Win £200 of Bahco professional garden tools

NEW YEAR, NEW GARDEN
If you’re looking to refresh your outside room for 2011, it pays to bring in the professionals.  Using a specialist one stop garden transformation company like Lime Orchard, provides you with access to award winning designers and skilled landscapers, whose experience and expertise will help you exploit your garden’s full potential, on time and on budget.
Working with Lime Orchard is the ultimate stress free approach to achieving the garden of your dreams.  Just leave it to us to translate your outdoor living aspirations into a stylish and practical reality, with minimum hassle and maximum satisfaction!  

Whatever the project, whether it’s a garden that just requires an image boost or a major revamp of an outdoor living zone, Lime Orchard recognises the importance of having access to the very best tools for the job in hand.  That is why the company chooses Bahco – the professional’s choice of ergonomically designed, quality garden ‘tools of the trade’.
 

Lime Orchard has teamed up with Bahco and the Newark Advertiser to give you the chance to win their very own set of professional Bahco garden tools this Christmas, worth £200,  

to enter complete the coupon in today's Advertiser (16 Dec 2010) or request an entry form from the Newark Advertiser's offices. 

Entries must be received by 23 December 2010, no purchase nessary, full terms and conditions  avaliable on request






For more information visit www.limeorchard.co.uk or tel 0845 539 1467.  For further details on Bahco visit www.bahco.com or telephone 01709 731 731.

Get Garden Fit!

Most of us feel like we’ve put in a good day’s work, after gardening for hours on end. But can gardening really be considered as good exercise? According to the University of Virginia, gardening rates up there with other moderate to strenuous forms of exercise, like walking and bicycling. Naturally, this will all depend on what gardening task you are doing and for how long. Like any other form of exercise, you have to be active for at least 30 minutes to see a direct benefit. Although you may not always realize it, while enjoying yourself in the garden, you are also working all the major muscle groups: legs, buttocks, arms, shoulders, neck, back and abdomen. Gardening tasks that use these muscles build strength and burn calories.

Besides the exertion involved, gardening has other pluses that make it a good means of exercise and calorie burning. There can be a great deal of stretching involved with gardening, like reaching for weeds or tall branches, bending to plant and extending a rake. Lifting bags of mulch, pushing wheelbarrows and shoveling all provide resistance training similar to weight lifting, which leads to healthier bones and joints. Yet while doing all this, there is minimal jarring and stress on the body, unlike aerobics or jogging.

And if you want to shed some pounds to prepare for the potential feasting frenzy that is Christmas, take note of the following research from Iowa State University, which shows how some of the more strenuous gardening tasks can really burn calories.

• Digging Holes - Men: 197 calories, Women: 150 calories
• Planting - Men: 177 calories, Women: 135 calories
• Weeding - Men: 157 calories, Women: 156 calories

In addition, further research shows that gardening for just 30 minutes daily will help:

• Increase flexibility
• Strengthen joints
• Decrease blood pressure and cholesterol levels
• Lower your risk for diabetes
• Slow osteoporosis

So if you are planning to tuck into mountains of mince pies and tones of turkey , - you know exactly what to do if you want to avoid starting 2011 with an uncomfortably tight waistband!!

Join the Revolution!

And we are not talking the Grow Your Own revolution this time! According to Smarta – ‘the ultimate advice and networking resource for anyone starting and running a small business’ – ‘the chicest, most bang-on trend for office space this season is …the humble garden shed”.

Shedworking is fast becoming a national phenomenon with many home workers choosing to locate their business premises in the garden. So if one of your new year resolutions is to start your own business, or even to try and maintain your current role but working from home, consider the following benefits of a garden office:

• free from the disruption and distraction of the traditional office, working from a dedicated garden office you are likely to be more productive and focussed
• cutting out the daily commute means that you get to spend more time actually working and less time wasting precious hours sitting in traffic or on a crowded train
• no more costly train fares or petrol expenses – AND a reduced food bill as eating from home is far cheaper than buying lunch from your local sandwich bar
• opportunity for parents to embrace flexible working patterns – the time you save on travelling to and from work can be put to better use doing the school run / attending children’s school events
• psychologically you are likely to perform better without the stress associated with travelling to and from work, and the natural garden landscape provides a comforting environment and an enhanced sense of work / life balance
• a good garden studio can add up to 5% to the value of your property, and works well as a selling point in competitive markets

Why not contact Lime Orchard to discuss how a home office can be blended into our garden landscape? .

Planting Perfection

The aesthetic beauty of any garden,  will always largely be determined by the final choice of plants that have been selected to adorn the outdoor space – and the manner in which the plants are displayed. If you like, so many of our customers, aspire to own a stylish outside room – but have zero time or interest in ‘gardening’ per se, the likelihood is that you won’t necessarily have a clear understanding of which plants you should consider to inject a dash of designer flair into the garden.

However, don’t despair if your fingers lack the ‘green’ midas touch, Lime Orchard is offering a brand new planting plan service to customers.  Not only can we deliver a cracking proposed planting plan for the garden (or even just for a new border) - which includes details of the variety, position and suggested size of each plant – we can also draw upon our extensive contacts to supply and plant everything you need for your new look garden. Because we buy through trade nurseries we can offer you the best prices on the supply of plants which will typically save you a whopping 20% less than what you would expect to pay in a garden centre!

And even if you enjoy the hard graft of planting up, we can help make the job a little less stressful by bringing in a team to help clear existing areas, dig over and improve the soil so you can get going as soon as the plants are delivered.

To find out more about Lime Orchard's Planting Services click here >

Nottinghamshire Schools Garden Design Competition

SEARCH FOR BUDDING JUNIOR GARDEN DESIGNERS
Nottinghamshire children invited to design the ultimate alfresco classroom …

 A countywide schools competition has been launched to seek out the region’s budding junior garden designers – with the winning school receiving a professional garden design consultation from award winning local company, Lime Orchard (worth £2,000).
Nurseries, primary schools and secondary schools in the area have been tasked with the challenge, which invites students (with a little help from the teaching staff!) to design an inspirational outdoor learning space.
The project, which requires entries to be submitted s via a sketch and short written description - is designed to help local learning establishments appreciate the proven benefits of the alfresco classroom. A survey of 700 schools and early learning settings, commissioned by Learning through Landscapes (the national school grounds charity) proved that schools which have invested in and improved their outdoor facilities for pupils, experience significant tangible benefits such as

• enhanced pupil behaviour (73% of respondents)
• a reduction in bullying (64% of respondents)
• improved attitudes towards learning (65% of respondents)
• better social interaction (84% of respondents)
• increased community / parental involvement (66% of respondents)

And in June of this year, the Royal Horticultural Society released findings from a study of 1,300 teachers and 10 schools which confirmed that taking part in gardening can make a child feel happy and boost their development’. It found children in schools that encouraged gardening became more resilient, confident and lived healthier lives, resulting in the RHS saying ‘school gardening should be used as a key teaching tool, rather than as an extra-curricular activity’.
Judy Behl, managing director of Lime Orchard comments:

"There is a vast body of evidence to prove that children really thrive in schools with a good outdoor learning facility. Having been involved in a national RHS Chelsea Flower Show project to design the garden that ‘children really really want’, we are very much aware of how much enthusiasm children have for the alfresco classroom. Following on from our RHS Chelsea experience, it made total sense to capture some of that inspiration and passion amongst local children here in the county of Nottingham”.

The competition, will run from October 2010 to February 2011, with judging taking place during March 2011.

Click here to contact us for further information

Visit our Schools Garden Design Page for more inspiration!

Wildlife Wonderland

Regardless of whether or not you are a wildlife enthusiast, you can’t escape the fact that your outdoor space is always going to be a living zone shared with various species of wildlife. These could be a family of hedgehogs or bumblebees, frogs, earwigs, birds, badgers – the list is endless. But as you go about your garden tidying tasks this autumn, it is important to remember that the fallen leaves, dead stems and log piles which we refer to as  ‘mess’ and feel duty bound to clear up represents ‘home’ for many wildlife visitors.

A recent Facebook poll on Gardenersworld.com suggests many of us are willing to compromise our gardening practices for wildlife. It is possible to be tidy AND care for wildlife at the same time, it just takes a little forethought.  So rather than throwing any garden debris onto a compost heap or bonfire, just move it  to a corner of the garden out of sight, but where it can still benefit insects and mammals. Think about creating hibernaculums (a winter home for hibernating animals) out of natural materials, for example you can bundle tree branches behind pots for insects, gather bags of leaves which can be crammed into corners to provide shelter for frogs, slugs, and snails or leave a stack of logs in a damp, shady corner to attract hedgehogs, beetles and amphibians.  And don’t forget you can invite a variety of  birds into the garden if you regularly provide them with food during the winter,  see below for a list of preferred menu options for specific species of bird!

House sparrows, dunnocks, finches, reed buntings and collared doves: small seeds, such as millet

Blackbirds: flaked, maize , dog and cat food

Tits and greenfinches: peanuts and sunflower seeds

Goldfinches and siskins: Nyjer seeds

Greenfinches, house sparrows, nuthatches, great spotted woodpeckers and siskins: peanuts

Robins, dunnocks and wrens: crushed or grated nuts, mild grated cheese

It Pays to Improve - Not Move

House prices are said to be sliding again and some are saying Chancellor George Osborne’s  spending review will accelerate the market’s decline.

Even before the Chancellor announced his £81 billion cuts, property prices were coming under severe pressure. The prospect of nearly 500,000 public sector job losses will make things worse by increasing the number of distressed sales.

Last month mortgage lending hit its lowest level for a decade at just £12 billion, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders. This followed shock figures from Halifax showing a record 3.6 per cent drop in house prices in September, the biggest fall in 27 years.  So if ever there was a time to sit tight and ensure you exploit the full potential of the property you already own it’s now. 

"Improve, Don’t Move" has become a tired phrase but it still rings true for many home owners, who may be forced to opt out of the buying / selling chain but nonetheless need to ensure their current home really does tick all the boxes.  And it goes without saying, why move when you can gain extra living accommodation from your outdoor space!   Garden studios and outside offices continue to grow in popularity while decking and patio installations can provide a year round entertainment and / or safe play area.  Speak to us for details of how to design these new features into your existing garden landscape.