Posts

The Barbecue Problem: Can Summer Food Be Greener Without Becoming Miserable?

Image
  The Barbecue Problem: Can Summer Food Be Greener Without Becoming Miserable? Hook: The problem with a summer barbecue is not the sausage. It is often the mountain of plastic plates, half-eaten buns and forgotten salad wilting in the sun. There are few things more British than deciding it is finally warm enough to eat outside, dragging the barbecue from the shed, discovering it is full of last year’s ash, and then confidently declaring that dinner will be ready “in about twenty minutes”. Two hours later, somebody is eating a blackened sausage in a roll, somebody else is wondering whether the chicken is supposed to be that colour, and a large bowl of salad is slowly giving up the will to live beside a packet of slightly sweaty burger cheese. Summer food should be joyful. It should involve family, friends, smoke, sunshine, laughter, and somebody’s uncle explaining that he has “a system” for lighting charcoal. But summer eating can also produce a surprising amount of waste: plastic p...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Summer Heat Survival Guide: Keeping Cool Without Cooking the Climate

Image
  The Summer Heat Survival Guide: Keeping Cool Without Cooking the Climate A Well-Insulated House Is Not Just a Winter Jumper “A well-insulated house is not just a winter jumper. In summer, it can become a cool box.” That sounds slightly odd at first. We tend to think of insulation as something that keeps warmth in during winter. We imagine loft insulation, draught excluders, thick walls, woolly jumpers, hot drinks and trying not to look too closely at the heating bill. But insulation works both ways. In winter, it slows heat escaping from the house. In summer, it slows heat getting into the house. The same principle that keeps a flask of tea hot can also keep a bottle of water cold. The trick is not just having the insulation, but learning how to manage the house as temperatures rise. As UK summers become hotter, this is going to matter more. We are not quite a Mediterranean country, however much the garden furniture catalogues would like to pretend otherwise. Many British homes w...
Post a Comment
Read more

Can a Summer Garden Become a Wildlife Service Station?

Image
  Can a Summer Garden Become a Wildlife Service Station? Your Garden May Be Busier Than You Think Your garden may look like a patch of grass to you, but to a tired bee in July it could be a motorway service station. There it is, wings slightly frayed, fuel running low, having fought its way across a landscape of patios, fences, driveways, mown lawns, artificial grass, decking, gravel and the occasional terrifying conservatory roof. Then suddenly it finds your lavender, your flowering thyme, your slightly untidy border, or that clump of clover you forgot to remove. To us, it may look like mild gardening failure. To wildlife, it may be the difference between carrying on and giving up. Summer gardens are not just decorative spaces. They are refuelling points, watering holes, cooling stations, nurseries, hunting grounds, hiding places and, occasionally, badger restaurants. If we start looking at our gardens through the eyes of wildlife, the whole place changes. The messy corner stops b...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Greener Summer Holiday: Can We Relax Without Wrecking the Planet?

Image
  The Greener Summer Holiday: Can We Relax Without Wrecking the Planet? Perhaps the greenest summer holiday is not the one where we do less, but the one where we notice more. Summer holidays are supposed to restore us. They are meant to get us away from the daily routine, away from the inbox, away from the washing machine that appears to generate laundry even when nobody has worn anything. But modern holidays can also come with a rather large environmental shadow. Flights, long car journeys, hotel air conditioning, disposable beach gear, new clothes, plastic bottles, imported food, overfilled suitcases and the mysterious holiday habit of buying things we would never dream of buying at home can all add up. The question is not whether we should stop having holidays. That would be joyless, unrealistic and deeply unpopular with anyone who has survived a British winter. The better question is this: Can we have summer holidays that refresh us without quietly wrecking the very places we a...
Post a Comment
Read more