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!