Hello and welcome. I figured we’d do another garden tour. And it’s September now, so I guess this is the September garden tour. I’ll show you around my allotment garden, show you what’s ready to harvest, what’s growing for winter, and give you an overview of how everything’s going.

Hello and welcome. I figured we’d do another garden tour. And it’s September now, so I guess this is the September garden tour.

We’re going to start in the greenhouse where we’ve got a little bit of a jungle. Let me show you. If I go in here, this entire side is filled with tomato vines and melon vines.

There’s also this pitiful little cucumber in here. Not looking very good. I had hopes that it would recover, but yeah, look at this.

That is the cucumber I thought was going to be the recovery. And while there are new fruit along the vines, they aren’t exactly looking good.

And also this cucumber keeps getting visited by these little friends. So yeah, I could just pull it and be done with it. But for some reason, it’s still there. I keep pushing it further to the side so it doesn’t affect the rest of the greenhouses much, but I should really just pull it.

But I haven’t really been here for a couple of days. We were at that festival. I’ll tell you all about that. And I also spent some time underwater finally. After two years, we went on the first dives again. We’re going to do that again tomorrow and probably once more this weekend before my husband has to get back to work, which means less time in the garden. But with this weather, I’m fine with that. It’s much better to spend this weather underwater and deal with the garden when it’s nice out. Okay. Greenhouse. Right.

There are plenty of flowers all over the tomatoes and the melon plants. And if you look along here, you’ll see there are little melons in a few places over here as well. I don’t think those are going to ripen, but I’m just going to let them go and let them do their thing.

We’ve got some actual melons that I’m pretty sure we will be able to eat in the end. That one there, the original one. Oh, hold on. The original one back in the jungle there that was there first, though I’m not sure it hasn’t grown in a long time. And then the crooked little one over there, which was stuck behind the bar and now just looks a little wonky. But I think those three might actually have a chance to ripen to full maturity and get eaten by us. So that would be exciting.

The tomatoes have a lot of fruit all over them. If I just crouch down, then you’ll see there are tomatoes all throughout this jungle here. So I’m pretty sure there’s going to be a nice harvest in here at some point–if the sun comes back.

On the other side of the greenhouse, there is a Pepper, but there’s also pepper. What are you doing? Apparently there’s a ripe tomato somewhere. Yep, pepper has found a ripe tomato. You want that? You’ve half eaten it anyway. There you go. There’s also one down there and over there. Pepper found these, I had seen them. I thought there were none that are ripe.

But yeah, this tomato jungle over here, I hope will ripen at some point. But there are plenty of flowers on them now, which is a little weird because these are supposed to be determined tomatoes. So they’re supposed to switch from producing flowers to focusing on fruit on their own and that they’re getting another batch of this many flowers is a little bit confusing, but I’m just letting them be. We’ll see what happens.

There’s also the unknown brassica back there. I’m pretty sure by now it’s not a kale, but I don’t know if it’s a cauliflower or broccoli because I don’t actually know what I planted there because I don’t think I ever planted any brassica there.

But there is a very, very happy nasturtium back there with flowers all over there. I’m a big fan. And then here, this little one, I still haven’t looked up what it’s called in English. I don’t know something gooseberry, I think, but physalis.

I’ve already got a little harvest back going here. So we’re going to pick that up and close the greenhouse. For now, let’s continue our tour.

Here, here, well, here we have nothing yet. There’s some grass growing through the mulch that needs pulling, but no corn salad yet.

This is one of the two ground covers I’ve chosen. This one will stay all winter, so it will be mowed down in spring. And then I can just use this as a bed, whereas others of the ground covers that I’ve done are not winter hardy.

So if we go over here, this bed also has a ground cover on it, but that one’s not going to be there all winter. It’s going to die when the first frost comes. And then I can have this bed either mulched or I can plant something in it, but these aren’t going to stay.

I’m very excited that the second kind of spinach actually has sprouted. There is a slug on there, so I’m going to throw that somewhere else at some point soon. But spinach has sprouted. I’m very excited about that. There’s neat little rows of spinach coming up and it looks like everything’s happy with the few days of rain we’ve had. I really have to get this bed mulched because there’s grass drumming through all over the place back there. And so I need to weed this and put some ground cover on it. Probably straw, but I also have some grass clipping. So we’re going to see what works better here–and Pepper’s on the beds again. Ah well, but everything’s looking healthy.

The leek has put out some size, and the beets and chard are looking excellent. I’ll soon even be able to take some leaves of the chard and the beets for salads, so that’s cool. Okay, how’s the rest looking? The brassica back there have been eaten by slugs, but they are surviving and that’s the key thing.

The next bed of brassica, it has some that are looking healthy and happy. Like look at this plant. That’s looking really good. And back there they are surviving. Hi Pepper.

Pepper’s checking out the spinach. This was the first spinach I planted and by now it even looks like spinach. So first of all, verdle is the variety. If you look at this bed, the spinach already looks like baby spinach and some is really big. Some of the spinach is already really big. I’m excited because we’ll soon be able to try the first ones and see how they taste.

The beans are looking excellent. I actually came here thinking I’d harvest them, but I’m going to leave them a little longer. The rain doesn’t seem to bother them yet, so I’m going to check again tomorrow, see if I need to harvest them. But they are putting on some good size over here, so I’m hoping that I can get them to full maturity and not have to harvest because of the weather before. Fingers crossed.

The potatoes never sprouted, but I dug some up and they seemed to store well under the straw. We’ll just leave them. Finally, finally, the first signs of the mushroom beds. We’d been sure they were a fail. We’ve actually harvested the first of the mushrooms. It was just a little cluster and since then everything’s been eaten by the slugs faster that it could grow, but it kind of gives me hope that there will be mushrooms and the first ones were delicious.

The carrots are looking great. I need to do some weeding as always, but I’m not too worried about it. Everything’s looking fine. These brassica here are surviving. They’ve had a lot of slop pressure, but they do have new leaves forming all the time. I hope it’s enough. Over here as well, the other kind of carrots are looking great as well.

I just harvested a zucchini squash from down there and our corn is growing beans. So we still don’t have more than one corn cob, but we do have beans on our corn and everything’s looking great and the corn is definitely bigger than we might know.

The tomatoes were continuing to put on fruit for us to eat, despite looking less than happy. The blighted stems were hanging in there almost literally.

I’m really excited because there’s the first color on the Lila Luzy, which means soon we’ll get the first ones that I can harvest, and we have not had a good chili year at all. So seeing some that are going to ripen and a lot of fruit all over this makes me very happy. We’ve also had some elephant chili. They are looking really good as well, and there’s a lot of fruit on there, but to see one more variety other than the elephant chili doing well makes me really happy.

The sunflowers are not so happy. A lot of the smaller ones are falling over and I can now either harvest them or leave them to the birds. The bigger ones are all standing strong, so I’ll just keep an eye on things and if any of the ones I wanted to keep are threatening to fall over, then I’ll do something. But so far it’s looking really good.

And the Velvet Queen sunflower. That thing’s a beauty. I mean all of them look different because some of them hybridized with the normal ones. So I’ve got some that are lighter and I’ve got some that are more of a darker shape and all the way up there, there’s even one that’s fully red. I don’t know where that went, that one over there.

So they look really really cool and I hope to get some seed out of them for the next year. Yeah, I really like that they don’t blossom at the same time as the regular sunflowers, so they kind of extended the pretty season and they’re so pretty.

Pollinators loved the darker Velvet Queen sunflowers that were in blossom after the original ones.

All of the tomatoes are doing really well, so it looks like we’ve recovered. I’ve harvested a lot of fruit already, but there’s fruit all over these vines over here, and all the varieties that originally made it survived. So we’ve recovered from blight, and I don’t think it’s going to be back even with a couple of days of rain we’re going to have now. I think we’ve made it and there are so many fruit on these vines. If they all ripen I’m going to actually be able to preserve some tomato, which is the goal after all.

Look at all that ground cover. That’s what the bed over there is going to look like in a couple of weeks. It’s just doing such a great job at covering the ground fast.

And over here, look at that. This is Helix pomatia. It’s a slug that is technically not supposed to be here, but that’s totally fine. They might need the help at some point. It’s endangered in its native habitat.

The beans are looking great. Over here as well, the Brunhilde is covered–and we even get some sunshine–in beans. The teepee beans are finally all coming into fruit as well. So all the ones that are planted later so the ones over here and back there, not this one. This was the first one. This is the older plant and all the others here I planted later and they are all now producing fruit. So I hopefully will have a harvest big enough that I get to preserve some.

The sunflowers that are not the regular kind, so all the special varieties are now in blossom. So we’ve got this kind here and that’s the same as these two. But all the regular sunflowers are kind of gone. So most of them are either already trimmed because I harvested them or ready to be trimmed and harvested. I’m leaving a lot of the sunflowers for the birds, but I’m also going to take some home to bring back in the winter just so the birds have something to eat here in the garden in winter, to make sure that they have some seed because that’s good fat. I don’t want to feed them regularly. I don’t want them to be dependent on me, but we’re going to just throw out one of those heads at some point and see if they like it, and just do it at irregular intervals so they don’t rely on it. But hopefully it helps them out a little bit.

I think that’s it for the September garden tour. Most things have already switched over to winter greens or are in the late stages of harvest. So soon this is going to be the winter garden. Right now it’s this fall transition period, and I love this garden. It’s produced so nicely for us for our first garden year, a really bad year with really, really bad weather. And we’ve still gotten a lot of food out of this garden and we continue to get a lot of food out of this garden. And now I know what I want to do differently next year.

And since we’ve had some changes to our plans–I’m going to tell you all about that in another video. We’re going to figure out how to grow in this climate, which is now more relevant because there’s a good chance we’re not leaving this climate. Again, telling you all about that another time.

But in any case, now that I know I might stay in this climate, I have a plan for this entire garden plot for next year to see just how much food we can produce for a family of two and a half. Because, well, I’m growing carrots for the dog, so that’s also something. And we’re going to see just how much self-reliance we can get done on these thousand square meters here.

There’s one more thing I need to show you before we leave and that’s the salsify. It’s doing really well. I’m very excited about it and I can’t wait to see if it’s actually good. And because it’s a root vegetable, you don’t really see if it’s doing that well. The leaves look happy. I hope that translates into really nice roots.

Anyway, that’s it for today. So long, and thanks for being here.