NOT THE BEST START TO SEPTEMBER / EMMA'S SUNDAY VLOGS

Good morning everyone, welcome back to my Sunday Diaries. My name is Emma, these are my Sunday Diaries. Thank you so much for tuning in. It's September, oh my goodness me, I can't actually believe we are in September already in the last four months of the year. I feel like summer, let's just not keep going on about summer, but summer was obviously very hot, very very difficult for the allotment, difficult for my garden, just difficult for life in general. I've kind of been really looking forward to these last four months of the year because I think hopefully everything's going to cool down, slow down and just give me a chance to kind of catch up with everything. So I'm very excited to be in September, very excited for all the autumny things, though it does sort of feel like autumn already because a lot of the leaves have dropped their leaves because of the stress of the heat waves, so it kind of feels like we're already in autumn. We've been in autumn for about four weeks, but obviously not like officially. So I'm very excited for the coming months and I'm going to try and make these vlogs as nice and cosy and relaxing as possible. I think a lot of you watch these because they kind of like, they're just like a nice relaxing watch on a Sunday. I try to just include lots of things, I mean you know when I do all those shots of my, I use my mobile phone by the way, when I do all those shots outside, it's all things that I just sort of want to take a picture of and I was sort of, my phone was absolutely full of pictures of really random things like leaves and trees or like the way the light hits a wall or stuff like that and I didn't know what to do with it and now that I do these Sunday vlogs I've kind of got an outlet for all of that stuff. Like I don't think I'm particularly arty or creative, I don't really know what I'm doing, but I just really enjoy it. It sort of helps me notice the little things in life and the little kind of beautiful moments here and there which I think really helps me to kind of slow down and it slows down my stress levels, like it lowers my stress levels and it just makes me feel better basically and happier and calmer. It helps me to notice the little things and I really hope that that's what these vlogs kind of do for you, so like when you watch them you kind of slow down and you notice all the little things and all the what is that? Yeah but that's kind of, that's the aim of the vlogs is for you to notice the little beautiful moments in life when you start to sort of watch these vlogs because I used to watch a lot of vlogs like this and it started to make me notice all the little things in my life and want to kind of document them. I mean maybe you won't want to document them but I'm hoping it will kind of help you to slow down as well but I thought I would say that because that's really something I enjoy about these vlogs. Is my house a complete mess behind me? Yes, sort of. It's looking cloudy today. We're actually going to go to Claremont Gardens. I've taken you there before and then we're going to go to Garsons. I need to go to the garden centre. I need to see some of the plants that they've got, see if they've got any late autumn veg that I can buy as plug plants and also get some compost. We'll also have a look around Claremont Gardens. A beautiful National Trust place in Esher, I think. Esher, sorry. Absolutely gorgeous, a little bit pricey to get in. If you have a National Trust membership it's obviously included in the National Trust membership but we don't have enough National Trust places near to us to warrant getting a National Trust membership. There's loads of places to go but they're all under different ownership so there's no point getting a membership to any one place. It doesn't make sense unless they all want to kind of gather up together and give one membership. That would be wonderful and save us a lot of money. Let me just give you a Pippin update because everybody waits for the Pippin update. It was my son's birthday party at the weekend. You shouldn't have that balloon because if he pops that balloon with his claws he's going to jump. You're going to jump, aren't you? Go crazy. But there's Pippin, very happy, living his best bunny life. He's molting again. I groom him every day but sometimes he goes through these molting stages where he loses a lot of his fur in one go and it's so difficult to keep up with. Yes it is. The new star of the vlogs, eh? The new star of the vlogs. My goodness, look at you. I'll see if there's any bunny toys in Garsons. I'll have a look for you. Yeah, I will. I'll bring something fun back, I promise. I promise. It's all feeling very autumnal here which I think is helped by the fact that the lake has almost completely dried out because of the drought. So like half the lake is gone which is so weird and also because all the grass has died and so there's just like no green anywhere and then a lot of the leaves are starting to turn orange and yellow and drop in their leaves. I mean this is turning into a very autumnal walk I have to say and it's literally the first of September today so hopefully we're going to get an extra long autumn and it's not going to quickly change into winter like that which I have a feeling it's probably going to or turn very rainy and wet which it could also do which would not be great for my allotment plot but you know what it is what it is. But yeah, despite the fact that we've had quite a lot of rain recently it's done nothing for the lake and nothing for the grass. The grass is still literally brown. I actually don't know if the grass will come back this year and turn green again. I'm not sure. I don't know how it works but I feel like we're not going to see green grass till at least next year now. I feel like the green has gone and even if we get quite a lot of rain I just feel like is it just a little bit too late in the season now for the grass to actually grow again and turn green. I don't feel like we're going to get lush green fields this year. I feel like we've just completely skipped all those lovely lush green fields but there we go. We've just moved straight on to autumn. You know what? I'm here for it right now. I love it. Look at all these acorns on the floor. You know what as well? There's like no acorns here. They've all been eaten by squirrels or birds. All of them are empty. Every single one is empty. They've obviously fallen a bit earlier this year because of the drought and they've all been sort of eaten by squirrels or collected I suppose for their hibernation time. But yeah, no acorns at all. Right, we're back. I just need to get Pip's food and then we're going to drop a few things down the allotment because we went to Garson's which was so nice today. It's like a garden centre basically. I'm not sure if I said that. Hopefully that was pretty obvious but it's a garden centre. Got a few bits of the allotment so we're going to go and drop that down now. Pippin, it's coming. Oh my gosh, look at this. Literally standing under my feet waiting for his dinner. Your dinner is coming my friend. It's coming. Right, here you go. Here you go. Come on then. Come and get it. There you go. Good boy. Okay. Right, okay. Oh my gosh. I need to wash my hair so badly. Look at that. It's gone like so greasy on top that it like starts to sort of fall in clumps. I've just got some mulch, some compost and then I've got some plants for one of the beds. One of the beds near the greenhouse is always dying on me and I thought I would sort of plant it up with some herbs and perennial herbs. I think that might do well there and be a bed that I don't have to think about so much anymore. So that's what I've got from Garson's and we're going to go and drop it down there now. Okay, let's go. Wow. It is hot in here. I've just backed onto some blackberry canes and then some of the canes have got stuck to my top. Every time I move I'm like getting jabbed by something, which is not very nice. I closed the door last time I was here because I thought an animal had come into the greenhouse. Well, it had come in and it found all the bird food and it moved all the pots about. So I closed the door and I tell you what, it is hot in here. It is humid and sweaty. Everything seems to be doing okay though, so that's a good thing. I'm not going to show you exactly what I got. These look really sad, don't they? These are my Savoy cabbages, which I don't know if I planted or not. I actually can't remember if I've already got these, but it doesn't matter because it's my favorite cabbage. Absolutely delicious. I won't show you everything I got because I'm pretty sure I'd have shown you in an allotment vlog. Dave's gone to get the compost and mulch. We're just going to literally drop it off and go because we're going to go for a run. I don't know if you remember, but in my last Sunday vlog I said that I went and bought some running gear because I want to get back into running again. I think it'd be really good for my fitness, my mental health, my mood, all the rest of it. Today is my second run, so I thought I would take you with me. I thought we could just sort of do it together. You're going to come with me. We're going to go to, I think, Nonsuch Park because it's so nice there, and we're going to run. I feel like it's going to rain while we're running because this cloud looks very much like rain is coming. You know what? I actually don't mind because we've had so little rain. I feel like it'd be quite nice to be rained on. Anyway, that's what we're doing now. I'm just waiting for Dave. Dave brings all the compost. That's what he does here to help me because compost is very heavy, and wheeling it back and forth with the wheelbarrow is just like too much of a mission, and he offers to do it. That's his sort of one job at the allotment plot, and then soon I'm going to be wheeling all of that wood chip. There's so much wood chip here, and I'm going to be topping up all the pathways. That's the kind of strenuous jobs that I do, but Dave's helping with the compost, which is very nice of him. Look how well it's all doing. We've got the chard, the celery, the leeks, and then the lettuce has come up in a little zigzag pattern. Do you remember that we sowed this in a zigzag? We've got some spring onions and some more lettuce. The whole bed is just all coming up. It looks so good. This down here as well, this is a courgette. I'm really glad that I didn't accidentally plant a pumpkin. It's starting to give me... Oh no, this one's rotted a little bit. That's really annoying. I've got a few more on here though, but it's starting to give me some little stripy courgettes. It's obviously just a different type of courgette plant that turns more viney, basically. You see that one there? I'm getting quite a few little tiny courgettes growing now, which is excellent. Look at this one here. It's growing right up my trellis and across the fence. That's so cool. They really are viney. I reckon I could have grown these over an archway, and they'd have done really, really well. Then my runner beans, these are also doing well. Yeah, just all looking so good since we've had the rain. Anyway, I've got some radish seeds, and I thought I'd try and fit them into this bed somewhere, because it has become a bit of a salad bed. I've got these ones, which are royal purple, which look fantastic. I've also got scarlet globe, which again, look fantastic. I'm going to plant these out. I think we'll be able to find some wiggle room in there. I think we'll be able to fit a row in between the leeks, so through the leeks, and then one just in front of the spring onions. I think we're just going to squeeze it all in, because what's to lose, basically. We'll just do one row here, because we don't need too many radishes. Our scarlet globes. I don't need tons of rim radishes, so I think we can kind of squeeze. I just want to squeeze as much as I can into one bed, to be honest. I think sometimes there's a real advantage to growing on a smaller scale like this. I think you can just fit a lot more crops in, and you get more of a harvest. It always looks full and luscious. It's quite enjoyable, actually. I'm quite enjoying growing into these little beds. I think I might get a few of these for the allotment plot, and put them where my strawberry bed used to be, in front of the shed. I think I might get four, and just make a sort of mini allotment in front. An allotment within an allotment, basically. I think they're really good for growing things like salad. I think they're great for carrots, because they're a lot deeper, and I just think they're really great. I just love them, so I think I'm going to get four for my allotment plot, and maybe start closing up some of the other bigger beds over the autumn winter, and just growing into the little ones. I think that might be a good sort of compromise, and a way of continuing the growing season a bit longer, sort of successfully though. I also think they'll be quite easy to protect, because they're quite small, and also even sort of make a mini kind of greenhouse over the top of them, so I could really grow into them like over the winter time. Anyway, I think they're great. If I can find them, I think I got them on Amazon. I will link them below, because I get a lot of questions about them, and they are great. I know we've had a lot of rain, but because these are new, these have only been planted about a week ago, they keep wilting, so I have to keep remembering to water them, because they have just literally been planted. This rudbeckia in particular keeps wilting. I might just deadhead it as well. Try and encourage some of those flowers to grow. Oh, sorry bee, sorry. Try and help it. Now that I've finished out there, and I'm ready to come back in, it's gone very quiet, and all the building work has stopped. So typical. Something very embarrassing happened to me. Oh, by the way, these are birthday balloons. It was my son's birthday, and we haven't taken them down yet. Something very embarrassing happened to me on the way back from the allotment plot today. I actually picked so many tomatoes, because I wanted to make a pasta sauce from scratch, and on the way home, the bag burst on the main road, went everywhere, literally everywhere. Everybody stared at me. Nobody helped, and I literally just walked on, because I was like, I don't have a bag. There's nothing I can do. They're literally all over the main road. So if you come across a load of tomatoes on the floor, it was me. It was me. I did it. I didn't know what to do, so hopefully some animal will come along and really enjoy those tomatoes. Anyway, I had to go to M&S and buy some tomatoes, because I really do want to make that pasta sauce, which is what I'm going to make now. So this is so easy to make, and actually, this would make a really good soup. I might actually have it as a soup instead, actually, but you could just put pasta with it. Sometimes I just put pasta with it and have it as a pasta sauce. So tomatoes, we don't have to be too precious with them. We can literally just... Such a shame that I dropped all of those tomatoes, because this would have been completely homemade then, but there we go. This is life, isn't it? There we go. Then we've got ourselves a red pepper. We'll just have a bit of this with it as well. Okay, red onion would have been perfect with this, but I actually think someone's eaten them all, so I've got a couple of shallots. Shallots will also work. Nothing that you chop up has to be too precise. Obviously, get the outer layer of the shallot off. Give it a little chop. Throw it in. Throw it in. It's all going to be roasted. So that, and then I've got a whole bulb of garlic here, which I'm going to... Where is the tinfoil? Do I have any tinfoil? That's really weird. I always have tinfoil, and I don't have any today, so just a little bit of baking parchment instead. Wrap that up. That's just so it doesn't burn, and then we just literally... Well, we'll season this first. So we want some extra virgin olive oil over the whole thing. On you go, my friend. Be generous. And then salt and pepper. Then I've got some dried dill. I'll put a bit of that on. And good old oregano. Always works quite well in here. In fact, I might have some fresh herbs to put in. Let's have a little look. Yes, thyme and sage will work really well in this. They'll all go very happily together. And then some of these sage leaves. Right, we just sort of slot our garlic in somewhere, maybe on the edge there, and then what we do is we just roast and roast and roast and roast this until everything goes really soft and the garlic is sort of squishy. And then we'll just sort of blend it together. How pretty does that look? Pretty. Too pretty to eat, but we will. Cutting in here. Cutting in here with the cooking segment. Just to say that my afternoon took a turn. It's five o'clock, and I'm in my pyjamas. I don't care. I think I'm going to have a glass of wine. I was working on this brand deal for a really good brand. Really excited about working with them, and I basically shot the whole content wrong. The entire thing from start to finish, wrong. Just completely mucked up the entire job, basically. Oh my god. So that's just an absolute nightmare. Anyway, let's get out our soup thing. Is that a helicopter? Oh my god, the afternoon is just so bad. Right, okay, let's move on. Let's move on. Let's see. This has been in here quite a while. I had to turn the oven off and sort of do work, so. Oh, genuinely smells amazing. I don't know if it's properly done, because I just had to sort of stop the oven and start doing work. Is this? Oh, I think it's done. Oh my gosh, this is just going to squish out. When you cook garlic whole like this, when it's cooked properly, they should just all fall out like this. Oh my gosh, and they like a nice brown colour. Oh my gosh. Might have to do this in stages, because I've only got a jug like this to whiz it up in. How am I so calm right now as well? I'm so, it's just been such a bad afternoon, and I'm so relaxed and calm, and I don't know why. I think I should get some kind of award. Is there an award I could have today, please? Anyway, I think we'll put a bit of that in, and then I think we're just going to put some kettle water in. Yeah, we'll whiz it in stages, I think. That's the easiest way to do it. So, magically all fit, yeah? I actually think this is a really good soup with some nice bread. I wish I've made bread today, but I definitely didn't have time for that. That is absolutely unbelievable. I only wish it was my own tomatoes that I'd grown myself, but that is honestly delicious. Absolutely delicious. Tomato soup. Tomato soup. You could also put pasta or noodles with this, but I think this would make a really good soup today. Perfection. Love it. I can't do it today. I don't know what to say. I've had a really terrible morning. I think I sort of mentioned yesterday when I was making a tomato soup that things are a bit stressful and this brand thing just went so wrong. I quickly tried to correct it and I made it worse. Oh my god. I've just finished at the allotment here, and I think I'm going to go down to the park and go to Costa and grab myself a Costa for lunch because I just think I deserve something nice in my life. And I've heard, are the pumpkin spice lattes out already? I think I'm going to see if there's a pumpkin spice latte. I don't actually like them. I don't actually love them, but I feel like I always need to have one at the beginning of the season. They're just too sweet for me. I'm just a flat white. I'm a flat white with oat milk kind of girl. I'm going to try their pumpkin spice latte if they've got one just to try and get me in the autumn mood. And then I'm switching off. I'm switching off. Blooming work. I'm done with it. I'm through with it until Monday and then I'll be back on it again. Anyway, let's go and grab that Costa and let's see if we can just chill our beans a little bit, chill our brains, chill our beans. Oh my gosh. What did I just say? Cut, cut. Look at this one. Oh mate, please don't fall off. Come on. You're going to be okay. I think these are a sort of stripey type of courgette. I actually can't remember what I planted. I'm very excited about getting one. As long as you get bigger, come on mate, you can do it. One of my peppers slash chillies, not sure what it is. It's changing colour. Oh wow. It's starting to go yellow. That is so very exciting. Look at that. You are beautiful mate. Apparently a lot of these chillies and peppers that I've grown are actually ridiculously hot and I don't actually know if I'll be able to use them because I don't love really, really hot chillies and peppers, but I will see what I can do. I'm sure I'll be able to do something with them. Anyway, I'm going to leave the vlog there. I've obviously had quite a difficult end to the week and I keep trying to pick it up in the vlog and kind of like run with it and do something to kind of rectify it, but I can't. So I think I'm just going to switch off here right this week off and then come back with a new vlog next Sunday for you, which will hopefully be a little bit more uplifting and happier. So sorry that I sort of ended on a bit of a downer. I just haven't been able to pick myself up. So obviously I'm a complete mess at the moment. I'm very, very stressed. I'm just going to switch off for the weekend. So I hope you've enjoyed the vlog. I'll be back on Monday with an allotment vlog or next Sunday back in my home garden and my London life. Thank you so much for watching. See you when I see you. Bye!