Health & Home

If you have an abundance of cucumbers, then fermenting is a great way to preserve them. Fermented Cucumbers or Gherkins are a great addition to sandwiches, salads and they even taste great just by themselves as a quick snack. Fermenting vs Pickling The fermentation of vegetables is among the oldest and healthiest methods of preserving food. There can be a...

Drying herbs at home is an effective way to preserve flavour, aroma, and therapeutic value from your garden throughout the year.

Grain is an amazing food – beautifully packaged in its exterior wrapping of bran it will keep for a very long time.  Once milled its nutritious bounty is made available for us to enjoy as flour and with the magic of fermentation this is transformed into our daily bread. A blessing indeed - especially if you step out of the...

With Covid keeping us all confined and the garden going into winter mode it’s time to turn inward and grow some magic in your kitchen. Not just for the five star restaurants - microgreens will raise your ham sandwich to gourmet level.  Microgreens are easy to grow and will provide you with fresh nourishing greens even in the depths of...

Make a healthy start to the New Year and grow something fresh and nutritious without having to leave your kitchen (apart from going to the gym of course).  Sprouts and microgreens will give you a very literal 'kitchen garden' giving you attractive additions to a salad, extra crunch to a sandwich and lots of healthy, fresh food. Microgreens Plate of...

It does seem a little early to be talking about Christmas, but if you want to have new potatoes for Christmas dinner this is what you do: What to plant You need cold treated seed – the cold breaks the dormancy cycle and spurs the potato into growth again. By using your own homegrown seed potatoes, or those from an...

We can all agree that growing your own vegetables has many advantages.  Nothing compares to home-grown for taste; growing your own means that your vegetables are very fresh, full of nutrients and taste delicious.  Then there’s the satisfaction – that sense of achievement that comes with picking your first tomato, or better still, when serve your first salad to a...

We have been stocking the Livos range of non toxic paints and wood treatments for some years now. As far as we know, Livos are the world’s first manufacturer of natural paints. The company was born in 1974 when a group of hippyish scientists and technicians began researching the use of plant compounds (phytochemicals) to create high quality paints and...

There are two types of people in the world – those that like sprouts and those that see sprouts as the vegetable that spoils Christmas.  This is probably all down to cooking so perhaps I should have started by saying there are two types of cooks in the world – those that respect the sprout and those that boil it...

The History of the Turnip & Swede Turnips are a cruciferous vegetable (member of the mustard family). Turnips thrive in cool climates. The turnip that we know is thought to have descended from the Wild Turnip which is native to Central Asia, the Mediterranean and the Near East. The turnip was a well-established crop in Roman times. Fast forward to...