Am I helping pensioners or exploiting them ???

Well, the collecting leaves for leafmould saga took an unexpected turn last week. I was out there collecting my latest few bags, and I saw an elderly lady in the pensioners' bungalows that face onto the little copse, who was trying to clear her pathway of all the oak leaves - of course, they get more and more slippy the longer they lie on concrete paths. So I offered to help her, rather than pick up the leaves from the public area just outside her gate, and she accepted.

So I picked up an extra bag right there, and then she offered me some other bags she'd stored at the back of her garden, ready for her son to take them to the tip. So when I went back to pick *those* up, she gave me a beautiful metal wheelbarrow to take them home in - I was a bit concerned she was giving me too much, and kept checking, but she seemed sure ...

And she said she'd put out any other bags she had by the gate, for me to pick up as I went past.

And then there they were! Three more! And another four after that!

And a lady a couple of doors down from her, she joined in too - so there were another two bags today!

I really am going to be able to put leafmould over the *whole* of my garden now, I'm really chuffed.

That's odd, that tree doesn't look green ...

For several years now, I've used a pruning from an ash tree in my garden as my Christmas tree - the travel costs are about ten yards, which has been great! I painted it gold, and each year I topped up the colour, then set it up again - I have a flower bucket from I-don't-know-where, and I anchored my eight foot tall "offcut" into it by wedging it in clean cat litter. A little unusual, but it worked for me, I hid the cat litter with pine cones, old tree decorations and the odd bit of tinsel.

However, now that I've downsized my house, I don't really have enough square footage spare in my living room to put it up and still have room to move around easily and get hold of everything I want ... or maybe I just get more claustrophobic these days!

And then a friend of mine gave me the link to the perfect solution, on the Eden Project blog no less:

http://www.edenproject.com/blog/index.php/page/2/

This is what the home-made wall-hung Christmas tree looks like on there. I think its brilliant!



I won't have time to do it this year, but I'll set it up for next - I have lots of loooong branches that could be great in this formation - sturdy ones would be buddleia stems, they'd be long enough for the outsides, and inside there could be more buddleia, or anything else really - the blackcurrant stems are pretty long, and the raspberry canes grow *huge* round here. All in all, I think its going to be lovely :)

I'd like to confess, right here right now, that my decorations aren't green. I've done the classic thing - started off with half a dozen plain little baubles from my childhood, and added a few more exotic things every year. This stuff has built up over a long time, and I've collected them from America and Germany and points in between ...

This was my Christmas tree a few years ago.

A closer view ....

And this is one of my favourite decorations!

Yoo hoo, water meter, where are you?

If I wasn't on a water meter, I'd apply to be on one. And I use so little water - I don't water the garden, everything there takes care of itself; I only take short showers; I have dual flush, modern toilets - so I was a bit confused to receive an extra bill, which will be paid automatically online.

Now, the back of the bill says: "please check your meter readings to make sure that there is no unusually high consumption that might indicate a water leak." Good idea. Except, unlike my gas and electricity meters, I have no *idea* where my water meter is. None at all. In the house? In the ground?



Some time later ....
Oh dear. I've just been roaming about looking for my water meter. And just as my water board says, its by the stop cock. Trouble is, while the stop cock is accessible, the water meter isn't, its been boxed in. There goes my attempt to read it, for now, anyway.

Mind you, in hunting for the thing, I looked under the sink, as advised, and found this:

Which looks completely mad to me, but quite a lot of fun at the same time :)

I know it works, thats the main thing.







And I've realised, about water useage - I have a washing machine and a dishwasher. And I'm not going to stop using either of them, so there we go, heading straight towards average useage after all, no matter how careful I am.

Do Leylandii leaves compost down to leafmould?

I don't have any leylandii myself of course, perish the thought! But I do have a next-door-neighbour with a row of leylandii, and they poke their branches over our boundary line. I'm not too worried about it, as they're only over my hardstanding at the front, and last year, just after I moved in, the neighbours were sweet enough to ask permission to come onto my property and give them a wopping great haircut - they cut about six feet off the height, and pulled them back to the boundary limit. They even took away all the branches and clippings.

But last month, a year later, they were peeking over the fence again ... and I was wondering about them being a soource of humus and soil feed for the blueberries, when I ever get around to planting them. I know pine needles are good for that, but do leylandii leaves count as pine needles?

The other reason I want to cut them back a bit is that they shade my living room when they get too big, and that room needs all the help it can get.

So an experiment was called for: I've been cutting some of them back a bit, to the boundary, and bagging them, then asking friends and online resources about this. And I have an answer!

Turns out they take a minimum of 3 years to compost down .... thats not really good enough, much too slow a turnover, and much too boring (and nonproductive) use of my property. So I've reached a compromise - give them a haircut once a year, because it *is* the front of my property, and it doesn't look nice, and put the clippings directly onto the ground on the blueberry-patch-to-be. They *are* acid enough to act as pine needles. I'm going to have the happiest blueberries in the south of England!

Sustainable Palm Oil: the reply.

Well, at least I know now why I couldn't find anything about the committee on the British Retail Consortium's website. I received a reply to my email (the one that used the contact form of the BRC) yesterday, *very* fast: it was sent by someone from the BRC, but explained:

"The Retailers’ Palm Oil Group (RPOG) is an independent group, which is facilitated by (my emphasis) the British Retail Consortium (BRC) and chaired by a representative from Royal Ahold. It consists of retailers interested in the drive to secure certified sustainable palm oil to join the group and take advantage of its benefits.... The group comprises 14 European retailers including: Royal Ahold (chair), Asda, Boots (UK), Coles, Co-op Switzerland, Co-operative Food (UK), Delhaize Group, Kingfisher, Marks & Spencer, Migros, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, The Body Shop International, and Waitrose. "

These are the people that hold one of the retail "seats" on the Roundtable, work on the committees and working groups of the Roundtable, keep up with market developments and ensure market compliance.

Hmmm. I'd love to see the amount of paperwork and travel generated by that little lot.

In a comment on my first post about this, my friend Cheerful pointed me to this brilliant article: http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/976417/can_the_palm_oil_we_eat_ever_be_wildlifefriendly.html

and Cheri has pointed me to a recent Radio 4 programme:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b016kgv1/Food_Programme_Palm_Oil/

You know, that original article in the Waitrose paper, that they got a high score in a recent assessment of their best practices, seemed so simple. But the ramifications ... particularly of what Cheerful and Cheri have found - are astonishing. And worrying.

Palm oil causes between a quarter and a third of deforestation in South East Asia. Time to take note once again of the ingredients lists in your weekly shop.

Collecting leaves and sidling around moggies

I've got a real thing going with collecting fallen leaves at the moment, its very energising and I'm loving it. Not only the ones on my own property, but on local paths. The road is about 20 yards away in this pic, good enough I think. Its mostly oak leaves so far: I have a very slight suspicion that they may contain a bit too much tannin (like acorns) to be good for my soil in very concentrated amounts (though I'm hardly going to collect that much!).

And its such a pleasure to walk through a glade of oak trees (other areas I collect from are more isolated than this), thousands of acorns round about, knowing that the squirrels will be having a field day. Then, next year, I'll empty the bags onto my heavy, heavy soil, and do the same again of course, and it will become beautiful, friable loam. I like the word friable :)

However, I'm *mostly* wondering about a different thing at the moment - a friend has contacted me to say that she's binning all the leaves that fall in her beautiful little courtyard garden, because they smell of cat wee. Yuck! I love cats dearly, and had a mother-and-daughter pair for 17 years, but ....

So, I've been doing some research, and contacted a few people about it, that I can trace online. The references are a couple of years old, so I'm not holding out too much hope. The real dangers seem to be from cat faeces - toxoplasmosis being right up there, of course. I don't think that its going to be a real issue for me - after all, the leaves are going to do nothing but sit in their plastic bags doing their thing while the worms do theirs, for a year or so, so anything actively harmful in the urine should have degraded over the course of a year. And of course, soil / loam / humus, whatever you want to call it, is worm poo. Truly! Just to be on the safe side, I didn't collect any leaves at all from around lamp-posts - those are for dogs, I reckon! And of course, I wear thick gardening gloves, of fake suede. Its a metaphorical minefield, once you get into it!

Another friend of mine made a couple of interesting points (he often does): "A reasonable rule of thumb with any airborne water-soluble chemical is that your eyes will start watering *way* before anything happens to your mucus membranes. Just think "onions"...Ammonia is not going to hang around for a year. It's very reactive, especially with various organic materials. That's why it is in kitchen cleaner. In terms of various life-processes, it's actually quite a valuable chemical."

I'll be keeping my eye on this - but I can't believe that my own leaves, which don't smell of anything, are dangerous. These are my bags of leaves - they're doubling as a mulch for where the blueberries will be planted next spring.

Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. Who? Wot?

I was reading the newspaper-type weekly freebie from Waitrose after seeing my sister last weekend, and saw that Waitrose have a commitment to use only "Certified Sustainable Palm Oil" in own label products by the end of 2012, and they've fulfilled that commitment to the extent of 68% - that gets them a score of 9/9 by the World Wildlife Fund.

Sounds good! Sustainable is important in its own right, of course, and because non-sustainable harvesting kills about 5,000 orang-utans a year, apparently. I was horrified to read this figure - I adore orang-utans, I studied them in the physical anthropology section of my degree course many moons ago, love them to bits.





Just who *is* the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil tho? This is their own description of themselves: "RSPO is a not-for-profi t association that unites stakeholders from seven sectors of the palm oil industry - oil palm producers, palm oil processors or traders, consumer goods manufacturers, retailers, banks and investors, environmental or nature conservation NGOs and social or developmental NGOs - to develop and implement global standards for sustainable palm oil."

Hmmm. Not the greenest people in the world then. Is something better than nothing? I suppose so, frankly its hard to tell at the moment. This is the Roundtable website:
http://www.rspo.org/

and this is the blurb from the World Wildlife Fund about this scoring process:
http://www.wwf.org.uk/wwf_articles.cfm?unewsid=5439

This whole project is pretty sobering. Until this initiative got going, even as a vegetarian I was contributing to the extinction of the orang-utan by buying Waitrose Own Label products. Still am, to the extent of 32% of my purchases.

Waitrose also mention that they're a member of the British Retail Consortium Palm Oil Committee. Sounds good, huh? They're on the case.

Well, not necessarily. This is the website of the BRC:
http://www.brc.org.uk/brc_home.asp

I've searched all over the site, and as many of its subsidiaries are open for business, and there's no mention of palm oil anywhere. I wonder how effective that committee is? So I decided to use the contact details and sent them an email, which I've saved on a draft post on this blog. We'll see what happens, shall we?

Foraging for sloes

I've never lived in a place where I could walk to so much wild fruit! This year, I picked a lot of sloes - some of them too early, around September - and I actually made sloe sort-of-chutney with them. I combined them with foraged apples and a *lot* of supermarket sugar, and got 4 little tubs like this:

I've now used up one tub, and I've decided that though I will forage sloes next year, and forage even more of them, I won't bother making chutney or anything similar. It needs a *lot* of sugar to make it passable, without screwing your face up and going ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww... but I'm using it in savoury dishes, and that just doesn't seem right.



Today, for instance, was a forage-in-the-fridge/freezer day, and I had some end of packet frozen cauliflower and some slow-cooked dried peas, plus a few cashew nuts. So I threw them all together with a bit of my sloe chutney, sloshed in some water plus a bit of avocado oil afterwards, and ate that as a stew/soup. It was nice, actually, but it didn't need sugar in it!

So next year, I'll forage lots of sloes and make a sloe liquor, frozen into small portions, and I'll put it in whatever I fancy, knowing that its just pure fruit liquor. And before I get some comments about sloe gin - well, I don't drink gin, I'm really sorry! I know I should, with sloe trees being so close, but it just doesn't work for me. I wish it did, the feedback about it sounds brilliant :)

Urban foraging

I've had a fine old time over the last few days doing a spot of urban foraging. Bit late for blackberries, hey? Yes, it is, but that hasn't been what I'm after. I'm after the elusive prey of builderskippus maximus!

There's a couple of building sites near me, and when I go out for a stiff lunchtime walk, to inspect the neighbourhood so to speak, I usually pass one of them - I'm fascinated to see the slabs of insulation go into the cavity walls, for instance, I've popped inside the showhouse on a fine autumn day and been surprised at how warm - hot! - it is.

Anyway, there's still lots of building work going on, and some of it entails taking things out of cardboard boxes and putting the cardboard on that day's skip. And I have a lot of places in my garden that could do with some cardboard mulch - well, all of it. Either its just been weeded, its about to be weeded, its about to be dug up to become border, and in addition to all of that, the whole garden needs more organic material - there's so much clay in this soil that sometimes I don't dig it so much as slice it ... its quite weird, after having been on the chalky soils of the south coast for so long.

Well, there we go. Cardboard! Hmmm, there's a lot of work to be done in this garden, isn't there - still, at least I know its fertile! This pic will be used again, incidentally, in telling the saga of my battle against the sedge .... for now, I'm just admiring the fact that I have good light in this garden, and everything wants to grow.

But thats not all - there were little carpet samples too, at another skip. These are about 15" x 6" - perfect for putting between plants (eventually!), they won't mulch a long strip of land, but they'll do a fine temporary job. I mustn't leave them on too long tho, because they're not natural fibre, and they'll soon break down into my now-organic soil if I'm not careful.

And last but not least, these amazing manufactured stone samples! They're really tiny, I've laid them out on the step up onto the grass. They won't do anything magical except look beautiful in amongst the borders by the house, which will soon be full of slate, pebbles, stones or shells.

A parcel popped through the door

Well, it didn't - I had to go to the Sorting Office, as when the poor thing tried to get in I wasn't here ... but then I was, so I went out, of course. And came back with a parcel from the lovely OrkneyFlowers, I'm sure anyone who reads this blog will know her blog, but just in case, here it is http://orkneyflowers.blogspot.com/.

Well, the parcel contained some dinky little silicon spatulas, as I've been wibbling on about getting pesto out of badly shaped jars - I'm addicted to pesto - and also a measuring cup set, the posh stainless steel type, both of which will come in very handy - OrkneyFlowers' recipe for 15 minute scones is in cups, and these cups will do it proud, indeed.

Best of all, because planted, grown and packed with her own fair hands, is a healthy little plant packed in a toilet roll innard, the piggy back plant, or tolmeia menziesii - she's qualified, is our OrkneyFlowers!

This is little Tolly as he came out of his toilet roll ....

And this is Tolly after he'd been all potted up. He's now sitting on my office windowledge, the only windowledge in the whole house that doesn't have a radiator underneath it, and its on the first floor, so he should be happy with the sunlight, and overlooking his friends in the garden.

Thank you OrkneyFlowers!

Admiration Day!

This is a friend from online who became a Real Life friend! She helped me move into this house last year, ferrying me about hither and yon, and even through her own troubles has always been here to call on. In this pic, she's admiring my beautiful mahonia shrub - I hear that the berries can be made into something yummy, and I seem to have a bumper crop, without doing anything at all except saying hello.

This one came as a bit of a shock tho - I was giving her the tour of what I'd done over the past few months, and came across this little monument to a pigeon - its where I'm creating a proper link between the crazy paving of the patio, and the kitchen wall - this sort-of-trench is going to have membrane over it and then be filled in with slate chips (sitting ready and waiting, re-used from my sister's garden) - but a fox has got here first!

And below is the spot, next door but one to the mahonia, where my little blueberry plants are going to go. The sad little pieces of wood sticking out of the ground are the remains of two packed-in rhodedendrons - I spoke to them before I ushered them out, and they were happy to go, as a rhodie shrub and rhodie tree remain. I've also been chatting to the worms, telling them to leave this piece of ground, as I'm going to be digging there, and I want them to be safe. The black plastic bag, happily for me, is rhodie leaves, which are going to stay in there for maybe a year, and hopefully rot down, like deciduous leaves. What can I say, its an experiment!

Taking back the world

Well, just as I start the blog up again, I've decided to lay off the garden work for a week so I can do my accounts, sob ....

However, this is very green! Honestly!

In the first place, I'm doing *all* my accounts this year - I'm not employing the accountants I've used for 15 years or so. They do less and less work each year, for more and more money, and simply don't talk to me helpfully. Since my income dipped again last year, I thought I'd better take my life in my hands, and actually *look* at the tax return that they've been submitting to the Inland Revenue on my behalf. And whaddaya know, its pretty simple - even for me, and there's overseas money involved too .... I may be crying in my spilt milk that I ever said such a thing, but at the moment, its progressing.

It feels very green to do the accounts myself, oddly - its empowering! I've given away my power to a technician I've never even met, and now I'm taking it back! I'm very happy about that!

And in the second place - because I felt quite lairy of doing all of this myself, I set out all the paperwork in the kitchen. Luckily, I live alone, and don't even have cats at the moment. The window in here is much taller than the one in my office, so I have a beautiful view of the sky and the sunset. And I'm using my kitchen, and the beautiful little kitchen table my sister bought me as a moving in present :)

What can be greener than that? To use what we have, to use our own growing skills, to reclaim our power. I'm chuffed!

What *have* I been doing to the garden?

Well, I've been keeping the grass useable since my sister cut it - thats a big thing! Nobody would ever mistake it for a lawn, but thats okay, I disagree with monoculture in any case :) I've also been getting in the corners that my sister couldn't reach with the lawnmower, making sure that the *layers* of old grass get pulled up, and stopping it encroaching any nearer to the compost bin.

The little flower border nearest the patio is planted up a bit more, and more or less weeded. Its also slightly wider - my ambition is to have very little grass, a la Alys Flowers :) Happily, strawberry plants seem to *love* the soil! So do aquilegia, which self seed everywhere :)

The right hand border is where most effort has been - my mum, when she stayed, spent three quarters of an hour (and remember, she's 85 years old!) bent double over the potententilla at the very end, pulling all the long grass away from underneath it, then weeding it properly, and shaping it too - it looks a lot happier!

I could see such a difference! So I've been working on that border consistently. Digging up some turf to expand it, getting rid of a sedge thats overtaken everything, pruning a blackcurrant bush and some raspberry canes, digging up grass thats growing in the border itself, mulching with anything I could lay my hands on, prettifying a lavender bush, and even, ta-da, planting some mint, which came from my previous house. Happily, in with the mint was some love in a mist, which was on my list to get, as the seeds are edible and I *love* the plant, and thats grown already, tho its a bit leggy because it was so late.

I also planted my beautiful, beautiful sedum in this area - the soil around that will *not* be disturbed :)

The other side, the north facing side, I've left more or less alone till now, but I've just started to cut back two of the shoulder high rhodedendrons ... I didn't even know there were two of them in this spot, the border's so overcrowded, its crazy. I'm reserving that space for my blueberry plants - they're far enough out from the fence that they'll get enough light. Lots of cutting back still to do, including training the tree-height rhodie so that it doesn't kill the cobnut tree. I have a cobnut tree!

There's a very narrow border that runs down the side of the house, just outside the back door, that was completely overgrown with ivy and sedge. It was taking forever just to keep it in check - it was 6 or 7 layers thick. My lovely neighbour, when I asked his permission to really chop it back, actually came round less than a week later, and did it for me! I now have an open aspect when I open the back door, not the lowering gloom of eight feet tall ivy blocking my path to the garden. Lovely! There's a climber of some description that wasn't *quite* overwhelmed by the ivy, with a single solitary fruit, so I'll be watching that with interest - pix coming soon. And I've realised its a fantastic siting for *more* strawberry plants :)

The border of the patio thats underneath the kitchen window has been dug out, to the depth of one course of bricks below the air bricks and the damp course - its going to have membrane and slate put down there, and I may even get to do that this weekend! We'll see, I make no promises, after all its Bonfire Weekend.

I have a single border at the front, and I was just going to give it a really thorough weeding and plant whatever I wanted to plant there. However, its not as weed ridden all the way along as I thought. There's creeping buttercup, true - but there's also a lot of bulbs in there, and no way I want to damage them. So its a bit of make-do there, while I see what's what.

Such a lot thats been done - with quite a bit of help, too, and I'm very grateful for it all. My little garden is a living, breathing entity again :) and I'm very happy about it.

What a long time ...

Directly linked to my last post, sadly - I worked really hard for my mum's visit, and continued at that pace after she left, so made myself ill for the whole of September.

During October - catching up! Which meant, making the garden mine, and its been lovely to do, I'm slowly transforming it from a boring suburban garden, the horticultural version of Tim nice-but-dim, into something a bit wilder and yet not overgrown, where most plants will fulfil several functions.

And since I have no real money to carry on doing up the house, I've changed the name of the blog - I've let go the "DIY and Renovation" part. That kind of work is still going to be included, but its not the sole focus.

There *is* one bit of building/repair work thats going to be done in the house, actually, and thats in the bathroom - a clever friend has told me that all the mould peeping out from the bath panel and the boxing-in of the pipes (which I hate!) is probably because the seals between the bath, the taps and the wall have been gone for a long, long time. Makes sense to me - but its so bad, I can see that the bath might have to be removed, and a new panel put in. I'm pretty sure I'll be getting rid of the boxing too, and in general the bathroom will be having a good old update. Watch this space (well, that space, that one over there ...).

The plan

I think everything hinges for the near future on the fact that my mother is staying with me for two days in the middle of August, so I need to clear the patio and create a seating area. To accomplish this will mean the following jobs:

- clear an area for the heap of clods of earth to safely sit and moulder and decompose. At the moment, there are two heaps, one on a flagged area underneath the cob tree, and the other just sitting on the grass.

- get the old table into position on its side in this area, so I can stack the clods inside it without harming the little picket fence on that side of the garden.

- that will also mean spraying the weeds between the table and the fence, and putting mulch down, so I don't get out of control weeds in an inaccessible area.

- move the clods of grass to their new position, all binny and proper :)

- the lovely hardwood 2 x 2 timber, and scaffold boards, should probably just be moved into the *other* shed at the end of the garden so I don't have to think about them at the moment.

- before I do that, however, I should rescue the electric fan from the back of that shed, seeing as its going to be hot again. One job really does lead to another.

- not so critical in timing, but some of the leftover vinyl thats *also* hanging around the garden needs to be nailed in between the legs of the table at each end so that it becomes the sides of the bin. I *think* I can do that when its in-situ.

- this means most of the patio is now clear! So the job then is to wash my lovely aluminium bistro chairs, and the grotty old white plastic garden table I inherited earlier this year, and hey presto, I have a cleared patio area with garden seating on it!

- maybe I can use up a larger piece of the leftover vinyl by gluing it to the top of the grotty white plastic table! Eureka, another use for leftover vinyl (I think) ...


I've just thought.... maybe I can actually use the flagged area as the site of the "bin" for the clods to decompose, for this year at least. It would mean less moving things around, and less weeding-that-doesn't-make-an-immediate-difference. Hmmm.

The garden just got scary

Hmmm... I accompanied my sister to the council tip late yesterday afternoon, and had a bit of a shock when she got back here. She fished out some stuff I needed from the back of the shed (I won't go in there - just too many spiders too close to my head, gulp) ... and she insisted on also getting the mower out of there and mowing my grass for me. And then I saw the garden through her eyes ...

Notwithstanding that I've spent a couple of hours on it in the past week, it looked very like the municipal tip itself :( Grass thats two feet long, empty saucers that used to have pots in, a few empty flowerpots around the garden, some pots that are full but the original plants have died and they're now taken over by weeds, black bags full of composting leaves left in the wrong place and having grass start to grow over them, clods of grass having been dug up and left in two piles to decompose, not just one, weeds growing at the sides and rear of the many mature shrubs in this garden, loads of slugs pootling about in all that long grass, the slabs of the patio not being repointed and so the weeds and the ants are having a field day in between, patio furniture stacked to one side because it needs to be scrubbed before it can be used, an old table thats meant to be used as the sort of compost bin for the clods still sat on the patio with lots of lovely hardwood that was in the loft just sat on it waiting for something to be done with it. It was absolutely horrendous.

I made a start, at least. I bagged up clumps of the grass that she'd mown, and *while* she was mowing, I made a start on clearing out the shed. At least now, I have a bit of cardboard - leftover moving boxes! - ready to put down as mulch.

Very scary tho. I have to get to grips with all of this. I need to be doing four hours a week or so, at the very very least, just on the garden. I'm not sure I can, but I'll do my damndest.

Just been downstairs to make a cuppa tea. I forgot about the empty drawers from an old chest of drawers, which were used to transport plants from my previous house, the old bricks that were here that will *eventually* be used for edging, the water butts not yet connected (only delivered 2 days ago, I'll forgive myself that one) and the trunk of the dead buddleia, with assorted branches. Oops. Admiring the neighbour's new kitten doesn't quite cut it. A plan is coming up.

Leftover vinyl flooring, and what to do with it?

I *like* vinyl, in lots of ways, tho I loathe the smell that hangs around just after its been laid. Fortunately, after the last lot, I went on holiday :)

And now, I come back home to lots of bits of vinyl - some are really big, 3 metres by two, others tiny, a foot wide by three long. So, what to do? This is what I've thought of so far:

- put a big piece underneath a rug thats on the ground floor - it can act as extra insulation, and will hopefully feel quite luxurious underfoot.

- use at my computer desk as a floor protector. I haven't used one previously, and the flooring was literally about to wear through after a decade of intensive use, ballooning in a very unattractive manner, shall we say!

- I have an old table on the patio outside, which I'm planning to put on its side and transform into a turf bin - I'm slowly digging up the grass so I can extend my borders - I'm planting herbs at the moment - mint, creeping thyme, ordinary thyme and oregano are in at the moment. The table will keep the slowly-growing stack of turf clods off the wooden fence at the back, and I'm planning to nail squares of the spare vinyl between the side legs of the table to keep it all in place.

- not sure about this one, but I was thinking I could construct a dust cover for my mahoosive all-in-one printer/scanner/copier, rather than buying one in the shops.

- I really don't know about using it as a mulch in the garden, I don't think its appropriate - its not water permeable, for a start. Well, thats a finish, really, isn't it. If its not permeable, it can't really be used in the garden. And because its not bendy enough to bend around clods of earth, it would provide *lovely* cover for slugs and snails. Don't think I want to go there.

Any other ideas gratefully received!

Water butts and showers

I'm very excited :) I've ordered two water butts from Wilkinsons Online, complete with lid, tap and stand. A big one for the back of the house, a small one for the porch at the front - altogether the total is just over £50 including delivery. I've got to get them fitted yet, of course, but I'm very pleased at all that.

In the same order, I've also got a solar shower coming. I was having a long chat about experimenting with solar energy, basically because I'd wondered about how hot it gets upstairs in my house, and thinking I could just hang one of these camping showers in the window, then hey presto, a free shower :)

Well, when I was searching for water butts, I found one of the solar showers, also at Wilkinsons - their search engine isn't very good if it turns up "solar shower" when the search terms are "water butt", but I'll forgive them, because its coming along at the princely sum of £4.68 - even if it doesn't actually work here in the UK, I've had an interesting time talking about it with friends, and its a good experiment for the long term! Plus, when I live in Spain, in some future indeterminate time, it'll definitely come in handy by then :)

Blackberries

Oh my word. I got back from holiday yesterday, and I've been hard at work in the garden: making sure everything is watered, mourning the creeping mint that didn't survive my absence, clearing ivy and long grass, starting to clear space to get rid of two of my three rhodedendrons (in a tiny suburban garden!!!) so that I can plant my blueberries in the right soil ....

Well, earlier this evening, I took a walk around the rest of my domain (also known as the Council Recreation Ground). And I picked a handful of blackberries! I've never lived anywhere before that was so close to so many blackberry patches, so I've no idea if this is ridiculously early, but I know its *fairly* early....

I'm determined to make lots of blackberry jam this year (strained - I don't like the texture of blackberries, even whizzed) and these are now washed and in the fridge - I'll pick some more tomorrow and take a bag with me, as I'm on staycation, and can do anything I want :)

Cleaning the oven. Eggshells?

I've noticed how this blog is often more about having moved somewhere than about renovation and whatnot ... sorry about that! But this is what's actually going on, as opposed to whats meant to be.

I'm certainly not particularly houseproud, though I'd like to be, and I'm also often quite slow to do things - like, starting to cook again after moving. Which has meant I didn't realise quite how *filthy* the oven was. And I'll confess now, which I haven't before, that I was storing egg shells in there to dry, to put them out around plants. So not only is there filth, *old* filth, there's starting to be mould. And it all got a bit much over the last few days, with the heat - so, in spite of the kitchen having the living room emptied into it because of the new flooring I'm having fitted (more in a while ...) I have to have a spring clean of the oven.

Started the normal way, just doing the door for now - I soaked it in stardrops. No reaction. Started scraping the crap off with a spoon - very slow. Then I realised I had some wire wool somewhere :) result! The stuff just fell off, in some parts, it was on so thick.

I can start to see through the door again, and this is good! Though in the long term, I may have knackered the door, because I can see crud thats got in between the two panes of glass or whatever its made from, though realistically that may be very old.

The egg shells can come out today into the garden, no problem, because a friend just gave me some comfrey cuttings, and they've rooted but in the last few days their pots have been in an overgrown bit of the garden (ha!) and their leaves have been chomped by something. So I can actually use the egg shells for what I was saving them for :)

Forgot to say, I'm using the elbow grease now because a few years ago I used oven cleaner in my previous house - and I scared myself stupid with the warnings and the smell and the look of the chemical reaction that seemed to be taking place. My green credentials were under threat, thats for sure, but I'm certainly re-converted after that experience.

Insect screens are all over the place

I'm seeing them available for purchase everywhere now. Its a well known psychological effect, but really, its very odd.

Robert Dyas have full-door flyscreens for £13 or so - made of metal links, and some are like vertical blinds. Lakeland, of all people, do door curtains like this too - even Lakeland manage a door curtain for £36, including a very jazzy version of bamboo. So the money I was originally quoted for a window - £230 or so - means a horrendous amount of profit would have been made from me. 100% markup can be fair enough, but its starting to sound like 1,000%, though I know that small businesses can't have the bulk savings that big firms do.

Lakeland also do a kit - consisting of fibreglass mesh and "adhesive hook and loop tape" (erm, velcro, anyone? anyone?). The screen mesh is one metre by two metres, and the kit sells at £16.99; with an unknown amount of additional tape (velcro! its velcro!) being available at £4.99. Okay, the profit margin on this may "only" be in the region of 100% or so. Good grief.

The final product dear Lakeland do is a weird foldaway thing - it covers a door, and it looks like when its folded up it'd be the size of a nappy changing pad... again, it sticks to the door with velcro, not the hanging blind version, so its ventilation only - it'd be impossible to use the door as a door. Mental!

It would be hard to express how pleased I am I found the roll of screening at the princely sum of £2 a metre :)

Adventures in insect screening

Ha! Well, I've done one window, and I'm already using the screen every day, as that particular room needs a lot of ventilation, for reasons I won't go into here :)

The first step was sticking the velcro onto the window frame, around the area I wanted screened - that was horrendously easy, no measuring required, so I was a happy bunny about that.

The next step was to figure out where to cut the material, which was basically about measuring what I'd stuck onto the window, lol. Transferring those measurements to the roll of screening material was much more difficult for me - as with cutting anything to fit, you need to take care, and you need to make sure you're cutting in straight lines. Dreadfully obvious, I know, and I knew it before I started, but I *have* still ended up with quite a lot of wobbly lines. Happily, the excess that I factored in has taken care of this. It will also take care of the fraying, which is considerable - I haven't yet hemmed it, so I'll have to update again about how that goes, but its obvious that its essential.

To be fair, the screening was really easy to cut, and I used a normal pair of scissors - if you can cut material, you can cut this. To get the velcro stuck onto the screening at the right place, I did one side, and worked from there, no measuring at all, just judging by eye where it needed to go, and it really does the job.

So, whats the result? I do need to take pictures still, but realistically, it works AND it doesn't look great, and these are the recommendations I'd make:
- the velcro you use *must* be the same colour as the windowframe its stuck to, so it can disappear as much as possible.
- the insect screening has to be hemmed, bits of material and fraying edges are not attractive.
- even better if the whole thing is behind something else, curtains, blinds, voile or whatever.
- you need lots of velcro! I only bought two metres, because I was experimenting, but obviously you need enough to go round the whole perimeter of the area you want to screen.

One final interesting point, for me was about what velcro you can buy - different colours and different widths, sure, but also you can buy the smooth bit and the hooked bit separately: so my aim now would be to buy one half sticky, to stick onto the window frame, and the other half the non sticky stuff, that can be sewn onto materials. Because thats what the screening is, its not magical, its just very stiff material. Happily for me!

Insect screens

I've been checking these out ever since I went to Grand Designs in April (was it April? good heavens, I can't remember ...) Anyway, prices have varied between £165 and £230 for half an ordinary kitchen window to be flyscreened, which seems a huge amount of money.

And yet I was still willing to pay it, until I saw one close up, that a salesman brought to my house. The handles were naff, no other word for it - real 50s retro, in other word no style at all, because this thing was otherwise in a normal, sleek modern style. And the closure of a good part of the screen was done with a brush, the sort of brush that acts as a draught excluder. Seems a lot to pay for that. And some of the screens that are that price are clipon things, where you turn four little woggles, one at each corner, to hold it on. Some need to be built out, to take account of clearance for the window handles, all sorts of things that stop the screens being a smooth, beautiful thing of, um, beauty.

Then I was at a garden centre today and saw it, in a roll along with the netting for climbing plants and fleece for frost protection. Insect screening! Eureka! It was £1.99 per metre, and its about 60" wide. I know the figures should be transplanted, but no such luck. I bought 3 metres, totalling £5.97, and my little tape measure says that its 60" once the bound edges are cut off (tho there's a good bit of edging I'll be leaving on, thank you very much).

So, its a home made version, but I'll have it as soon as the end of this weekend, with none of the hassle of workmen and the smell of glue. Cost is as follows:
£5.97 3 metres of insect screening.
£4.80 2 metres white velcro for the white uPVC - this was a guess, I may need more.
£4.80 return fare to the garden centre, in the interests of not over-egging the pudding :)

Total: £15.57, for 3 windows. I'm very happy about that!

Double glazing, continued Part Deux The Return

Aha! I got a phone call from the double glazing company. The boss had told his staff to say he was out on Friday. He told his workman not to turn up to me today. I understand schedules and appointments, I really do. I don't understand their inability to pick up the phone - when I said a version of that to him, politely, he said "we have to move on from this". Which is code for "you've got us bang to rights"....

Their reputation has suffered serious damage with me, to the extent that when I get the rest of the house double glazed, I don't know whether or not to ask them to be one of the companies that quote. Of course, maybe they don't want repeat business - but you'd think they'd want word of mouth. Its all very puzzling. I'm self employed, and I know that if I ran my business like that, I'd simply run it into the ground.....

The new-new appointment isn't till the middle of next week, so we'll see.

Double glazing, continued Part Deux

Well, this is all getting a bit sad. Double glazer turned up just as my client arrived - stuck in traffic, he said. My client travelled further, and arrived on time. Glazer promised faithfully to ring around 7am Tuesday morning (this morning), he'd do the tiny little leftover job first thing. He hasn't.

To add insult to injury, the admin bloke from the firm rang yesterday afternoon - a bank holiday! - to check everything was okay. I explained the situation, and he said, oh, its all fine then. Mmmmm.... my response was "well, if it happens, its fine". Am I prescient, or wot?

At the office, the only person who can make decisions is engaged. After being unavailable for three phone calls on Friday afternoon. Anyone would think he didn't want to speak to me :(

Double glazing, continued

All *may* be well - the double glazing firm doesn't really understand that trapping carpet beneath a double glazing sill isn't a good idea, but they *do* understand that I don't like it, and they've agreed to turn up tomorrow to fix it. Fingers crossed.

Double glazing

Yesterday, I had two merry men working on my front door, the windows on either side of it, and the kitchen window. I now have secure double glazing! The previous frames, which no longer closed securely, are gone, and I'm happy happy happy about it. I have a FENSA certificate. The glass is kite-marked. Come winter, my hall will not be freezing - not quite so freezing, anyway, as the porch is solid walled, and the mortar on the rest of the house isn't good enough to allow for cavity wall insulation yet.

There is one fly in the ointment, however: I was going on (and on and on) to the head bloke about not leaving any voids behind the fascias .... and on the windows, he hasn't. But you know the protective internal step immediately in front of a door? Thats been laid on top of the carpet. He'd said he'd be repairing the concrete floor, because he had to take out the whole frame of the door, of course, and the concrete needed to be touched up. But really, to put the last bit of the doorframe, the fabric of the house, over a piece of carpet? A piece of really naff, dirty carpet, I might add, which is going to the skip next week, as my builder is booked in next Thursday?

I've been putting off the phone call this morning, but I have to make it. Still, my double glazing is very beautiful, very minimalist, and easy to use. Mostly-happy bunny here.

An oven thermometer....

And exactly how is that green, I hear you ask? Buying stuff? Well, it *does* make sense. I'm keeping the oven that was here before I moved in - its fairly modern, its certainly still on sale. But its already been pretty well used, or the accessories are *really* cheap, because the markings on the dials have been rubbed off, and also there are two or three different heating elements to use within the oven itself. These two things together make it *impossible* for me to know what temperature the thing is at, so I'm hoping that once I get the thermometer, which has had good reviews on Amazon, Ovenz R Eeezy will become my nickname :)

I *very* nearly bought a halogen oven a while back, to tell the truth - this fitted one that I'm waffling about is a range cooker. "Ooh lovely" people said, when I told them. "Not when you're a single person", I replied sadly - and truly, unless I batch cook in the severest way, the thing is a complete dinosaur. So, when I know how to use the thermometer, I will finally, finally experiment with batch cooking.

There are two shelves, as well as the bottom of the oven itself, of course, and the shelves themselves are twenty two inches wide, so I'm pretty sure two normal baking trays can go side by side. So, regular batch cooking, which saves money and time and will also help me nutritionally somewhat, given that I'm currently eating hardly any onions, for instance, or anything that can't be bought as a frozen vegetable, oops, apart from a few salady bits.

So, typical easy-cook oven dishes for a vegetarian who's gluten intolerant and cow's dairy intolerant (life is difficult sometimes, lol!):
- jacket potatoes.
- crumble, sweet or with a savoury sauce.
- bean stew.
- quorn sausages
- lentils and rice (classic combo - has the protein equivalent of steak).
- vegetarian bolognaise-type sauce.
- possibly pies - but there's rolling involved :( crumbles are easier :)

My fantasy is to be able to cook my own gluten free bread, even once a month would be a real treat.

Compost holder in the kitchen

This has been an inner source of turmoil for me for many years ROTFLMAO.... I like composting my stuff, but I'm basically quite lazy. So I dislike washing out my compost holder.... but letting it get dirty (and mouldy, oops) by continued re-use is not good, washing it is annoying, and letting it take space in the dishwasher (now that I have one) is almost as bad.

Solution: use a strong plastic bag that a food item has been packed in! Oats, pasta, breakfast cereal, you name it, they come in a strong plastic bag that can take a few days of stuff intended for the compost bin, they can probably be reused, and they can be thrown away without bothering to wash them! They probably need to sit on a plate, true, but I can usually room in the dishwasher for a single plate....

I'm a very happy bunny right now :)

Burgess Hill Recycling Tip

I was at the tip yesterday, my second run there in a fortnight, and while I was waiting for my sister to return from her own escapades there, I was looking at the huge piles of *stuff* opposite the places where members of the public actually dump their recyclables. I must have been looking very pensive, because a staff member came up to me and asked - well, I wish I could remember the exact words he used, because it was beautifully put.

I replied something like, I was wondering when we got to be a society who had so much to throw away..... and he was lovely. He pointed out what each pile was - the stuff that would go to the new recycling plant, the earth and green materials that would be chipped or composted, and the waste that would go to the incinerator to provide electricity.

The pile that just goes to landfill was out of sight, but as he said, its getting smaller and smaller all the time.

I left much happier!

Not sure about how green this one is either ....

I'm seeing a theme. My conscious theme is trying to really take care of my standard of living in this house, as well as the house itself, so I'm doing things like installing the right lightpull, i.e. one that I like. It took ages - to look around and find what I liked, to buy it when it wasn't in stock and I couldn't order it, to find time to unpack it and look at it properly, to figure out how to thread the string through a tiny hole and have a nice finish still ....

And I did all that, and thought, well, its not particularly green. But it *is* what I wanted, and on my ordinary online diary, several people have come on to mention that they'd been going through the same process.

Any green manufacturers of lightpulls out there?

Green renovation is hard when you're "desperate"

Good lord its hard to spell "desperate".

Anyway, my desperation is of the house variety. At Easter, I went away for a family wedding - and I had to leave the house by the back door, as the front door wouldn't shut properly without a kick from the inside. Its a very old double glazed door, and I thought it would last until I had the money to get the whole house double glazed, but no, 'twas not to be. Then the kitchen window wouldn't close properly.

Now, I'd like to have the time to research properly the firms that will do timber-based double glazing - of course, I'd like to have the money to pay for them too. I *do* have the money to pay for bog standard uPVC goods, and thats what it'll have to be. The only thing I'm going to splash out on is a retractable fly screen over the kitchen window, which I reckon is worth losing the hassle of chasing stuff out of the kitchen while keeping a lovely cool breeze.

I've always agreed with, and often campaigned for, green causes, but applying it all to the place I live in has been much more difficult than I thought. The amount of research seems to be *ridiculous*. So this is what I'm actually doing, as opposed to researching.

In a new-to-you house, the priorities are making a cup of tea and getting somewhere to sleep set up. That much, I think we all agree on. And after that, there are a million pathways to what makes us happy!

For me, it was unpacking books (with four full height sets of bookshelves in a small 3 bed semi, having the books on the floor was a nightmare of *epic* proportions). Then it was setting up the room that I work from at home - work is what enables me to keep the bills paid, after all. Then it was getting the toilet built and the electrics renovated - the first gave me privacy in my living room if clients needed to use the loo, and the second stopped my house from burning down in the night. Thats always a good thing.

Then, it was just getting through the winter and getting well. Lately, its been preparing for a family wedding. Right now, I've been trying to set the garden to rights a little bit - I have an elderly buddleia with a rotten trunk, so I now have dead branches strewn all over the little garden, which I'm clearing away. The man down the road is a ranger for the local wildlife association, and he has a woodburner in his house! He's going to take the trunks, which are fine to burn.

On the bright side, the buddleia seems to be putting forth new leaves :) buddleias are happy plants, even very old ones. And I now have the freedom to paint/protect the wooden fence.

On the other side of the garden, protecting the fence has become more important than ever, as I'm chopping back overgrown ivy thats obstructing my route to the back garden proper, and in chopping it back, I'm exposing areas where its pulled the top protective layer of wood away from the fence panel. Dee-dah, dee-dah,sirens blaring - Casey Greenpath to the rescue with her pot of paint :)

And then, finally, all the little plants I brought with me from my previous house can put their toes in the soil again! More happy plants!

What this tells me about being green, actually, is that maintenance is just as important in being green as spiffy new projects. If I maintain what I have carefully and well, I don't need to chuck everything out and start again. And whether thats nurturing a buddleia or a fence post, it applies. Oh my god, wisdom, of a kind anyway. I think I may faint.

And now ... the Good Life beckons. In future posts, I'll be going through the rooms, looking at the options, and seeing how green I can be.

Oh my word

This blog has been like an orphan! Poor little blog. Truth to tell, my virusy-fluey-stressy lurgies got the better of me for a long, long time: I was one of those people that said to you, in all probability, "I thought I was well, and I went back to work, and then I got sick again". That happened to me four times, I think :( which wasn't at all nice.

And I've just clicked one of the two websites on my little list on here, to check it still works, and it doesn't. Rats!

Ah well. I've been well for about a month now, I spent an hour in the garden yesterday pulling up ivy tendrils, and "I'm back" just about sums it up. More than ever determined to make the house and garden green, so I can enjoy it in good conscience. So I intend to be posting about twice a week.