also care for you. I was distracted by a butterfly up in my greenhouse. Welcome to the greenhouse!
As you can see, things have been growing. So many cool things have been growing this week. If you watch the main channel this week you will see that I potted up some of the things — actually no, I planted seeds. These are the seeds right here. These are the seeds that I planted on camera this week. They have not woken up yet, but that’s fine — they will. Normally they’ll take about a week to wake up.
Let’s go and have a look over here at some of the other things that I planted this week. These are sunflowers that I planted a little bit further back. So they may be… oh, there might be one right there now thinking about poking up. That is excellent news. And the sunflowers — obviously, you can’t have a summer garden without sunflowers. I really like sunflowers. They are amaze. Amaze, amaze!
So look at my tomatoes and my tomatillos. Some of them have gone absolutely crazy. This one here is doing really well. Some of the tomatoes are doing well — this Brandywine here. These are the peppers — I think I told you about this last week. These are the peppers that have been in the greenhouse for a couple of weeks. They were previously in the house over winter and they are waking up and doing great things. I did actually put some fertiliser down to help encourage these plants to grow a little more, and it helped with the leaves. So the very first leaves were a little bit yellow, which meant that they weren’t getting enough potassium and nitrogen. So I fixed the soil and that has helped a bunch — much healthier growth now.
And then obviously my celery is doing incredibly well. We’ve got some peppers that are growing here. Cucumbers, tomatoes, tomatillos. Here we’ve got some celery — or celery there, sorry. Broccoli and cabbage are doing incredibly well. And at some point very soon — I think probably in about two weeks’ time — I’m going to be ready to set up a stall and sell some of those plants. And I think, as I said in previous weeks, I’m not necessarily looking to make money per se. I just want to ensure that those plants can be passed on to people who can make use of them.
Over here I haven’t had a chance to get in here yet — this week has been very, very busy. But as you can see, I do have some strawberry flowers coming up. I need to get rid of this bramble here. And one of my hopes this weekend is that I can get in and sort these beds out, because as the thumbnail suggests — I am feeling behind.
I know that I am not behind. I’ve looked back — I don’t know if any of you do this, but I look through the calendar and look back at previous years of photographs and go, “What was I doing this time last year?” And once I know what I was doing in previous years, I go, “Okay, I’m actually not doing too badly.”
So here I have a bit of a confession. I planted — as you know — some peas and some broad beans. But now the broad beans that I thought had quit are actually coming up. And I ended up putting more broad beans and more peas in pots. So I now have more broad beans and peas than I know what to do with — but that’s one of those things.
The onions are doing great, the radishes are doing great, I need to put the carrots in this weekend. The raspberries are really starting to get the hang of “oh, it’s time to start growing,” which is phenomenal. You see some fresh growth there, which is lovely — that’s what we like to see.
And because of everything going on in America right now, I don’t mind admitting I’m finding it kind of hard just to keep going. Because there’s so much distracting how we live our lives. The news cycle is absolutely abhorrent right now. And when you exist in a country where there are credible threats, it can screw with your brain a bit.
But check out this! I’ve purposely left this lawn to grow because I feel like: A) I want to have a little bit of a meadow aesthetic going on here, and we also don’t really use this much in the summer — it’s just for the dogs to play in. And I figure if we can help encourage the growth, it will help make the world a little bit nicer, it will reduce any fire risk. Yes, we’ll probably get more ticks and other nasties come summer, but other than that we should be pretty good.
And I’m also daring to come over to do a check — to see if my nemesis has started to grow again. And I don’t see it. I’m going to speak very gently because my nemesis — the Italian Arum, the Lords and Ladies — it is not there. This is good. It has taken me years and years and years to get to a point where it’s not been growing. And frankly I would like it to not grow, because it’s a horrible invasive species and it gets everywhere and it’s not good for my garden. So if I have actually managed to stop it growing, I will be incredibly happy. There are two or three places in the garden that it has grown in previous years — and of course I never planted it, it planted itself, self-seeded by birds. So fingers crossed — fingers crossed it’s actually done and dusted. That’s what we hope.
The blossom from the cherry trees — well, they’re pretty much over. But as you can see, we already have some cherries forming. If I put my hand here, you can see I’ve got some nice cherries starting to form. I can eat those cherries — they’re not particularly sweet — but if you check out my actual cherry tree, which has cherries that I can eat, we actually have some proper cherries growing. So my hope is that this year is the year that we actually start to get proper cherries, which I’m super excited about.
And do we have any apples growing yet? I don’t see… I don’t see many yet. It looks like we might have some caterpillars getting involved, which is not so good. But yeah — everything is looking really beautiful. But I still feel so far behind, because there are so many things that I had hoped to work on, that I hoped to grow, and I just haven’t had a chance — because things at the studio have been frankly really difficult.
But hey — look! We have proper flowers on the parsnips. And while we do not have any potatoes poking up yet, I genuinely do not think it’s going to be long before they come out.
Anyway — do you feel behind in the garden? Do you feel like you’ve been working really hard and then suddenly things are much more difficult? Also, I want to show you this — this is super cool. I have a double-headed tulip! There are actually two stems coming up here — it’s like a conjoined tulip. It hasn’t bloomed yet but it’s super, super pretty. And also I think those are poppy seeds coming up, so I’m super excited about those as well. We’ll have to see if they are actually poppy seeds or not — we’re going to have a really good display of poppies this year.
So yeah — tell me in the comments below: does it feel like you are really, really delayed in your garden this year? Are you on top of it? Have you done everything you need to do? Or, like me, do you spend most of your time worrying that you are behind when you’re probably actually not? Let me know in the comments below. Remember to be kind and civil to others and to put your listening ears on. I sound like a schoolteacher — I did used to be one, so that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
Thanks for watching today. Thanks also go to the amazing list of people scrolling by on either side right now — they are the reason that we are still here. Without them we wouldn’t be able to make these videos, we wouldn’t be able to pay everybody their salary, and we wouldn’t be able to have things like health insurance, which is kind of super important for everybody on the team. You can support us and join that amazing list from $1.50 a month on Patreon or YouTube, or you can send us an old-fashioned cheque to our PO box, or you can send us a Ko-fi — that’s another great way of doing it — or you can go to our swag store and buy one of our t-shirts. I am wearing one of those underneath this, but I’m not going to rip my jacket open with the zipper because it will make a horrible noise. So you’ll just have to take my word for it.
Anyway, thank you for being the positive change that we need to see in the world. Remember to tell the people in your lives who are important to you that they are important to you. And I will see you this time next week. Thanks for watching — as always, keep evolving!
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