The weather is still being a little topsy-turvy, but as the roses come into flower, and Nikki’s sunflowers are really accelerating their growth, it’s starting to feel like the garden is a real garden again. The problem? There’s still never quite enough time for all of the things that Nikki wants to do in her garden!
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 transcript here
Check out my roses! Hello everybody! Welcome to another Transport Evolved Chicken and Garden update. I hope you are safe, you are well, and you are with someone you care about who also cares for you.
I know the introduction was a little bit different there — I’m just feeling a little different today. I want to tell you that the garden is starting to feel like a real garden again, but before I get into that I want to give you a bit of an update on my plants and the plants I have been giving away. As you can see, we’re down to just a few, and I’ve moved the trailer now because — so basically what happened was, I advertised them on various local groups and people were interested and came along and expressed an interest, and then what happened was I said, “hey, the people who have already said they’re gonna come and pick some up — you can still come; first come, first served; please take no more than five; pass the kindness on” — that was my rule. And a lot of people just ignored that and went, “oh, she’s marked them as not available,” and that was it. And so I’ve got some plants left that really should have been given away that haven’t been given away, so I need to get rid of those.
But other than that, look at some of the stuff I’ve been doing in my garden. So you’ll see here that my cabbages are now finally in, my broccoli is finally in, and then over here we have the lettuce growing — this is the store-bought lettuce I shared with you last week — but then we also have the celery in, and that is coming along nicely. And the cool thing about the celery is that I didn’t think it would transplant very well, but it has actually transplanted really amazingly.
Over here, well, the peas are doing great. The beans — I thought they were going to be has-beens, but they’re really doing amazingly well. The fava beans are actually growing really nicely. I haven’t planted any of my runner beans yet — my pole beans — that is a to-do for this weekend if the weather is supportive. And you can see here that my other peas are growing up, so I’ve got two sets of peas and I’ve got some fava beans, and then over here I also have some progress. So the radishes are coming up incredibly well, I’m starting to see maybe the first few signs of carrots coming up in the in-between rows, and the onions — well, the onions are not doing great, and I think that’s partly because I need to get rid of the shade that is provided by this tree. As you can see over here, I did get rid of some big old branches over there, and I didn’t kind of get around to doing that because this spring has been particularly wild for me — we’ve had a lot of stuff going on in our family, we’ve had a lot of stuff going on just with jobs and everything else, and I have not had a lot of time to spend in the garden.
I need to get back in here and weed again. Look, this is crazy — I weeded this like two weeks ago and already we’ve got some weeds coming up. But the garlic is actually looking pretty spectacular right now, which always makes me smile. This garlic particularly is doing pretty well, the elephant garlic is looking great, and I do now have my irrigation on — it hasn’t done a whole lot of irrigating yet but it is slowly coming together.
Meanwhile, the raspberries — well, what a difference a couple of weeks makes. I think the last time I showed you these they weren’t looking anywhere near as good as they are now, and they’ve just really started to accelerate, which does unfortunately mean that these lovely strawberries are going to be crowded out pretty soon. But these are great for early on in the season, these strawberries, and then I have the main strawberry patch over here and they are doing just incredibly well. I haven’t got any strawberry fruits yet, but I think maybe another week or two and we’ll start to have some early sweet strawberries — and it does depend rather a lot on the weather. But as you can see there are some fertilized flowers in that sort of mid-stage where they’re not fully strawberries but they’re not flowers fully anymore. So we’ll see, we’ll see what happens.
Also, I’m going to show you in here — I am so happy with how things are going in the greenhouse, because I did some planting up over the weekend. So this is the corn, and the corn is really taking off, and you can see some great roots coming along on the bottom there, which is phenomenal. And then this here — these here are my zucchinis, or my courgettes, and I potted them all up over the weekend and they are doing incredibly well as well.
But the real stars are some of the tomatoes. So this is Seattle’s Best of All — it’s a local variety. These are both Seattle’s Best of All, as are these, and they’ve just really started to shoot up. Also shooting up are my peppers, which is phenomenal. And if I show you over here, you’ll see the peppers at the front — the two peppers that I planted that I grew from seed this year — and you’ll notice that they are catching up rather splendidly to the larger pepper plants in the back, which are the ones that I overwintered in my house. So while overwintering peppers does seem to in fact work, just timing and placement really does help a bunch.
And you can see more tomatoes — they’re looking pretty incredible. And then over on this side, same thing with cucumbers. So those cucumbers you’re seeing there — those are the English-style cucumbers, the Telegraphs, and then I’ve got some lemon cucumbers over here and some Straight Eights. And then we go back to tomatoes, and again these tiny little varieties are actually really taking off incredibly well. Look at them!
And then over here we have our tomatillos. Now this is the year that I’ve grown more tomatillos than I’ve ever done before — I’ve got two of the purple tomatillos and two of the Mexican Strain tomatillos, and they’re really starting to look very, very nice indeed. And it’s a really lovely feeling. You know, the thumbnail that I asked Erin to make for this was like “it’s really starting to feel like a garden again” — and it really does feel like I’m starting to grow things now.
You’ll see here I’ve got my drip irrigation running. Oh dear, that sunflower is not looking happy — I may have to replace that sunflower. But some of these other sunflowers are looking incredible; I planted them up over the weekend and again they’re coming up really nicely. Some over there and some over there. Strawberries again — we’ve got some — oh, that might actually be a fruit there on the strawberry. Looking great.
And here — here is my snhuuupin. I should probably tell you about this. So when I was a kid I couldn’t say “lupin” properly, and so I just ended up — I used to call them “snhuuupins,” apparently, according to my mum. I cannot confirm nor deny that, but she said that apparently I just called them “snhuuupins.” So now they’re called “snhuuupins” — whatever. I talked to my mum because that’s the kind of family I have.
I’ve already shown you the roses — they’re starting to come in and they’re looking really incredible. But let’s finish by looking at this little double tulip, which is pretty much done now, and then you’ll see this little area — that’s the first time that I’ve ever done anything here. And again you’ll see I’ve got some sunflowers coming in and they are seemingly pretty happy about it. I don’t know if I’ve got poppies growing yet — I’m kind of on tenterhooks about whether the poppies took or not. I don’t seem to have a huge amount of success growing poppies, which always upsets me, but hey, it is what it is.
But tell me, what’s going on in your garden? Does it start to feel — or has it started to feel like it’s really becoming spring-like, like the garden is finally doing gardeny things again? And tell me what kind of challenges you’ve got laying ahead for you this week and in the next few weeks, as the temperature starts to rise. I’ve got some heat waves coming in the US, but I think Canada’s also gonna get some, and meanwhile my mum in the UK — she had a frost this week. So it is a very complicated growing time of year. Anyway, let me know in the down below.
And thanks to the amazing list of people scrolling by on either side of me right now — they are the reason that we are still here and we are still able to do what we do. It has been a really challenging year for TE for various reasons — political pressure, financial pressure, just trying to make sure that we can pay the bills — and I am very, very, very, very much insistent that we do the absolute best we always can with the resources we have. And the resources we have come from these amazing people on either side. You can join them yourself by going to patreon.com/transportevolved, or by going to our main YouTube channel for Transport Evolved and supporting us from $1.50 a month. You can send us a Ko-fi donation, or you can send us an old-fashioned check. But you can also go to our swag store and buy some swag — unfortunately I can’t share any swag with you because I’m not wearing one of our t-shirts, but there are some great designs. Check out the links in the down below, support the channel any way you can, and that can also mean just sharing our content and engaging with us even on social media. Can you tell I’m tired?
Anyway, thanks for being the positive change that we need to see in the world. Make sure that you tell the people in your life that they are important to you, and I will see you this time next week. Keep evolving.
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