Come summer the house turns itself inside out. The windows stay open, supper drifts out to the garden table more often than not, and the allotment finally stops taking and starts giving — the first broad beans, the early strawberries, enough salad to bother cutting. The small things that matter move outdoors with you.
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These are five small things earning their keep at ours this month. None of them will change your life — that’s rather the point. They’re the kind of objects that quietly improve a long summer evening, and this time every one is under £20.
A jug for the long table
Best for: Cordial, iced tea, and the first proper supper outside.
This is elderflower-cordial season, and a good jug earns its place on the garden table from now until the clocks change. Borosilicate glass means it takes hot or cold without complaint — cordial straight off the stove, iced tea, a Pimms, or just water with mint and a few slices of cucumber. The lid keeps the wasps out between top-ups, which by July you’ll be grateful for. It looks like a jug, not a gadget, and it carries out full and comes back empty.
Why this one: heat-resistant glass, a lid that does an actual job, and change from fifteen pounds. The thing you reach for the moment anyone says “shall we sit outside?”
The mesh dome that saves the cake
Best for: Eating outside without sharing it with the flies.
The unglamorous hero of British summer eating. Five pop-up domes in assorted sizes, fold flat to nothing, and go over whatever you’ve carried outside — the fruit bowl, the cheese, the cake, the strawberries while you fetch the cream. It’s the difference between lunch in the garden and lunch in the garden defending every plate from a wasp. Eleven months of the year they live folded in a drawer; in the twelfth they more than earn their keep.
Why this one: five sizes for under three quid each, collapse to nothing, and they turn a hopeful picnic into a relaxed one.
A trug for the first pickings
Best for: Carrying the first beans and strawberries up from the plot.
Come June the allotment stops taking and starts giving — the first broad beans, a handful of strawberries, enough salad to bother cutting — and you want something to gather into that isn’t a supermarket carrier. This is the genuine article: a Sussex trug, still made by hand in Herstmonceux, here in Sussex, much as it has been for the best part of two centuries — a sweet-chestnut frame, hand-shaved willow boards, the boat shape that’s been carrying English harvests since long before any of us. It costs more than everything else on this list put together, and it’s the one thing here you’ll actually hand on to someone. If you only want the job done, a £15 FSC-wood trug carries beans just as well — but some things are worth buying once and keeping for thirty years, and this is one of them.
Why this one: handmade in Sussex, built to outlast you, and it turns a trip down the garden into a proper harvest. The splurge of the list, knowingly.
A hat that lives by the back door
Best for: An hour’s weeding when the sun’s got teeth.
Not the hat you plan an outfit around — the one you grab off the hook on the way out. Wide brim for actual shade rather than decoration, unisex, packs flat into a bag, and a lanyard so it doesn’t blow across the plot the moment the wind gets up. June sun in this country has started to mean it, and the back of your neck is the bit you always forget until it’s too late.
Why this one: a brim wide enough to shade your neck, folds away to nothing, under twenty pounds, and it lives by the back door from now until September.
The one that earns the glut
Best for: A June glut of lettuce, herbs and just-washed leaves.
The boring one — and the best test of whether this column means what it says. KitchenCraft have been making sensible kitchen kit for decades, and this is a proper-sized spinner, not a token one. June is the month leaves arrive faster than you can eat them, and the truth nobody tells you is that washed leaves only keep if they’re properly dry: spun-dry lettuce lasts days in the fridge, and dressing actually clings to it instead of sliding off. Pull-cord mechanism, BPA-free, big enough for a real harvest.
Why this one: large, robust, easy to clean, and it earns its keep every single time you bring lettuce in with grit still on it.
Sign-off
Five small things: four of them under £20, and one handmade Sussex splurge that takes the total to about £129. None of them will change your life — pick the one or two that solve a small problem summer’s about to hand you, and let the rest wait.
What’s earning its keep at yours this summer? Hit reply and tell me — I read every one.
— Gareth
A month on the list had turned over again — the five earning their keep in July are almost all about keeping up with what the garden produces rather than coaxing it along.
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About Gareth
Gareth Isherwood is the editor of Danbury & Lovejoy. He has baked bread at home for 25+ years and has 15 years of growing experience across gardens, containers and other growing spaces, including an East Sussex allotment for the past three years. Read his full story →
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