I’m selling my home… has lockdown impacted asking prices?

Is your house on the market and you're wondering how lockdown will impact your sale? We held a live Q&A to answer your questions.

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More birds and bees, please! 12 easy, expert ways to rewild your garden

Now is the perfect time to boost the biodiversity of any outside space you have – whether by buying your cat a bell or ditching the insecticides

With humans – and our polluting, road-killing, noisy machines – largely out of the way, nature is having a big party. This is one of the few positives of lockdown to which we can cling, witness and even encourage. “The land taken up by gardens in the UK is greater than the area of all our national nature reserves,” says Mark Fellowes, a professor of ecology at the University of Reading who specialises in interactions between humans and wildlife, as well as urban ecology. Everyone with outside space, he says, “can become a nature reserve manager. You can do really simple things to affect biodiversity where you live.”

These days, even the most lackadaisical gardeners are taking a greater interest in whatever outside space they have, not least because panic food-buying seems to have segued into panic food-planting. Grow bags have become hard to come by and the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has reported increased inquiries about growing fruit and vegetables.

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More birds and bees, please! 12 easy, expert ways to rewild your garden

Now is the perfect time to boost the biodiversity of any outside space you have – whether by buying your cat a bell or ditching the insecticides

With humans – and our polluting, road-killing, noisy machines – largely out of the way, nature is having a big party. This is one of the few positives of lockdown to which we can cling, witness and even encourage. “The land taken up by gardens in the UK is greater than the area of all our national nature reserves,” says Mark Fellowes, a professor of ecology at the University of Reading who specialises in interactions between humans and wildlife, as well as urban ecology. Everyone with outside space, he says, “can become a nature reserve manager. You can do really simple things to affect biodiversity where you live.”

These days, even the most lackadaisical gardeners are taking a greater interest in whatever outside space they have, not least because panic food-buying seems to have segued into panic food-planting. Grow bags have become hard to come by and the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has reported increased inquiries about growing fruit and vegetables.

Continue reading...

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Five houses with AMAZING sea views

There is nothing quite like living beside the seaside.

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What is an offset mortgage? Nottingham Estate Agents

If you’re lucky enough to have a decent savings pot and want to reduce the cost of your monthly outgoings, an offset mortgage could be worth considering. OnTheMarket talks you through a type of mortgage with which many consumers may not be familiar. Offset mortgages explained As the name suggests, this type of mortgage allows […]

The post What is an offset mortgage? appeared first on OnTheMarket.com blog.

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Gardening: the virtues of seaweed – archive, 12 May 1973

12 May 1973 There are fashions in fertilisers. At the moment the “in” thing is seaweed

There are fashions in fertilisers. At the moment the “in” thing is seaweed. Unquestionably organic, it has a sure-fire appeal for the suburban gardener of the muck-and-mystery school who cannot get the muck. Even the flat-dweller whose gardening is confined to pot plants now finds himself assured that almost every new product manufactured for their nourishment contains the magic elixir, “seaweed extract.”

The seaweed in question is usually Ascophyllum nodosum, the common brown bladder-wrack or bladder-kelp that keeps itself afloat by means of those airfilled swellings which children so delight to pop underfoot when scrambling over rocks at low tide. And there is of course, nothing new about its use as a fertiliser, or at least as a soil-conditioner. For centuries growers of arable crops around our coasts from Cornwall and County Cork to Shetland have been spreading it, raw or composted, in thick layers on their land each autumn and ploughing it in each spring.

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Gardening: the virtues of seaweed – archive, 12 May 1973

12 May 1973 There are fashions in fertilisers. At the moment the “in” thing is seaweed

There are fashions in fertilisers. At the moment the “in” thing is seaweed. Unquestionably organic, it has a sure-fire appeal for the suburban gardener of the muck-and-mystery school who cannot get the muck. Even the flat-dweller whose gardening is confined to pot plants now finds himself assured that almost every new product manufactured for their nourishment contains the magic elixir, “seaweed extract.”

The seaweed in question is usually Ascophyllum nodosum, the common brown bladder-wrack or bladder-kelp that keeps itself afloat by means of those airfilled swellings which children so delight to pop underfoot when scrambling over rocks at low tide. And there is of course, nothing new about its use as a fertiliser, or at least as a soil-conditioner. For centuries growers of arable crops around our coasts from Cornwall and County Cork to Shetland have been spreading it, raw or composted, in thick layers on their land each autumn and ploughing it in each spring.

Continue reading...

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