VOTE FOR ME! (PLEASE) / EMMA'S ALLOTMENT DIARIES

Hi everyone, welcome back to my allotment diaries. My name is Emma, these are my allotment diaries. This is my first allotment plot going into my second year and I just vlog everything about my allotment plot, growing seeds, starting my garden at home, just everything to do with gardening and growing. So I'd love you to subscribe to my channel if you're new. I do have a little bit of news today. I found out over the weekend actually, I have been nominated as a gardening influencer for the Grow Your Own, I've got it written here, Great British Growing Awards, which is run by the Grow Your Own magazine. I did ask you to nominate me if you liked my vlog. I never thought in a million years that I would actually be in the finals and be a finalist, but I am a finalist to win the award. So if you enjoy my content, you enjoy my Instagram, you enjoy these vlogs, I would love for you to head over there. I will leave the link below in the description box and I'll also leave a comment in my comments showing you where to go. You will get entered into a draw to win loads of gardening prizes if you do vote. And I would love for you to vote for me. I'm under the gardening influencer. My name is Emma Bailey. I'm the first one. So I'd love for you to vote for me. How exciting is that? I've only been doing this for a couple of years and I've already been nominated for an award. It's amazing. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much if you have nominated me. It means the world. I was proper made up over the weekend about it and I can't believe it. I'm also in the finals with some really, really amazing influencers who I follow myself as well, so feel free to vote for them too. You don't have to vote for me, but I'd love for you to vote for me. Right, that was all very awkward. I feel awkward like asking people to vote for me and stuff anyway. Right, let's do some gardening today, shall we, to get over this awkwardness. Finally it is spring. I'm officially calling it, this is the first day of spring. It's the first day we've had blue skies and some warm weather. So I'm rewriting time in history and I'm calling today the first official day of spring for London anyway. I hope you get some good weather wherever you are. I know some places it's still blooming snowing. Madness. Look at these blue skies. Listen to the birds, not the crows. They're not quite as pretty. Oh, there they are. What a beautiful spring day. Just feels so nice to be out here when it's sunny and it's warm and I'm not wearing a coat. It's amazing. Um, and of course everything in the, in the allotment plot is actually responding to the sun and the warmer weather. Everything just looks better. Everything looks like it's growing and something very exciting this morning. Oh yes. The excitement doesn't stop here on the allotment plot now. Some of my new tulip bulbs have started to finally open and show their colours because I didn't really know what colours they were. They were sort of a multi-colour pack. Um, but look at this one. Look at the colour on him. He's like red and then he's got yellow at the top as well. Um, and I can see that some of the others coming up have seemed to have two different colours. So they really are rainbow tulips. Absolutely stunning. So I really don't know what these are all going to look like. Um, I've never really seen multi-coloured tulips. I've certainly not grown them before, but absolutely beautiful. What do you think of the tulips Tom? Good. Good. Yeah. Can't wait for them all to flower now. It's going to be very exciting. Just have to show you the chard as well. Um, I did hack it back a little while ago, very, very badly with a pair of blunt kitchen scissors, but look how it's responded to that. That, that absolute like butchery that I did. It's obviously panicked and then grown twice as big in the hope that the butcher doesn't come back again with the kitchen scissors. Um, but yeah, I think some of it is definitely ready to harvest. Chard is such an amazing thing to grow. It's one of the first things that I put in the plot, um, a whole year ago. One of the first things and it's still here. It's still alive. It's just so bushy and vibrant and happy and oh, look, it's a bunny in there. Yeah, it's lovely. And look at these colours. Look at the colours. I don't know if it's going to show up actually, cause it's so bright. Hey, I wonder if you can see the colours a little bit better here. Look at that red, absolute vibrancy. It's just stunning. And then I put the yellow right in the middle. They probably need thinning out, but I just don't want to get rid of any of it. It grew fine last year like this. So why change it? If it's not dying, don't mess with it. That's what I say. Right, over these archeries here that I made quite badly, um, are going to be my pumpkins. I'm growing two varieties of pumpkin. I'm growing two baby varieties. Um, so one of them is called Jack Be Little and the other one is called Baby Boo. And one of them is white and one of them is orange and they're like tiny little munchkin pumpkins. So I'm going to have three plants this side, three plants here, one, two, three, three plants that side, one, two, three. And I've made this giant archway, um, which will hopefully sort of support them. And I just think it's better to grow as much as I can vertically because there's not that much space on the plot. I say there's not that much space. I mean, it's massive. Um, but for what I want to grow, I just seem to be growing more and more. And so I think the more I grow vertically, the more I can grow horizontally, basically. That's what I'm trying to say. But yeah, this is my archway. It's almost finished. Um, and I'm just wondering when to put the pumpkins out. I think maybe in about a week or two, I might stick them out. I think I'd be really interested to see how far up the archway they grow. I'm sort of envisioning the whole thing to be covered, but I doubt that will be the case. I'm pretty sure it will go up to about there and we will see. Right. I need my gardening gloves because, um, a lot of people, uh, advised me to watch The Edible Garden. It's on BBC two. I watched it on Sunday. I'm not sure which day of the week it's actually on. I think it might be a Sunday. Um, but she was talking all about stinging nettles and the power of stinging nettles. And one of the things that she suggested, cause in my last vlog, I was like, Oh, I hate stinging nettles. And everyone was like, no, no, don't hate them. Don't hate on them Emma. Uh, because they do a lot of goodness. You can make apparently your own fertilizer out of stinging nettles. And as I'm all about doing things and getting things for free, um, I have some fantastic stuff here. Um, I have a feeder fertilizer seaweed, um, which absolutely blooming stinks, but it's fantastic for tomatoes, pumpkins, pretty much everything. Um, but if I can get some more out stinging nettles for free, I'm going to do it. So apparently what you do is you cut them, put them in a top, fill them up, put them in a pot, fill that, fill it up with water and wait for it to kind of ferment or something. So I'm going to do that. We're going to do it. Right. Here's some stinging nettles over there. See the only ones that I removed from my plot were the ones that were growing in my raised beds. Cause obviously I don't want them in my raised beds, um, that they can be around the plot. I'm not like an evil psycho killer or anything, you know, destroy of nature. This bloody door. What we're going to do. I'm going to use an old paint can. I don't really know how to do this without getting stunned to death. Here we go. That was a lot easier than I thought. You just pick it up with the scissors. Right. Now we'll put some water over it. Natural. I think the idea is to cover it. I've been warned a few times that it absolutely stinks. So I will keep you updated as to how my homemade fertilizer goes. Whatever this stuff is, and I don't know the names of any of the pond plants I put in, it's really invasive and it just seems to self-sown itself everywhere or self-rooted itself. It's this stuff. It has like little yellow flowers on it. It just seems to have taken over. So I'm just trying to clear it. So I've got a little bit of clearing of actual water, which hopefully will help wildlife and attract some more frogs. Cause I don't want the whole pond covered. Um, and that's the idea. And then I'm trying to make more secret areas, but I think frogs have got quite a lot of coverage here to hide under. I think they've got quite a lot of coverage to be honest frogs. I've got all this grass down here. You see, I think it must be the water. So I'm just going to try and keep clearing it. That's the idea. Talking to you through the reeds. I've cleared quite a lot of it now. I think it's just quite an invasive plant. I don't want to take out too much stuff. Do you know what I mean? This one seems quite happy. This seems really happy. I don't know what that is, but that is just doing great. I've left quite a lot of stuff around the side of the pond. You can see cause I did weed it, but I've left quite a lot growing, you know, for wildlife and stuff. Obviously I'll leave the daffodils to die back. Um, I've got, um, irises coming up to irises coming up there. I've left a lot of grass as well. Cause no animals like long grass and we've got rocks around here. This is quite a shady area here. Honestly, my honest, honest thoughts on it is that my pond is fine. I think the frogs are just being fussy. I blame the frogs because actually I think this pond is going in the right direction. It's got loads of coverage. It's under the shade. It's got to get sun in the day as well. The water seems quite clear and fresh. So I don't know. What do you think Tom? I think you need to put some lily pads in there. Yeah, I'd like lily pads. There's not really much room in there for lily pads now. I've got hope that they will arrive. Don't keep your hopes up. Oh, it feels good to be here in the sunshine with blue skies. But we're sort of at that awkward in between stage now where it's like, you can't plant anything out, but it's so nice to be here. You just want to dig and put everything out, but you know you can't yet. I think I'm going to leave it one more week and then I'm going to start putting some things out cautiously with the intention of clushing them if I need to. Because we are sort of coming to the end of April now and we really should be able to be putting some stuff out. So I've got a few things growing. It doesn't look completely dead. You know, the plot sort of looks relatively alive. But I am getting a bit impatient now. I hope you enjoyed my vlog today. Like I said, give me a vote below if you want to. And don't forget to subscribe to my channel if you are new and I will see you next time. Thanks for watching. Bye.