Processing Ideas, Tips & Guides

When you've finally decided to sell your home, the process of doing so can be challenging and confusing. Whether it's going through numerous open houses or waiting around for the right offer (or any offer) to come in, speed up the process by following some of these real estate expert tips to sell your home faster.

Freezing tomatillos is a great way to preserve them so you have some on hand whenever you need them.

Growing onions is a popular task for millions of gardeners and knowing when to harvest red onions – along with yellow and white varieties – is important for success. If you harvest onions too early, it means a limited storage life. But, harvesting too late could mean a split or rotten bulb. In this article, I’m going to review two perfect times for harvesting red onions. One is ideal for fresh use and the other is best for optimizing storage life.

Dennis Leupold | Design: Better Homes & Gardens

Growing Poinsettias from Cuttings and keeping them in pots indoors is the best way to add a Christmasy vibe to your home all year round! Let’s have a look at how to grow and maintain it successfully!

If you’re interested in an organic solution for problems with your garden and houseplants, you may want to consider neem oil. “This botanical pesticide is used as an insecticide, which is most effective on immature insects,” says Barbara Smith, consumer horticulture extension agent at theHome & Garden Information Center at Clemson University. “It does have some fungicidal benefits for diseases such as powdery mildew.”

No, cauliflower is not man-made. It’s a product of selective breeding from its wild ancestor, wild cabbage. Over many centuries, farmers chose specific plants with desirable traits to cultivate, leading to various types of Brassica oleracea, including cauliflower.

The kitchen is often referred to as “the heart of the home,” but what happens when the weather gets nice and nobody wants to be inside anymore? Enter the outdoor kitchen. It’s the perfect place to relax with friends and enjoy the backyard. Today we’re sharing tons of outdoor kitchen inspiration, ranging in scale from giant outdoor kitchen kits to simple grilling areas made with reclaimed materials.

Just over a week ago I spent a couple of hours at the Eden Project, so I thought I would show you some of the more unusual edible plants I came across while I was there.

Paula Cocozza had an article published in the Guardian yesterday, which was titled “No plastic please, Mum: my quest to make waste-free packed lunches“. In it she reported on a week where she and her 8 year old son Gabriel set out to fill his lunchbox with packaging-free food. It’s an article that will – I am sure – resonate with plenty of people who are juggling time and money constraints with food preferences and a desire to be a bit more eco-friendly.

When I clear the next bed it will be time to plant the overwintering onions. I choose to plant my onions in the autumn for two reasons; the first is that I like having the beds filled overwinter. It’s nicer than having a bare garden to look at. The second is that they are harvestable about a month earlier in the summer, which means their bed is available for replanting a month earlier, and that works for me.

I’m not a politician. I’m not a diplomat. I’m not an expert on foreign policy. It’s hard to watch what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank with any equanimity; over 1300 Palestinians have been killed so far, including 315 children and and 166 women.

When I set about blogging The Peat-Free Diet it was an experiment, an journey into the unknown. My aim was to provide gardeners who want to garden without the use of peat with the information they need to do so, and the book evolved into a gardening primer that assumed peat was not on the menu. My love of science made more of an appearance than I had anticipated and there are plenty of big words to cope with, but it is my hope that they are presented in such a way that they are not hard to swallow.

Potting on

It’s hard to imagine anyone being more excited about eating lettuce than the three astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) were yesterday, when they tucked into the first leaves of space-grown lettuce they’ve been allowed to eat. Despite having to sanitise the leaves first, with citric-acid-based, food-safe, antibacterial wipes (yummy!), they broke out the oil and vinegar and tucked in with gusto. They even thanked Mission Control and the scientists for giving them the opportunity to take part in this payload mission, and saved some veggies for the Russian cosmonauts who were outside on a spacewalk at harvest time.

I love tendrils, I find them beautiful and utterly fascinating. And occasionally irritating, when they tangle and cling to things they shouldn’t. Anyway, in previous years I have spent a far amount of time looking at tendrils, achocha tendrils in particular, like the one above.

This morning I have finished reading the Introduction of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, a call to arms to everyone on the planet to prevent climate change becoming a human-extinction event. A week ago, the Guardian published an article suggesting that using the narrative of war for environmental purposes may not be a good idea. The author thought that it may be deepening the divisions between us, making it harder to get our message across. It didn’t suggest any alternative wordings, except:

Ryan and I celebrated the start of National BBQ week (running from 25th – 31st May this year) with a slightly over-ambitious outdoor cooking session. More about that later, but for now I’m going to skip ahead to the end, because dessert was the best bit.

Gayla Trail over at You Grow Girl has been blogging recently about an illness that has kept her from gardening this year, and how that makes her feel, and as a result she has rebooted her Grow Write Guild series of writing prompts by asking gardeners to write about a time when they were unable to garden, for whatever reason.

Whenever I see demonstrations of composting on TV I’m always impressed by three things – the size of the compost heap, the endless supply of compostable materials to put on it and the enormous vigour of the gardener in charge of the heap.

Last month, writing on the topic of blackberries for Lubera, I made the observation that the British don’t have a tradition of foraging. It made me wonder again when and why we lost it (which I started wondering when I was writing about Sea buckthorn on FB for Lubera). So far I haven’t found a definitive answer – ethnobotanists spend a lot of time exploring the reasons for loss of traditional/indigenous knowledge about plant use, but generally focus on societies where it is being lost now, and where there is hope of conserving it.

They may not look like much, but these little fellas could be the Holy Grail of growing citrus from seed – polyembryonic seedlings. What’s happening is that two seedlings are growing out of one seed (in other cases it can be three). One of these seedlings is a true seedling, formed via the normal process of fertilization. It will therefore have characteristics from both its parents.

Like new potatoes and asparagus, giant American marshmallows are clearly in season at the moment – they’re appearing in all the shops. We spotted them in our local garden centre (!) and, fresh from the success of our inaugural marshmallow toasting, we thought we’d set ourselves a challenge and see whether we could repeat it with something considerably larger.

This year I took part in a Garden Organic experiment to see whether quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) can be successfully grown in UK gardens. Two varieties of seed were supplied by Real Seeds – Rainbow and Temuco. They’re a tender crop, and I sowed my seeds at the end of April and planted them out at the end of May. Germination was excellent.

This is our garden plan for the front garden and the ‘back’ garden (which is at the side of the house, strictly speaking). The red areas are paving – a garden path, a wide patio and enough hardstanding to go underneath two sheds (one of which may turn out to be a greenhouse).

As gardeners, we’re all familiar with finding caterpillars in the cabbages, but we’re also adept at removing them before we cook up our feasts (or, in my case, feeding the whole lot to the chickens). But what if we didn’t? There are plenty of cultures around the world in which insects provide a valuable source of protein, and even in the Western world our food processing systems don’t guarantee us insect-free food, so we’re all eating them unwittingly anyway. (Although, apparently, the idea that we eat spiders in our sleep is an urban legend.)

Last week’s outdoor ‘cooking’ experiment didn’t involve lighting a fire – I relied on solar power!

I’ve mentioned the TomTato and the Egg & Chips plants before – they’re exclusive to T&M, grafted vegetables that grow two crops – potatoes combined either with tomatoes or aubergines. Now opinion is divided as to whether they’re genius space savers or a novelty that won’t give you your money’s worth on either crop. But if you’d like the opportunity to decide for yourself then they’re on offer today – you can buy a pair of plants (one of each variety) for just £4.99.

Header image: The future of agriculture? Nick Dragotta

When I first became a freelance writer, I had no thoughts of writing a book. It wasn’t that it was daunting, but rather that there were a lot of gardening books on the market and I couldn’t see how there needed to be any more. My garden had been slowly growing for a few years, the grow dome was just about finished and in use, and I had started to become interested in unusual edibles, but I wasn’t a gardening expert – just an enthusiastic amateur. I knew that I didn’t want to add to the army of books that tell you exactly what you need to do in your vegetable patch every month in the year.

I’m in the process of building up a freelance writing business, the aim of which is to have clients pay me for my words and images. This is not a hobby, it will be my livelihood. I have not embarked upon it with a sense of entitlement; I am a good and professional writer with a wealth of experience. I deliver what my clients need, and in return I expect to be paid and treated fairly.

Over the past few weeks, Ryan and his dad have been working on the new workshop. We struggled with the groundwork because the weather has been so wet this autumn, so in the end we hired some professionals to dig out the space and lay concrete for the foundation. Ryan and his dad have built the cabin themselves. (One of our neighbours mistook them for professional installers and asked if they were able to install modern garden offices!). They have been varnishing it during breaks in the weather, and Ryan has painted the floor, and once that is dry he will be installing shelving. Ryan’s dad is making a bespoke workbench to fit. 

Header image: The finicky fruit took some time to adapt to California’s climate. Print Collector via Getty Images

Header image: NV77/Shutterstock

Did you get new books for Christmas? I did. I got two lovely new books, a coffee table book on Mars (it has maps!) and an unofficial history of NASA mission patches (which came with stickers…).

When this bright red gladiolus suddenly appeared it was inevitable it would end up in a Monday vase sooner or later. One of a batch of 25 bought from Aldi two or three years ago, it is one of only about 3 blooms in total over that period, working out to less than £1 per bloom!