Outdoors cooking with barbeques
Summer wouldn’t be Summer without the mouth-watering smell of barbeques in the garden. That beautiful smell of food wafting around your garden. Allied to the growth of interest in eating outdoors is a similar growth in cooking outside. The food from barbeques tastes different from anything cooked inside, and is a good way to bring together fun, friends, and family in your garden!
If you visit any large DIY store or garden centre in The North East or Stockton-on-Tees and Darlington early in the Summer you will see a wealth of different styles of barbecues. Some are relatively cheap and basic, others are expensive and have sophisticated extras. From the cooking point of view, many people find that the simplest and least expensive models work perfectly well and do exactly what they want. Although they are often left outside all year round, free-standing barbeques should be stored away when not in use and will, therefore, need storage space, which should be a consideration in a small garden.
Built-in barbeques, just like free-standing types, can be as simple or as sophisticated as you would like. The most basic outdoor barbecue is little more than a brick hearth, possibly with somewhere to put tools and food. If bricks are not bonded with cement, the barbecue can be taken apart and built elsewhere in your garden. If paving slabs are used as foundations, the whole thing will be quite mobile. For the true barbecue aficionado, a properly built structure is more likely a whole area devoted to alfresco cooking and eating, with built-in seats and a great raised herb garden built quite close by.
Designing a brick built barbeque
A barbecue usually is a box shape made of stone or concrete blocks, with an open top and an open front. A barbecue needs to be a stable structure with the grill set at a comfortable height for cooking: nine or ten courses from the ground level is about right. The grill and the fire-box can be supported on metal brackets or rods built into the brickwork, or brick ledges sticking out from the walls. Ideally, both the grill and the fire-box should be removable for cleaning and winter storage.
Your barbecues design can be as simple or as complicated as you would like, Green Onion Landscaping are professional bricklayers and can construct a barbecue to meet your design specifications. Green Onion Landscaping can include any number of features in your barbecues, such as cupboards, work surfaces, and utensil hooks. Simply tell us your design, we’ll sketch it out for you and then construct you the barbecue of your dreams!
Plants near barbeques
There should, clearly not be any plants in the immediate vicinity of your barbecue, simply because they are likely to get scorched. You might, however, want to have some herbs planted not too far away so that you can pluck a handful of fresh thyme, chives or rosemary without having to walk to the other side of the garden to find them. Green Onion Landscaping can build barbecues to any design anywhere in Teesside, Tees Valley and the North East including Stockton-on-Tees, Middlesbrough, and Darlington. View our Facebook page here.
