Gardening Projects for the School Holidays

Do harmony and balance in an environment design bring the occupants peace and prosperity? The answer is yes according to the ancient Chinese art of Feng Shui. Using Feng Shui principles means arranging objects and space in your living space in a way that will accomplish these goals.

‘Potato Pete’ was a cartoon character from the WW2 era, whose job was to persuade people to fill up on homegrown potatoes rather than bread made from imported wheat. Potatoes made it into all kinds of recipes during the war, replacing some of the fat in pastry and even turning into dessert. The Ministry of Food published the Potato Pete Recipe Book, which you can read online.

This summer, we will be focusing on the main garden. The aim is to have the structure in place by the end of the year, so I can spending next year gardening rather than building the garden. It’s not that it hasn’t been an interesting experience, and I’m loving watching the design unfold and become the garden we want, but I’ve spent far more of the year wanting to garden than I will spend actually gardening!

These are the tea bags I buried in the garden in July for the Tea Bag Index, a citizen science project investigating soil health. I dug them up a couple of weeks ago, and they have been drying on the dining room table. There are accompanying soil samples to go with each tea bag. It’s time to send them all off to Tea Bag Index HQ, so they can become part of the national and international data set. It will be interesting to see the results in due course.

Allyson Brady, McMaster University

Last summer, Ryan and I popped on our face masks, slathered our hands in sanitiser and braved a trip to pandemic-era Ikea. There were a few things we needed, and I wanted to stock up on consumables for my Hydroponicum.

In November 2021, Heinz announced to the world that they had successfully created a high-quality ketchup made from tomatoes grown in Martian conditions.

Header image: The Artemis II mission will send four astronauts on a flyby of the Moon. NASA

Header image: Macromitrium microstomum is found throughout New Zealand on the trunks or branches of smooth-barked trees, or on rock. Silvia Pressel, Author provided

French toast is a classic breakfast dish and for good reason. It's made by soaking stale bread in a mix of milk, beaten eggs, cinnamon, and sugar and then cooking it in a skillet until it's golden-brown. The results are crispy on the outside and custard-like on the inside. It's even better with a pat of butter and maple syrup on top. It's a nostalgic breakfast that many of us grew up with. The basic recipe has been unchanged for years until our Test Kitchen stumbled across a new TikTok hack.

Collaborative post

There is no perfect garden plant, unless one is talking about plastic. All chlorophyll-loaded garden accents have both good and bad visual and cultural attributes. Understanding the weaknesses of your garden’s plant material presents an opportunity for you to use one plant to complement another while hiding visual weak points.