To turn back to the little patch of green and to get fit

The weather has finally started to brighten up in the UK. If you’ve been neglecting your gardens, or the little patch of green you have been nurturing, what better time is there to turn back to it than spring? Matt Collins has set out an easy-to-follow guide of affordable gardening tips that you can implement to watch your garden bloom into summer. For those who have no desire to nurture their green fingers, keep scrolling for other uplifting stories, taken from our First Edition newsletter. Nimo Omer, assistant editor First Edition

A new start after 60: Sepsis almost killed me – but I survived to invent a new sport Mac McKechnie was determined to get fit after a serious illness at 67. But when ‘walking football’ proved too fast, he decided to reinvent cricket to suit people up to the age of 100 – and beyond Full story here Kitchen renovation reveals 400-year-old friezes in York flat Discovery of wall paintings of national significance in Micklegate flat is ‘bonkers’, says Luke Budworth A man renovating his kitchen has found a 400-year-old wall painting of “national significance” in his York flat. Parts of the friezes, dating back to about 1660, were found by kitchen fitters in Luke Budworth’s flat on Micklegate in York city centre last year and have since been fully uncovered. The paintings are thought to be older than the buildings at either side of the wall and are based on scenes from the 1635 book Emblems written by the poet Francis Quarles. Full story here ‘A living pantry’: how an urban food forest in Arizona became a model for climate action A decades-old neighborhood project in Tucson provides food to residents as well as shade to cool streets in the third-fastest warming city in the US Full story here

A moment that changed me: I failed to impress my orphan cousin — until I learned to laugh at myself I was excited to be in charge of a 13-year-old for a week, but she just saw me as bossy and unyielding. Then our car got stuck on a hill … Full story here

‘These are my stomping grounds’: the first Black-owned bookstore opens in Octavia Butler’s home town Octavia’s Bookshelf promotes Black writers, culture and business in Pasadena, where the famed novelist lived and worked Full story here