A WEEK IN MY SMALL LONDON GARDEN / COOKING AND PLANTING

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to my gardening diaries. My name is Emma and I do a weekly gardening diary. What I got up to in my week in my home garden here in London. First time filming on my new camera, so hopefully it goes okay. It's quite noisy day today, so I don't know how the sun's picking up. Hopefully it's all good. The sun is out, there's blue skies, it is a little bit windy. Um, but it's still feeling quite warm, so it's a good day to get out and do some gardening, I think. Haven't got many sort of set plans this week for the garden, but I kind of like weeks like that cuz it's a little bit more spontaneous. I can kind of pick and choose the jobs that I feel like doing at the time. I think I'll be doing lots of work on my pots, um, some work on the borders, maybe some more planting and things. So, we'll just see what happens really. If you're enjoying these gardening vlogs, please subscribe to my channel. I put up a gardening vlog every Sunday and then three a lotment vlogs every single week. So, if you're enjoying that content, please do subscribe so you don't miss any of my videos. Let's have a little look around the garden. Got lots of pots this year that I'm growing into. I don't normally grow into pots. I'm not much of a pot grower, but this year I'm really giving it a go. The two sunflowers are doing really well in the pots, which is excellent. I've got lots of pansies and some uh rosemary here. In this pot at the back here is a rose, a rose bush, and I don't think it's very happy in a pot, so I might need to move that at some point. Got lots more pots over on this side as well. And these pots are all doing really, really well. Looking really healthy and happy. All the lovely flowers. The sweet peas are growing on my little soup sweet pea structure. Some of them aren't looking too healthy, but most of them are. So, I'm happy with them. This bed under the tree here, this is a prunis. No, it's not. Is it a prunis? Yes, it is. It's a prunis adelide or accolade. Adelaide or accolade, something like that. It's absolutely beautiful tree. And then I've got all these plants around underneath. It's looking a bit bare now cuz I pulled up all the forget me knots. So, we need to fill the spaces a little bit. Actually, all the borders are looking a little bit more bare because I did pull up all of the forget me knots and there was a lot in that border over there. But you know what? It's starting to fill out a little bit now. The dia will get nice and big. This rose will get nice and big. Hopefully the cosmos will as well. So, it should start to fill out soon. I've got a little raised planter here that I made about 3 years ago with my husband and it's still going strong. Got lots of plants in here. But what's most exciting is that the ders are doing fantastic in here. So I've got three. This is one. This is two. Did I just snap that? I've just snapped that bit. Oh my god. Right. Okay. Note to self. Stop touching the plants. I cannot believe I just showed you that daily and then snapped it. Got a lovely little array of flowers going on here. The cosmos that I planted last week is still alive. It's all doing really well. And these here that I said were deraniums are actually pelagoniums, you guys said, which are not very hardy. And actually, they are an annual, but I could take cutings from these later in the summer apparently. And actually, they'll be really nice for now. And I do like peloniums. Peloniums. Pelog. Yeah, pelgoniums. I do really like them. I think they'll be really pretty. So, I'll be taking some cutings later on. This down here is my little vegetable patch. Um, little veg, what's it called? Veg planter. Um, I've got some perpetual spinach here. I've got a corette and it's got a little bit of powdery mildew on which is a bit annoying. But I might just take these infected leaves off and hope for the best. Got a bit of sweet corn there and then some radishes. What I'll do is I'll just snip these infected leaves off and hope for the best. There we go. Cuz the plant's small enough to recover from that. So, I hope all the other leaves look absolutely fine. Right in this pot here, I think these are called oxide daisies, which are absolutely beautiful. But there's also a blueberry plant in here, a big blueberry bush, and it's always doing so, so well, but I've never given it ericacious soil. Sorry guys, the light in my garden is so I told you this before. It's like either bright sunshine or really dark shade. It's just no in between. I've never given it an ericacious feed before. And what blueberries like is acidic soil. Um they just perform so much better and they're so much happier with acidic soil. So I've got some ericacious soil here and what I'm going to do is just mulch it with it. So we'll give it a weed and then we'll give it a mulch. Also try not to disturb the bees in it. There's a lot of bees in here all the time cuz they love it. There a few weeds in here. So then this pot here has got this beautiful little rose in it. And I don't think the rose is happy cuz it's not got any bigger in the last 2 years. And I don't think it wants to be in a pot. It also probably doesn't help that we've got all of the green fly over it as well. So, it needs some real TLC. What I want to do is take it out the pot and plant it into the ground somewhere. I don't feel like I've got all of them up there. Don't feel like that's big enough. Or is that maybe why he's still so small? I don't know. Anyway, let's go plant him. Come on, mate. This poor little rose has been moved about so many times. Maybe that's the problem, though. I keep changing my mind and just not giving him a chance to grow. But hopefully here in front of the sweet peas cuz there's sort of a gap here. Yeah, maybe. Maybe we'll see. And then there's a couple of plants in this border that aren't doing very well and I thought I'd dig them up and put them in a pot instead. Sometimes if they don't do well in the borders, they do okay in a pot. So, where are they? This one. This little friend here is not doing very well. I think it's cuz we got the tree here. And the thing is is the tree takes a lot of nutrients from these plants and some of them need more nutrients than others. So I think this one needs to go in the pot. Yeah, he's not happy. Oh dear, these plants. They just look so so unhappy. Unhappy in the border. I have a feeling they're going to be unhappy in here, too. What I'm going to do is snip off anything that looks not good, which is pretty much the whole plant. Sometimes when you do do this, they do miraculously come back to life. I guess time will tell, but it does sort of look a little bit more dead now than it did before. Oh well. Oh well. Right. I'm going to cut a little bit of this perpetual spinach for dinner. So, I'm just going to take some of the leaves. Right, I'm going to cook some of my perpetual spinach for dinner tonight. I've got some salmon, some new potatoes, a little bit of corette, um, and we're going to sauté it, which is a very big exciting word that basically means throw it in a frying pan. Uh, and cook it in there. So, I've washed it all. Right, that's my potatoes being boiled to within an inch of its life over there. Are you done, potatoes? for 4 minutes. Four minute. Yeah, it's done. Right, we'll turn those off. Make it shut up. Right, we're going to slice a clove of garlic. I like to cook with garlic whenever I can. Literally, almost every single meal, I will put garlic in it, even if there's not garlic in it in the recipe. Slice it as thinly as we can without chopping our fingers off. I can't really show you what I'm doing. It's terrible. My kitchen is so small. Um, but there's a little drizzle of uh olive oil in there. And then we'll just stick our garlic in straight away. So, we don't want it to burn. So, we're just going to cook that for a little bit. So, with the spinach, we're just going to chop it into bite-sized pieces. Okay. Right. That is smelling lovely and garlicky. Believe it or not, the garlic smells of garlic. And that should flavor the olive oil. Ready for our spinach. Right. Come on, spinach. In you go. Yes, I talk to my cooked plants as well as my other ones. feel like it's wrong to cook this and then not try it in front of you. So, I'm going to try a little bit. What they always do on um cooking shows, they always eat it. Imagine if they just made it and didn't eat it at the end. What would we all do? We just be like, "Is anyone going to eat that?" Delicious. You could season that with some salt or some lemon juice. It would be really nice. I'm going to leave it plain. There you go. That's my finished dinner for tonight. Not plated up, but it felt wrong not to show you. Got some lovely salmon, some new potatoes, and the sauteed perpetual spinach. Right, I've just got back from the a lotment plot and I thought I'd come straight out into the garden because it actually rained last night and um I forgot to bring everything in so everything's got a bit wet. I just want to check that the slugs and snails haven't eaten everything. So, I'll just go around and do a little sweep first and then a couple of things arrived from Amazon and I really want to just quickly put them out and see how it looks. So, let's go check and see what the slugs and snails have done. And it seems to all be okay. Just looking through my pots now. They all seem to have survived. Don't seem to see any sort of slugs and snails about at the moment. I'm actually wondering where they all are and if they're all okay. Nope. No damage at all. So, it's really weird at the moment, even after rain, they don't seem to be about. Um, I think I'm going to give my pots a bit of a feed. Uh, cuz I haven't done it yet. I haven't given them any kind of plant food at all. And the rain has just reminded me of that cuz the rain obviously brings down all the goodness and nutrients. Right, let's go top this up. Right. I've been very kindly sent this one by Envy. It's an all grow organic allpurpose liquid plant feed. So, I thought I'd try this. It's also says it's bee and wildlife friendly, which is quite nice. So, I thought we'd try this one today in the pots. That's not coming out at all. What's going on with you then? Oh, one of the wonderful jobs of gardening. Having to fish out all the crap from your watering can. What's in there then? What's doing that? There's something in it and I can't get it. Oh, it's a I think it's a a leaf. Don't quite know how to get that out. Oh, there we go. It's working. Right. This is what arrived, guys. It's a mirror sticker. So, it's like a sticker that's a mirror, and it's for this broken window on my shed. And a lot of you said to turn it into a bit of a mirror, which apparently is like, I don't know why I'd need a window there anyway. Do you know what I mean? It's just unnecessary. So, thought this would be quite nice. I really do want some mirrors in the garden cuz I think it reflects all the plants and it makes the space look bigger or something. So, I am like on the lookout for some nice mirrors for the garden. But this this was so cheap. I feel like this is going to be quite fiddly. No, I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure I like it. I absolutely hate it. I hate it with everything I have. I absolutely hate it. It looks like I put tin foil up at the window. I absolutely hate it. It didn't work at all. I couldn't get it to go straight. And I'm pretty sure there's a snail under there somewhere. No, I absolutely hate it. Looks like I'm trying to grow something you're not allowed to grow in there. Do you know what I mean? Looks like there's a plant growing in there that's not supposed to be growing. I absolutely hate it. I'm gonna have to take it down. I think what I need is like more a proper mirror basically. I need a proper mirror to go up there cuz that's just not going to work for me. I absolutely hate it. It looks like tin foil. No. Right. And then this is the other thing that arrived from Amazon today. So they are gladioli. Um they're not called bulbs, I don't think. I think they're called corns. So they're called the gladioli nanos mix. So they're like a dwarf, a smaller gladioli. And I thought they'd be perfect for pots. So I've got 10 in here and 10 in here. So 20. All right, let's have a look at them. Full sun or partial shade. Perfect. There they are. They're about that big. So, perfect size for pots, right? So, let's find a couple of pots for them, then. These are either violas or pansies. I think they're violas. They're not very happy in these pots. And they're not very happy in this pot either. They're just not doing very well. Um, which is funny cuz the pansies up here are doing very, very well. So, what I thought I'd do is take them out the pot and plant them into the border and see if they do any better. And then we can use these pots for our gladioli. Ah, I think I've discovered the problem. It seems to be a family of snails in this pot. This is where all the snails in the garden are hiding. It's in these pots. Look at these guys. I've just dug them up. They were just hiding just under the surface. It's a whole family of snails. Whole family of them just hiding in this pot. So, that's been the problem. Okay. Look at that. Another whole family of snails. This is where they've all been. Look. Mommy snail, daddy snail, baby snail. Absolutely unbelievable. Heat. Heat. Right, I've still got 10 more. So, I'm thinking of just putting them into this big planter here. Hello again, guys. Um, it is currently Friday. I just got in from the a lotment plot. So, I don't know when you'll see that video. I think next Friday you'll see that video at some point you will see it. But I've just got back from the plot and I picked all this lovely purple kale that I had growing and I'm going to cook it for my lunch. And I sort of explained in the video how I was going to cook it, but I thought I'd show you in my Sunday vlog how I'm going to cook this kale. First thing we are going to do is dry it after we washed it because we are going to put it in the oven. So, you want it to be dry. So, I'm just going to sort of squeeze it with a tea towel to make sure it's nice and dry. And then what I'm going to do is take out some of this really hard stem here cuz I don't like it. I suppose you could keep it in if you don't mind it. But what I want to eat is the leaves. I just want the leaves. I don't want that hard stem in it. So, I'm going to sort of slice it out. Then, what we'll do, we'll just slice our kale up. into sort of eatable strips. Eatable strips. You know what I mean? Just so it's not so big. Right. Pop it all into a baking dish like so. And then we need a little bit of olive oil just over the top. Okay. I'm going to pop it into the oven for about 25 minutes until it crisps up like crisps. Time to take it out. Oh yes. You see how this is quite crispy now? Oh, it's just like it's gone all crispy and delicious. Pop it into our bowl. Some sea salt flakes. Just a little bit. And that is it. Delicious way of eating kale. Oh my god. It's just like eating kale crisp. It's delicious.