CREATING PRIVACY IN MY SMALL LONDON GARDEN

Good morning guys, welcome back to my Sunday garden diaries. I hope you're enjoying these. We are on the cusp of another heatwave in the UK, which I'm actually quite happy about if I'm honest because we've had some really, really dodgy weather recently. We had a lot of rain, but the garden's been happy to be fair, but I'm very much looking forward to some nice sunshine now. So I had a couple of very exciting deliveries this morning and I've got a few jobs in the garden to do. Also got a few things to cook with some of the produce that I picked for my allotment plot. So I hope you enjoyed this vlog. If you do, do hit the subscribe button, give me a like and let's go and have a look around the garden. I'm going to spend a bit of time now deadheading some of my flowers. A lot of the flowers are dead. So if you want to continue to get more flowers, the best thing to do is to cut off the dead ones and then hopefully you'll get more blooms later. This also looks done. This is my sweet pea teepee in a pot. Didn't get many sweet peas from it at all, to be honest. And even though the plant looks nice and green and like it's living, I still, I sort of feel like it's getting all tangled on itself with these spindles and stuff, what they're called tendrils. I don't know whether just to rip the whole thing out or maybe just to cut it down a bit. I think I might try and save it. Maybe cutting it down a bit will encourage it to give me some flowers. I don't know. Well, there's only one way to find out and that is to cut it back. So I can see new growth on it actually. So maybe there is hope for them. Yeah. There are new flowers. Right guys, so I'm going to prepare a couple of things for dinner later. Do I already look tired? Oh my goodness. Right at the beginning of the vlog and I already look exhausted. It's all right. I've got a nice cup of tea here, so I will be fine. I'll be right to But it's a couple of salad things that I want to prepare for later and I thought I'd show you how I do them because I'm going to use two things that I've picked from my allotment plot, which is very exciting. So I'm going to make a potato salad and I'm also going to make a kohlrabi coleslaw. So we'll start with the potato salad. Right, do excuse my messy, messy kitchen. It's been a long week so far. It's Tuesday. Nice big pot of water. And then this is a great big bowl of my early potatoes that I harvested this week at the allotment. There are quite a lot here. So I'm going to make a great big potato salad to have tonight. I'm going to pick out the smaller potatoes. Any potato I think could be eaten whole. Could I eat that whole? Yeah, I think I could. If only that I can get my mouth whole. It's going to go in the colander. It's going in the potato salad. Right, so I'm just left with all these bigger ones now. I was going to say big, bigger, and they'll be really good for roasting. So let's get these washed. So while the potatoes cook we'll start on the coleslaw. So this is my kohlrabi that I picked from the allotment. Let's give it a bit of a wash. Okay, so this is not the biggest kohlrabi in the world, but I think we'll be able to make a little bit of coleslaw out of it. It should be okay. So what I'm going to do, this is where it sort of split as it was growing, and it's still fine. It's still absolutely fine. It's just we have to sort of, I think we have to sort of treat it as to. You see here, that's where it split as it was growing and it's sort of grown over and healed itself. So I'm sort of treating it as two kohlrabis because underneath that it's absolutely fine. So then we'll just grate it. So we'll pop our grated kohlrabi in the bowl. So we'll do the same with some of the red cabbage. How much should we, maybe like a quarter? So to this, you can also add grated carrots. You could add some grated red onion. You know what you could add actually? Grated courgette. That might not work, but let's try it anyway. I actually genuinely don't know if a courgette would work, but I'm going to try it for you. So I don't have any carrot or onion. Courgette is in. We've gone experimental on this one guys, but to be fair, it is just a coleslaw. So I don't think you can go too wrong. Right. So we've got some mayo, classic Emma style. I'm not going to be too specific with the amount. I think technically, I think it's about a quarter of a cup of mayo, something like that. And then splash of vinegar, a little bit of sugar. What is sugar without a little bit of sea salt as well? So we'll put a bit of sea salt and we'll just mix this up. How pretty does that look? That looks gorgeous. I feel like we could put some herbs in here. What herbs would work? I feel like chives might work in here. Let's cut some chives. Some of these chives. Slice these up quickly. Let's try a little bit. Oh, that is so lovely. The best thing to do with a coleslaw is once you've made it, put it in the fridge for a little bit. So just a few hours. So make it a lunchtime for dinner or make it a breakfast for lunch. Leave it in the fridge to get nice and cold and it'd be absolutely perfect. But how pretty does that look? I love it. Right, let's drain these potatoes. Come on, potatoes. Right, so like the coleslaw, we're starting with mayonnaise. Just a big old drizzle in there. Drizzle of vinegar. You can use whatever vinegar your heart desires. I think cider vinegar is the one that it always says on the recipes. Half a lemon. And then whatever herbs your heart desires. Personally, with a potato salad, I really like dill. But I don't grow it, so I've actually had to buy it. It's a bit annoying. I will have to grow some dill. So we will chop this up. Dill just goes really well with potatoes. They're just like best friends. They're like a match made in heaven. They just really like each other. They get along. They play nicely. They never argue. So just stick them together, you know? Okay, all that goes in. This is the point where you can season it if you want to. I don't tend to add a lot of seasoning to my food, like salt and pepper. I use herbs, but not so much like... I don't put salt in everything, do you know what I mean? But you can. You can put salt in it now. I'm sure it would be lovely. Right, we will decant into a bowl. And again, keep this in the fridge till later when we're going to eat it. So the thing that arrived the other day that I was so excited about for the garden are two planters that come with like a trellis that's on the back of them. I got them from a place called Wayfair, and I will leave a link to them below. If I forget to do that, please leave me a comment and let me know. But I will try to remember to link them. They were quite pricey. They were £151 each, so that's nearly £300, just spent on two planters. But they had a discount on where if you brought two of them, you got like £20 off. So I think it turned out to be like £280, something like that. Anyway, they're excellent quality and they are treated, so they should last really well outside. And I just need to put them together. Very excited to see what they look like when they're all up. Right, they do come with liners. I don't have my staple gun with me, though. I've got that at the plot, haven't I? So what I'll have to do, place the liners in, drill the thing, drill the thing to it, and then staple gun it tomorrow. This is all making more sense in my head, so bear with me. Right, I love it. I think it's so, so nice. This one is going to go at the back of the garden, so let's see if we can get it there. Maybe should I'm out of breath. I'm not sure though, but I do know that I need to decide for sure before I fill it, because that is so heavy as it is. OK, I'm going to have to sort of assess the situation a bit. Basically, what's going to go in that is this wisteria, which is planted behind my tree, and a lot of you said that it will kill my tree. Oh, there's me. Hello. So I'm going to move the wisteria into this planter, and I did discover that that is actually south. So that fence there is a south-facing wall, which is what wisteria really needs. But then part of me also wants to cover this, because this keeps flying away. We will have to fiddle about with it. But the other one is going at the front. So let's sort that It is so hot. I think at the beginning of this vlog, I said that there was going to be a heat wave, and we're now in the middle of it, and it is incredibly hot. So I thought tonight for dinner, the only thing I want is a big salad. But it's not very filling a salad, is it? And I am actually quite hungry. We've been out to Bushy Park today. It was beautiful, but my goodness, it was so hot and sweaty. So I thought, why don't I make some focaccia with it? So I'm going to make some focaccia bread. It's one of my... I think I'm saying it right, by the way. Is it focaccia or focaccia? I've never had to say it for anyone before, so I always get the names of these things wrong. I think it's focaccia bread. It's the only bread that I could envision making in this kind of heat, and I think because of the heat and the humidity, it will prove really well. So we're going to make that for dinner. I've got some rosemary growing in the garden as well, which I will use. So let's get started on the recipe. Right, so into a large bowl, we're going to put 500 grams of strong bread flour. So in that goes. And then on one side, we'll put one of these sachets of fast-action yeast. So one side, we'll tip that. On the other side, we'll put in two teaspoons of fine sea salt, just on the other side, like so. And then we'll mix it together. And the reason why we separate the salt and the yeast is because otherwise, the salt will kill the yeast before it has a chance to get going. So you do it on separate sides of the bowl and then mix it together. I hope you can see this okay. Right, two tablespoons of olive oil. Oh, not the lid. That doesn't go in. And then we're going to start adding some lukewarm water and trying to form a dough. The recipe always says 400 mils, but I think you need to use closer to 300 mils. And go fairly slowly because you don't want it to be overly wet. Right, now comes the fun bit. It feels so dark on this camera. It's so warm outside and the kitchen is still so dark, but there we go. Bring on the kitchen renovation, I think. Okay, we're going to dust a surface of flour. Okay, and then we're going to knead it. It should be sticky, but not unworkable, not unusable. That's where I used to go wrong. I used to use too much water and it was a nightmare. So put your water in nice and slowly and then this should be quite a pleasant experience instead of a stressful one. Right, it's been about an hour, so let's check on our dough. Look at that. Look at that. It's doubled in size, so it's ready for the next stage. Hmm, I feel like the tray I was going to use is probably going to be a little bit too small. If I can find something else. It's quite a lot bigger than I thought it would be, which is not really a bad thing, to be honest. All right, so I just put a bit of oil in it. This is just olive oil. Rub it around. It's a great day to prove your dough outside. So stretch it. Oh, you can't see anything that I'm doing, can you? No. I'm just stretching it out in here so that it fills our oiled tray. That's it. Stretch. Come on. Stretch. You can do it. We all believe in you. And then we're going to prove it again for about 45 minutes, so back out in the sun. I just cover it in cling film and then a tea towel, and then I'll just leave it out in the sun because it's so nice and warm outside. I think it will do a good job. This is where I put the other planter, by the way, and I've just planted a jasmine into it, but I need to top up the soil. I just need to top up the soil level so I can put some lovely bits around here and hopefully some things to spill out, and that will have to be in the next video, I'm afraid. Okay, guys, so the bread has proved in the garden in the sun for another 35, 40 minutes. Oh my goodness, it's absolutely huge. I just knew this would be great weather for proving bread. I just knew it. Right, can I actually get the cling film off? Oh no. This has never actually happened before to me. It's okay, we're okay. We got it off. Okay, maybe a good idea, maybe a good idea to oil over your cling film before putting it on the top. That's never actually happened to my bread before, but hey-ho. Okay, so a little bit of olive oil, a little bit of water, a little bit of salt, mix that up. Incredibly disappointingly, this has flopped a little bit because the cling film got stuck to it, but it's still fine, it'll still be okay. So I'm just going to make some holes in it like this, pour over our little miscellaneous concoction. I picked some rosemary from the garden, so what we'll do is we'll just stuff that in. In she goes. And that, my friends, is the finished focaccia in a very dirty baking tray, hence that I tried not to show it to you. It looks and smells delicious. Just having it with some kale salad and a couple of slices of halloumi, which I have grilled. How delicious does that look? Amazing. So I'm going to tuck into that now and end the vlog here, I think. I don't know how long this vlog will be, I've just not had the time this week to film as much as I like to. I'm going to be back again at the allotment plot on Monday, so tomorrow, and I'll be back next Sunday with another home gardening vlog. We will fill up those planters and plant them up properly and do a few other jobs around the garden. Hopefully the heatwave will have subsided just a little bit so that we can actually get out and do some gardening. That would be lovely. But anyway, join me again next Sunday or I'll see you tomorrow on the plot. Have a lovely rest of your weekend. See you next week. Or tomorrow. Whatever. See you next time, guys. Thanks for watching. Bye!