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?