If you’re one of those people who loves scavenging for useful things, or has a pile of interesting odds and ends stashed away for future projects, then you could think about recycling them into a 5 star wildlife hotel.
21.08.2023 - 11:40 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
Astronauts in space don’t have to worry much about furniture. There’s nowhere to sit down on the International Space Station (ISS), as (a) it’s really impossible to sit down in microgravity and (b) without gravity, you don’t really feel the need to sit down. So the crew just float, tucking their feet into restraints if they need to stay in one place. So although the ISS does have a small dining table, it doesn’t have any chairs, and there are no beds.
That will all change when we have astronauts living and working on the Moon or Mars. The Moon has about 1/6 Earth gravity, and Mars around 1/3. So the crew of those missions is likely to need some furniture, and choosing it is not quite as simple as heading to Ikea.
Funnily enough, Ikea has given some thought to the problem of space furniture.
The Mars Desert Research Station in the Utah desert is a place where researchers go to simulate a space mission. A team from Ikea has spent time there, learning more about living in extremely small spaces.
Their time in the MDRS inspired the Rumtid collection of product concepts exploring “the future needs of urban, small space living”. Rumtid makes use of a new super-lightweight veneer material. Made from “wood and waste”, it is rolled into strong, hollow tubes that can be joined together with connectors to form custom furniture solutions.
And in 2019, the team returned to the MDRS with Ikea products designed for small space living, choosing multifunctional items that could be arranged flexibly. Things like furniture on wheels, stools for seating and stackable chairs to save space.
It’s ironic that outer space should be so cramped that space is an issue. It’s not the only one. Like all travellers, spacefarers need to watch what they pack
If you’re one of those people who loves scavenging for useful things, or has a pile of interesting odds and ends stashed away for future projects, then you could think about recycling them into a 5 star wildlife hotel.
I met the Duke of Edinburgh a few years ago. Shame I was stuck in front of a computer at the time, and not somewhere more exciting like the Chelsea Flower Show. Meeting human royalty might be a rare occurrence for most people, but you can surround yourself with royal plants and get that regal feeling every time you step into the garden. To illustrate my point, let me share with you an old joke….
Soil isn’t one thing, it’s a collection of different things that come together to make the life-giving, plant-growing ‘dirt’ that we love. We have a tendency to poison it, cover it over and generally forget that it’s there, but good soil is the heart of a good garden and something we should pay a lot more attention to.
Ryan and I celebrated the start of National BBQ week (running from 25th – 31st May this year) with a slightly over-ambitious outdoor cooking session. More about that later, but for now I’m going to skip ahead to the end, because dessert was the best bit.
A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for some statistics about the average UK garden size, and I found some interesting ones. According to the 2015 media pack for the RHS The Garden magazine, a document that is aimed at attracting advertisers to the publication, the 380,000 RHS members the magazine is sent to have gardens that are 10 times larger than the UK average, covering over half an acre.
Like new potatoes and asparagus, giant American marshmallows are clearly in season at the moment – they’re appearing in all the shops. We spotted them in our local garden centre (!) and, fresh from the success of our inaugural marshmallow toasting, we thought we’d set ourselves a challenge and see whether we could repeat it with something considerably larger.
If you’ve ever wished you lived in a tropical climate, simply so that you could grow your own chocolate, then the future is looking bright. Last time I touched on this subject I mentioned plants that might add a chocolatey touch to your garden (with their colour, scent and even flavour).
A few weeks ago I received a press release from Waitrose about their new Alan Titchmarsh gardening range. It’s a fairly routine set of offerings, all nicely packaged up. The one that caught my eye was their ‘Broadfen’ horseradish thong, which they said is a “heritage variety first grown by the Egyptians (1500 BC).”
I’ve always been fascinated by the Home Front, the enlistment of every man, woman and child in the British Isles in an effort to beat Hitler through food rationing, making do and mending, salvage, growing your own and basically making the most of scarce resources with elbow grease and endless ingenuity. I’ve just read Eggs or Anarchy by William Sitwell, a biography of Lord Woolton who was the Minister of Food for much of the Second World War. He was in charge of ensuring everyone got fed, and improving nutritional standards was one of his aims. It’s unusual to get the ‘behind-the-scenes’ view, and the political situation wasn’t as united as may appear from our rose-tinted histories.
Ahoy there, me hearties! ‘Tis the day of the year when land lubbers talk like ye scurvy dog pirate of old, shiverin’ their timbers, and the like.
Today Blue Origin today successfully launched the New Shepard space vehicle’s Mission 9. The spacecraft is carrying payloads from private companies, universities and space agencies- including the world’s smelliest fruit.
Interviewers always seem to ask fiction authors “Where do you get your ideas?” and I suspect they then have to come up with an answer than doesn’t make them look like a loon. Because the truth is that, although inspiration can come out of the blue, once you start writing on a regular basis ideas come thick and fast – there just isn’t enough time or energy to turn them all into stories. Or that’s my experience anyway, writing non-fiction.