Our latest family-friendly posts on weekend days out, gardening with children, simple family cookery and seasonal ideas for Saturdays and Sundays.
Prune lavender once a year, straight after it finishes flowering: usually late July or August for English lavender, and a little later for the taller lavandins. Remove the flower stalks and cut about a third into the leafy growth, but never into the bare, woody stems,...
Prune free-standing apple trees in winter, while they are dormant: from leaf fall in November until early March. Trained apples (cordons, espaliers, fans and stepovers) get their main prune in summer instead, from mid- to late August, about ten days later in the...
559 UK car boot sales, county by county, with a postcode finder: which are on this weekend, when buyers get in, what a pitch costs, which run all winter and what happens when it rains.
Where to put a hedgehog house and which way it should face, what makes a good one, free plans for a timber box and a £10 storage-box version, a cat-proof feeding station, what to feed hedgehogs and when they hibernate.
A family sloe gin recipe with the hand-pricking method, how to identify and pick sloes legally, when they are ripe, the kit, and how to grow your own.
Thirty pumpkin carving ideas sorted by age, with ten free printable stencils, a step-by-step guide, the kit worth buying and where to pick your pumpkin.
137 UK pumpkin patches for 2026, county by county — with the opening dates each farm has published on its own site, whether you must book or can walk up, entry prices and which patches suit toddlers.
Floury or waxy? Which UK potato variety to buy — Maris Piper to Charlotte — for chips, jacket potatoes, boiling or a dauphinoise.
By Linda Garrould — 16 August 2026 Bridgewater is the RHS's fifth and newest garden, opened in May 2021 on the site of Worsley New Hall — a Victorian estate Queen Victoria visited twice and that burned down in 1943, leaving 154 acres to sit largely derelict...
By Linda Garrould — 16 August 2026 Harlow Carr began as a trial ground for what would actually grow in northern England's tougher conditions, and that practical streak — this is a garden that tells you what works, not just what looks nice in a photograph — is...