Life Begins When You Start A Garden. This perfect little Chinese proverb exemplifies the simplicity of gardening pleasure. Millie and I have both received good gardening tuition from our green-thumbed parents, who have understood the wonderful returns gardening provides in fruit and vegetable yield for many decades. Gardening also comes with bonus features like exercise and stretching (natural yoga, right?), direct contact with healthy soil microbes, sunshine on skin, and the deep pleasure of feeling closely connected with seasonal cycles. Using well designed and constructed tools increases gardening productivity. Dad still uses some of the tools his father was using in the 1940s and 50s; that kind of product durability should be something all manufacturers strive for, not because it’s highly...
Every year, the world sups its way through 16 billion single-use coffee cups. Check out the zeros: 16,000,000,000. Every. Year. That’s an obscene quantity of tree-destroying, non-compostable nonsense, isn’t it? And it needn’t be that way, people... read on.
My apron and I are inseparable. I’m at peace with that, in a renaissance-blokey kind of way. It lends a certain svelteness to my physique. It also makes me ‘look the part’. Looking the part is important because, when it comes to Pashley bicycle maintenance, there’s really not that much to do...
Who? John Muir died over one hundred years ago, but most historians agree that he was instrumental in the establishment of the American National Parks system; the same model was used to create New Zealand’s national parks back in 1887. I picked up my inaugural John Muir book, My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), last year and that was it. Instant fan boy...
While summer seems to be conventionally labelled Picnic Season, the truth is that any day worth venturing out in can be accessorised with a delicious picnic lunch, enjoyable outdoors or in your vehicle, parked up with a glorious view of nature. Here are a few of my most popular picnic recipes.
