Category
11 articles
Heavy clay punishes a badly built path quicker than any other ground. Here's how to choose between gravel, timber rounds, reclaimed brick and stone setts, put the base in properly, and use a timber edge without turning your footpath into a dam.
November strips the garden back to its bones, which makes it the best month to actually read your timber rather than guess at it. Here's a ten-minute route — gate, fence, deck, shed, beds — and the three fixes genuinely worth doing before the frost arrives.
A timber side gate is not a fence panel with hinges bolted on. This is how to set posts, place hinges and brace a gate so it keeps its shape through wet winters, dry summers and the odd gale.
A pergola is as much a shadow-making tool as it is a timber structure. Before you order beams or slats, spend one bright day mapping where your patio is already sunny, already shaded and already a bit gloomy — then let that map guide the size, orientation and spacing of the build.
A solid boundary feels like the obvious answer to a windy garden, but it usually makes things worse. Here is how to choose porous screens, sensible timber and fixings that let a gust through rather than turn your build into a pile of offcuts.
Damp timber is rarely a buying problem; it is usually a storage problem. This is a small-space seasoning stack for firewood, offcuts and future projects, built to let British wind do the work rather than a tarpaulin.
Your shed roof is a small reservoir in disguise — and most of us let it empty onto the lawn. Here's how to catch what falls on timber structures, route it to the borders, and detail the wood so a wet British year doesn't wreck the thing doing the catching.
Most garden timber failures begin at a fixing you barely notice — the bracket at the post base, the screw in the deck board, the hinge on an oak gate. This practical guide sorts stainless, galvanised and coated fixings by exposure, timber type and the jobs where they actually matter.
You don't need a slab to put something in the garden. From helical ground screws to dry-laid brick piers, here are five footing methods that cope with British rain, frost and shrink-swell clay — and what to check before you start digging.
Every saw owner ends up with a mountain of 'useful bits'. Here are nine garden builds that genuinely earn their keep, from a salvaged-window cold frame to a compost lid that finally keeps the rain out — plus honest notes on end grain, treating cut ends, and the scrap you should never put in a garden.
Raised beds, fences and pergolas live outside in a climate that is damp, mild and endlessly cycling between wet and dry. That is a brutal test rig for any timber. Here are seven home-grown species that genuinely hold up, what each is actually good for, and the questions worth asking before you hand over your money.