Take notes and get inspired: jobs for September in the garden | Alys Fowler

Take cuttings, sow a lawn or visit a display garden for ideas

I love this moment. When the sun slants and everything is mellow with ripeness; when the garden can’t quite decide if it is celebrating the last of the heat or the beginning of the cool. There is much to harvest, from seed to produce. Gather as much as you can into bottles, jars and the freezer; you may have had your fill of courgettes and runner beans, but deep in December their summer flavours will cheer up a dark night.

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How to grow strawberries for next year

Plant now, and strawberries will have enough time to bed down for a decent harvest from next June

The 15th-century Welsh physician Andrew Boorde wrote: “Raw crayme undecocted, eaten with strawberries is a rurall mannes banket… I have knowne such bankettes hath put men in jeopardy of their lyves.” Quite! Fresh garden strawberries are truly to die for. If you want to wallow in heavenly pink creams, now is the time to establish your strawberry patch.

Young plants and rooted runners are offered by nurseries at a fraction of the price you will pay next spring for a potted version. Planted now, they will have enough time to bed down for a decent harvest next year.

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'My company has gone fully remote and I'm despairing': who wins in the new world of working from home?

As we move away from the traditional 9 to 5, the boundaries between office and home are increasingly blurred. Meet the bosses trying to get it right

I am 20 minutes into my scheduled 30-minute call with Shivani Maitra when I start to freeze. Maitra, a partner at global consultancy firm Deloitte, is leading the firm’s post-Covid-19 research into the future of work, and is giving me a seamless analysis of what business is about to look like: more autonomy, more remote work, happier workers, more accessible leadership – all facilitated by technology. But I can’t get Skype for Business to function. It’s a hot day and the connection comes and goes, leaving me contorted and sweating over my laptop.

Maitra is not necessarily wrong, but as my kids (aged three and five) thunder into the room, I can’t help but think we have some way to go. Los Angeles-based tech company PORTL Inc has promised that, in five years’ time, we will all be able to beam life-sized, talking holograms of our colleagues into our homes; right now, I think an impenetrable forcefield around my desk would be more useful. “Technology is going to be key to how we work in the future,” Maitra concedes. “But it’s going to be an enabler – it’s not going to be an answer.”

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How to give your home’s paperwork a spring clean ready for selling Nottingham Estate Agents

Before you sell your home, a key task is ensuring you have all your legal paperwork in order and up to date. Alongside touching up the paintwork, clearing out any clutter and staging your property, it’s important to see to the paperwork. On behalf of OnTheMarket, national law firm Stone King has put together the […]

The post How to give your home’s paperwork a spring clean ready for selling appeared first on OnTheMarket.com blog.

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Inside the London mansion Rihanna called home

Look around!

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The Tories' planning overhaul is about to come back to bite them | Chaminda Jayanetti

The strategy of backing developers over local opposition is going to anger voters, and won’t fix the housing crisis

After a decade of Conservative governments actively worsening Britain’s multiple housing crises, this one finally has a plan to get England’s housebuilders building.

There’s one problem – many Tories hate it. And if they don’t now, they will soon.

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Gardening in time of crisis has brought me closer to my mother

She once brought to life a neglected back yard and after years of distance we have now reconnected over plants and vegetables

It was the deck that sold me in late 2016, when we saw the Bronx apartment we now live in. For years, I dreamed of living somewhere that overlooked a forest. I imagined plants hanging on the windows, and a backyard garden like the one my mother had created in 1980 behind our first-floor apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn – although I hadn’t inherited my mother’s green thumb so I didn’t know how I’d care for all that greenery. The only plant I hadn’t killed was a golden pothos, also known as devil’s ivy because it’s nearly indestructible. But that’s the thing about fantasies: you don’t have to figure out the how. You get to dream up a garden you don’t know how you’re going to maintain, until you get the chance and you do.

Related: As an anxious, cerebral internet nerd, my relationships are thriving during lockdown

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