The Garden of St Erth is a rambling delight located in Blackwood, Victoria.

A charming country garden lovingly cultivated by The Diggers Club since 1996, this oasis now offers glamping stays, so its beauty can be enjoyed from dusk to dawn!

We ventured just over one-hour north-east of Melbourne’s CBD to take a look.

Gardens have become a HUGE focus for us over the past two years, and we have our intrepid gardens columnist, Georgina Reid of The Planthunter, to thank for that! (ps. Have you bought her brilliant new book yet!?)

Today we take a look back through the most popular gardens we featured in 2018. So lush!

The summer holidays are all about well-deserved indulgence. Christmas puddings for weeks after Christmas day, pavlovas piled high with cream and berries, and ice cream justifiable at any time of day!

As you may have ascertained, the TDF team are NEVER ones to shy away from sweet treats… isn’t it incredible how dessert stomach means there is ALWAYS rooms for a choc-top or sliver of pavlova? Read on for our tastiest summer sweet treat ideas.

Summer is here, and life is GOOD! The afternoons are long, the nights are balmy, and the emails will remain unchecked for many days to come.

Also, the season of spritzs and sparkling is definitely upon us! Whether you like your drinks strong and potent, or light and fruity, we’ve rounded up some of our favourite zingy summer cocktails.

Don’t worry, it’s not Tuesday! We’re squeezing in A SECOND recipe this week because we just have too much awesome stuff to fit in before the holidays kick in!

Today our darling Partnerships Manager Alice Johnson and her partner, landscape architect Marlon Ziebell, leave us with their final recipe, a super tasty and endlessly versatile recipe for (slightly boozy) preserved pears.

What do you do with preserved pears, we hear you ask? Serve warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, tip them on a pavlova or rich chocolate cake, or add them to muesli and yoghurt for a deliciously decadent breakfast – the options are endless!

Our Partnerships Manager Alice Johnson is no fairweather foodie! She’s the real thing, rain, hail… and even when she has an intolerance to the key ingredient! Yep, she’s that devoted to the age-old art of pickling and preserving – a pesky onion allergy wouldn’t prevent her from sharing this recipe with us!

Today Alice and her partner, landscape architect Marlon Ziebell, show you how to make perfectly pickled onions. It’s just the addition you’ve been looking for to take your summer cheese platter to the next level!

‘What should I get so and so for Christmas?’ has been the talk of the office this week. Not wanting to break the bank (and also sticking to many of our own buy-local and eco-conscious goals) has made this already-challenging task even harder than usual, especially when thoughtful and useful are chief criteria!

Happily, our partnerships manager Alice Johnson and her partner, landscape architect Marlon Ziebell, are back today with the second serving in their make-yourself menu of preserves. Perfect for Kris Kringle/co-worker/extended-family gift giving!

We advise you make a double quantity of this wholegrain mustard, because you just won’t want to part with it all!

We’ve been waiting MONTHS to share this very special Tasty Tuesday series with you – a series of simple yet brilliantly inspiring recipes, from two of our favourite people!

Alice Johnson is The Design Files’ partnerships manager, and one of the sweetest girls we know, whilst her partner, Marlon Ziebell is a talented landscape architect. These two are a match made in heaven. They spend every spare moment at Marlon’s family property in South Gippsland, and when they’re not in the great outdoors, they’re preserving, pickling and fermenting an incredible array of food together, using mostly homegrown produce.

This month, this industrious pair will share a little of their passion with us, kicking off today with a deceptively simple yet intensely flavoursome ginger-spiked sauerkraut.