Category: Gardening Youtube

So, did you know that placing weeds in a bucket of water does something quite incredible? So, weeds are full of nutrients, take this nettle for example. Not only is it a nutritious free form of food for us humans that I much rather eat over spinach, it is also full of potassium, magnesium, calcium, and other important minerals to add to a compost bin. But as growers, we can enjoy the nutrients of weeds in other ways as well to benefit our gardens. One of those techniques is something called chop and chop. So if you follow permaculture, it is quite a popular one. This is where you gather say plant leaves or when you’re clearing things out and instead of putting them on a compost bin, you chop them up and then you put the nutrients directly back around the ground where it was growing. There is another type of chop and drop and it’s called chop move and drop. This is where you’re moving material, plant material from outside the garden. There might be a patch of nettles or dock for example, chopping them up and bringing those nutrients, transporting them into the garden to then mulch and benefit your plants. Not only are you adding nutrients and also creating a protective covering over the soil, it’s going to break down into becoming organic matter, which will both help the soil retain moisture during dry weather, but also when you have really wet weather, allow the excess water to drain nice and freely. Traditionally, when we think of nettles or dandelions or thistles, we think of them as weeds, but they’re not always weeds. The definition of a weed is a plant growing in a place where it shouldn’t be growing. In this case, nettles aren’t a weed. They’re here in nature enjoying well enjoying the space and helping to improve the soil. But in a garden bed, they’re not very welcome because I’m trying to grow annual crops. And the same applies to say you got a few tomato plants that have started sprouting up in one of your beds that shouldn’t be there. Technically, they’re a weed because they shouldn’t be growing there. And you can treat those in the same way whether you put them on the compost bin, for example, or chop and drop. But for the sake of simplicity with chop, move, and drop, you’re going to be moving plants that we traditionally would call weeds, for example, this dock into our garden to benefit it. And the other use of weeds is understanding the magic that happens when you add them into a bucket of water. And this is especially important, say if you’re starting to clear your garden and you’re pulling out weeds, uh some more nettles here, but the these have started uh creating seeds. If I put this onto the compost bin, all I’m going to end up doing when I eventually use that compost is spread nettle seeds all over the garden. I don’t want that. So, putting them in water allows you to utilize the nutrients of a weed, but in a way where you’re not spreading the seeds, and you can apply it in a different form. With weeds, when you soak them in water for a few weeks or a few months, you’re extracting all of their nutrients and goodness, you’re not going to be spreading their seeds around, but you’re also creating a form of nutrients to feed your plants a lot more rapidly in terms of nutrient access than spreading over compost because in liquid form, they can go down to their roots really quickly. There’s a couple of approaches for creating a liquid weed feed which is the magic of placing weeds in water. The first is to do single type recipes. Very simply this is my dock weed fertilizer liquid fertilizer. All I’ve done is I’ve put dock and water in here. Bit of leaf mold. I’ll come on to that after but nothing else. And I just let it soak. The reason why you might want to go around just using a single type is if you’re looking for a specific group of nutrients that you might need or your soil might be lacking. Doc’s really high in potassium, for example. So, this is creating a nice potassium liquid feed that I can use for say my tomatoes next year. The other way of going around making a liquid weed feed is to actually mix a load of different weeds together by creating more of a balanced or a multi-purpose feed. So instead of just making something say out of nettles which has yeah a lot of calcium but also a lot of nitrogen and is great for more kind of leafy growth. If you mix in things like dandelions and thistles, creeping thistle has a good amount of iron, and then you’ve got dock and everything else all mixed together, you’re going to really quickly create a nice multi-purpose plant feed. You don’t really need to know the nooks and crannies of the nutrient quantities of all of these different plants. If you just understand that there’s strength and power in diversity, the same thing applies to creating a nutrient-rich liquid feed for your plants. Mix it up, have a load of things together, and it will really benefit. Just before I show you the recipe of creating this weed feed as well as how to apply it, if you feel that your garden is a bit overrun with weeds or you’re feeling like it’s getting to that stage, I wrote a blog post that I put on my blog over at hughesgarden.com last week about how to clear a garden full of weeds completely organically and then how to maintain a weed-free garden. There’s a link down below. So to go about extracting the amazing nutrients from weeds, what you do need is a bucket or any form of similar container, which obviously needs to be leak proof. Then you need to go around and collect your chosen weeds. Whether you’re just going to put in a load of thistles or you’re going to do a nice mix for more of a multi-purpose feed. Fill up the bucket with the weeds. And then you want to actually add the water on top. just enough water where you’re covering all of the plant material and give it a bit of a stir. Now, at this stage, you could also add a handful of leaf mold from under a nice big deciduous tree. This is a jam inspired technique. So, what you’re doing is you’re grabbing the biology from under the tree and uh you’re adding it to the feed. So you’re creating a bit of a biological feed as well, but it’s also going to help break down and extract the nutrients. Then once you’ve created it, you want to put on a lid very loosely if the container comes with a lid. If not, just put over a slab or say a few planks of wood and leave it for at least 2 weeks up to kind of 2 months before you start using it. So after 2 weeks, you can start using your liquid feed. There’s a couple of ways of going about it. I’ve strained this one just out of ease to show you. You can see the the color there, for example. Now, what you can do is you can use a sie so you can keep all of the plant bits away from the actual watering because what you want to do is you want to water it and if you’re using a watering can, you don’t want to block up the rows with bits of plant material. So, if you want to start using your weed feed after 2 weeks, what you want to do is you want to dilute roughly one parts feed to 10 parts water. There’s a nice dilution ratio. We do this because if you put too strong of a of a plant fertilizer or liquid fertilizer down, it can actually burn and damage the roots. You just want to make sure that it’s suspended in a in a load of water so it’s nice and gentle on the plants. And then you water. Now, if you’ve got something that’s a lot older, maybe it’s five or six months old, anything after that, you then reduce the dilution ratio to around 1 to 50 cuz it’s going to be a lot more potent. Apply this to the plants as just a little bit cautiously. See how they respond and adjust as necessary. But it’s literally as easy as that to create your own free liquid plant feed using weeds to benefit your plants really quickly, to benefit your crops, to grow more food. That is the process. If you’ve got enough buckets, what you can do as you’re starting to extract the liquid once it’s being made is just as the year continues, continue to top up the bucket with the same rough mix of weeds or the same certain type of weed or plant material and a bit more water. So, as you’re taking out the liquid, just keep on topping it up with a little bit extra goodness. So, that means you’re never taking away any of the solids. A lot of that’s going to break down into becoming a liquid, but it means you then have that dedicated bucket that is producing that really beneficial plant feed. If you live in a particularly cold climate, you might want to consider bringing your bucket of weed feed undercover because if they’re going to stay frozen solid for 2 or 3 months, there’s not going to be any breakdown. So, nothing’s really going to be happening. And now’s a great time to harvest those nutrients to break down over winter to give you free plant feed to start using spring next year. So, my channel is full of videos on how to save money and make the most of kind of waste materials and resources. But some of you might not know that I have written three books. My latest book, for example, the vegetable growers handbook, is full of my absolute best tips for gardening. It goes into a lot more detail in terms of creating natural amendments and composting for example and how to grow basically whatever you want to grow. So like one reviewer said this book is like gold dust. You can check it out yourself over at hughgarden.com. And there were also signed copies available there as well. Also the nature of food book written by my colleague Sam using produce from this garden. The photo of a a leak grown in a bed just up there is also available now over at hughesgarden.com. We’re about to ship all of the Indiegogo crowdfunding orders, but if you’re in the UK, you should also through the website be able to get them before Christmas. It’s such a stunning book. You’re going to love it. One read that I haven’t mentioned is grass. Not really fun to have in a raised bed, but if you’ve got a lawn or pathways, grass clippings are amazing for your garden. I’ve made a whole video which you can watch here. It’s been really popular and it’s how to use grass to help you grow more food and it includes a grass-specific liquid feed recipe. So check it out and enjoy.

This plant here is called tree spinach. It is one of the fastest growing and tallest crops that you can grow in your garden. And it means it’s one of the most productive ones. And it has a different name as well, which I’ll reveal a little later on. It has a slight slight secret that you don’t know at first. But tree spinach is amazing and so that’s why I’m making this video about it. Now, as I mentioned, tree spinach is edible. And there are two main ways that you can eat it. Either raw or cooked. When you cook it, cook it down like you would for normal spinach. And it has this really nice asparagus flavor to it. So, it’s a very pleasant flavor. Um, eating it raw is also delicious. You can eat the leaves, you can eat the whole tips, add it into salads. It adds a little bit of color because, as you can see, you have these beautiful magenta tips which look stunning. Now, in terms of raw flavor compared to normal spinach, I think it tastes a little bit more mineraly and it is related to spinach. It’s within the same genus family thing, but it isn’t closely related to spinach. It is within the amaranth family. So, the amaranth family for everyone else. And I asked Chat GPT if this is more nutritionally dense than spinach because it it tastes so with that mineral-y flavor and apparently it is. So I’ll put the chart up so you can see it. And yeah, another reason why to grow it because it is nice and nutritious as well. This isn’t technically a spinach, but is it a tree? Well, obviously not, but it does have, as you can see here, this branching like habit. So the tree just kind of explains the gigantic nature of it and the way that if you do let it grow, it will continue to branch out. And it works really well as a tree, as a structure. But if you do have some open area in the garden, you might want to consider staking it because if there’s some heavy wind, sadly, it will knock it over. So if you are after the height of which it can grow to 2 and a half meters tall or eight foot tall then just consider giving it a stake and no it is not a tree but it’s kind of like a temporary tree. Now, at the start of the video, I mentioned that this plant has another name, okay? Giant spinach or tree spinach. But it is also known as the glitter spinach because if you go up closely and you peer into the top and the base of the leaves, especially when it is sunny, it it shines like it’s got lots of micro bits of glitter. So, you’ve kind of got plastic free glitter growing in your garden. and uh and it looks stunning, especially when you’ve got that sunlight and it really just makes it light up. Um yeah, glitter spinach. So, if you got kids, you could be like, “Hey kids, I want to grow some glitter spinach.” And that might be a way of trying to get them into gardening cuz I think all kids should grow their own and they might as well grow their own edible glitter. Now, those of you who are permaculture gardeners or are trying to grow resilient gardens, so you have more perennials, like here I’ve got ochre growing up around these runner beans. I’ve got ders here. Tree spinach is fantastic because unlike regular spinach, we all know what it’s like. We grow normal spinach and it gets a little bit too hot and dry and it panics and bolts and goes to seed. Well, the amazing thing about tree spinach is that it thrives even when it is really dry and hot. It doesn’t kind of bolt from under seed. It just keeps on growing. So, in terms of having a resilient plant over summer months, this is fantastic. And there’s another core benefit of glitter spinach, which is it isn’t fussy really about soil types. It will grow in the poorest quality soil, which is another major benefit because sometimes when you plant normal spinach in quite poor quality soil, it’s kind of like I’m not very happy. I want to be somewhere else. But glitter spinach, it’s just grateful to grow anywhere and it will grow anywhere. I haven’t planted a single glitter spinach this year because all this is a self-seeded glitter spinach. All of the other ones are. Um, and I will show you why it is sometimes a little bit of a problem because it is so prolific. But it means that once you grow it once, you’ll never have to buy the seeds again. And dealing with it is quite simple. It’s easy to pull out or to hoe off. But just I just noticed as I was speaking, I’ve got a weed here. And this weed looks very similar to this crop. And this weed here is known as goosefoot or lamb’s quarters. Now lamb’s quarter is very much very closely related to glitter spinach. Some botonists think that perhaps tree spinach is more of a domestication or cultivar of this gooseoot. But like goosefoot or like tree spinach both give you edible leaves. So whilst this might be a weed, it is an edible weed that you might want to consider leaving in your garden. And as you can see, it also has a bit of height, but lamb’s quarter, it will never out compete the scope and size of tree spinach. Now, one thing to be aware of, if you do grow this plant, you’re not really going to get rid of it. And that can be a great thing because I get loads of food to eat, but it can also be a bad thing because it might mean that you need to do a little bit more weeding. But here I’ve got celery or cilerak actually growing and this if I don’t deal with this tree spinach, it is going to take over. But you can just quite easily go and pull it up. Even with the size of it, it is very easy to go through and weed. And as I mentioned earlier with permaculture, what is actually a great benefit of it is that you you can weed it and then chop and drop and use it as a mulch around the other plants that are growing. If these got like really tall and I was like, “Okay, there may be a little bit of a beast and out competing the plants growing nearby.” The way I would chop and drop it is get something out some shears and start at the top and just work down so it falls down on the ground and then I will edit its placement around the other plants. So again, it’s providing another function and before this is actually the second batch of selfsewn tree spinach because before I planted the carak there was a ground cover of tree spinach. So, it’s actually protecting the ground, adding that fertility. We then cleared it, planted the cilerak, but there’s still more seeds in the seed soil bank. And uh yeah, it can take over, but I mean, it’s pretty. So, I’d rather that take over than other things. Now, if you want to sew some glitter spinach, all you need to do is find a place, throw down some seeds, break it in, and that’s it. But for all of the selfsewn seedlings like this one, it’s really easy to move about. You just dig it up with as much of the roots as possible and find the spot where you want to plant it and then you place it in. And then the next thing to do is to give it a really good water and it is going to be overly dramatic. It’s going to flop over and you’re going to think, “No, it’s not going to make it.” But then within a day or two, it will come back up and it will keep on growing. Because of this plant, during the growing season, I don’t really bother with growing spinach. I will right at the start and I’ll grow spinach to overwinter in the poly tunnel, but really glitter spinach takes over because I do like a bit of efficiency. And this just grows itself and it’s maybe time for you to consider growing it. But again, just be warned, it will spread. For some people, that’s a good thing. For other people, that’s a bad thing. And whilst you’re deciding whether it’s good or bad, watch this video.