Faraway Furniture™ Journeys

Organic vegetable gardening is becoming increasingly popular each year, as people are becoming more self-sufficient on their own produce. If you are looking to start an organic garden from scratch, it is fairly straightforward. Here is what you need to know to get started.

Staying fit and active is so important for our physical and mental health, especially whilst in lockdown. In fact, over the last month 60,500 Brits Googled “exercise”, highlighting that it is high on our lockdown agenda. As a result, FarawayFurniture.com have researched the best activities you can do in your garden to lose weight and stay active whilst self-isolating.

To do this, we have analysed a selection of popular garden activities and estimated how many calories could be burnt per hour (on average) – but, please note, this is dependent on your current fitness level and how vigorously you attack each activity.

A breakdown of the best garden activities to lose weight:

FarawayFurniture.com can reveal that mowing the lawn with a manual push mower is the best garden activity you can do to burn calories. This was closely followed by digging in the garden, which is estimated to burn 350 calories per hour.

In third place is assembling garden furniture, which burns an estimated 275 calories per hour.  Following closely behind in fourth, and burning just 25 calories less, is manually trimming hedges, which burns 250 calories.

You may also like:DIY Garden Ideas That Will Inspire You

Fifth place is occupied by weeding. This garden activity includes copious amounts of bending over and squatting, therefore it is no surprise that this activity manages to burn roughly 175 calories per hour.

If you have a dog, you may be in luck! Picking up dog poo could burn an estimated 150 calories per hour! Who knew?

If you would like to focus on the aesthetics of your garden, this is also a great way to burn calories! Our research has found that painting fences could burn125 calories per hour, and cleaning your patio could burn an estimated 100 calories per hour!

Unsurprisingly, planting seeds is the least strenuous for losing calories, with just 50 being burnt per hour. Raking leaves only burns 25 more per hour with 75 calories.

These results show that while it may be difficult being stuck at home, you can still get some good quality exercise and stay in shape. Another bonus is that your garden will look in great shape too, ready for a summer of entertaining friends and family when things go back to normal! So, next time there’s a nice sunny day, head outside and tend to your garden to get your body in tip top shape. 

Be sure to read our blog posts for some garden inspiration.

Image credit: Shutterstock/Tretyakov Viktor

What can improve your physical and mental health, while bringing life to your living space? Houseplants of course!

In the current climate, many of us are working from home and self-isolating. While we’d love to be out and about buying things, unfortunately we’ll have to find other ways to stay active from the comfort of our own homes. So, which at-home exercises are best and what activities burn the most calories?

After many years, you may find that your teak garden furniture will become a silver-grey colour, as opposed to the golden brown finish when you made a purchase. This leaves many people pondering whether to paint teak garden furniture, but is this really a good idea?

As spring fast approaches, deciding which wonderful flowers to plant in your garden can be tricky. From sunflowers to roses the choices are never ending.

So, why not turn to Instagram for some inspiration? The experts at Faraway Furniture accumulated the number of hashtags per flower to discover which one claims first place.

Many of us don’t have the time, nor energy to spend hours upon hours tending to our gardens. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that people take shortcuts to ensure their garden looks good, with minimal effort. In this post, we’ve outlined some handy gardening tips for lazy gardeners.

Did you know that a garden is one of the most desired features of a house for potential buyers? In fact, having an attractive garden is far more important than having a well-presented bathroom or kitchen, according to a survey of 2,000 homeowners. On average, house hunters would be willing to spend an extra £14,448 to buy a home with a garden – a substantial amount of money – and has the ability to add a hefty 20% onto your property’s value.

However, there are certain garden features that can potentially cause a decrease in property value when it comes to selling. Faraway Furniture has spoken to several experts to reveal the garden features that can potentially leave you out of pocket and how much these unappealing features can cost you or potential buyers in the long-run.

Growing your own produce is not only extremely fulfilling and an enjoyable hobby to pass time all year round, but it is a great step forward towards being more sustainable. A greenhouse gives you freedom when it comes to what you can grow, and even gives your less hardy plants a home when the cold weather hits. If you’re thinking about setting up your own greenhouse but don’t know where to begin, follow this guide with some fantastic greenhouse tips for beginners.

We have previously provided readers with 6 ways of attracting wildlife to their garden and 6 ways of attracting birds to their garden. For those who want even more information on how to transform their garden into a lively playground for various fauna, we will continue our series of guides with one aimed at teaching you how to attract squirrels to your garden.  

Squirrels are small, bushy-tailed rodents that can be found living all over the world. In order to understand how to attract squirrels to your garden, you must first get to know these tiny animals. Knowing what they eat and what sort of environment they prefer to live in will allow you to design your outdoor space in such a way that squirrels will not only want to come there but will also want to spend most of their days there.