How to buy and set up a tall cold frame

It’s a big investment, but you’ll reap the rewards if you sow and grow under glass, says our gardening expert

Every gardener dreams of one day owning a greenhouse. It is an inevitable path that starts with a bit of fleece and the miracles of growth that happen with just a few extra degrees of heat, and ends in lusting after luxury bespoke greenhouses online and fantasising about pineapples. Growing under protection changes the game: seedlings grow strong and robust in a way that never happens on a windowsill. You can extend the season and ensure heat-loving plants still bake in less-than-perfect weather.

For me, this has been a fantasy for years. I have built lean-to structures, fashioned from skip finds, old windows and used fish tanks, but they have all fallen apart. This year, as I trawled through online sales of fancy glasshouses, I did a cost-per-wear analysis. I realise that such metrics are usually reserved for handbags and expensive jackets, but my world is floated by happy green things and my windowsills are starting to buckle and warp from years of seedlings grown on them. If I bought this handsome, tall cold frame, it would cost just under £20 a week. Put another way, every tomato I eat this year will cost me a pound – but oh, how wonderful they will taste. A single plant can produce up to 200 fruits, so from five plants I could harvest 1,000 tomatoes.

Continue reading...

from Home And Garden | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Ho0zB4
via IFTTT

Gardening tips: plant elephant’s ears

Then sow poached egg plants and join a plant society to meet likeminded gardeners

Plant this Bergenias, or elephant’s ears, can tolerate shade, especially in tricky places such as under trees. ‘Overture’ has magenta flowers in spring and burnished red leaves in autumn and winter; or try ‘Bressingham White’. Pair with pulmonarias and hellebores under bright dogwood stems.

Join this There’s no better way to learn about plants than meeting other growers. Whether you’re into alpines, cottage garden plants or cacti, there’s a society for you to expand your knowledge, buy seeds and plants, and meet people. Check out this list and join one today.

Continue reading...

from Home And Garden | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2XNcM8b
via IFTTT

90% of home-hunters would consider buying a fixer-upper

We asked the experts for their top renovation tips.

from Property blog https://ift.tt/2tYo8IE
via IFTTT

Actually, the rich pay lots of tax. But on income, not their wealth | Patrick Collinson

Rather than cut income tax, the government would do better to tax the country’s real wealth

We know that giant multinationals are engaged in industrial-scale tax avoidance. We know from the Panama and Paradise papers how some individuals will use every offshore trick to dodge taxes. We know that billionaires flock to Monaco to hide from any responsibility to their fellow citizens back home. But let’s not deceive ourselves about who is paying which taxes and who isn’t.

HM Revenue & Customs this week published an analysis of the income tax paid in the UK by salary band, region and gender. In total we paid £174bn income tax in 2016-17, the latest year for which figures are available. But of that, £52.5bn – nearly a third of all tax raised – was paid by the 381,000 taxpayers who earn more than £150,000 a year. The tax paid by those 381,000 individuals (overwhelmingly male) was more than all the income tax paid by the first 20 million taxpayers.

Continue reading...

from Property | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Jb69cK
via IFTTT

Let’s move to Brentford, west London: its finer moments are the grungier ones

It’s as if some deranged, power-filled local politician had spliced Putney with the lower reaches of Pudong

What’s going for it? Walking along the Thames, from Kew to Twickenham, you’d be momentarily excused for wondering where you were. Brentford is an odd place, as if some deranged, power-filled local politician had spliced, say, Putney with the lower reaches of Pudong. It has all the usual accoutrements of a west London suburb: a pleasant enough old, bricky centre, snug pubs, a gigantic stately home, Georgian townhouses and lovely walks by the Thames, all chucked together with luxury gyms and 80s offices housing financial advisers. But recent years have added beefed-up apartment blocks and the shrink-wrapped offices of today’s economic masters, Sega, JC Decaux, GSK and Sky. Brentford’s finer moments are the grungier ones, the lower reaches of the Brent, where buddleia and elderflower burst from the paths and houseboats flaunt their blooms in recycled Belfast sinks. At spots like this you can scrape away the banal present to see the town’s origins, a place older than London, where ancient travellers and tribes once met to trade, I don’t know, amulets and barley, at the ford across the Brent.

The case against It’s definitely not a beauty, though it might have been. Overdevelopment and traffic choke the place.

Continue reading...

from Home And Garden | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2SOahic
via IFTTT

Let’s move to Brentford, west London: its finer moments are the grungier ones

It’s as if some deranged, power-filled local politician had spliced Putney with the lower reaches of Pudong

What’s going for it? Walking along the Thames, from Kew to Twickenham, you’d be momentarily excused for wondering where you were. Brentford is an odd place, as if some deranged, power-filled local politician had spliced, say, Putney with the lower reaches of Pudong. It has all the usual accoutrements of a west London suburb: a pleasant enough old, bricky centre, snug pubs, a gigantic stately home, Georgian townhouses and lovely walks by the Thames, all chucked together with luxury gyms and 80s offices housing financial advisers. But recent years have added beefed-up apartment blocks and the shrink-wrapped offices of today’s economic masters, Sega, JC Decaux, GSK and Sky. Brentford’s finer moments are the grungier ones, the lower reaches of the Brent, where buddleia and elderflower burst from the paths and houseboats flaunt their blooms in recycled Belfast sinks. At spots like this you can scrape away the banal present to see the town’s origins, a place older than London, where ancient travellers and tribes once met to trade, I don’t know, amulets and barley, at the ford across the Brent.

The case against It’s definitely not a beauty, though it might have been. Overdevelopment and traffic choke the place.

Continue reading...

from Property | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2SOahic
via IFTTT

The only way is up at this Essex barn with its own airfield

You can live like a Hollywood A lister here.

from Property blog https://ift.tt/2THGKvi
via IFTTT