Jogging along nicely thank you, especially in the garden!

Well, a lot of improvements - like replacement more of the draughty double glazing - will have to wait until my single solitary investment matures in September - but on the whole, the house is doing okay. The garden had deteriorated quite a bit over spring and very early summer - the patch of grass you're supposed to be able to sit on (other people call it a lawn) was over a foot in height, for instance, partly because the operation I had made it impossible to use two hands to do anything, and partly because of the rain, I never seemed to have any free time when it wasn't throwing it down. But over the last month - woo hoo! The turnaround started when a couple of people stayed with me over the weekend, and at the end of the last day, they spent 45 minutes in the garden pulling up the grass that had consumed the border, including a beautiful, beautiful little sedum plant I brought from my last house, that I absolutely adore. And these two lovely people got a whole dustbin-sized bag of grass from out of the border, and then rescued the sedum and replanted it so it could breathe again. And I couldn't let that work go to waste! So ever since then, I've been reclaiming the garden - cutting back the grass, weeding the borders, mulching wherever I can find space, and using anything I can for the mulch, all of which I gathered last year - the oak leaves, the wool carpet samples, old cardboard, all of it is down now, in the garden, slowly feeding the soil and making sure I don't get nearly so many plants growing where I don't want them!

The fence is mended!

Hallelujah! The fence at the front blew down in one of the really bad storms we had earlier this year, and my favourite builder couldn't come along for ages, so I had to wait, with bits of fence strewn all over my little forecourt. Now, however, its been done, and in as green a way as possible too. Several of the panels blew off, and the posts were so rotten that one of them came down too. Surprisingly, the posts were the easiest bit to fix - they'd been very tall, so tall that they caught the wind, so my builder friend cut them down and in doing so cut off the rotten bits that had made them collapse. Hey presto - more normal looking posts, at no extra cost, and no waste.

This is what it looked like soon after it had been blown down. Initially, I tried to shore it up with one of the horizontal overheads that had blown down, but it continued to be too windy for that to survive for long.

So, when the builders were able to come, the first thing they had to do was take away all the rotten stuff, and all the stuff that had collapsed because the rotten stuff wasn't there any more!





The panels themselves seem to have been a little bit more tricky - each end was rotten, so there had to be a little bit of jiggery-pokery extending the horizontal bits supporting the whole thing, so as to re-attach the panels to the posts. I'm very happy with the way its gone! The workmen that came also fixed my gate, without me asking - and without telling me, actually - I only found out when I was suddenly able to close my front gate and have it stay closed. Very nice, and very kind.

And this is what it looks like now - it has one coat of weather-proofing on, but if the last few winters are anything to go by, it needs a few more. Looks much better now though, doesn't it!





And now, finally, I'll be starting to pay attention to the soil, and the planting out in the front. While the fence was down, for instance, I slowly pruned one of the huge, flowerless, depressing shrubs out there - in looking at it, you can't tell, but a whole binbag has gone. There's two self-sown trees, much too close to the house (one is only six inches away) and they'll have to go. The roses need shaping, so does the honeysuckle and the forsythia. The Japanese anemone needs to be consigned to history, there are too many, and they're way too big. And I don't like them! Thats rather important!

There's a little bit out there that can be used as forage: the roses can, for instance (rose petal jam, anyone, or rosehip tea?). Heather flowers can be used, though I'm not quite sure I'd use them from that border. Interestingly, forsythia is said to have anti-viral properties, though the studies are small, and I don't think they've been replicated. I wonder if thats why forsythia was named in the film about a flu epidemic, Contagion? I love forsythia anyway, I much prefer it to daffodils - whatever garden I had, there'd be room in it for forsythia. There's also lots of lily of the valley out there, and while apparently it has genuine cardiac effects, its known for every part of the thing being "highly poisonous" according to most authorites. Oops. Better not forage that, then.

I plan to plant my comfrey out there too, I think thats a good use of the area. Otherwise, any of the flowers that I really like, such as forget me nots, or the cotoneaster that managed to accompany me from my previous house - bees loved that plant. And there's an increasing number of self sown aquilegia out there - they are such beautiful plants, and they grow on the clay soil here like weeds. Wonderful ....

Another long absence

Oh dear. I've been gone a long time again - lots of excuses jolly good reasons this time. I'm self employed and I was doing my accounts (got them in the day before the deadline, hurray). Then I buried myself in housework and springcleaning for a fortnight, because I was due to have an operation on 14th February - nice, huh! I had the operation, and all has gone swimmingly, but it *is* an operation, after all, and moving my shoulder just downright hurts. Including typing, after a while.

My eyes, however, are as good as ever, and my left arm is fine, so when I've been awake, I've been having a ball wandering about all over the web, blogs, ebooks, newspapers, forums, you name it. Even facebook, god help me. Not posting very much, of course, but reading (plus a few reallly crappy dvds have come my way, that helps) and I've been making plans fit to bust. Its been a lot of fun!

Still thinking, still plotting, still determined to live the way I want to live. I'll be back, as Arnie said so unforgettably ...

The 52 week salad challenge: several weeks on!

Oops! I got distracted by actually doing, y'know? And I have, honest, and I mostly took pictures while I was doing. Only fair, innit!

So, week 2, I nearly got behind. A little supermarket pot of basil was crying out to me to be rescued, so I bought it, for 70p. It must have been last year's, because there were only two stalks, but they both looked like mature plants, well, almost, so I put them in their own little pots, cut them down to have an easier time, and they're both really happy still - well, mostly happy, I think I didn't quite take off enough leaves.

What I *did* take off, I combined with the sprouted mung beans, and ate. Go me!

This is the little basil plant, ready to be divided.

Done! There's a lot of new growth showing on them now, I'm sure they're going to make it, no basil plant funerals here any time soon. The cuttings are sitting in water at the moment, hopefully they'll take root, and I'll have some more. When I'm ready, I'll buy a couple of supermarket pots and make a little basil forest, but not yet. Happy with this, tho!

The sprouts from the first week went really well with the basil leaves, and this is how they looked together with some chili sauce - thats from Approved Foods, bless them, I haven't grown my own chilis yet.

This week, the project has been to grow some cress seeds - I confess, the seeds were Best Before 2009, but they did eventually sprout.

This is how they looked a few days ago. Today (I'll include an update on the next week's) they're looking more like cress, but I don't like it nearly as much as the sprouting - I'm quite prepared to add sprouting to my weekly schedule, but this isn't great, though I might feel better about it if I used a little layer of compost, rather than kitchen towel **shruggy smiley**

All in all, although I might be one of the least active on this challenge, I'm really pleased I'm taking part - must remember to post over there at the end of the month. And this week's challenge? I have some lettuce seeds. I suspect they're as old as the cress seeds, but we'll see :)

The Energy Now Expo 2012 Exhibition

The lovely Wittgenstein has been chatting to me about smallholding, and when I followed what she was saying around the web, I found The Energy Now Expo 2012 exhibition, to be held at the Malvern Showground in Worcestershire in mid-February.

And looking at the exhibitor list:
http://www.energynowexpo.co.uk/VisitorInformation/ExhibitorList
its fascinating - biomass, anaerobic digestion, hydropower, risk management (uh oh, I wonder how that applies?), the Dulas Coop (the commercial subsidiary of the Centre for Alternative Technology, bless their woolly socks).

It sounds a fantastic place to be, even though there is the odd bank in there, as well as a government minister There's a conference too ...

I'm absolutely sure that some smallholding technologies are suitable for houses - heat exchange, for instance, or any solution to using less fuel. I won't be able to go, sadly, but I'll be watching the news space.

The 52 week salad challenge begins

The challenge is from VP at Veg Plotting, which is a *really* professional blog, with huge amounts of information, both on there and referenced.

http://vegplotting.blogspot.com/2012/01/52-week-salad-challenge-begins.html

And now that we're at the New Year, it seems appropriate to take on a challenge, a practical one anyway - I have enough challenges that need just online or written work to fill a book of their own, which is very aargh.

Anyway, I've Commented on the post I've linked to there, and I did indeed put some mung beans into soak. I'm going to root about (geddit?) on VP's site now to look for quick instructions on sprouting - I'm fairly sure I remember how, but better check, poor little mung beans, it would be sad to do it and drown them and have to throw them away ...

I confess, I hadn't researched the posts carefully enough: I was going to grow in this, just a food tray from a supermarket. But I read the sprouting post, and it seemed the drainage would be a nightmare. The label, by the way, is that classic of the green world, a piece of a plastic bottle. And the beans themselves are on the right, soaking in a little glass jar that held pesto (to which I am addicted - this jar is from the Waitrose version, a nectar indeed).

Then I thought of this, which I bought from Zimbabwe more than ten years ago - I wouldn't normally do that, but I've since had a couple of presents of much more dramatic woven stuff, and a big basket also from Zim, so at least a single use before I get something more appropriate is okay. Though its certainly not two inches high (EDIT - but that doesn't matter because it won't be stacked, d'oh!).

This big basket, it cost about 50p, which even at the time was a bargain. Absolutely unique, especially because of the bent twig for the handle. I bought it from an ordinary little stall at the roadside, which is a great way to buy - *all* of the money goes straight to the woman who made it, after all.

This big square one was a gift a couple of years ago. I think the "crazy patchwork" effect might mean its a more Western approach, but its still hand made by someone ...

I've photographed the reverse as well, as the handfinishing using natural objects is so remarkable - you can see where the stalks or strands or whatever they are have been chopped off in the finishing work, so it will sit straight on a table. Gorgeous.

This one is more accomplished, its made of softer strands, more tightly woven, some of its been dyed and then woven into patterns. Its less striking because of that, but if you look closely (at the rim, on the right hand side) you can just see that its not concentric rings - its a spiral! Thats a lot more impressive, and a lot cooler :) :) :)



This business of whether the sprouts are supposed to root or not is a bit confusing: if its a tray you're using, its good to give the sprouts something to root to; if you're using a bag, you should move the sprouts around to stop them rooting ... I think chaos theory (otherwise known as suck it and see) might operate here.

A bag seems the best alternative long term, but I'll be using the little Zim basket for this helping. I think I might end up actually *knitting* a bag, not sure yet.

This post seems to be much more about basketwork, but you know what, there's an important principle there - how to use those dramatic things we buy on holiday! The little one I'm using to sprout the seeds, thats been my bedside tray for ages, so things don't fall off my chair. The lovely big square one can do that for a while, thats fine. Usefulness!

Wish me luck with the sprouting!

I made my own mincemeat **happy dance**

Oh dear, here's another "consequences of Christmas" blog ...

I love mincemeat. But in the shops, its either crap, or the same price per weight as gold dust. So, I thought, I'll make my own. How hard can it be, in Jeremy Clarkson's immortal words?

Not very, is the answer. I looked at a few recipes online, made a (mental) note of the main ingredients, compared them to what I had in my storecupboard (metaphorically speaking - its a CD rack, the space is long and narrow). And hey presto!

I soaked a full bag of Sainsbury Basics mixed fruit in the juice of 3 lemons (Aldi's best, they must have been waxed, so I just squoze them to get the juice out), and glugged in a miniature of whisky from my tour of the Hebrides a million years ago - Lagavulin? Not sure now, that bit was a while ago...

Then, one fine morning, I chucked the mix in a pan, followed up with mixed spice, some chopped maraschino cherries (oops, ate the rest as finger food at the beginning of December), couple of tablespoons of sugar, some lumps of vegetable suet, and maybe 100g of ground almonds. Let it bubble once it was all together.

I had a taste, and its sooooo good. The suet (even vegetarian suet!) gives it that thick taste, where it slides over your tongue, and the almonds give it that sense that its overloaded with evil things that you love - like its all overflowed the sauce and become gritty. But in fact, almost all of it is incredibly good for you, and whats 3 tablespoons of sugar between maybe 20 helpings anyway?

There's still a little bit left, and from now on, my own mincemeat is a must-do for Christmas.

Some green reasons not to burn a pan ...

As the saying goes, oops!

I wasn't doing badly at all. I needed to switch the fridge freezer off while I was away over Christmas, so I needed to finally make blackberry jam from the 2.5 kilos of frozen blackberries I'd gathered over the past months. I started two days before I left - what can go wrong? I have a proper stainless steel cauldron-type affair, a mahoosive great wooden spoon to stir, all fine and dandy.

Except it wouldn't set! And I was doing it after I finished work and after I'd eaten, so no time to boil it up again *and* wait for it to cool enough to strain it and put it into the jars I'd so carefully sterilised. Do take the careful bit with a pinch of salt, but it was certainly Good Enough.

Anyway, on the evening of the next day, the last before I was due to travel 300 miles, I boiled it up again. I was much more enthusiastic about my definition of a rolling boil, and I thought to myself, I know, I'll reduce it a bit by boiling, that should help.

It helped so well, in fact, that I couldn't strain it to make blackberry jelly at all - it just sat there on the purpose-made strainer on the purpose-made stand, looking ridiculous. What saved me was that that amount of boiling meant that the blackberries themselves had disintegrated, and their texture is what I dislike about blackberry jam - so, with them gone, blackberry jam becomes an elixir! Especially since it was gathered with my own fair hands from countryside areas, or town parks at least 30 yards from a road.

What about the pan? Well, I didn't stir the jam enough when it was doing its determined boil, and I burned it. Certainly didn't have time to do anything about it before I left for my holibob, and since I came back, its literally been pushed to the back burner, gathering dust and other awful items very nicely, please and thankyou.

Today is my first day back at work, and even someone as bad at housework as me eventually has to do something with a burned pan. And this is the result of only five minutes work below:

The ordinary sticky stuff is cleaned off, and about half the burned stuff is scraped off with a knife - I started on it with wire wool, and realised that life is far too short for that, so I went in with the emergency equipment ...







So, the green reasons for not burning a pan:
- in extreme cases, you have to throw the dratted thing away. This is not green.
- you're deprived of the use of a fairly expensive piece of kit for quite a while, if you're anything like me. Inefficiency is not green either.
- you have to put a lot of energy into restoring something that shouldn't have been damaged in the first place, if you'd been, say, following a recipe carefully **whistles innocently**
- you've wasted not only your own energy, but you've wasted fuel (gas, electricity, from whatever source) as well.
- you've also wasted the food that got burned onto the pan - in this case, blackberries, sugar and lemon juice.
- you might affect the flavour of what you've managed to save! I haven't, thankfully, but I might have.

And truly, although I'm already in a "back to business" sort of mode, I wish everyone a healthy, wealthy and happy New Year.


PS - please, please, tell me I'm not alone in sabotaging my green efforts in this way .... anybody got any confessions they'd like to make?

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!