The definitive guide to stylish outdoor spaces, with garden tours, hardscape help, plant primers, and daily design news. We wanted it to be super seasonal, hyper seasonal in the way that it felt and the way it was written.

You can often catch him cooking in his greenhouse among the beehives sharing honest tales of farming life and his gentle, thoughtful dishes. It’s a well-worn stereotype, but the tale of the ambitious twenty-something tends to be one set to the backdrop of a thrumming city. And then it means that when you’ve got that odd ingredient in your fridge, you don’t know how to use it, so for me it was trying to get the playfulness back, to get people to feel free again in their cooking. The farm had been untouched for a year, “the fields alive with grass and wildflowers and butterflies, the hedges toppled, small woodlands in themselves,” and the first 12 months were spent gradually settling in. It’s a particularly beautiful book, packed with inspiring, hearty and useful recipes; the perfect gift for the hobby cook in your life.Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). I went out one beautiful spring morning and she was just licking and pawing at this perfect little kid. An audience of 500k on both Instagram and Tik Tok has followed his insipring journey to find himself, while he’s become one of the most compelling advocates for modern British food and regenerative farming. As you’d expect, his debut book channels all of the beauty of his smallholding—especially the moments captured through the seasons on the farm—as he launches into around 100 recipes, beginning with the seductive food of the coldest months. This week, Gilly is with Alex Jackson, Noble Rot chef, former restaurateur at Sardine and author of Frontieres.

The restaurant had fostered a deep appreciation for its host of passionate suppliers who were producing the very best organic and local ingredients, “the juiciest tomatoes you’ve ever seen, trays of thorny artichokes, blue-skinned pumpkins sealed with red wax and whole lambs slowly reared on permanent organic pasture. Written over a single year, the gardener, cook and first-generation farmer captured fleeting moments on his Dorset smallholding, his notes and voice recordings snatched attempts to distil its effervescent nature. That a goat will come all the way across the field to lie next to you and let you nuzzle it, because they want love. He was the star of A Taste of the Country: Dorset on Channel 5, which followed Julius’ first year on his farm in South West England.Rather than using his platform to deliver dogmatic sermons, Julius instead hopes to show us that small habits are easily changed and have an impact. It’s very wet, there’s gruelling work and no pub or theatre to occupy yourself with when it gets dark at 3 o’clock. His mind wandered to those formative experiences, “hands in the mud, hiding in the woods, foraging with Granny,” and, after a gruelling period, “all of that instinctual stuff just kicked in quite hard.

So in a world where we’re getting less and less connected to the natural world, I thought setting the food in the seasons and really telling that story of a year on the farm would help people understand why we eat what we do when, and encourage them to reconnect to mother nature via the food on their plate.Chemicals or artificial fertilisers have not been used on the fields for over 30 years and there have been 160 species recorded. Passionate about seasonality, Julius shows us how to make the most of produce, from crisp, crunchy apples in autumn, pink rhubarb in winter, asparagus in spring and the first summer strawberries. Lay the chicken in a large, high-sided roasting tray, season generously with salt on both sides and leave for an hour at room temperature so it loses the chill of the fridge. Full of comforting soups, fresh salads and slow-cooked feasts, Julius offers an invitation to approach your days a little slower, in tune with life’s natural rhythm. I initially thought that it would be "just a regular cook book" (which is something I would've been fine with, since I love his recipes), but this book is so much more.

Make a creamy sauce from the broth with mustard and tarragon, then bake the whole thing in a flaky buttery crust studded with fennel seeds and salt.One slight niggle: in common with almost all chefs/cooks nowadays the chilli seems almost obligatory. If you make a mashed potato with good potatoes it will taste great, but if you add a decent butter it’ll be unreal. At 23, just as his peers were finding their feet, Julius left the strain of the city with a plan to reconnect with nature. Yes, I have a little bit of restaurant experience, but ultimately I’m just a home cook,’ Roberts says. Broken into sections based on the season, The Farm Table encourages cooking with seasonality in mind through scrumptious recipes to inspire joy and confidence in the kitchen.