#ad AUTUMN GARDEN CLEAN UP / ALLOTMENT GARDENING FOR BEGINNERS

Good morning everyone, welcome back to my allotment gardening channel. My name is Emma, this is my gardening channel and you join me today in my back garden. It is... oh my gosh Ozzy what are you doing? Huh? Where are you off to? As you can see I'm interrupted here by cats just as I am at the allotment plot as well. They're drawn to me you see, they're drawn to me. Oh where's he gone? Never mind. It is just that time of year where the garden just needs a really good tidy and a really good clear up for autumn time which is exactly what I'm going to be getting on with today. It's quite nice to get out here, it's been really beautiful weather here in London so it's a really good time just to get out and do some cleaning. The first job on my list is to clean up this little seating area at the back here. So you can see it's not in the best condition right now, we've been using it all summer. I get a lot of questions about this. This is just all made from free pallets. When we moved to our house we couldn't afford to buy a massive expensive seating area so we picked up these pallets free from local DIY stores and things and we painted them, we stacked them up, we need to get some cushions for them, we've made a table. You can see here we just stacked a couple up to make a table but obviously it's in a little bit of bad condition so it needs a little bit of cleaning I think and I've got just the thing. I know what you're thinking, what is that? Well this is actually a product from Vivo and it is their auto pressure sprayer which basically is a fancy way of saying it sprays out water or whatever liquid you put in it really really hard and a lot of these products you actually have to plug in. This one you don't, it's all just you can just take it anywhere with you so it's great for me because obviously I've got a long garden and the wire doesn't stretch and also if I want to clean off my shed or something like that I can. How does it work? Well you and me both need to know this. So it's actually not as complicated as I seemed to first think it was. So this is our contraption right we've got this on it here so you can hold it around yourself this is our actual where the water goes in and stuff this thing here this is our spray gun like that okay this is the bit that we need to know about for putting everything in so what we do to just undo that like that get our water put our water in and then we basically just need to add our own pressure to it so that it squirts out water really really fast and to do that we just pop it she says I feel like it's gonna explode. Why is it releasing gas while you're doing nothing? Why is it going down? Is this thing got anything to do with it? Oh right the whole pump comes out that's the seal okay right yeah I'm gonna try this again. It's supposed to be up by that yeah it's supposed to screw it in yeah so the seal pushes down yeah that's when you're when you're pumping it's not letting out air yeah yeah gotcha. See sometimes it takes me a little bit of time to figure out how to use these products that doesn't mean that it's a bad product or anything it just means that I'm a bit dumb and I can't always work them. That took us about five minutes between us to figure out how to do it and now is the moment of truth I'm going to use it on my pallet furniture and see how well it cleans. You can actually twist this nozzle at the front and get a different jet of water so you've got the classic one you can twist it and get more of a localized kind of jet like that. So Viva's slogan is tough tools and equipment pay less they are offering 30 days free return on their product 12 months warranty and shipping in 24 hours. So when you run out of water and you need to refill it you just pull on this and it releases all the excess air so it's all safe. Right what we'll do is we'll fill it up again and I'll show you that even little old me can figure out how to work this thing. I'll just put it on really tight right out comes that bit there right in goes our water in goes our pump really tighten it so there's no air gaps okay so if you are looking to get your hands on one of these pressure washers by Viva I will leave the link below and I've got a discount code for you to use as well for some lovely money off the whole thing probably needs a bit of a repaint and re-sanding and everything like that but I'm really pleased with the way it's all come up and some of those really tough stains have really come out as well without with minimal effort very happy. Right seating area at the back cleaned I like to get that done in the autumn time because I think it's just one of those jobs that it's just perfect for autumn because it can stay wet for ages and yeah very nice I might cover it this year actually what do you think should I put a big ground sheet over the whole thing I think that might be a good idea actually just see my bunting's fallen down it's been eaten by my nasturtium plant this is the bunting I had up all summer and it looks like my plant has eaten it my goodness all right let's get this back up you know he's broken my bunting don't you squirrel he's eaten it I've seen him he runs across it and he's bitten it and broken it little bugger one of the great things about gardening at this time of year is that the soil is really really like moist and not together so weeds are really easy to pull out I think because we have quite a lot of rain and also the temperature's cooling down so the ground is just kind of moving a bit and I don't know like it's just it's just easier just to pull weeds out so I just find this a great time of year just to get all your beds all your beds weeded and then if you can mulch them with something this bed has got particularly weedy and I could see here I've got a little rose which has just been covered up with them with weeds but I'm getting this this sort of weed here I don't know what this is but it is sort of like a ground cover weed which is great because I like the ground being fertile and having a lot of nutrients put into it and weeds do do that but you can see that there is quite a lot of it and it's not looking too neat and I appreciate gardening's not all about being neat all the time but at the same time I don't want loads of weeds everywhere because it doesn't look nice does it doesn't look nice come on weeds out you come you've had your fun right there's a couple of jobs off my list so I think what we'll do is call it a day there and we'll come back tomorrow and see what else we can get on with so I'll see you then hi again everyone it's the next day oh my goodness it's such beautiful weather here in the UK it's so warm outside I can't believe my luck um so yesterday we weeded that bed and we sorted out the pallet furniture there and cleaned it all up well today I want to top up my path this is my little kind of makeshift pathway that I made you can see I've just got some weed membrane underneath it which I just put down put these little um these are actually fence posts either side um and then I've just filled it with stones but it needs filling up again because my kids like to play with it all so like I said before I just find autumn a really good time of year just to top things up and make things you know just get them all in order really before the spring comes around again and also because it looks nice in the autumn too don't dismiss autumn as like a dead season it's really nice to have a nice garden in the autumn so that on days like this where it's beautiful out you can actually enjoy the garden so autumn's the season to enjoy too let's make sure this weed membrane is jammed there we are that's about three bags of gravel which is three for 12 pounds I know it's a smaller gravel but I actually really really like it um I think it's just a great material for making little pathways out of if you don't want to spend a fortune and if you've got a bit of a wonky garden like ours you don't have to worry about flattening the ground properly because obviously the little stones are very very forgiving and it makes a lovely crunch when you walk on it and I just love it it's like delicious that's how I describe it just delicious right this whole back of the garden now isn't looking too bad and I've got some pots on the floor and stuff to move but it's supposed to be a bit shabby around the edges it is autumn time I'm trying to be a little bit less worried about the detail the detail being things looking perfect and more focused on kind of the necessities and the things that actually need to get done this year and one of the things that needs to get done is that I mulch my pots up because I planted my spring bulbs in most of these pots down here and I haven't topped it up with a new compost and it's really important to keep topping up your pots if you grow anything in pots because obviously it's in a small container and very quickly it loses all of its nutrients and goodness so I've gone with this compost this time which is miracle grow peat free premium all-purpose compost it's supposed to be quite good rooted in science all looks very professional the thing is is since you know we can't use peat anymore and peat is such an incredible material for growing in it is honestly the best growing material and my first year at the plot I used all peat compost not knowing anything about peat being bad or anything poor old peat it gets a lot of blame but yeah but I haven't been able to find a good alternative yet and I use the b&q stuff but I think I'm going to switch to miracle grow for a bit and just see how it goes really so I'm going to top up some of my pots down here maybe a few at the back with some peat free compost right I'm going to show you something that I actually brought this morning at the garden center that I've wanted for a long time but never actually brought and it's these it's the chrysanthemums I got um three different colors I got the dark fuchsia pink the light pink here or kind of purpley pink I guess and then I got the golden yellow one as well and I've never brought these before but they um they tempted me this year I couldn't help myself I thought they would be quite nice in my little courtyard garden just while things aren't growing really because you know it's autumn winter and I thought what I'd do is I'd put them in a couple of pots and I put them up here on this windowsill so when I'm doing the washing up and stuff I can just see flowers basically or I might leave them in their pots and just literally put them on there what do you think do people usually plant them again I don't know I think I might just put them on there and move the herbs oh my god you know that killer spider that got away oh my god I don't know where it was it's there why is he there oh for god's sake he's under there somewhere I know he is oh my god the only thing I can think to do is to spray him with this I could spray him with this thing found another use for it guys spider removal just blow him away I don't have to kill him or anything that is a great spider remover I know it's not what it's for but that's awesome that is all right sorry random snails and stuff oh my god sorry we're gonna have to just move maybe just walk past and laugh at me taking pictures of my chrysanthemums but hey ho there we go that's just what I'm like I think they look nice I'll probably move them 100 times but I'm happy with them the last thing I wanted to get done today as part of my autumn garden cleanup thing is actually just so my sweet peas because I forgot to do it the other week and you can sow sweet peas now in autumn winter and overwinter them and basically what happens is it makes them quite strong so when they go out because they are tough old plants they're not actually as weak as people think so they can tolerate a little bit of cold I'm going to overwinter them in my greenhouse and hopefully it will strengthen them up a bit when I come to plant them out in springtime they will be nice and strong and happy and hopefully not just die like my ones did this year they just literally just snuffed it straight away I'm just filling these little pots they got quite deep roots and if I'm going to leave them all autumn winter I want them to be in their own little pots and then we're going to whack them in so sweet peas that I am sowing are these ones which are the giant waved varieties they're all different colours they're quite big and really good for picking because they get quite long stems and they are scented do check if your sweet peas are scented because not all of them are and they are the most delicious smelling flowers so here's what we're going to do like it's really crazy we're just literally going to just put a hole in oh god not if you drop them all though right this is the sweet pea seeds put one in like that close them up happy to go give them more water I'm just putting one seed in each because I'm being really optimistic here I think they'll grow to be honest I have faith in my seeds you see but you could you could if you if you want to do it properly you could put two in and then pull the one that is weaker out but I don't like to waste my seeds like that I just like to you know have a bit of faith in them give them all a little dribble of water there you go there you go you're welcome you're welcome you're welcome you're welcome you're welcome I'll give you a bit more later mate right that's it how's he got up there so bleeding fast you're a speedy snail you are right I do hope you enjoyed my little vlog today my little garden garden jobs to be getting on with don't forget to check out that pressure washer it's just down there I've also it's just down there um I've got a discount code as well in the description if you fancy one that's not electrical or anything I think it's a good little nifty thing to have um but yeah I'll leave the link below do go and check it out and check out that discount as well I will see you again in my next vlog if you enjoyed this one do subscribe to my youtube channel and I'm going to be doing a Q&A soon as well so if you do have any questions for me just leave them below in the comments and I will answer them in my next video and I'll see you again next time see you next time guys thanks for watching bye