A TOUR OF MY LONDON VICTORIAN TERRACE GARDEN

Good morning everyone, welcome back to my allotment diaries. My name is Emma, these are my allotment diaries, I'd love for you to subscribe to my channel. For those of you who don't know, I have been unwell with coronavirus for the past week and a half I think, it's actually been quite a long, it feels a lot longer than it has been because it's just been such a nasty debilitating illness to be honest. I am starting to feel better now, so today is Tuesday, I'm on day nine of coronavirus and I'm just starting to feel like I'm coming on to like the upside of it and you can probably still hear that my throat is a little bit sore and I'm probably going to be coughing throughout this video but on the whole I am feeling a lot better. I just want to say thank you, thank you to all of your lovely comments on here, on Instagram, on Facebook, wishing me well, I am feeling much better so thank you. It's actually been really nice because the weather has actually just been amazing while I've been sick and for the first few days it didn't matter because I was bed bound pretty much with a high fever but once that went the the sky has just been blue and it's not cold, it's just not cold at all and it's so funny because today's the first day of February and it feels more spring-like than I think the whole of spring last year felt to be honest. It's been really nice just to be able to come out into my own back garden and I feel so grateful and thankful that I have at least this outdoor space where I could actually come out and just take a breath and get some sunlight and be surrounded with grass, I mean that's pretty much all that's growing right now is grass, but it's green and it just feels so good. I thought today I would do a little tour of my garden because I haven't shown you what my garden's been up to for a little while and now it's going into February, things are starting to happen out here and I'm also going to sow a few little seeds, a few little cheeky seeds, first of Feb why not, why not, but right now I'm going to sit here and enjoy my cup of tea because it is just beautiful. So my garden hasn't changed too much recently actually, it's not that different because obviously it's been the winter time but I will show you a few ideas I've got for this year and how things are doing in the winter right now. So just behind me here this is our seating area, so it's looking a bit messy because we just sort of use this as a bit of a dumping ground in the winter, we don't come out in the garden much at winter which is a shame really, but these are just made from pallets and I'll put some cushions on them over the summertime and then all my pots here, I've got tulips and daffodils and things in them which are starting to come up now. This is salad leaf and this one here is mizuna. I've never sown a salad leaf or mizuna or anything like that and I've never sown things in the autumn time to leave outside over the winter except for like bulbs, so this has been a real experiment and I cannot believe just how amazing, amazing it's done, it's so lush and it's so green you can see it from like in the house just looking out the window and it's just amazing that things will actually grow like over the winter when we had all that frost and cold and rain and everything. I've done nothing to it and this is the salad leaf, it tastes so good, it's so fresh, excuse the siren, if it's not birds it's sirens, it just tastes so fresh and so lovely and yeah really easy just to have at the back of your garden just to pick and sprinkle on a sandwich or something so it's brilliant. Mizuna is also doing well but I've never, I haven't tried that yet, apparently it's better to throw it into a stir fry and cook it and it's quite peppery but like rocket so I'm sure I'll like it but I've not tried it yet. The pathway here which was quite a cheap make really, we just put down some ground sheets and put some stones on it, it needs a little bit of a tidy up, I think it could probably do with a couple more bags of stones because my kids love digging in here and pretending that this is treasure and they'll just like scoop it up and then run around the garden with it so I need a few more bags I think just to fill it up and then over here this is where I've got my tree, this is what I call the tree bed because I put in this beautiful prunus which flowers really lovely in the springtime and has beautiful green leaves in the summer. You might be able to see it's starting to get all its little buds to have its little pink flowers with blossom coming on and the whole tree just fills with blossom, it's such a beautiful, beautiful tree and it's so happy where I put it, it's like so happy, so happy in fact that it wants to spread its branches out but unfortunately there's a wall in the way there mate so you're gonna have to sort of rein it in a little bit. This is a rudbeckia, my mum gave me this before she moved house and I didn't cut it back over the winter because I actually thought it was quite pretty, it's quite an ornamental little flower head so you can see there's a few more things in here that I've not bothered to cut back over the winter, I don't really believe in cutting things back too much and I have actually heard that insects actually do quite like it when you don't cut everything back because it gives them somewhere to hide and shelter in over the winter so that's my excuse anyway. But like for example you might be able to see in this little dahlia here that I haven't cut back, that's hollow, it could very well be nesting insects and things in there who have overwintered so there you go. So over here in front of the yellow shed, the bright yellow bumblebee colour shed, I've got my planter which Dave and I built last year and I've got a video on that which I'll link below if you want to see how we built this planter ourselves for a fraction of the cost of what it actually would cost you to buy one because they're really expensive. And this plant here and I don't know what this is and if you do know what this plant is please leave the name below because I've lost it, but it is doing, it's so happy and I have heard that they do flower but they only flower every so often, every so many years or something they flower but I have seen one flower and it's beautiful, it sends up a really long stem and then it has like beautiful coloured flowers, don't know what colour these ones will be but there we go. It's taking over the bed because it's a monster, I might have to move it this year somewhere else but in here I planted lots of bulbs, you can see some of them starting to come up so the idea was that this whole bed would be full of like tulips and daffodils and things, there's another one coming up down there, hello sleepy. So all of the planters and all of the pots that you see up here have all been planted with tulip bulbs and daffodils so hopefully it'll be quite a beautiful display in the springtime or whenever they bother to wake up I've got this lovely archway here and this year I'm going to grow some sweepy flowers up it, last year I tried to grow nasturtiums up it and they didn't really work because they don't really like to climb now I'll show you something that I'm doing on the lawn just down here so we have this great big rectangle lawn so I've started to cut into my lawn and cut these little semicircles, I've got one as well just over there and it's just to add some more bedding room so I've got some room for more plants basically which will go around here hopefully I'll be able to cut a little bit into here as well at some point. Now this little area down here because we're a Victorian terrace we have this little corridor kind of area and this year this is my project basically this is my garden project this year so I'm going to turn it into a little vegetable kitchen garden kind of patch because my kitchen is just here behind you so it'd be great just be able to pop out here and just pick a few things and then cook with them in the kitchen so it's not a very big space I think I measured it I think it's about four meters by about a meter and a half of actual room to grow but obviously I've got a lot of fence room and a lot of wall room so I will be able to grow things sort of vertically and up I've been collecting some pallets and things and I have this trellis on the wall here and I've got a few window sills as well I think I can make something really beautiful down here and really productive as well I'm certainly going to give it a go anyway because that's just what I do I'm going to put loads of things loads of window boxes and things all along the fence and stuff and just see how much produce that I can actually grow at home which I should have done last year before I got coronavirus and I wasn't allowed to go to my allotment plot to be honest but hindsight eh it's a wonderful thing I've been sorting out my little greenhouse behind me I picked this up last year from Wilko's for about or 25 pounds I think and I've weighed it down with some bricks and things and I've been using it I used it last summer as a bit of an outdoor greenhouse area just more like a cold frame because it doesn't really get very warm in there at the moment I've just got a few all-year cauliflowers growing you can see the middle one's been a bit munched on and then at the bottom down here I've been sorting out all of my pots and growing things ready for this year I've got lots of coffee pots which I plan on growing in as well I'm caving I'm gonna I'm gonna sow a few seeds not too many because obviously it's the first of February so let's not go crazy people um I am going to throw in a few sweet peas because I'm desperate for sweet peas here and on my plot this year and I've got limited room inside so I need to get sowing them now basically so I can move them out into my cold frame and I've also brought some snap dragons and the um the actual name is anterinum magis tetra mixed I think that's how you say it an anterium anterinum anyway that's what I'm sowing I'm gonna sow these in little coffee pots that I was collecting over the Christmas um and I'm gonna put some holes in the bottom for drainage I'm not gonna forget I'm just gonna use a pen like this the thing about these coffee cups as well is because they're large ones because Dave always gets a large when he goes to the coffee shop I always get a small um they're quite long and so the roots are going to be able to really dig down deep um and it's going to be really great for planting out I think if this works obviously I've got the drainage holes on it but um I will let you know also I have to say I feel so much better just for being outside for a few hours today like it's just amazing what a bit of fresh air and a bit of sunshine and stuff can do like I'm not saying that that's the cure because it's not the cure but it definitely does make you feel better when you're when you do manage to get outside in the sunshine if you're ill if you're not ill even if you're well I think it makes you feel better just to get outside for a bit and do do a job with your hands and get a bit muddy so for my snap dragons because the seeds are so tiny teeny teeny tiny seeds I have a feeling they're going to need pricking out when they get bigger so I'm going to use a seed tray for those exactly the same concept so this is this is so broken look how old this is see I just I like to reuse plastic as many times as I can um and hopefully this one will will last at least one more year hopefully for the snap dragons at least I have no idea where those seeds went they were so teeny tiny I couldn't even tell you if they landed in the tray so there we go I hope that hopefully they will become sweet peas and they will go up my archway and also I've got an archway at the allotment plot which hopefully they'll go up there as well if they germinate they're going to sit on my windowsill and I'll let you know how they get on you can follow me over on instagram I'll be posting lots of updates about my seeds as I get them started but don't worry it's far too early really I'm just doing it because I'm so bored at home and I'm just desperate to get back to my allotment plot um hopefully next time I will have a vlog for you from my allotment plot uh stay tuned for then and I hope you're all well and thank you again for all of your well wishes um as you can hear my throat is I'm just completely losing my voice again um so I'm going to go in and have another cup of tea I hope you enjoyed the vlog today and I will see you next time bye