The Nutella Incident

Traditionally, greenhouses can be quite energy and water intensive, running on fossil fuels which are detrimental to the environment. This is why more and more UK homeowners and gardening enthusiasts are designing their greenhouses with sustainability in mind. In this article, we’ll talk you through the different areas where you can consider improving the sustainability of your greenhouse and how these could benefit you – so that you can garden with a green conscience as well as a green thumb.

Using wallpaper to update your space brings in patterns and textures that plain old paint just can’t match. Especially with numerous peel-and-stick wallpaper options, you have various designs you can choose from without having to fully commit for years.

When it comes to interior design, it can be tricky to know what decor trends to buy into and what to skip. While 2023 trends included leaning into bold color, maximalist style, dark countertops, and a nod to Art Deco, some others like all-white interiors, sparse spaces, and wiggly furnishings weren't as popular. They may not be entirely trends to skip, but at least ones to put on the back burner if you are currently designing or updating your space. Looking for some advice? We sat down with interior designers to get their take on design trends they wish they'd skipped.

Header image: Lupinus albus (altramuces o chochitos), by Calapito via Wikimedia Commons.

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It’s at this time of year, I think, that a polytunnel or greenhouse really comes in handy in the garden. Over the summer it may just be a tangle of tomato vines – productive, but a space that you really only go in to keep up with the watering chore, or to harvest ripe tomatoes. You know you’re going to come out with green stains on your clothes and hands that smell funny – tomatoes are like that. Those tomatoes will hang on longer into the autumn than you thought they would, and by the time you’ve cleared out the polytunnel the season will be so far advanced that it will be cold and dark and your crop of overwintering salads will barely be growing – just marking time until the days are long enough for them to actually grow.

The ice cream experiments continue, with a spate of frozen yoghurt trials. I have never been a big fan of chocolate ice cream, but something I read online (and a half-empty jar of Nutella) prompted me to give Nutella frozen yoghurt a go!

Just over a year ago, when we were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing, I talked about the lack of diversity in space and mentioned Mary Jackson. In 2016, the movie Hidden Figures shared the stories of Mary Jackson and two other Black female mathematicians – Katherine Johnson and, Dorothy Vaughan. They worked at NASA when a ‘computer’ still meant a person carrying out mathematical calculations. The film is based on a book by Margot Lee Shetterly, which I am reading at the moment. The book offers a more detailed and accurate account of the prejudice these women (and others) had to overcome.

Can we grow food on the Moon or Mars? That was the question that started Dr Wieger Wamelink, ecologist and exobiologist at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, on a research quest in 2013.

Header image: Geoff Caddick/EPA

Getting a plant payload into space is rarely straightforward. In this episode, Emma the Space Gardener chats with Dr Carl Carruthers, who started out sending his own research projects into space and then became Chief Scientist at Nanoracks. There he worked on projects to send palm tree seeds to the International Space Station for the UAE and to design a kit to turn school kids into space farmers. 

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