There’s been torrential rain for the majority of this week – so Nikki’s cheating today and sharing how some of her indoor plants are doing – plus showing and telling the awesome stash of new seeds she picked up at the local garden centre!
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.
Welcome to my very messy living room. Forgive the mess. I haven’t had a chance to tidy up. It’s tax season. We’ve been doing all of our accounting and life in 2026 in the US has been interesting, interesting to say the least. And I’ve been playing with Karlach a lot. See, playing with Karlach, BG3. If you don’t know, BG3 is a computer game and I’ve been spending a lot of time playing BG3. It keeps my sanity safe. And it also has a lot of characters that I really identify with. It deals with a lot of trauma and surviving abuse and horrible things that happen to you, in the pursuit of a mad person or mad things that are trying to take over the world. Let’s just say there are some parallels.
But the reason you are in my house today instead of out there is that we have torrential rain on and off all day. Vi doesn’t like it when I take cameras outside and there’s torrential rain. That’s my grandfather clock. I have a grandfather clock. I’m very proud of the fact that I have a grandfather clock. Anyway, it’s really horrible weather out there right now and I don’t particularly want to be outside in the wet and it would look terrible and it would make all the gear horribly wet.
So I’ve just been to the garden center and I figured it would be a good time to talk about inside things for once.
Let’s start with this lovely fellow here. This is my abutilon, which is a type of Chinese maple. As you can see, it’s got some stalks on it because it’s had a bad start in life but now we’ve got two separate branches growing up and this winter it’s grown very well. Also things that have grown really well this winter – my geraniums. Again, that one’s dribbling. My geraniums, I’ve just watered them. They’ve been doing pretty well. In previous years, I didn’t do very well looking after geraniums through the winter but this time I’ve done really well. This one is one of my favorites. This is a Vancouver Centennial, I think. Yeah, Vancouver Centennial. It’s like a variegated geranium. It smells amazing and it’s got like little red bits in the middle, which is obviously Canadian, Canadian. So that works.
And then we’ve got a couple others here. This one is one of my favorites as well. This one here is an ivy type of geranium. It’s called crocodile and it likes to vine. So I’ve got to figure out what I’m gonna do with that in a couple of weeks.
But anyway, at the weekend, last weekend, when you were watching last week’s chicken and garden update, it was really nice weather. So I jumped in a vehicle and we headed out to Portland Nursery, which is completely the opposite end of Portland to where we are. And I went shopping and I picked up potatoes. Boil them, mash them, put them in a stew. They’re very nice and they’re very enjoyable. I ended up buying five different varieties of potatoes, seed potatoes, and I kind of assumed that everyone knows what a seed potato is, but in case you don’t – potatoes grow from other potatoes. You can grow them from seed. I’ve not had very much success doing it that way, but you basically wait for these especially looked after and disease resistant seed potatoes to sprout their own little roots. And then you just put them in the ground and then you end up growing entire potato plants. I did a really poor explanation of that, but it’s late in the day and I forgot to take my medication two days ago and my body is still recovering.
Side note, nothing to do with chicken and garden. I went to bed on, I think it was Tuesday evening and I was really tired. I didn’t feel great and I forgot to take my medication. And just as I was drifting off to sleep, I was like, have I taken my medication? Yes, I think I have. And I’m on a type of medication that if you take too much, you could actually do some serious damage. So I didn’t. And then on Wednesday morning, I jumped on the exercise bike, which is just off shot here. And my heart was like, whoa, hey, no medication slowing me down, let’s do it. And I had a really great workout. My heart went like about 40 beats per minute higher than it’s supposed to be capped at for my own safety. So I forgot my medication and it’s taking my body a while to recover from that omission on my part.
But I also went and got some seeds, right? So I was hoping it wasn’t gonna be raining this week, but I picked up some fava beans, we call them broad beans in the UK. They need to go in like yesterday. I also picked up some snow peas. If you’ve never had snow peas before, they are great. They’re like, you can eat the whole pea and they need to be in like yesterday. I also picked up some more broccoli. We do still have some broccoli kind of wandering around the garden, not literally. They’re not ants, but I’m growing them in various parts of the garden. I’ve got some basil. I also picked up some more telegraph cucumber because I am British and I don’t want to upset Americans, but the best type of cucumbers are clearly the British smooth skin type, not the knobbly ones that you eat in pickles. They’re fine as pickles in a sandwich with maybe some pastrami or some other stuff in a good hoagie, that’s fine. But cucumbers that you can slice and have in a salad, British every day.
Also some more carrots. This time I just went with some Danvers because they’re really kind of rock solid and stable. And then I picked up some parsnip because parsnip is a type of seed that doesn’t do well in storage. Off camera, I literally have a box that is this big with all of my tomato seeds in and all of the other seeds that I’m going to use and grow this year. But parsnips can’t be saved from year to year. You have to buy fresh seeds every year. And again, those parsnips should have been in two weeks ago.
I’m feeling behind, but I’m not going outside into torrential rain to plant seeds because if I do that, they will literally be washed away. I also picked up some celery because my wife is on a bit of a celery kick right now. And I also picked up some more sweet corn.
Now, if you’ve watched the channel for a couple of years, you’ll know that I’ve not really had a whole lot of success with sweet corn. And I did consult with someone at the nursery. And they told me that I just need to fertilize it crazily when it’s warm up here and the weather is good. Because I’m up in the hills, in the foothills of the coast range, my house is at 850 feet. We get a much later start in the year. So just as an example, in the nearby town, which I nearly named, that would have been stupid. I nearly doxxed myself. In our nearby town, we actually have cherry trees in flower. Up here, my cherry trees are still going. It’s still winter. We’re having a lovely winter sleep.
So when it comes to growing things like corn, which prefer warm weather and a really favorably long growing season, I’m going to have to encourage them with fertilizer, apparently, to get them to grow more quickly and also to yield better. Because up to this point, I haven’t done very well. My squashes do really well up here. Pumpkins, zucchini, or courgettes, whichever way you wanna call it, they do really well. Beans do really well. But everything else, I’m gonna give them a little bit more encouragement this year.
And while I’m not outside right now, I do wanna let you know the chickens are doing fine. They are in fact laying again. I’ve just watched a Christmas tree be blown over outside. It’s a Christmas tree that I still need to put in the ground. I will get on that ASAP.
A lot of my bulbs are like starting to flower, which is phenomenal. I actually saw a snowdrop. I think is what my mother called it. It’s not a snow drop, it’s a snow drip. Came out of the ground this week and it’s doing great. My lilac bush is thinking about flowering. And yes, my cherry tree and my apple trees are thinking about making buds, but they’ve not quite got to that point yet.
The other thing I wanna show you, and I do wanna reiterate, I don’t normally keep my geraniums and my abutilon and everything here. They’re on the other side of the house so they get a little bit more light. These are the peppers, the California bell peppers, that I saved last season. Unfortunately, I have lost two of them, but when they came in for the winter, they were still in little tiny pots. And so the fact that these two especially have grown so well is a good sign because it means I have only got to keep them alive for another couple of, maybe another month. And then hopefully I’ll be able to put the new greenhouse cover on and we’ll go from there. The old greenhouse cover, I am so glad I ordered a new one because that has been destroyed a little bit more by this wind. I’ll talk about that next week if the weather is nice.
But other than that, what are you getting up to in the garden? Have you started planting things? And do you save seeds? I’m wondering if I have any here. I don’t have any seeds behind me, but I have little pots around the house because AUDHD, wherever I put it is the perfect place with things like pumpkin seeds and melon seeds and sunflower seeds. There’s a bunch of sunflower seeds over there on a dog kennel. I just put them somewhere safe and then in the spring I’ll put them out in the garden. And I know I’m not the only one. So let me know in the comments below what’s going on in your garden.
Thank you for putting up with the slightly different change of scenery. I will look fantastic because we’re being filmed, I’m being filmed even on the excellent, expensive studio camera as opposed to the little handheld GoPro, which is a bit naff. Look after yourself. Don’t forget to join the list of amazing people scrolling by on either side. They are the reason we are still here. And I will see you this time next week. Keep evolving.
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