Welcome to Gardening with Ben, the podcast where we dig into the soil of
our gardens and the depths of our green funds. I'm your host, Ben,
here to guide you through the joints of gardening, from sowing seeds to
reaping bountiful harvests. Each episode will explore tips, tricks, and tales from
the garden and allotment, sharing insights from ourself and stories from our own back
garden adventures. Whether you're a seasoned gardener or just getting your hands dirty for
the first time, there's something here for everyone. So grab your brew and
gardening gloves and let's get growing. With Gardening with Ben. Hello, and
welcome to catch up with Gardening with Ben, the podcast where a gardening dreams
can take route. I'm Ben your host, and every episode will be digging
deep into the world of gardening and allotments. From tips for beginners to advise
for the seasoned green funds, We've got you covered, So grab your gloves,
grab your cough, and let's get growing. So in this episode,
we're gonna have a little catch up of what we've been up to down at
our allotment. As I know people like to find out what I've been getting
up to and what I've been doing so that they can keep up today and
so that they can try starting some stuff off for doing some bits like I've
been doing. And I know people like to find out what I've been up
to, as I do get a lot of comments asking me what I've been
doing down at the allotment, et cetera, et cetera. So sit back,
relax, and let's enjoy today's episode. So what have I been up
to down at the Allotment. Well, I've not been down to the plot
for the last two days, I must admit that, as it's been absolutely
freezing, and I thought, you know what, I'm going to have a
rest. I'm going to have a lion. So I did actually have a
lion, and I had a nice sleep, and I've kept nice and warm,
and I thought the allotment can wait. I've done a lot this winter.
I'm on track getting it all up and ready for next year, well
for this year, and getting it ready for the growing season. So I
thought I'm going to stay there some warm and get some bits and bobs done
at home done, and obviously record these podcasts for you so that you've got
some for the next few days as it seemed to be doing really well at
the moment and we're getting lots of listens on our platforms. So what have
we been up to down at the allotment. Well, recently I've been doing
a lot of clearing and tidying and weeding, which is the main focus over
the winter period. I'm currently digging up all where my beds are, straightening
them all back up, rescrewing them together so that they're strong. Some of
them had snapped off, some of the wood had rotten, so it's case
of taking all the beds apart and getting them all sorted. I'm trying to
line them up a bit better because they're all over the place at the moment.
They're not particularly straight. I know if people see photos of it,
nothing that's a bit wonky. So I'm trying to straighten them up a bit
and make them look a lot better than they actually are. And obviously I'm
improving my paths as well and getting all them salted because a lot of them
are just black membrane. So I'm putting paving slabs down and putting wood chip
down. It's all going to look really fancy come this summertime, and I
just want it to look really nice so that I can get some good pictures,
share some good tips with you, and share some advice. So I
want it to look really good. And like I said, my social media
is doing well at the moment, so I want to show off what I've
been up to. And this year, I'm hoping to obviously get my YouTube
backup and running and just do more on my Instagram pages and my TikTok sharing
tips and advice on just how to do stuff and little tips and things what
I do. So I've now obviously rebuilt all my shed at my allotment and
it's looking absolutely fantastic on the inside. Still a few little bits that I
need to do, but I'll be able to start filming content in there.
And obviously once I'm sewing on my seeds and planting them up and putting them
up and getting my harvest so that I can show you more what I'm doing
down at the plot. And there's gonna be so much content coming out this
year for you all to keep up to day on, because like I've been
saying, is that I've been lacking this last year of the content for you
all to see, and hence why I've got my podcast back up and running
and I'm shooting out all these episodes for you to listen to. They running
icing short, sweet episodes. I didn't think people would want to listen to
thirty minutes, so they usually about ten to fifteen minutes long episodes for you
to listen to. So hopefully we can start growing as a community again.
And thankfully I've not lost any of my followers in the year that I've not
been going live for you all and doing my podcasts, so I'm glad to
have you all still around and listening. So over the time, hopefully Fingers
Crossed will start to grow and people will pick up and more and more people
listen to the podcast, and obviously everything goes back into my allotment to share
with you all. So looking around at my allotment at the moment, I've
got so many bulbs that are popping through the ground. I can't believe how
many is starting to show. It's so exciting to see and they're all starting
to pop through. I've got my crookses popping through, my higher simps to
popping through my tulips, my daffodils, my irises, so it's going to
look absolutely fantastic come springtime and next year I will be adding more spring bulbs
to my plot. Each year I do add possibly around five hundred bulbs to
my plot because I want it to look so nice and so pretty for you
all, and it attracts the bees, and that's the most important thing on
my plot is getting the bees to my plot and letting them enjoy it.
And just see the benefits from getting the bees to the plot, which will
get more fruit on the plot and more pollination happening. So the more flowers
we have on the plot, the more the bees will come and enjoy it.
So hopefully in the next few months you'll be seeing loads and loads of
photos of all the spring flowers and the blooms down at the plot, as
obviously they do look beautiful in the photos, so stay tuned for all them
photos to come, because I certainly will bombard you with all them. But
looking around as well, in my new rhubarb patch, which I've done,
well, it's not you. It's an old rubarb patch, but I've slightly
improved it to make it look nicer. It was just on black membrane down
around the rhubarb crowns around my fruit trees. But this year I've put wood
chip all over the black membrane and around the fruit trees and around the rhubarbs,
so it all looks really nice now. And obviously putting wood chip down
around my rhubarb crowns, it's warmed the ground up a lot more and all
the rhubarb crowns are shooting through a very lot now and the rbs covering on
really well. To be honest, it shouldn't be growing this well at the
moment. It shouldn't be waking up yet. It should be still a sleeping
dormant, but it is growing. And obviously, when we do get the
cold weather what's meant to be forecast, and there's no possibly, it probably
will kill the roubarb back off again, and then it'll wake back up again
when it starts to warm up. But at the moment it's looking absolutely fantastic
and the rhubarb is looking really nice and healthy. But you never know.
If it does stay warm, we may be having some rhubarb crumble in January
at this rate. Well, yeah, we'll have to stay tuned for that.
So I've obviously pruned all my fruit trees. They're all nicely pruned back,
ready for the year ahead, and I've got one last job. What
I need to do on them is put a winter wash on them, which
is meant to protect them from the winter mof which nest on the fruit trees
and which can cause bugs in the fruit. So I need to put a
winter wash on them. I purchased some wash from Amazon. Last year.
It was so spraying all them. I just put them in a big sprayer
and just spray them all and you're meant to do it again around springtime.
So I've got that job to do. Hopefully on a dry cold day.
We'll get that done when it's not raining, because we don't want it to
wash straight back again off we wanted to stay on the trees and protect the
trees. So we've got that job still to do. And my strawberry plants,
they're all pretty much died back at the moment. Obviously, when the
warm weather comes we'll start to see those sending out the shoots, sending out
the buds and start growing again. But we've got about eighty strawberry plants in
my shed, which i'll start planting out probably around March. Time when it
does warm up, I could leave them outside where they'll stay watered, but
I wanted to put them in my shed so that they can grow a bit
better and a bit faster and hopefully provide bigger plants so that we get better
crops from them. But I'm going to try some little tips on my strawberries
next year. I've seen loads pictures online of people buying these wedding favorite bags
and tying them around the strawberries to protect them from getting eaten from bugs and
slugs and stuff like that, and people say they were fantastic. So I
may be purchasing a load of those wedding favorite bags that you can get.
They like Hessian ones. They let the rain and the stuff through them,
but they just protect them from the slugs and the bugs. So we may
be purchasing some of those. And obviously the hans can't get through them as
well into really small holes, so we might be getting some of those.
So stay tuned to see how well we get on with that. And yeah,
I've been busy at home as well with getting things ready and started.
I've planted some beef sized tomato seeds and they are currently shooting up they have
grown within like a week and getting tall already. Obviously, we've got to
be careful with growing stuff indoors as it can get kind of leggae, and
obviously they go towards the light, so you've got to keep turning them around,
and you never know. We might have some beef to martars growing pretty
well next year. I wanted to start them off early because beef to martars
are obviously big to martars, so we want to get hopefully a bigger crop
off them and hopefully get them ripened in time rather than ripening towards the end
of the year. So I've started some of those off and they're looking really
good. I'll have to post a picture of them soon, and you never
know, may have to start potting them up to be honest, because they
are getting too big for the pot. And I'll give you some tips and
advice on how I've started my tomater seats off in another podcast, so make
sure you stay tuned for that one. And also peppers I talked to in
another podcast about the peppers that I purchased. I purchased some red, green,
and yellow normal sized peppers rather than buying the seeds this year because I
thought you get more seeds in a pepper than you do in a packet of
seed, and it's cheaper, so why not just use the seeds from the
peppers. Because I used the seeds from the tomatoes last year, so I'll
try it with peppers this year. And I've scraped them all out and got
hundreds of seeds from each pepper because you know how many seeds they are in
the pepperis loads, so separated them or put more into little bowls. I've
labeled all the balls up which one's red, which one's green, which one's
yellow. So they've all dried out now, so we need to get those
planted next week. That's my duelist. The next week, get my peppers
planted, because pepper plants do need to start off early to get a good
reliable crop. So you do need to start sewing peppers around now and February
time, so start looking around at growing your peppers. And also I've got
some mini peppers, they like baby peppers. They're in Tesco. They were
like a multi pack of red, green and yellow ones. But they're very
small ones. They like chili size, but they're actually peppers. They're not
chillies, so we purchased some of those, and they like orange ones,
yellow ones, and red ones, so I'm looking forward to trying those.
I might get a better crop from them than the actual peppers themselves, because
obviously normal peppers take a long time to grow them big ones, so if
they're small, hopefully we might get a bigger and better crop off them.
So I'm looking forward to them and seeing if we do get a fantastic crop
from these pepper plants. So you'll have to stay tuned for that one as
well. So we're going to be planting those in the next week or so
and getting those planted and we should be well on our way. And I've
got two ammurillases at home as well, a red one and a one,
and they're just about ready to start flowering, and I can't wait for that
to happen. We purchases back in November when they started going on saling the
supermarkets, so I purchased two of those and they're just about flower. They're
getting really tall now as they do, so we'll stay tuned and hopefully,
you never know, in the next week they might start to open up and
we might get some actual flowers. From these Amuros plants. One job that
I do need to start doing though, is starting to look for my potatoes
ready for growing as well, because now is the time start looking at whether
you're chitting on, starting to get the shoots growing on them and get them
ready for growing this year, and seeing what crops that I want to try
and grow. I'm going to grow them in boxes again this year. Last
year I grew in boxes and I had a fantastic crop. And the benefit
with growing them in box is that you're not having to do all the tunnels
from the laying and obviously growing them in boxes, you don't have to dig
them out. You can just empty the boxes out and you won't have any
risk of digging through any of the potatoes, which is a constant thing for
me. I'll end up trying to fork them up and I end up breaking
through a potato and ruining it. So it's a way of saving those potatoes.
You actually get every potato that you harvest, rather than just chopping through
them like I always do. And another thing with growing them in boxes potatoes
rather than in the ground, is that you get every potato out of the
soil, whereas if you grow them in the ground. You could end up
leaving a few in there and they'll grow again next year. And you don't
want to be growing potato in the same spot every year. You need to
rotate them every year in a different area for growing potatoes. So we're growing
them in boxes. You don't have the risk of them popping back through year
after year without forgetting to get them out. And obviously boxes you can just
wash them out, make sure that there's no diseases in them, just disinfect
them, clean them up, and then you can start growing them again.
And if you want an earlier crop, you could start them off in the
polytonel and plant them in a boxing, a polytonnel or in a greenhouse,
start them off a bit earlier and then when the chance of frost has gone
you can take them outside and they'll grow fast so and you'll get an earlier
crop. So that's another little tip for you there. So we've got lots
to do with the lot. But we've done lots, but we've still got
lots to do. Like I said, I've cleared most of I've cleared about
half of my plot. We've got that sorted or I've wood chipped around an
area that I started last year, the top of my plot, which I
had not touched for sixteen seventeen years that I had it. I decided to
give it a tackle the other year and I cleared it all and I made
some beds in it with some bricks. I laid black membrane down for the
past, tidied it all up, fenced it all off, weeded it all,
dug all the big roots out what had been in there for years,
and we got all that nice and tided and we had some wood chip delivered
to our allotments and I managed to claim some and I've wood chipped all around
them beds now and it looks absolutely fantastic. We did have some herbs in
there, but some of those have died off and not taken. So we
need to plant some more herbs next year in these areas and some flowers and
it should look absolutely stunning. It's under a big sycamore tree, which is
not helpful because all the sycamore seeds grow everywhere. But it's like a winter
a woodland area, which is really nice. So I need to look at
types of woodland plants to grow, so I might be growing some alpines and
things around there, so we'll stay tuned on that. I'm gonna pop that
down on my list to start looking at alpines and plans to grow in woodland
areas and hopefully we can get a nice area growing around there. So we've
got plenty to do. Like I said, this year is going to look
absolutely stunning on my plot this year and putting so much time and effort into
it, hopefully it will reap the good rewards from my plot and you will
see the benefits of what I've got up to down at the plot. So
I hope you've enjoyed this episode today. It has been a nice long one.
And yeah, if you've not started following me on these podcasts, do
click that follow button, do click that subscribe button, and you'll get notified
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until next time, remember, keep smiling, keep shining, and keep gardening
with Ben. Everybody, Thank you for listening, And that wraps up another
episode of Gardening with Ben. Thank you for joining me in this journey.
Remember, every seed planted is a step towards a greener world, and every
day is a chance to grow something beautiful. Keep nurturing your gardens and your
souls. Until next time, I'm gardening with Ben, reminding you to let
your garden be your sanctuary. Happy gardening, and see you in the next
episode. Remember keep smiling, keep shining, and keep gardening with Ben.