Buying or selling a property is a stressful business at the best of times – add in a global pandemic and moving home becomes an even more daunting prospect. Not only do you now have to worry about your buyer pulling out or the chain collapsing, what happens if you get sick with coronavirus or […]
The post Coronavirus clauses in home buying contracts explained appeared first on OnTheMarket.com blog.
Three ways to keep safe when our much-loved crops revert to their wild old ways
One of the most fascinating things for me as a greedy botanist is quite how different our most commonly cultivated crops are to their wild ancestors. Today’s sweet, seedless bananas are the result of an accidental sterile hybrid of two wild species that are so packed full of ball bearing-like seeds they are essentially inedible. The fat, juicy sweetcorn cobs we know from supermarkets started life as tiny sprigs of rock-hard seeds of a Mexican grass called teosinte. A totally different species. But perhaps the most extreme examples are crops like potatoes and squashes, whose wild relatives are packed so full of bitter toxins that it took thousands of years of selective breeding by farmers to make them edible.
Ornamental squash cultivars are full of toxic compounds
Continue reading...Three ways to keep safe when our much-loved crops revert to their wild old ways
One of the most fascinating things for me as a greedy botanist is quite how different our most commonly cultivated crops are to their wild ancestors. Today’s sweet, seedless bananas are the result of an accidental sterile hybrid of two wild species that are so packed full of ball bearing-like seeds they are essentially inedible. The fat, juicy sweetcorn cobs we know from supermarkets started life as tiny sprigs of rock-hard seeds of a Mexican grass called teosinte. A totally different species. But perhaps the most extreme examples are crops like potatoes and squashes, whose wild relatives are packed so full of bitter toxins that it took thousands of years of selective breeding by farmers to make them edible.
Ornamental squash cultivars are full of toxic compounds
Continue reading...If we cannot build out sideways, perhaps we should try building upwards? That is the thought process which more and more British home-owners are going through. In a crowded urban environment, building a large lateral extension to a property can sometimes be impractical or unlikely to get planning permission. But a loft conversion – provided […]
The post How much value does a loft conversion add to a property? appeared first on OnTheMarket.com blog.
Outside her small terrace is a perfect little green oasis
Post-quarantine coffee (tea for me) and custard tarts in Kala’s rampant garden. I have been looking out over it from my window like an imprisoned prince in a nursery rhyme. Watching her water her plants and grass. Seeing her deadhead.
But here we are for the first time since sowing. Since mid-May, on her birthday, when we always scatter her summer seeds and plant out the root-trainer trays.
Continue reading...Outside her small terrace is a perfect little green oasis
Post-quarantine coffee (tea for me) and custard tarts in Kala’s rampant garden. I have been looking out over it from my window like an imprisoned prince in a nursery rhyme. Watching her water her plants and grass. Seeing her deadhead.
But here we are for the first time since sowing. Since mid-May, on her birthday, when we always scatter her summer seeds and plant out the root-trainer trays.
Continue reading...Rome’s ‘enclave of cool’ provides the ideal location for this light and airy house with an artistic edge
There’s no place like Rome, but if you talk to designer couple Paolo Giacomelli and Roberta Paolucci, the lesser-known neighbourhood of Pigneto is where the creative spirit of the Italian capital is currently flourishing.
The Italian-born founders and designers behind the jewellery brand Iosselliani discovered Pigneto, 5km east of the centre and outside the ancient city walls, in the early 1990s when it was still a sleepy suburb. This was well after the late film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose work includes The Gospel According to St Matthew, made it the setting for some of his seminal pieces –but long before the trendy restaurants moved in and the New York Times coined it “an enclave of cool”.
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