Tomato Varieties: Sarah Raven picks some of the best

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Slugs and snails can wreak havoc in the garden, demolishing seedlings and decimating the leaves of larger plants such as hostas. While slug pellets are an effective deterrent, those containing metaldehyde can harm hedgehogs and other wildlife, while other forms of slug control can be time consuming and aren’t guaranteed to work.

Perennials are the stalwarts of our garden borders – they provide colourful flowers in the garden, year after year.

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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!

We don’t really eat fresh tomatoes in this house, and as a rule I don’t tend to grow them. Last year I was tempted by a trio of unusual flavoured tomatoes from Wyevale, but they were tall and needy things that wanted constant watering. I didn’t notice any significant difference between the flavours of the ones we did eat; I gave most of the fruit away. When I had a juicer I would grow cherry tomatoes and make tomato juice; the chickens loved the leftover pulp. (And yes, if you juice yellow tomatoes you get yellow tomato juice.)

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.

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Unparalleled in their August marvellousness at Perch Hill are of course tomatoes. The smell of the stems and leaves that lingers after pinching is almost as good as the taste of the fruit. We grow groves of tomatoes in the greenhouse here, and these are sometimes supplemented with the hardier and more reliable ones growing in a sunny spot in the garden. And we plant lots of basil in amongst and through our tomato jungle.