Gardening

Samhain (pronounced sow’ain) is the precursor to today’s Halloween, an ancient Celtic festival honouring the ancestors that came before us. It is believed that at this time of year the veil between this life and the Otherworld are at their thinnest, meaning that connection and communication with the dead is easier. To our modern ears, this may sound morbid – or downright scary – but Pagans respected death as a normal and natural part of our journey. The fact that Samhain became Halloween – a day for getting dressed up in our most frightening and ghoulish costumes – means we mostly forget to mark this time of year with a deep, intuitive respect for the cycles of life.

Nothing evokes Autumn quite like the taste of pumpkin. Once you’ve gouged out all the flesh to make grinning jack-o-lanterns, it’s sometimes hard to know what to do with it. If you have a glut, you could make it up into a puree and then freeze it as a tasty addition to soups and breads later in the year. Or you could try one of these pumpkin recipes for a nutritious Samhain feast.

Natalie Fee meets author and celebrant, Glennie Kindred and talks motherhood, art and the elements.

Living in a house without electricity and heating always makes us slightly more ambivalent about the arrival of autumn. This season, which used to be one of my favourites, is now a reminder of the more challenging winter months to come. The nights begin to draw in, and we have to get ourselves organised for bedtime well in advance! The expansiveness and openness of summer, with its long, glorious evenings, is over. It helps me to remind myself just how much there is to love about this wonderful season. Here are ten things to love about autumn.

Courgettes are at their best right now, and these recipes offer some interesting and delicious new ways to make use of them in the kitchen from the fabulous teatime treat - courgette bread to a summer barbeque favourite.

With a few basic kitchen ingredients you can make great finger paints for your children that don't contain any dubious substances. Then, with a little foraging and creativity, you can colour them with wild flowers and leaves to create a truly natural painting experience.

With rules and regulations, campsites can be strict. There are some that allow camping fires, but these are few and far between and often get booked up during the busy summer months. One simple and fun way to enjoy camping on your own terms is to start in your very own garden! Kids will love the novelty of a camping night, and it is a lovely opportunity to have some ‘connected’ time together as a family without the distractions of television or video games. Here are some ideas to make your garden camping night one to remember...

Launched on 22nd April 1970, Earth Day is an annual global call to arms to save our planet. With a focus on education, the day aims to raise awareness of the problems facing our world and what we can do about them. When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, it was a watershed moment for the modern environmental movement. Before that, there was a distinct lack of interest and engagement with the reality of pollution and how it was harming our planet, as massive industry enjoyed the spoils of success.

Spring is a great time to get little ones enthused about gardening. There’s something so magical about the first shoots peeping out of the soil and then steadily growing into a healthy plant. Gardening offers education in all areas of the curriculum, from measuring seed spacing and counting seeds (maths), to assessing growing conditions (science), to reading the seed packets and writing labels (English), to finding out about traditional crops that grow well in your area (History), to sketching out a map of your plot on graph paper (Geography). Throw in a bit of Latin for the plant names and you really have a complete educational experience! National Gardening Week takes place from 13-19th April.

You walk past the same patch of wasteland every morning. Your kids always comment on it, how empty and barren it looks. Broken supermarket trolleys, carrier bags, scratchy bare earth and rubble can all be glimpsed through a wire fence. Several rows of houses back onto the wasteland and many people see this barren landscape from their windows, not to mention all of the people who walk and drive past it every day. Rumours indicate that the area is to be the site of a new block of flats, or a mini supermarket, but years have gone by and nothing has happened.