Food for too much thought

Like most, I enjoy the barbecue season, and I don’t just mean guarding the grill, beer in hand, tong armed and comedy apron attired. I mean the whole process, food preparation, marinades, sauces, salads, cooking, alfresco dining etc. As a mild pyromaniac, I was introduced to the barbecue at a fairly early age, perhaps as a vain attempt to channel my fire obsession, but more likely as a cleverly disguised chore. In those days our cooking device was little more than a stack of un-mortared bricks and a wire grill rack, but I used to revel in the process of getting the temperature/coals just right to ensure that my mum’s Indonesian recipe skewers (more on those in a future post) were cooked to perfection, and I rarely failed.

Recycle and re-buy British

It used to pain me, the way my parents and grandparents labelled us the ‘throw away’ generation.

“It’s not worth replacing, it’ll cost almost as much as buying new,” I would argue. Or “Don’t blame us, were the consumers not the manufacturers.”

But now as a parent myself, a little older and slightly more responsible (!), I now discover myself agreeing with them to a certain degree, but don’t let on.

Now I’m not saying every product built today is inferior to those of yesteryear, that would be ridiculous, although quite why advancements in technology and our so called increased intelligence do not allow the smartphone devices we urgently rely upon today to last longer than a couple of years annoys me, but I guess that’s the point, intelligence has taught us that we need to replace items frequently to maintain positive economical sustainment. Confusing isn’t it?

Whilst I do find myself reluctantly accepting of shorter product lifecycles, I am also instinctively becoming more attracted to older and solidly made items particularly with interior and exterior furniture and now more recently garden tools.

Have I found a 'free lunch'?

If you ever wanted a clear example of the importance pricing plays in a marketing strategy to increase the desirability of a product or service, then look no further than The Royal Landscape, part of The Crown Estate near Windsor.

The area is broken down into three areas, namely The Savill Garden, Virginia Water and The Valley Gardens all housed within the Windsor Great Park. Very fortunately I live on the doorstep of this thousand acre site, and utilise its entirety often for various family activities.

Arguably the leading attraction is The Savill Garden, a 35 acre site wonderfully fronted by the strikingly modern The Savill Building, a 2007 RIBA Sterling Award Finalist. As you would expect this garden offers diverse planting with a myriad of plants, design and landscaping and of particular splendour is the fairly new contemporary rose garden addition, designed by RHS judge Andrew Wilson.

There’s no such thing as a small garden project!

I have a little lawn to the north facing front of my house. Over time I've added some box hedging to line the front path, some birch trees, that I intend to keep small with regular pruning, a few pale narcissus that pop up briefly in the spring and a Rosa banksiae 'Lutea' rambling rose which I'm currently training along the wall and adjacent fence.

Unfortunately the lawn is a bit of eyesore, with neglect leaving it overrun with moss and a brown colour suggesting a small infestation of Chafer grubs, and whilst I do like a bit of the old green blades, I’m still finding the area fairly featureless and so decided to attempt a little bit of simple landscaping to create a new central bed.