If you are wishing that spring would just hurry up and get here, you are not alone! But while we wait for the sunshine, blossoms and buds to emerge, there are plenty of things to do in preparation for the season ahead. Whether you have a compact patio, an average-size urban plot or a sprawling garden, now is the perfect time to grab your heavy-duty gloves, bin bags and a mug of tea, and head outdoors for a tidying session. Give any outdoor garden or patio furniture a good scrub. There may be weathered planters, toys or other things that have been left lying around over the winter months that you could give away or take to the tip. Put anything you want to keep to one side – you may be able to revive items like plastic planters or patio chairs with some colourful spray paint. If you have a lawn, it is a good idea to rake the grass this month and spike it with a fork to aerate it. This encourages soil organisms and root growth. At this time of year the garden is still dormant, but the sap will start rising early in spring.
Which means now is your last chance to prune and remove dead growth from your shrubs, trees and hedges. You might want to do some hard landscaping, such as building a miniature wall or creating a garden path or a decked area. Although it’s cold outside, now is a great time while the garden is quietly sleeping to form the layout and structure of your garden, ready for the fun part later – planting! Even the smallest garden can be enhanced with some considered planting. Architectural plants can really make a statement, and you could even go vertical by fixing planters up the walls. Look online for garden inspiration and sketch your ideas out. Perhaps you fancy reshaping your lawn and flower beds? Diagonal and circular shapes are popular and you can find lots of advice and different downloadable designs online to help you. If you fancy a vegetable patch this year, you could create some raised beds specifically for this purpose. After the risk of frost subsides later this month, you can get busy diving perennials and even plant out deciduous shrubs and roses.
If you have a greenhouse, or even just an airing cupboard, you might want to start growing some seedlings and potting some cuttings. Creating an Outdoor Living Room (image created by blogger) It is so lovely in the spring to sit outdoors and feel the sunshine on your face. Why not make it even more pleasant and maximise the use of your outdoor space by creating somewhere really inviting to sit. Weathered old fences can be spruced up with some delicious shades of fence paint and this season there are lots of lovely homeware items at George to help you create some seriously stylish garden rooms. Retro style seating in minty green, anyone? These chairs are surprising lightweight and comfy to sit in – especially dressed with plump, colourful cushions – and every outdoor space needs some fun string lighting! Even if the weather is still a bit chilly, you can take a snuggly throw outside with you to put round your shoulders. Or why not consider buying a patio heater for extra warmth – they are especially useful in the evenings, allowing you to spend a little longer outside, when you might also want to light a candle or two for extra ambience.
Keep an eye out for cheerful daffodils and snow drops appearing towards the end of the month and then you’ll finally know that spring is on its way! Antonia Ludden is a freelance content contributor specialising in home interiors and the founder of TidyAwayToday.co.uk, a home interiors and lifestyle blog. She is a married mum of three boys and lives in South Manchester.Make your home feel a bit bigger this summer – just by opening the door. Whether you want to dine on your balcony, relax in your garden or spend time together on your patio, we've lots of comfortable and durable outdoor furniture for creating (even more) space for living in.What could be better at prizing your little ones away from the iPad and getting them playing with good old-fashioned toys than a train set? There’s something inescapably Christmassy about watching a child chuffing their way around a wooden track and building different shapes. Give a pre-schooler enough wooden track to concoct dangerous routes around the living room and they’ll be happy for hours on end.
Each of the sets featured here have wooden tracks and connect universally – so you could buy all of them and make them stretch all the way down your street. 1. Deluxe Railway Set: £199.99, Brio Brio is still the best-recognised and most enduring brand for wooden train sets. It has a lot of expectations to live up to (not least because it is expensive) but happily my resident pre-school tester and I were extremely chuffed. The Deluxe is luxurious in the sense that it covers nearly all bases for transport obsessives: trains, cars, buses, trucks and boats. The complex kit comprises 87 pieces including three bridges, two tunnels, cargo cranes, stations and little plastic people. The toys are all plastic but the track is wooden with connectors cut from the main piece — making them unlikely to break. The urban design is a pleasingly modern move from a brand that was once known for its simplicity. 2. Lillabo 20-piece basic train set: £8, Ikea It seems quite extraordinary that Ikea can make a product this good and sell it for so little.
Like one of the early Brio sets in design terms, you could buy two of these and add a few extra bits and pieces to make a really long, exciting train set. With one you can make a figure of eight or oval shape. It comes with a bridge that is nice and solid and a black train with three trucks. The only problem we foresee with it is that the track connectors are plastic so might fall out with heavy use. Basic, yes, but brilliant value and with all the ethical and child-friendly manufacturing credentials that come with the Swedish brand. 3. Tidlo Train Set: £59.99, Amazon No toddler would turn their nose up at a Tidlo. This 100-piece set is excellent quality, colourful and comes with lots of extras (houses, trees, cows, traffic lights, road signs and people) as well as good major infrastructure (two bridges, a road crossing, buildings). There is so much track that you can construct a myriad of complicated shapes and designs. And, bust my buffers, it even comes with a siding and a stop so your trains don’t go off the rails.
4. Dinosaur Train Set: £44.99, Bigjigs Toys This is one of the most popular train sets Bigjigs makes and with its whimsical mixture of dinosaurs and trains you can see why it’s a toddler’s dream toy. The cheerfully painted set has loads of character and we particularly like the monster faces of the main engines and the way you can give your dinos a ride on the back. The multi-coloured stegosauruses and even the T-Rex look comical and inviting rather than scary. The multiple-level bridge is probably the most elaborate we’ve seen but is sturdy thanks to the fact that it doubles as a volcano oozing lava. 5. Adventure Train Set: £32.50, Early Learning Centre With 100 pieces and for around £30 this train set is seriously good value and comes with plenty of one-off features. You can make a bridge that goes around a corner (a bit wobbly, but still good) and there’s a nifty magnetic crane to help you load up your cargo. The best thing according to the tiny tester we consulted was the helicopter but the police station and bright yellow taxi were a hit too.
The blocky, brightly coloured design is friendly and classic. Parents will appreciate its robustness as, like the Brio, it looks like it’ll last several generations (depending on the level of boisterousness applied). 6. Chad Valley 60-piece train set: £9.95, Argos Another classic design, this comes with buildings, trees, stop signs, car and some inexplicably over-large traffic cones. The blue bridge is an attractive shape and pretty easy to put together. You’re not really buying the track here as much as the extras so you could definitely buy a compatible basic set of wooden track to accompany it and have yourself some serious fun. 7. Thomas & Friends Wooden Railway Starter Set: £19.99, Argos If you have a Thomas the Tank Engine enthusiast living in your midst then this is a great affordable starter set. You’ll get a nice smiley model of the Number 1 engine himself as well as the Fat Controller, a coach and signals. There isn’t much track but again you’re investing in the extras rather than the scale – and it is also compatible with most other wooden tracks on the market so it’ll be easy to get Thomas chuffing from Sodor to Misty Island before you know it.
8. George Home Wooden Train Set and Table: £75, Asda This is one of the most imaginative train sets on the market and comes with so many different pieces that unpacking it felt like several Christmasses rolled into one. Oh, and it just so happens to come with a giant play table as a bonus meaning the whole lot arrives in a box large enough to hide Santa. You do need a lot of room to set it up but boy is it good fun. With diggers, cranes, loads and characterful animals it is a tiny person’s fantasy. This is another one that looks like it’ll last for the duration of several childhoods – and frankly we want to play with it too. 9. Fisher-Price Thomas Wood Coal Hopper Figure of 8 Track Set: £36.99, Argos This is another good starter set for Thomas fans and you can teach them about fossil fuels (well, sort of) as this comes with a special feature that allows you to load the little blue engine up with coal. You simply push Thomas under the coal hopper and press down on the top of it.