Adventure Ideas, Tips & Guides

Reese's | Design: Better Homes & Gardens

After a busy few weeks of summer travel and adventures, my family and I returned to a home that was in need of a major declutter.

Join us this summer as we explore some of the UK’s best 2-for-1 Gardens to visit in August, for fun days out with all the family. Whether it’s an adventure playground or woodland trail for the kids, or a rose garden or restored Elizabethan garden for the horticulturalists, there is plenty to enjoy at these gardens. Visit using your 2-for-1 Gardens card to save money on your trips to all these wonderful gardens.

Did you know that there’s a whole day dedicated to celebrating the mighty oyster? That’s right, National Oyster Day is on August 5th, and it’s the perfect excuse to dive into some maritime merriment with your loved ones. Here’s how you can make a splash and ensure this day is a pearl of a time for everyone!

Ketchup, soy sauce, and hot sauce are condiments you’ll find in most anyone’s pantry. These pantry essentials are the basics; more adventurous or globally oriented palates might also stock products like fruit chutney, gochujang, and harissa (to name a few) to keep around the house as add-ons to delivery or key flavor punch-ups for homemade meals. The next condiment that probably deserves a place on your pantry shelf? Hot honey.

National Hand Roll Day, which is celebrated on July 6th of this year, is a culinary adventure that invites you to dive deep into the vibrant world of Japanese sushi hand rolls. With their striking colors, tantalizing tastes, and varied textures, hand rolls are a testament to the artistry and tradition of Japanese cuisine. Observing this day is an opportunity to immerse yourself in a cultural feast, exploring the rich tapestry of flavors one roll at a time.

Certain sounds fill the heart with the joys of summer, but the season's undisputed high note has to be the sizzle of a garden barbecue. Beyond clear blue skies, and an excellent potato salad recipe, what more could a griller want besides first-rate barbecue tool sets?

There’s nothing nicer than being outside on a beautiful late spring day, especially if it means you get a whole day away from your desk. Danielle, Carol, and digital editor Christine Alexander recently played hooky from their editorial duties and went on a horticultural adventure at one of New England’s great public gardens. Located in Boylston, Massachusetts, Tower Hill is filled with fun places to explore, including formal gardens, woodland trails lined with native plantings, and two conservatories. After exploring the grounds and chatting about some of the great plants they came across, Danielle and Carol sat down for a chat with Tower Hill’s director of horticulture, Mark Richardson. We hope this episode inspires you to get out and enjoy a field trip to a public garden near you!  

National Cucumber Day is a unique celebration that brings a refreshing twist to our calendars every June 14th. This day is not just about enjoying cucumbers in their natural, crunchy form but also about exploring the creative avenues this versatile vegetable offers. Families can turn this day into a fun, engaging, and delicious adventure, strengthening bonds over the love for cucumbers.

Image: Newby Hall Gardens. Credit: Newby Hall Gardens.  Wondering what there is to do around Yorkshire this spring and summer? There are plenty of Gardens to Visit in Yorkshire, with lots to see and do — including impressive gardens, glorious stately homes, and much much more!  Here are just a few picks that might tickle your fancy this season.  Newby Hall Gardens Newby Hall and Gardens is located in Ripon, just a 40–50-minute drive from York and Leeds.Their gardens cover 40 acres and includes a whopping 15 areas of interest — including one of the UK's longest herbaceous borders! Not only that, but they also have a miniature railway, boat trips, an adventure playground and more to explore. Perfect for a family-fun day out, whatever the weather. Sheffield Botanical Gardens Image: The pavilions at Sheffield Botanical Gardens. Credit: Sheffield Botanical Gardens. Opened in 1833 and spanning over 19 acres, are the impressive Sheffield Botanical Gardens. They’re a Grade II site of special historic interest, featuring traditional glass Pavilions and sweeping gardens. There’s lots to see and do, including a Mediterranean Climate Garden, a Rock and Water Garden, and even a traditional Victorian Garden display. A must-visit if you’re near the area! Did you know that Manchester once had a Botanical Gardens? There’s even remains of the epic entrance, which can be seen at the front of the White City Retail Park near Trafford. You can read all about Manchester’s Lost Royal Botanical Gardens here. Harlow Carr (North Yorkshire) RHS gardens are a gem of the UK, and RHS Harlow Carr is no exception. This Harrogate-based Garden has lots to do and see throughout spring and summer – a perfect pick for all the family. Their main borders

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Spritz Society

The winter doldrums are a reality in the Midwest, especially for gardeners, but an immersive plant adventure at your local conservatory is a sure way to lift your spirits. Fortunately, midwestern cities and towns are blessed with many gardens under glass where visitors can experience the warmth and color of the growing season any time of the year. For me, an annual winter trip to the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago, just a two-hour drive from my home in southern Wisconsin, is the perfect way to get my plant fix and keep my sanity.

Among all the hobbies you could choose to engage in during your free time, gardening should definitely be top of that list. The therapeutic feel and connection with nature you get to experience even while enjoying the fruits of your labour is one of its enticing perks. But all this might just be an added advantage if you're focused on the beautiful landscapes and serenity it creates.

Can you imagine stepping outside your house and wading out onto a reef to collect seaweeds and shellfish for your lunch? Or talking the dog for a walk into the nearby forest, hunting for mushrooms and foraging edible plants to go with them?

In Jade Pearls and Alien Eyeballs I take a look at some of the journeys familiar plants have made across the globe, and touch on their arrival in previously inhospitable places – underwater, Antarctica and even outer space. Since writing it I have become increasingly interested in the idea of plants in space, and have blogged about some of the current projects (lettuce on the ISS, and a ‘Mars’ greenhouse in Hawaii, you can scroll through the posts by selecting the space blog category). Researching the history of plants in space has proven to be quite a challenge. It’s not that there’s no information available, it’s that there’s a *lot*, and it’s a fascinating topic. Tracking down one piece of research inevitably brings up something new and shiny, and you’re off down a rabbit hole. It occurred to me that it’s a bit like a maze, and I thought we could treat it like a Choose Your Own Adventure story.

It started at the garden centre, where I was helping to put newly arrived plants out in the autumn/winter ‘tub and basket’ display. There’s a good range of ornamental plants on offer, all looking very cute in their youthful stages, in various colours and textures. They might not have the showy flowers of summer bedding, but they’re all interesting plants. The winter garden doesn’t have to look dull! The ones that caught my eye were Gaultheria ‘Very Berry’, cute little plants with dark green leaves, white bell-shaped flowers (they look exactly like little blueberry flowers, because they’re related), and quite large berries ripening from white to pink (ultimately they should go red).

It’s common to hear Americans talk about their exciting experiences at Space Camp. It’s not often that students in the UK get to work with astronauts on a space experiment, but that’s exactly what’s on offer next summer at Mission Discovery – King’s College London 2023.

The two individuals in the top photo (shot April 9) were cut from my vines in fall and stored in the mudroom closet since, both still heavy and firm and solid as can be. From the feel of them, they’ve got more life left—though I expect I’ll have at the dears well before they falter. The other half-dozen fruits I harvested from that hill last fall would have kept just as well—except I ate them.I bought the seed at Turtle Tree Seed, a biodynamic seed company nearby, specifically because the description said that they’d been “intensively selecting for storage,” saving seed to sell from their ‘Butternut’ harvest each year with lastingness in mind. Another gardener or seed farmer might have selected for another trait—but Turtle Tree was intent on long-storing squash, and that they got.Remember my story about Turtle Tree last year, an interview with co-managers Lia Babitch and Ian Robb

I confess, I’d become somewhat herb-complacent, always stocked up year-round on garden-grown parsley and garlic and sage and chives, but not very herb-adventurous any longer otherwise.  I have various other herbs in the garden, but mostly ornamental varieties—like gold-leaf creeping oregano (also called marjoram, and a great groundcover), or garlic chives (which I rarely eat, but whose late-summer white flowers the pollinators and I both enjoy very much).After saying goodbye much too soon that Sunday to Gayla, her husband, Davin Risk, and their dog, Molly, all I wanted to do was pulse aromatic things in my food-processor, and I made basil pesto to freeze in cubes, froze whose rosemary twigs, made a parsley log and more of my usual fare–the ways I always freeze herbs. But every time I looked over at the goodies I’d made in class the day before, I thought: more, more, more!Gayla re-awakened the herbalist in me, with “recipes” like these:homemade herb-infused vinegarsWE WARMED a stainless

My “simple question”—really the same question, asked in two phases—was to Marco Polo Stufano, a far more expert and fearless garden-maker. I’d lost one trunk of a very large, wide-reaching old apple tree last fall, exposing a large circle of shade perennials to the sun.Do I have to move all thehellebores, the gold Hakonechloa grass and other things that once enjoyed the apple’s shade, I’d asked then? After some discussion and some plant-shopping, I’d begun the remediation with a female fringe tree, Chionanthus virginicus (a native with fragrant white June flowers, good fall color and dark blue fruits).This spring I called for help again, still fretting a

Coauthor Joan Maloof is founder of the Old Growth Forest Network, aimed to preserve, protect and promote the country’s few remaining stands of old growth forest, and she’s a professor emeritus at Salisbury University in Maryland. She joined me to talk about complex the organism that is the forest, and I learned how almost half of all our rain is dependent on the forest’s “exhale” of water, how the trees with all their light-detecting cells can “see” different colors and intensities of light and respond accordingly, and much more.Read along as you listen to the Nov. 27, 2017 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here). Plus: Enter to win a copy of the new book by commenting at the very bottom of the page. (Below, co-authors Llewel