Just one week after feeling incredibly behind in the garden, Nikki has enjoyed a very productive week – and she’s managed to move a little closer to where she wants to be.
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.
This is my lilac bush. It smells amazing. There’ve been lots of bees on it this week, and my beloved can barely smell it. That’s right — for reasons that I won’t go into, my beloved has a very poor sense of smell, and I have a very finely honed olfactory system, and so I kind of feel really sorry for her, the fact that she can’t smell stuff. She’s always not been able to smell very well, so it’s not a big thing for her, but I’m like, “How can you not smell?” I mean, I know, but I feel also sorry for her.
Let’s give you a bit of a tour of the garden, because last week I told you I was feeling behind. This week I’ve done so much work. Check out my apple tree. So as you know, I pruned this after some of the branches fell off last year, and I’m so glad I did, because look, this tree is flowering later than some of the other trees, but it’s actually healthy. We’ve got healthy flowering going on, and I’m really happy about that.
Also over here — I do not want to jinx this. I do not want to jinx this, but look, I have cherries. I have actually quite a few cherries. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this year is the year that I finally get a decent amount of cherries on that tree, because we’ve never had a decent number of cherries before. In terms of apples on this tree, well, I don’t see a huge number of apples yet. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Looks like we might have some more flowers to come at some point, but that’s fine. We had way too many apples last year, and I seem to recall that this one does tend to flower really late, so I’m not going to worry too much about it.
Meanwhile, this cherry tree — this one right here — is also very full of fruit. Now we could have weather that means that that changes, but so far so good.
Also, this apple tree seems to be growing a decent number of apples and seems quite happy about it, and if you go up here, you’ll see — look, we’ve got some, we definitely have some apples growing here, so I guess we’ll find out, right? I can’t get super excited yet, but fingers crossed it will happen.
Unfortunately, one of my gooseberry plants — never seen this happen before — but this gooseberry plant actually pulled itself out of the pot, and I think I’ve saved it, so I’m just going to leave it and see what happens, because this still seems to be growing. I’m just going to leave it and see what happens. I need to plant the rest of the gooseberries up.
I apologise, the sun is right over the top of the house right now, and so it’s creating some pretty big shadows, but check this out! These are my volunteer potatoes, and they are very much doing volunteer potato things. I’ve got some — I found one the other day, under here. It feels weird that we’re so far along in the season with potatoes, but you know what? If they come out and they are nice, I will eat them. I am not above eating volunteer potatoes.
Let’s look at the actual potato crops. You can see here, these are the potatoes that I actually put in the ground. So one, two — I think there’s one over there as well. I kind of did a zigzag pattern, so they are growing really well. The potatoes are at that point where they’re not quite breaking out of the ground yet, but they’re going to be breaking out of the ground very shortly. That makes me very happy, because I like potatoes. Yes, I know it’s full of starch, but I like potatoes. Potatoes rock.
Let’s show you what else has been going on. So the garden — I, my wife helped me cut the grass the other day, because I came out here — I think Saturday, not yesterday, two weeks ago — and I did some pretty significant gardening. Let me show you.
So over here, I weeded through all of my strawberries, and you can see they’re now looking like they’re actually ready to start growing stuff. Over here, I weeded through my garlic, and again, garlic starting to look pretty darned good. I did some weeding in my raspberry patch — raspberries and strawberries. There’s still a few kind of straggler strawberries there looking really good.
Over here, I haven’t worked on this one yet, so this is one of the beds I haven’t done, and I also haven’t tackled that herb garden, which I know I need to do. So these two are still to do.
I have put carrot seed in, next to the onions and the radishes. The radishes are coming up incredibly quickly, which is great. I have an interloper that I need to deal with that wasn’t there the other day — that’s how quick the brambles grow.
Over here though, check this out. These are my peas that I put in — I put them in midweek. I will need to put some twine around, as you can see I’ve done here with the beans, because the beans are growing really rather nicely.
Unfortunately, someone keeps going in and helping themselves to my bean seeds. I’m going to come around and show you what I mean. I think it’s gophers, or it might be some other ne’er-do-well, but they’re coming in, they’re digging up the ground, and then they’re going, “Oh, I want to have this lovely plant!” and then, um, the plant doesn’t survive.
So what I do — you can see here, they kind of dug down, tried to dig in, didn’t have much of a success. I’m not super worried about my beans. I think my beans will survive. Some of these peas though, yeah, some of these peas are being eaten. Um, and I think they’re being eaten from within, which is a horrible thing to say. You can see some of them are just being devoured from underneath.
And while I’m trying really hard to get these peas to grow properly, um, I think I may have to admit defeat on at least some of them. Again, if you look here, they’re just trying to dig them out of the ground and help themselves. And so what I’m going to try and do is encourage these peas to actually start growing upwards. And what I might have to do — it’s a horrible thing to have to do, but what I might have to do is actually put a net over the top to stop birds and things from getting in and helping themselves.
Because you can see they’re doing it on all of them. They’ve done it over here as well, and it just seems to be like this thing that they like to do. They’re like, “Oh look, someone’s put some new plants in and there’s some fresh seeds and we can have the seeds, and that would be nice.” And then you’re like, “No, that would be quite horrible actually.” And once I kind of push them in a bit, they seem okay. But as you can see, some of them not so much.
The fight between nature and humans, I suppose. I’m going to push these ones in as well. And that’s going to look terrible on camera, but hopefully it will help.
The ground here, there are so many gophers and holes underneath. I think a lot of these are just getting pulled down from within. And the whole process is just horrible. I do not like it. I do not enjoy it. And I do not support it. The little sods digging up my plants. What are they like?
Anyway, I’m going to show you the greenhouse now, because lots of cool stuff’s been going on in the greenhouse. And the purpose of today’s video is — I am no longer behind. So I cleared this lot, cleared that lot, cleared that lot. They’re all ready for planting. Maybe I need to send Charlie out there and guard against critters. He does a pretty good job with that.
In here, you’ll see there has been much growth. So some of my cucumbers are just ridiculously tall now. So this one is a Shintō Kiwa. And then we’ve got some tomatoes here doing really well. Looks like they’ve got some roots on the bottom. So that’s good.
There’s a dead slug down there covered in mould. That’s not very nice. From my Sluggo. Yes, I’m afraid I had to use slug pellets.
Here we have some sunflowers coming up, and also some Black Beauty courgettes, or zucchinis. And then over here we have more sunflowers. And even there, you can see critters are getting inside and helping themselves to my plants, which is never a good thing really. But these are going to look so lovely. These sunflowers, when it’s all done, I think it’s going to be worth it. I will be selling some of them and giving some of them away.
But everything seems to be doing really well. You’ll see that some of my tomato plants are not looking super happy. Some of them are going a little bit yellow. So I need to make sure that they don’t get too much water or not enough. I think these ones might be a bit dry, so I’ll give them a bit of water in a bit. How are these ones? These ones are wet. So some of them are wet and some of them are dry. I guess I just need to figure out the ideal watering scenario for these, and then hopefully they will be a lot happier.
But anyway, tell me what’s going on in your garden. Have you had to fight the critters? Are you enjoying the warmer weather if you’re in the northern hemisphere, and if you’re in the southern hemisphere, are you preparing for the cold winter ahead? Let me know your thoughts in the down below.
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