A RAINY WEEK IN JANUARY / EMMA'S SUNDAY DIARIES

I think my sweet pea seedlings have got that leaf mining beetle, the bug that kind of eats the leaves and the insides out, which is very annoying but that's I think all those marks are on my leaves and it will just spread to all of my sweet peas now until they are no more. That is such a shame but I think that is what has happened. They still look pretty healthy though so I'm not going to do anything drastic just yet. We will live in hope. Hi guys, welcome back to my Sunday diaries. My name is Emma, I have a sore throat which is why I'm going to be a little bit croaky in this vlog but I'm feeling good otherwise. There will come a time where I don't have to start these vlogs in my kitchen doorway but that time is not today. Today it is actually quite sunny, the sun keeps poking through the cloud but then it disappears and it just goes so so dark. Just made myself a coffee. I've actually really been cutting down on my coffee intake recently just because I feel like it makes my anxiety worse so I'm really trying to cut down on it but today is definitely a coffee day. I'm feeling tired. If you watch my allotment vlogs you'll know that I've been making the back of my plot neater and digging it all out and making like a fence and it's exhausting work, like it's really exhausting. I ache in places that I did not know I could ache. Anyway, I do have a few plans this week so I thought I'd pick up the camera. I've got lots of seeds to start which I'm definitely going to do today. I've got some chicken soup to make. The seeds that I'm sowing today are my chilli and peppers. I have shown you it in, if you watched my January seeds that I'm sowing in January, I've just bought a couple more packs which I think I showed you in my last Sunday vlog so I'm all over the place but basically you will see me sowing them today. Of course January, you don't have to sow too much in January, like it's not a get in the garden, go, go, go. It's not like March. March is kind of your up and at and you need to get going now, like get up. But January is still very slow. If you are ever wondering sort of what to do month to month in the garden, one of the best ways of finding out is through magazines, especially gardening magazines. Usually at sort of the beginning of most gardening magazines they have like a what to do this month in the garden section which is really useful and one of the best ways of accessing magazines is through the Readly app. If you've watched me for a while, you'll know that I go on and on about Readly. I've worked with them for a while. I'm a huge fan. It's just a great way of getting access to over 7,000 magazines and newspapers all in one place and there are a few features about Readly which I think make it really, really useful. Firstly, they backdate all of their editions of magazines so if you've missed a month or two or three or four, you can go back and access those editions that you've missed and with gardening magazines in particular, I find that really useful because you want to get a head start on the next month or whatever and the magazine isn't out yet, you can go back to last year's edition and have a look what to do in March, what to do in April, kind of plan your whole year. The other feature that I love is that you can favourite your favourite magazine so you don't have to search for them every time you go onto the app and you can bookmark specific articles so that you don't lose them. That's particularly useful with the articles on sort of what to sow now in your garden or what jobs you should be doing month to month. You can just bookmark those articles and they all end up in a nice list where you can just go straight back and access them which is fantastic. I also have a discount for you which will give you two months access to the Readly app for free. My discount code and the link to it will be in my description box below and I think a QR code as well where you can just access it straight through here. So do go and check out Readly if you think it's something you'd be interested in. For me, I've used it for a long time, I find it incredibly useful and I love it. So let me know if you do that, let me know what you think of Readly. Right, I'm going to get those seeds together. I'm not going to go seed crazy guys, I promise you, I do know it's very early for seeds. So it's just a combination of peppers and chillies and then some aubergine, that's it. All these with some compost, I'm just using multi-purpose compost, that's all I've got. I think it'll be fine. A lot of the advice you guys gave me online was to not over-sow, so I'm going to work really hard not to over-sow. So starting with F1 Longhorn which is a chilli pepper. So a lot of you said that I probably only need one or two plants per chilli because they do, they are like crazy chilli producers. Actually, I'm going to sow four seeds of those, I'm going to sow four and then we can prick out the one that doesn't work. So just cover that with a very thin layer of compost and then we'll just label it. Because we are going to label these guys, can you believe it? Who am I? Who even am I? This is Longhorn. Lemon drop, I like the look of the lemon drops. These are again hot peppers, these are hot. Wow, you get like a million in here. Okay, these are going to go inside on a windowsill which is on top of a radiator. That's the best that I can do in my Victorian terrace. I do not have room for grow lights and all the rest of it unfortunately, so we'll just have to see how they go. The aubergines that I'm growing, they're called money makers, money makers. I think again, I'm probably only going to need one, maybe two plants because I think they're pretty prolific. I'll sow four seeds in there and if it doesn't work and they don't germinate, I do have time to try them again in Feb, so I think we should be all right. I don't know if I'm going to sow all of them now, now that they're all sitting there like that and I'm thinking four plants coming up might prick out just two and then pop them on. That's quite a lot of plants to go in my greenhouse because these are going to go hopefully into pots in my greenhouse, not into the ground directly because I don't think it'd be warm enough on the ground. So I think I'm going to stop there. The ones that we are skipping are the jalapeno M, which is a very hot chili or pepper, so I don't think I'd like that anyway and the hot pepper padron, which is by Seed Craft. So we're just going to not sow those ones this year, we'll do it next year I think. Look at them all sitting there like that. Don't they look funny? It's like a school assembly. It's like I'm taking the register. Right, these are going to go, like I said, up in the loft, on the windowsill, on top of the radiator. Lots of warmth, lots of sun, that's the best that I can do. Right, in last Sunday's vlog I made some chicken stock, so if you've missed that video and you want to know how I make my homemade chicken stock, go back to last Sunday's video and have a look. It's basically just, you just basically roast a chicken, so like you do your usual roast chicken on a Sunday if you do that, I do it pretty much every Sunday, and then the next day you take all the chicken off of the chicken, take all the chicken off the chicken, and then you just boil it with some apple cider vinegar, some water, and lots of leftover veggies for like four hours, and then you sieve the liquid that comes with it, and you get a beautiful, delicious homemade stock. It's gorgeous. Every Monday I make chicken stock, and then for the rest of the week we use it for things like chicken soup, curries, anything we're making that needs chicken stock. That's basically what it gets used for. Today it's Tuesday, so I'm going to make some chicken soup for my husband and I, and I'm going to show you how I make it. This is what I do with the chicken stock. Let me show you, ow, what was that? Let me show you the chicken stock. So you get a lot of it, it depends, oh it's got tea written on it, it's not tea, don't drink it. You get a lot out of one chicken, so you can kind of get more or less, but that's what it looks like. So this is going to be like the base of our chicken soup today, and we're going to add some fresh veggies and some chicken to it, so let me show you. Turns out this isn't going to be quite as exciting as I thought because I've only really got carrots. The best kind of veg to put into your chicken soup, and you don't have to put any chunky veg in, I just like a little bit of crunch to it. I've got sweet corn as well actually, I've got a can of sweet corn, but the best things are vegetables that have got a little bit of crunch to them, so celery, I usually put celery in it. Carrots and celery are just perfect for chicken soup. Also another tip is to make sure that your veg is chopped up really small because it just, I don't know, it just makes it nicer. I'm going to use this old pot today because I think it's just a better shape for the soup. So when I open up my stock, there will be a layer of fat on the top, and I'm going to scrape this off into the bin because I don't like it. Right, and then underneath that, we are left with like a jelly kind of consistency, so if you buy those stock things, the sort of fresh ones, that's pretty much what it is. So we will put in, I think about half the jar, will make quite a nice chicken soup. Add some water. Throw in our carrots. You know what I also might throw in? A little bit of pasta. Now I usually throw in some noodles and make chicken noodle soup, but I don't have any noodles, so I'm going to break this pasta up. Pop that in too because I do like it to be a little bit, just have a little bit more substance to it. And I know a certain someone who will love this little bit of carrot. Should we go and give it to him? Come on then. Got the zoomies. Where did you get the zoomies? And I gave you that. That's so sweet. Oh yes. Nice bit of carrot. Okay, so now that the pasta and the carrots are softened, we'll throw in just a whole tin of sweet corn. It really needs some green in there. What it really needs is celery, but I just don't have any. And then we'll just heat that up. And that my friends. Oh no, it's not that. That's not it. Scrap that. We'll just heat that up and then this is all the chicken that I got off the chicken before I made my stock. So there's loads of chicken here. We're going to put some into the soup and then some on top of the soup at the end. So it's just, it looks nicer. Some of it can go straight in here. I'm just going to tear it up a little bit smaller as it goes in. And then the big chunky bits will just go straight on top of the bowls of soup. Right, lots of chicken in there. It's a very chunky soup. Very chunky. Like I said, you don't need to put in pasta and veggies if you don't want to. You can literally just heat up the stock with some water and just have it like that. Or you can throw in a little bit of chicken and just literally have plain chicken soup. But I just like it to be a little bit more chunky because I get hungry and I like to eat something and bite something, you know. I tend to put a lot of chunky stuff in my soups. Let's dish this up so it's for Dave and I. There should be plenty here for two people. And again, I still don't have a ladle. I really need to get one. This is so warming, delicious, good for you. Definitely a good thing to have if you've just been to your allotment plot, my gosh. Now that, my friends, that is a chunky soup. That is proper chunk. So then we'll just pour over the rest of the liquid to turn it into an actual soup. And then just on the top I'll just put a little bit more of this chicken because it needs to be used up. What an absolutely, like a complete contrast to yesterday. But what an absolutely miserable day it is today. It's literally going to be raining the entire day start to finish. I think the rain started sometime last night because we've got a loft extension, conversion, whatever it's called. It's always really noisy when it rains and it was actually so lovely and relaxing, but it just didn't stop the whole night. And it does appear that it's just going to keep raining for the entire day. It's also quite windy. It's also quite cold as well. The weather's got a lot colder. So it's just miserable out there. So no garden for me, no allotment for me. I'm actually going to cook dinner right now. It's 11 o'clock in the morning and I'm going to cook dinner because I've got quite a busy day of editing. Oh my God, what is that? A train. Yeah, I've got quite a busy day of editing and I'm going to be sitting down for most of the day during that, which is not my favourite thing to do at all, but it's definitely the perfect day for that. So I'm going to cook dinner now in case I run out of time later. It's a bit of a cook and advance dinner anyway because I'm going to make a chicken and leek pie, which I think again is perfect for this weather, isn't it? That's all you want in this weather, a nice warming pie. So chicken and leek because that's what I've got. I'm going to make the pie filling, put the top on, might cook it. Should I cook it and just heat it up later? I think I should cook it and heat it up later. I know that's not the best way of doing it, but I think that's what I'm going to do. Right, right. I've had a little skim through the recipe online and I think I kind of can take it from here. I don't think I need it because I think with a pie, you can't really go that wrong or am I wrong in thinking that? I don't know. Right, so we're going to cook our chicken in butter. Where's my little wooden, I'm asking you. These ends of the leek I will keep for my chicken stock recipe, which I will make next Monday with my roast chicken. Then I'm just going to make up my chicken stock, but I'm going to use my homemade chicken stock. So I'm going to do half and half with this. I'll tell you why. I didn't make this stock quite as strong as I normally do. I actually put more water, put more water in with my chicken when I made this, which means that it's less concentrated than it sort of usually is. So we're going to do literally half chicken stock and then half, half boiling water like that. So I did notice that my chicken soup the other day, it wasn't quite as strong as I like it. So that smells really good, like proper chicken stock now. So I think I just watered it down a little bit too much when I made it. Take this chicken out. So these are not in the recipe, but I thought some peas might be good because once again, I don't have any celery. So that's what the recipe says. Yeah, I feel like peas will work. Right, a little bit of plain flour, and this is going to help to thicken the sauce when we start to make the sauce, just a little bit. Kind of soaks everything up and just thickens it all. And then we'll add our chicken stock. Pop our chicken back in. Okay, then to this, we're going to add a spoon of Dijon mustard, which smells like hot dogs. A little bit of that. Go in. Bay leaf that will just sort of stick in there. A bit of thyme can go in. That's quite a nice herb for this. This is really on its last legs. I've used literally this in every bit of cooking I've done for the past couple of weeks. Stir that Dijon mustard in. We might do a little bit of salt and pepper just to season it. I always get told off for not seasoning my food very well. Not much of a seasoner, I'm afraid. I mean, unless you count like herbs and stuff. Mixy, mixy all that in. Make sure that mustard is well and truly mixed in. Otherwise, someone's going to get quite the mouthful. Could you imagine? And then a little bit of double cream. It should add quite a nice little creaminess to it, obviously. About a cup of that. And then we leave the filling to cool down completely, which takes about an hour. So I'm just waiting for it to go a tiny bit thicker than this. And then I will just turn the heat off, move it to the back one and leave it an hour. And then we will construct our pie. I think I'm going to do is put that in the fridge and then cook it a little bit later for dinner and just put the pastry over the top. So I'll show you the rest of it a little bit later. I'm just going to cover it with... God, it looks so good, doesn't it? Oh my God. I'm just going to cover it with some tin foil. Keep it in the fridge. I think I should keep it in the fridge till later and then we can kind of have it like freshly baked. So I'll show you the rest of it later. It is absolutely disgusting out there today. It's literally not stopped the entire day. I was going to see if I could just get out and just do one or two things, but literally has not stopped raining the entire day. I actually had to nip out and get some bits for dinner tonight just for the kids and a few extra veggies to go with that pie. And I got soaked, literally head to toe soaked. So I've changed into my Harry Potter jumper. And I'm feeling like a little bit cosier now. Had a nice cup of tea, feeling okay. So I thought I'd just spend the afternoon writing in all those new seeds into my allotment handbook planner. I feel like I should call these a handbook in future because it is so much more than a planner. It is more like a handbook because I do have lots of sort of useful tips and recipes and things in here as well. I have bought a new storage box, seed storage box. It's this Peter Rabbit one, which is so cute. I got it from TK Maxx. I'm obsessed with Peter Rabbit at the moment. I've got a Peter Rabbit calendar in my kitchen. Like everything Peter Rabbit, please. Yes, please. Absolutely love it. I have a humongous pile of seeds to get organised. So I'm going to sit here and just sort of jot them in. There's a few pages. Oh my God, I'm dropping them everywhere. I'm going to use this section, which is seeds to sow in 2026. And it's kind of like tables with all the months. And I think I'm going to pop them in here because I think that's the most organised one to do. So that's the section I'm going to use for this just because I think it is the most useful. Is that lighting okay? No, I haven't filled any of my planner in, by the way. It's so bad. I know, but I'm literally doing it now. I'm like, it's January. It's still fine. Seeds to buy this year. So you can jot down all the seeds that you need to buy. And then this is the one that I thought was really useful for people. Seeds I already have. So you jot down the seeds you've already got. And then there's a tick box here where you can say if you have a full pack or if you're running low so that you know you might need to top it up soon. But this is a really good way of just keeping track of everything you've already got. I will sow my pak choi in March. Cosmos. Look at those petals on that one. This is a double click rose bonbon. Oh my gosh, I love it. I just love the name. I love the look of it. I really hope I manage to grow these. So I'm going to sow these in at the end of Feb. Try and get a head start, I think. Cosmos. But also on each month, there are pages that kind of give you an idea of what you can sow and grow. So like in February, you've got sow indoors. You can chit your early potatoes. You can sow tomatoes, chillies, peppers, cucumbers, aubergine and peas. And then sow directly outdoors. You've got broad beans, bare root fruit trees and bushes, onions and shallots, parsnips, carrots, radish, spring onions, beetroot and spinach. And then on the other page here, there are some suggested jobs to do in February. So like plant out overwintered sweet peas, which I will definitely be doing because I've got so many. Sow chilli and pepper seeds, sow tomato seeds, chit early potatoes, clean the greenhouse, warm up the ground ready for spring planting with fleece. Sometimes I use cardboard for that as well. But there's like lots more in this planner. I'm now going to go to each month and pop in all the seeds that I'm going to plant, depending on that chart. So I can stay nice and organised. So I feel like this vlog has just been bad lighting, bad weather and we've just barely done anything. And that's pretty much it. So I'm so sorry about that. We did cook a couple of things, I think, at the beginning of the week and I did sow those seeds, which was really good. And I have done some, a little bit of organisation, but the weather this week has just been horrendous and the lighting in my house obviously is terrible. I should have done more filming in here because it's actually much, much lighter in here. I'll be back again on Monday for an allotment diary or you can join me again next Sunday for another home vlog. And hopefully it will be a little bit lighter and I'll actually get outside and do something. Oh my God, Pippin, is that you? What are you doing? Come in then. Just attacked the door to get in. Pippin, honestly, naughty bunny. Yeah, hopefully we will get outside a little bit more next week. Don't forget to check out Readly and my discount code below, which will be in my description box. And I hope you have a lovely week. I will see you again when I see you. Thanks for watching, guys. Bye.