No matter the time of year, freshly cut flowers will always bring a sense of joy and natural beauty into any room. Fresh bouquets in water — whether grown ourselves or gifted — are normally at their best for a couple of weeks, but blooms will be fleeting and are usually thrown away once they start to lose their colour and wilt. So, a question that I’m asked a lot is simply — ‘How can I make my flowers last longer?’ The answer lies in the art of drying flowers — a craft that I’ve been immersed in for the past seven years. Dried floral arrangements will bring a different aesthetic to interiors compared to fresh — they are not for everyone — but if you like the look, you can very easily prolong the beauty of your flowers by months — even years — by creating striking arrangements that celebrate floral structures and will add interest to mantelpieces, dining tables, sideboards — you name it — throughout the seasons.
Meet the man pioneering vertical farming in an effort to save our food production | House & Garden
23.06.2023 - 10:25 / houseandgarden.co.uk
James Lloyd-Jones photographed at his company’s Innovation Centre in Bristol, where different crops and new technology are trialled
This month, entrepreneur James Lloyd- Jones is opening the world’s largest vertical farm in Gloucestershire. His business, Jones Food Company, already supplies around 30 per cent of the UK’s cut basil, which is grown at an existing site near Scunthorpe. However, this new farm, at 15,000 metres square – the equivalent of 75 tennis courts stacked one on top of another – will be recordbreaking in both size and technology, enabling the company to supply British supermarkets with hundreds of tonnes of super fresh herbs and salad leaves.
‘We import over 50 per cent of our salads, herbs and flowers in this country. It’s crazy,’ says James. ‘The nutritional content of the food goes down, the longer it waits to get onto the shelves. With our system, the crops are harvested and on the supermarket shelves within 12 hours. We are cutting out a whole chain of events that consume huge amounts of energy – from flying produce in by air to transporting it in large trucks. We are also using considerably less water than traditional agriculture and there is less food waste, which is one of the biggest culprits for carbon emissions.’
Vertical farming is a form of soil-less hydroponic growing that has been practised for hundreds if not thousands of years – some people believe the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were based on hydroponics. Crops such as strawberries, tomatoes and salads have been widely grown in hydroponic greenhouse systems for many years, cultivated in inert substrates soaked in nutrient-dosed water. But large-scale vertical farming, using more advanced lighting and watering technology that allows the
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