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I knew houses when I was growing up that always seemed to have the same scent no matter when you were there, be it bread, cows, or in the case of one family whose business was in bottling and distributing essential oils, lavender. Habits of the household, I suppose. Our house usually has a faint sce...

Sloes shouldn't be too hard to identify - essentially, they're small, and if you go to pick one and feel like you've been stabbed in the arm, that's a sloe tree. They're also called blackthorn, at least in Ireland, and have great spiky thorns up to about 3cm long, which you could nearly use as panel...

Not-quite-ripe apples were a component in a chutney one of my mother's relatives (we're into second-cousin-twice-removed-back-flip-in-law territory here; we called her 'Aunt') used to make, so it does work. However, the stuff was so very sour-tasting that in our house, only my grandfather would eat ...

I was shown a grape vine growing wild (or at least feral) on the south coast of Ireland a few years back, so it's not completely impossible. That leaf looks grape-vine-like to me, certainly, but I'd try for more reliable identification before eating it. If you can get a picture of the plant in situ,...

We've got peas coming in in large quantities. Well, I say "in", they rarely make it to the house, but there're still lots of them. The courgettes are in full blast, the blueberries are doing well, and there are even a few somewhat unexpected strawberries from plants we put in this year. We...

Thompson & Morgan's stuff is very good indeed, in my experience. I'd be sceptical about blight-resistant anything, but if they're saying it's so, I'm inclined to put a bit more trust in it. And indeed, having had a look at the website, they're advertising these ones: http://www.thompson-morgan.c...

Greetings, people of Selfsufficientish! My name is Drew; I live in Maynooth, Ireland, where my wife and I bought a house about three years ago. We're gradually doing up bits of it (or, in some cases, undoing strange things the previous owner did), and bringing the garden (big-ish for what's essentia...