A CLEVER WAY TO FEED THE BIRDS / ALLOTMENT GARDENING UK

[Music] [Applause] [Music] good morning guys welcome back to my lot M Garden Channel today I'm in my back Garden I've got a bit of a festive Christmas themed Vlog for you today which I hope you're going to really enjoy if you're new to my channel my name is Emma I Vlog all about allotment gardening growing my own food growing my own flowers in South London i' love for you to subscribe to my YouTube channel if you're new and you can follow along my journey in the new year as I get ready for spring planting which is a very it's just like the best time of the year it's basically the Christmas time of the year for gardeners so whereas everyone's counting down for Christmas and I do love Christmas us gardeners are always counting down to spring because it is just the busiest most exciting time of the year for us um but today it's all about Christmas this is my beautiful little pottage Christmas tree that I brought from Bean Q about 2 years ago now um and I absolutely love it because the thing about a potted Christmas tree is it lives lives on you can put it in your garden and it just continues to grow if you look after it this was really wonky when we brought it and it was discounted for that reason so what I've done all year got a little bamboo cane in here and I've been propping it up trying to get him to grow upright and straight and actually it's working and this is the first year where he's actually looked like an upright sort of normal Christmas tree normal Christmas tree sorry mate you know what I mean however the downside of having your Christmas tree in a pot outside is that it's probably going to get full of spiders and if you're anything like me and you're absolutely terrified of the little creatures uh probably not a good idea to bring it into the house so he's going to sit in my front garden as a bit of a Christmas decoration display put some little lights on him yeah so he's going to go outside the front of the house and I think he just looks lovely he's got lots of new growth on him as well which is very exciting very exciting right let's get you out [Music] so guys I did promise you a christmy vlog V before Christmas and it just so happens that I have got a lot of christmy things to do today um so I thought I would take you along with me and just get stuck in with it all the first thing I'm going to do is decorate my Christmas table I always do like a Christmasy theme for my table and this year it just so happens the theme is going to be like natural Woodland Garden kind of themed so I really want to keep things proper natural and lots of greenery lots of pine cones lots of berries lots of things from the from the natural world I can kind of bring into the table I love doing a theme for Christmas it's honestly it's something that I just completely live for and I can't get enough of it I love being a little bit creative even if I'm not I'm definitely not the most creative person in the world but I do love giving it a go and that's what Christmas is all about giving it a go so I've got loads and loads of things here in my box I always use to decorate the table um it does kind of change every year so I have different bits in different boxes everywhere but this is every I could find that I've got that's kind of green you know the natural world kind of the natural world kind of theme that we're going for so lots of little Robbins as well look at this isn't that cute little Robin so we're going to have little Einstein on our Christmas table this year which is just lovely um and I also am going to make a couple of things for my table I like to do little favors um I love doing Christmas favors on the table so I've got lots of ideas of my Christmas table and a lot of my inspiration for things not just in the the garden but all things Christmasy this year come from magazines I have talked about the readle app so many times it's just my it's just such a great app to have you get access to thousands and thousands of different magazines or different categories magazines just give you so much inspiration even if you're just looking at the pictures um because they're so picture heavy and and kind of like visually aesthetic they you just get so many lovely ideas from them and honestly I can't get enough of them one of the best things about readle is that you can actually back date magazine additions that maybe you've missed um so for instance if you go to the kitchen Garden Magazine and you go back in time which you can do on the Reedley app you might find a familiar face in there I have written quite a few articles before for kitchen Garden Magazine I haven't done it for a little while I've just been kind of busy with other things but you can go back and read a lot of my articles in kitchen Garden Magazine um and let me know what you think of them maybe I'll try and do some more um for next year or the year after you never know when I was thinking of my table decorations I used the readle app and went through loads and loads of christmy Garden magazines to try and find some inspiration to use on my Christmas table um I did find a fantastic little picture of a wreath that has been made out of herbs they've used Rosemary but I think you could do it using lots of different herbs um and it's just put on the table on the plates and I think it is such a beautiful idea so what I actually did is I bookmarked that page in the magazine and it saved it to my bookmark so I can go back and then have a look at it so I don't lose it and that's another great feature of readle that you can bookmark things so you don't lose anything and I thought that exactly what I'm going to make for my table it's just such a perfect idea and also because you're using real herbs it's going to smell incredible so we're going to make that today for our table as well if you do want to download the readle app um you can follow my link below in the description or my pinned comment or you can scan the QR code which will be on the screen now you'll get a free trial if you sign up using one of my links or the QR code to my link um which is amazing you can try it out for yourself and then report back to me and let me know what you think of the read app because it's really honestly something I've promoted for a very long time I really really love it and I think that you guys will love it too I've got some really really lovely flowers on the table these my mom sent to me this is what my husband brought me the other day these are gorgeous but unfortunately they're not going to go with the theme so they're going to have to move I might be able to use one at some point you never know let's just move them off the table [Music] [Music] right so for these little mini table waths um I'm going to use some Rosemary and I've got a rosemary bush in my garden so I've just cut some of the bits of the Rosemary off but I also went to M&S and I got the Christmas herb selections so this comes with Sage Rosemary and Thyme as well and I thought you could just use lots of different hers actually to make these and I think it look quite quite pretty and I think hopefully as these dry out as well they're sort of dry and smell lovely in time for Christmas I mean it's only a few days till Christmas so I think it would it will work so we're just going to sort of follow the picture and I'm going to use some I don't know if you can see this on camera it's like really thin green wire and that's going to be my wreath shape this is all just guesswork by the way because I've never made this before and it doesn't say in the article how to make it but I do think it is just a matter of making your little shape and then using more wire to just attach these bits [Music] on oh I love it that is so beautiful and you know what it smells absolutely insane it smells gorgeous I absolutely love oh the Bow's falling off again well they don't need to be picked up do they they just need to lie flat on the table but I love them oh my gosh they're so cute let me show you the idea of these little table favors this will be on the table for everybody the first thing we're going to do is I brought this little set it's like a gift it's a gift accessory pack it's from s it's basically just little labels and things for um for your presents so we'll decorate our pot I mean I was thinking of painting these but then I thought no got stabbing myself right oh my God why would you do that to me there we go so we got a little pot like this now inside is where our favor is going to go and I've got these chocolate coins so what I'm going to do let put a little handful of chocolate coins in there got these little bottle brush Christmas trees from Hobbycraft on the top so it looks actually you probably need one less coin sorry kids taking your chocolate away I need to glue that string a little bit a little bit of hot glue and keep that string in place but that it looks like a little little plant a little tree out of a pot how cute is that it do have these little stars that's going to be my little table favors isn't that so cute and the kids will just straight away just like rip this off straight in for the chocolate coins which are hiding in the pot I'm going to set one of the places up um and show you sort of what the finished design will look like um yeah so let's do that [Music] it's kind of my natural green theme it's very green isn't it it green and orange I think um yeah I absolutely love it um so let me know what you think on my little table [Music] display right guys I thought I'd come back out into the garden do a little bit of outdoor activity today we will need some fresh air and the sun's come out and the sky is lovely and blue so while it's blue we need to get outside that's what I always say um you might remember a few Vlogs back when I did another Garden Vlog I sewed some sweet peas and I was going to overwinter them well this is what they're looking like now not too bad some of them are germinated a lot better than others obviously this really long one here is doing really well but they they've done pretty good you know yeah I'm really happy with these so we're going to sew some more today so obviously you can see I've sewn them into toilet rolls um which is just a great little hack because the toilet roll it actually sort of disintegrates um so I won't do it too much but you can see it's just coming apart like that so I can plant the entire toilet roll into the ground and The Roots will come through it but look at the roots coming at the bottom absolutely incredible they've been so happy in these little toilet rolls so what we're going to do is we're going to add more toilet rolls to this and really pack it out luckily I've been collecting them so I've got absolutely hundred hundred so we're just going to fill in all the gaps and really squish them together and that's going to keep all the soil in them this time cuz last time found it quite hard to fill them all up in you go right I've actually got the perfect amount here that's amazing right and then what we'll do is we'll just fill it up with some compost this is just multi-purpose compost we're going to put the compost everywhere so they're going to go into the toilet rolls but they're also going to go outside cuz obviously the roots are growing outside of the toilet rolls so I think might be a good idea just to fill the whole [Applause] thing right so you can see this time I've really compared CED them in and I've let the soil fall around them as well which means they're really stuck in there they're not going to fall over which I think is really good I think that's where I went wrong last time I didn't have enough toilet rolls and I didn't come pack them in enough so these are the sweet peas that I've chosen they're from Thompson and Morgan they're called Robert I don't know how to pronounce that uale Robert uale idale these are the ones they're um bright pink obviously you can see from the picture and they have a really beautiful fragrance and don't forget that not Sweet Pea smell so if you're looking for that beautiful sweet pea scent which um is just like in my opinion it's the best flower smell ever um then make sure that you choose a variety that has a fragrance and it will just tell you on the seed packet so if you choose your packet that you like so if you pick up the seed packet make sure you just check that it's actually got a fragrance and then you'll get that lovely smell otherwise they won't smell which would be a shame really so technically you should be sewing these sort of around October November time it's now December I think we're going to get away with it I think we'll get away with it I think the weather is okay and I've got my little outdoor Greenhouse there to uh keep them in so we're going to do one seed per one or two depends how many seeds I've got yeah I'm going to have enough for two in some of them and then we'll put another one next to him another quick tip is you can soak these seeds overnight in warm water and I think it helps speed germination up a little bit but I've not done that I've not done that I'm just going to go for it hopefully we'll have some really nice strong sweet peas to plant out in the springtime that would be [Music] lovely so last weekend we were supposed to go to R Wizzle to see their glow Christmas event so it's lots of Christmas lights they light up the whole garden um there's like a fountain light display with lots of music and stuff and a little Christmas Market there unfortunately last weekend it got cancelled because of a storm so they had to move our tickets to the following weekend so it was a little bit of a delay but actually we got so lucky with the weather and it was just beautiful there and not even that cold to be honest so I've got lots of footage from the rhs wizzly glow event so if you haven't been or you're interested in seeing what it's like or you just want to see some nice Christmas lights this next bit of the Vlog is definitely going to be for you I didn't do any talking there just because it was quite windy it was quite busy there was a lot going on I was trying to kind of take it all in myself as well cuz I loved it what I will say is it was £68 for the four of us to get in I am not an rhs member but it is cheaper if you are a member I would say it's worth it it was absolutely fantastic the walk itself took us about just over an hour to walk around so it was definitely well worth the money the kids loved it the Christmas Market was gorgeous they also have a garden center there with like a massive Christmas um section which was again stunning uh lots of food there and stuff and lots of things to drink some mold wine hot chocolate it was just magical and fantastic and well worth going to so enjoy rhs wizzly [Music] [Applause] [Music] all [Music] oh [Music] you [Music]