Hello, and welcome to Gardening with Ben. You'll go to a podcast for
all things green and growing. I'm Ben, your allotment guide and here to
help you cultivate your garden and your passion for plants. Whether you're a seasoned
gardener or just starting out, this podcast is for you. Each episode will
dig into tips, tricks, and techniques to make your garden and allotment thrive
from planting, sewing, and growing. We will share all the tips and
add advice. We will also have regular episodes talking about what we have been
up to on the allotment. So sit back, grab a brew and enjoy
today's episode. Hey everyone, and welcome back to Gardening with Ben for a
brand new episode. Yes, it's been quite a while since our last episode.
I've had a bit of a rest. Sometimes it can be a bit
overwhelming according so many episodes at once, but we've had a little rest.
And yeah, we've been pretty busy down at our allotment for the last few
days. While we're being off work. It's been absolutely gorgeous. Whether the
last couple of days we've had a bit of rain, but not much,
but yeah, we've had absolutely glorious sunshine, which always means that we need
to do lots of water in and get it, keep it hydrated, and
keep everything growing as well as the weeds. The weeds certainly love the sunshine
and the water. But yeah, the produce is coming along fantastic now and
I'm going to be sharing some pictures of what I've been harvesting. I've harvested
all the rest of my potatoes today and they look absolutely beautiful. They look
absolutely delicious. I can't wait to try them in the air fire tonight and
have some chippies fresh from the allotment. It is lovely when you like harvest
it that day then eat them that night, and the freshness of how well
they taste, it's absolutely phenomenal and you can't beat it. You can't beat
the fresh produce from the same day's harvest. And we've also harvested some runner
beans which look absolutely gorgeous. I need to learn how to cook runner beans.
I've never cooked runner beans before. I'm learning more and more stuff every
single day. And we've also harvested some they're like purple French beans, by
the lots of it, purple or black French beans, and they look interesting.
What they'll taste like, I don't know, but we'll have to again
learn how to cook them and taste them. You probably think, well,
it's easy to cook the you just don't shove them in a pan. But
yet I'm no cook and every day is a learning day for me when it
comes to cooking. Give me a garden in any day. Man, You'm
not a perfect gardener either, so so yeah, we'll give them a try
and see how well they come out. So we'll keep your posted on them.
So what else have we been up to down at the allotment. What
We've been doing a lot of clearing some of my beds, what we're growing
as some of the beds I finished harvesting, like my lettuce. My lettuce
had gone, it had had enough now, it had got to the time
when it's passed its cell by day. So we dug all that up shoved
in as compost heap. We also dug over our pea beds what I've had
all my peasing. So that were three of the beds ready for my late
crop. What I'm going a plant. I've got some kell done wonder peased
plan. They're currently just shooting through in the seed trays in my shed at
the moment, so in the next week or two we'll probably be planting those
out, so stay tuned for that. We've also got some more runner beans
to plant out. I've planted a lake crop of runner beans as well.
We've already obviously got runner beans growing, but I've planted a lake crop as
well, so they should be coming along pretty fine as well. They're all
popping through in the seed tray, so we'll be planting those out as well
soon. And obviously, as you know, runner beans do grow fast.
Once they start growing, they'll speed speed up, speed up the canes,
and up the netting, so we'll soon be having runner beans off them.
And obviously runner beans you can harvest all the way up to October, possibly
November, depending on the weather situation. When we get the first frost,
that will be when they kill them off, so we can be harvesting absolute
alerts. So we do need to learn how to cook runner beans if we're
going to be harvesting lots of them coming up. We've also been busy just
like tidying up and doing a bit of pruning and tidying up some of my
roses and tidying up some of our borders. What I've got growing, and
yeah, just doing the general maintenance as well. And it's because obviously I
do watch videos and everything all the time for tips and advice as I'm always
learning as well. And one video that I watched this week was Alan tich
Marsh talking about pruning roses back while deadheading roses back, and basically it's a
climbing rose that he was doing, and climbing roses tend to have like three
or four flowers per stalk growing on them, and what he said is that
rather than deadhead and just chop off where the rosebud was, you need to
go back to the stalk to where it's about pencil thick. So you can
end up chopping off up to a foot off the rose, basically off the
rose branch, as he said that it gives the rose more momentum to bush
out and all to provide more blooms on the roses, and it makes it
better. Rather than just pruning off the flower head, you need to go
back about a foot to where it's a pencil thick on the stalk. So
I've learned something new this week, and I do love sharing tips that I've
learned from other people. As sharing helps everybody, so hopefully we'll get more
and more rose blooms. So I'm going to go around next time i'm off
and do as he says and pruning them back to about a pencil thick from
where the flowers have ended. So hopefully, fingers crossed it comes back better.
If not, I'm blaming Alan chich Marsh. But yeah, I saw
that video this week and I thought i'd share it with you what I've learned.
So I've done that, and obviously we've been watering and watering and watering
absolutely low to watering. And I've also had a bit of a tide up
in my shed. I don't usually do it till the winter time, but
it was raining one day last week and I thought I'm going to start tidying
it up. And I have a lot of trouble with bind weed on my
plot, and however much I try, I'll never get rid of it,
not unless there's a miracle and it just disappears overnight. But I don't think
that. But yeah, I have bind weed growing everywhere, and it grows
all inside my shed as obviously I don't do much digging in there. It's
all black member and at bottom, so I can't get all the roots out
and everything like that unless I had to take all the flooring and do that,
but I'm not exactly going to do that. So we've been clearing out
a lot of our bind weed from the shed, which is a job in
itself, but it's certainly looking a lot better, and hopefully it'll be a
job that I don't have to spend all winter doing tidy and all my shed
up. So I'm going to try and do a bit each week and get
it all ship shape, and hopefully this winter I might actually give it a
lick of paint, because last year I obviously spent all the time rebuilding it
all and getting it back to how it should look and revamping it all and
putting all new shelving up everything like that. We spent all winter doing that.
That was one of my biggest jobs that I've done for a long time
down at the allotment, so we spent all winter doing that. So hopefully
this winter I may actually give it a lick of paint and tig it up
and make it look more attractive on the inside, and we may look at
that bind weeding the floor in. Eventually it's not top of my priority,
but it is a priority to get it sorted, so we'll keep an eye
on that and see if we get to do that. But yeah, I've
also obviously been filming some YouTube videos as well as I've not posted any YouTube
videos for a while, and they'll be available on my YouTube channel. If
you've not checked it out, go and check it out. It's called Gardening
with Ben. They'll be popping on for the next few days. We've done
an allotment tour video today so you can have a look around my plot,
see what's growing, what's not growing, have a look how it's all coming
along. And yeah, just sharing how things are getting on down at the
atment so that you can all have a nosy around and see what I'm actually
talking about. And you can also see all the seeds what I've got growing
down there as well and how well they're all coming on for July. And
one of my videos is recently, what I posted about ten days ago is
doing absolutely fantastic. It's getting loads of views. That's talking about all the
seeds that you can plant in July. So I'm going to do another video
at the beginning of August talking about all the seeds that you can sew and
grow in August. So we're going to do that each month I think now
as obviously that is a topic what people do like to see and see what's
growing and what you can still go down at the allotment and in the garden
in August, so we're going to do that each and every month for your
all to watch. So yeah, we have been very busy down at the
Allotment. I don't think there's anything else to report back on, but yeah,
have a look at that videos and check them out. And obviously if
you're not following my Instagram account, give that a followers well, because that's
why I share all my photos. Again, that's called Gardening with Ben.
And hopefully we'll get some more podcasts recorded for you all to listen to.
But we're back at work tomorrow, so we'll be very busy again. But
I hope that you've not missed me too much. And if you've not subscribed
to this podcast channel, please do subscribe to it. Like it. You
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next time, remember, keep smiling, keep shining, and keep gardening with
Ben. Everyone, thank you for joining me on this episode of Gardening with
Ben. I hope you have found some useful tips and instegration for your own
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