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What Should Be in a Resilient Home Cupboard?

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  What Should Be in a Resilient Home Cupboard? Going Green Blog Series | October 2026 | Practical Living, Household Resilience and Sustainability | I got a lot of help on this one. Appendix at the bottom of the article. “Resilience can begin with one ordinary kitchen cupboard.” Introduction: You Don't Need a Bunker to Be Prepared When people hear the words emergency preparedness, they sometimes imagine underground shelters, enormous stockpiles of food, complicated survival equipment and preparations for events that may never happen. But sensible household resilience is something altogether different. It is about being able to cope comfortably and safely when ordinary services stop working for a while. Imagine waking up one morning to discover that the electricity has failed. Your heating isn't working, the Wi-Fi is down, and the mobile phone network is becoming unreliable. The shops are open, but their payment terminals aren't working. Or perhaps a burst water main has left...
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Half a Million Trees — An Announcement Worth Celebrating

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  Half a Million Trees — An Announcement Worth Celebrating At the end of September 2026, the Government announced an ambitious programme to plant up to 500,000 new trees across England. The £53 million Community Trees Fund will support planting between April 2027 and March 2030, with trees appearing in streets, parks, rural landscapes and places where people live and work. It forms part of a wider £79 million package to help communities restore nature and adapt to climate change. GOV.UK +1 That sounds like excellent news, and in many ways it is. We need more trees. They provide shade, absorb carbon dioxide as they grow, support wildlife, intercept rainfall and make our towns and villages more pleasant places to live. But whenever I hear announcements about planting thousands, or even millions, of trees, one question immediately comes to mind: How many of those trees will still be alive in 10, 20 or 50 years? Planting a tree is relatively straightforward. Keeping it alive through dr...
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The Great Autumn Garden Tidy-Up: Ten Things You Should NOT Tidy

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  The Great Autumn Garden Tidy-Up: Ten Things You Should NOT Tidy “A perfectly tidy October garden may look wonderful to us—and like a housing crisis to wildlife.” October brings out a particular instinct in many gardeners. The leaves begin to fall. Perennials turn brown. Seed heads replace flowers. The lawn becomes untidy. Stems lean at strange angles. There are twigs behind the shed, dead leaves under the hedge and plants that, by midsummer standards, appear to have reached the end of their useful lives. So out come the secateurs, mower, rake, leaf blower and garden-waste bags. Within a weekend, everything can be transformed. The borders are cut to the ground, every leaf has vanished and the garden looks wonderfully neat. There is just one problem. Much of what we have removed was somebody else's winter home. Those hollow stems, dead leaves, seed heads, old logs and apparently neglected corners can provide food and shelter for insects, birds, amphibians, small mammals and countle...
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