Nine of the Best Gardening Shoes in 2023

13 of the Best Winter Pear Varieties to Grow at Home

Evening is the best time to relax after a routine day’s work. Besides relaxing in the garden, you can do productive and interesting tasks that will result in a beautiful place to relish a great cup of coffee. So, if you are thinking about What to do in  Garden in the Evening, have a look at the following innovative pointers below!

Nurturing your crassula ovata plant to optimal health requires the right balance of care, and choosing the right fertilizer plays a vital role in this equation. With many options available, both commercially and from your own kitchen and pantry, let’s explore an extensive list of the Best Jade Plant Fertilizers!

A lot of new gardening and plant books have landed on my mat this spring, and I need to up my book reviewing game! I like to do them justice, and spend some time reading them before I write a review, so that does create a bit of a backlog. Right at the time when the garden is demanding my attention. Anyway, the book that has found itself at the top of the list is one that really encompasses the gardening zeitgeist – The Community Gardening Handbook, by Ben Raskin. I looked him up, and he has impeccable credentials. He’s currently Head of Horticulture for the Soil Association; prior experiences include working for Garden Organic, running a walled garden and being a Horticultural Advisor for the Community Farm near Bristol.

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Kate Greene talks about Shannon Lucid, the NASA astronaut who spent six months living on the Russian space station Mir. Shannon, it turns out, was a bookworm. During her stay, she read 50 books and improvised shelving from old food boxes, complete with straps to stop the books floating off. This was in 1996, a good decade before the invention of the Kindle, and so these were real books. She apparently chose titles with the highest word to mass ratio, since launch weight is a critical factor! Lucid left her library behind for future spacefarers, but it burned up when Mir was de-orbited in 2001.

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.

We’re visiting Catherine’s Dickerson’s garden today in San Diego. We’ve visited before (A Little Slice of Heaven in San Diego), and it is always a pleasure to see what is growing there.

A cherry plum, sweet, thin-skinned and very prolific (you’ll also find it sold under ‘Red Grape Sugar Plum’). It was in the top three of our recent taste test and everyone liked it for its strong tomato flavour that’s sweet but not overly so, and its firm not mushy texture. It has a slight acidity running through it which all sweet tomatoes need. It ripens quite late compared to ‘Sungold’ and produces for a long period of time. It’s lovely in a mixed salad with the larger varieties. 

Like honeybees, bumblebees visit flowers to collect pollen and nectar to take back to their colonies to feed the developing brood.

When it comes to garden gear, there is a clear divide among growers: Those who love tomato cages, and those who consider them an absolute useless eyesore. I’m controversially the latter. Aesthetics aside, there are a lot of questions I have about the invention of this particular metal torture device, and I have opinions about how it might not be the best way to grow your tomatoes. In fact, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with your crops due to cage structure—increased pests and lower fruit production to start! 

Used for turning, driving and removing screws, a screwdriver is fundamental to most DIYtasks. A screwdriver is a length of shaped metal designed to fit into a specific screw size and shape, attached to a long shank and handle. However, it’s not quite as simple as it may seem. 

China is one of the great destinations for visiting gardens. The influence over garden design and the vast array of plants and flowers is secondary to the investment in time and dedication demonstrated in so many great locations. This is just a selection of those you may consider visiting if you can make the journey..