Growing Things and Making Things

Spring flowers

2012-02-25T12:47:00.001Z

I'll be away from the internet for a week or so, but I'll leave you with some pictures of spring flowers, taken about a week ago.

Snowdrops

Crocuses

Cutting down trees

2012-02-24T00:15:00.000Z

If you're going to cut down trees, now is the time to do it, before the sap starts rising (so that the tree fights back) and the before the birds build their nests in the branches. We have a hedge made of leylandii or something similar. Small, as trees go, but trees nonetheless.

Hedge on a hill

This hedge runs up the side of the steep bit with oak tree, separating our land from a neighbouring field, in which sheep live. I would like to replace this hedge with native species, such as blackthorn, hawthorn, hazel, and ash, all of which are usefully productive. Most of all, though, I'd like wild roses in my hedge.

As it's a long hedge, I thought I might do the job in stages, one-quarter to one-third of the hedge each year, so as not to destroy all the nesting habitat all at once (top tip from my bird-watching neighbour). The other day was dry, so we grabbed our opportunity, along with the chainsaw (pausing only to find enough extension leads to reach the hedge, and rewire the plug indoors to solve a particularly irritating failure of plug to reach socket) and headed out to tackle the hedge.

I'd already cut some of the lower branches off the end two trees to make it easier to get to the trunks, and Ian set to with the chainsaw. He started with proper tree-cutting-down procedure, cutting a wedge out of one side, then cutting from the opposite side, so that the tree falls in a planned direction. That didn't go terribly well as the hillside impeded access for the last bit. On the other hand, taking the saw straight through the trunk worked surprisingly well as, once cut, the tree didn't go anywhere. The branches were so intertwined with the next tree that it just didn't fall over. Pushing did shift it though.

After Ian had cut down a couple I had a go, but just couldn't handle the machine. It was too heavy for me and I had to admit defeat and give the power tool back to my husband. After breaking for a cup of tea, I thought I'd have another go, this time with the new bow saw we bought from Charlies for £5 recently (heavily discounted for some reason - couldn't pass up such a bargain).

All the tools you need for cutting down trees
(so long as the trees are rather small)

It was much easier with the manual saw! I didn't have to cope with holding to the weight of the machine and could put all my energy into cutting. I was so pleased with myself that I carried on until I'd added six trees to the pile and was utterly exhausted.

A heap of small trees. The last one was very small indeed.

That, I think, is enough for this year.

Hedge with gap.

There is a fence running along behind the hedge, but we intend to stick small branches into the ground before lambing season gets under way, all the same.

Advance(d) meal planning

2012-02-22T23:07:00.001Z

We're having a family party here at Easter, and a couple of weeks ago I was idly thinking about what I might serve for lunch, French bread, quiche, salad... Ah - salad. It occurred to me that if I want salad leaves in early April, I'd probably need to do something about it like, erm, now.

I rummaged around in my seed bucket and found a packet of Oriental salad leaves (mixed) that I hadn't bothered to grow last year. Those would do nicely, and into a seed tray they went. I also sowed some spring onions and some tomatoes, though I'm under no illusions about the tomatoes being ready by April; it just happened to be a good time to sow them. In no time at all, so it seemed, I had a forest of little seedlings in the salad leaf tray. Perhaps sowing the seeds wasn't quite as urgent as I'd thought.

This afternoon I carefully disentangled one hundred (I counted) of the tiny, delicate seedlings and transplanted them into deeper trays. The seedlings are now on the windowsill, looking a bit disorientated. I'm hoping that once they've settled in, they'll be able to stay in their new trays until harvest time. I gave them a fairly rich compost mix, so they should be quite well fed, I hope*.

Seedlings on a windowsill

Transplanted salad seedlings are in trays on the right of the picture, those left behind in the seed tray are at the top left. The tall plants in the middle are chillies that didn't come to much last year, but didn't die either, so I brought them inside. They're now, improbably, forming tiny fruits. Between the chillies and the left-behind salad are tomatoes, just coming through, and the little smudges of green that look like camera shake are spring onions. Notice the cat-sized space left on the windowsill. Pebble has strong feelings about this windowsill - if there's any sunshine to be had (which is rare), this is the place to catch it - and she makes her feelings felt in the form of deep paw prints in seed trays, if they take up too much space.

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* If anyone who actually knows what they're doing would care to correct me on this, please do. It doesn't really matter for my salad - I'm happy to learn from my mistakes - but other people might read this and get the impression I know what I'm talking about.

Cleaning tallow for storage

2012-02-17T14:50:00.000Z

I use tallow (beef fat*) for chips, because I think it gives the best flavour. The first time I made a big batch of chips I bought some fatty offcuts of beef from the butcher specifically for that purpose (and got some good stock and meat for pies out of the process, too). However, I'd rather use leftovers if I can.

We recently had some beef brisket, and very tasty it was too. It also produced a good quantity of tallow, which I saved. Unfortunately, I've now made as many chips as I'm going to with this year's potatoes, so I don't have a use for that much tallow in the foreseeable future. Fortunately, tallow keeps very well, provided it's clean. I don't mind dirty tallow, i.e. with a little meat juice mixed in, for cooking, it just adds to the flavour, but that won't store well.

I looked up how to clean tallow, and it's not complicated. The fat should be melted in water, then the whole lot allowed to cool. The fat rises to the top, leaving everything else to sink to the bottom in the water. If necessary, this process can be repeated several times.

Tallow melting in a pan of water

As soon as it was all melted I poured it into the Pyrex pudding basin that I usually use for stock (transparent, so easy to see how thick the layer of fat is at the top, should you be interested). I had intended to let it cool and set before separating fat from water, but it occurred to me that this wasn't necessary. The two liquids separate out well before the fat sets, so I could scoop out the tallow while it was still liquid.

I wanted to store it in a jar with as little surface area exposed to the air as possible. This required the fat to be liquid when it went in, so it made sense to transfer it while still liquid rather than let it set, separate from the water, then melt it again to pour into the jar. I took a small ladle (yes, it could be said that having a choice of ladles indicates too many kitchen implements, but it was handy on this occasion) and scooped out most of the fat into a jar. The last bit was too difficult to get out without mixing it up with the water, so I left that to set. Once set, I lifted the solid layer off, scraped the underside of anything that wasn't clean yellow fat, and broke it into a (clean, dry) pan to melt again, so I could pour into the jar.

Jar of tallow

I now have a jar full of beautiful clean tallow, which I hope will keep for most of the year until I need it for chip-making again.

Oh, and the coating of fat left in the pan after pouring? I used that to fry onions for making bolognaise sauce.

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*Fat from lamb and mutton is also called tallow, whereas fat from pork and bacon is lard, and I don't know about poultry or game. Come to think of it, there's probably not enough fat on game to warrant a name for it.

Navelwort

2012-02-16T23:08:00.003Z

When Hazel mentioned navelwort on my previous post, I'd never heard of it, still less knew how to find it. When I followed her link to see a photo, however, I recognised the plant immediately, I just didn't know what it was called. This afternoon I had a look around for some. There was none in the garden, but I had a hunch there might be some by the railway line, so I went for a little walk. Sure enough, I found some...

Navelwort growing on a clump of moss in the railway cutting

... and it was exactly where I'd expected to find it, growing on the rocks in the cutting. Hmm, do you think perhaps I'd seen it there before, and my subconscious memory was what made me expect to find it there? I think that's a distinct possibility.

Here's a closer view:

Close-up of same navelwort, growing amongst the moss

When I was little my mum showed me how to blow the leaves up like balloons, but I've never managed to pull off that trick. Yes, I did try again today.

I tasted a few leaves, and liked it. I can't put my finger on what it reminds me of - perhaps nothing. It's bright and refreshing, but slightly bitter and quite a strong flavour. It would be good in salad, but I might also try some in soup (I put just about anything in soup) to see what it's like cooked.

There's not a great abundance by the railway, but enough for me to pick a meal's worth without having too much impact, and definitely enough to be worth the couple of minutes' walk to fetch it. That's two new wild foods in as many days, which is very exciting! Hazel also mentioned Alexanders (should that have a capital letter? It's only a plant, but it looks wrong without), which I've been wanting to try for a while, if only I can find them. I may have to get nearer the coast for that, though.

Spring greens

2012-02-15T23:19:00.001Z

In spite of the mild winter, spring seems to be a little later this year than last. This time last year I was harvesting ground elder and nettles, so I went out to look for some but found hardly anything.

A few tiny leaves of ground elder under the hedge

On the other hand, there is a weed that's popping up all over my garden that I've a feeling might be edible, but I'm not sure what it is. That is, I think I saw a picture of it in a discussion of edible weeds, not just that I had a hunch!

I think these leaves are rather pretty, and they have nice white flowers later in the year, too

Consulting my general purpose book on wild things, I identified this as hairy bittercress, described as, An attractive common weed, which sounds about right. The name is somewhat misleading, as the hairs are so tiny they're almost invisible and it's not really very bitter. It is, however (further research revealed) edible, and tastes similar to watercress. Excellent! I have loads of the stuff.

I harvested some for dinner, together with what ground elder I could find, a few young leaves of rose bay willow herb (said by some to taste like asparagus, but I think they're confusing sparrow-grass with ordinary grass; it tastes of nothing much) and sorrel. I cooked these in milk for a few minutes, then added flour and butter to thicken, and cheese to make sauce.

Spring greens in cheese sauce, being a side vegetable.

Wood store mark 3

2012-02-07T22:11:00.000Z

The wood store we bought a year ago is too small for a full load of fire wood, so we've moved it upstairs* to the patio, right next to the door for easy access from the sitting room. This makes space downstairs for a larger store.

Our next attempt was this:

Not very practical wood store

... which looks cool, but isn't actually very good for storing wood. For a start, lacking sides means that the rain just blows in and soaks the wood at the sides. Lacking sides also makes it very difficult to stack the wood efficiently without it all falling down. It takes a lot longer to stack a load of wood if you have to do it three times because it keeps falling down again. I speak from experience. The rain also tended to run down the back because we didn't seal the top edge of the roof. Finally, those twiggy bits don't half get in the way. All in all, a crap wood store.

So... a new design was needed. Having had big things delivered for the heating project, we were in possession of a few pallets. Two had already made their way into the mark 2 wood store, as you can see. The third was bigger, but rather less substantially built.

More a frame than a pallet, really

Having established the importance of sides to a wood store, I decided to use the smaller, sturdy pallets as the sides and the large frame to hold it together. After a false start, halfway through which it occurred to me that the side with three slats would be better for fixing things to than the side with only two slats, I got the three pallets fixed together.

After considerable manoeuvering to get the thing turned over without falling apart, in a space considerably too small for the operation (I'm glad I abandoned my original plan of making this in the workshop - I'd never have got it out again), I then fetched some old floorboards to use as slats across the back. I set the top one higher than the top of the slats, to give the roof a bit of a slope, then rested the wooden roof on top.

New wood store with old wooden roof

As soon as I looked at it I could see something was wrong. No, not the sag in the middle. This roof isn't much higher than waist height, and the store is deep. It wouldn't be much fun getting wood in and out of there. I pondered hinges for a while, then decided on an alternative, flexible solution. I fetched a sheet of plastic that had been wrapped round our big water tank and stapled it to the back edge of the store. I then raided the sewing basket for eyelets (and the gadget for putting them in) so I'd have something to fix the front down with.

Eyelet in wood store cover, hooked over a nail

Here's the finished store in use:

Wood store, full of wood

It has to be said that there's room for improvement with that roof, but having it removable was definitely the right decision. Stacking wood was also a great deal easier with sides to the store. All in all, I'm quite proud of this.

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*NB references to upstairs and downstairs mostly refer to outdoor space, as that is where the stairs are. Both flights of stairs.

Water-only hair washing, one year on

2012-02-06T20:46:00.000Z

It's been over a year since I last used shampoo on my hair. I won't say since I stopped washing it, because I still do wash it, but with plain water only. I did try not washing at all (sebum only) but didn't get on well with it. On the other hand, I'm very happy with water-only washing; it's not just stubbornness that's made me stick with it for over a year.

I was a bit puzzled in early October to see a tuft of short hair growing from the crown of my head.

Tufty

I hadn't cut it, I didn't think I'd lost any hair there, so why the tuft? I didn't worry about it too much until a couple of weeks later, when Ian said, Why have you got a bald patch on top of your head? A bald patch?! He was right, too...

Baldy

Although this was quite alarming, I wasn't overly worried as the hair was obviously growing back - the skin wasn't smooth - and it was only a small patch. On the other hand, if that spread all over my head...

I monitored the situation for a week or so, as growth shows up quickly in very short hair. It shouldn't be many days before the bald patch was hidden again, and indeed that's what happened... but then it was back. At this point I started to worry. If the hair keeps falling out then I have a problem. I did a bit of online research, and learnt that patchy hair loss is not that uncommon in women, and has all sorts of causes. It can just happen and then get better again. That was reassuring, but not entirely helpful.

After a bit more reading and thinking, I came to the conclusion that the most likely cause was a bad habit I'd developed - scratching. From reading the Long Hair Community forum (whose abbreviation I can't see without thinking Large Hadron Collider) I'd got it into my head that scritching is good for hair, and this developed into a bad habit. With willpower backed by the fear of going bald, I managed to stop... well, mostly stop, and I'm glad to say my hair is growing back happily now. I may be tufty for a while yet, though.

My current routine is to wash my hair in hot water about twice a week. This shifts some of the sebum, which I find is now a waxy substance, rather than oily, and softens what it doesn't shift. Once the hair is dry (to avoid breaking wet, fragile hair), ideally within a few hours of washing, I brush thoroughly with a natural bristle brush. Because the brush is dense and my hair is at this point covered in a soft wax, this is very hard work and can make my neck muscles ache. As well as spreading the sebum along the length of the hair, brushing removes quite a lot of it, which then needs combing out of the brush afterwards. Apart from that, I just use my old plastic brush every morning, as I used to. Sometimes I don't get round to using the natural brush after showering, sometimes I use it more often.

So how is my hair? Apart from the slight stickiness after showering (which isn't evident just by looking at it), it looks pretty good. It's at its best the next day, looking good and feeling soft and silky. It also has a lot more life than it ever used to. About eighteen months ago, when a hairdresser offered to put a bit of body into my hair by blowdrying, my response was, Good luck with that. Now I have that naturally. I love the way it bounces back when I run the brush through it. I think it's still improving, too, very gradually.

Oh, you want a photo? Oh, OK then!

Hair that hasn't seen shampoo for over a year

Potato audit (and notes on peas and carrots)

2012-02-06T13:20:00.003Z

I stored our potatoes in sacks in the store room and they've kept reasonably well, except that the King Edwards started sprouting in mid November, and the Desiree about six weeks later. I kept using them and just snapping off the shoots before cleaning them, but there comes a point when all the potato's reserves have gone into the shoots, and there's not much left in the tuber. A few days ago I decided that it was time to see what I have left.

The Desiree were in pretty good shape, though most had one or two short, fat shoots. Since I've found very little blight damage, I've decided these will be OK to use as seeds, so I picked out 36 medium spuds for planting, leaving half a dozen large ones that'll be good for baking, and a few small ones that I confess I couldn't be bothered with, so they've gone on the compost heap, where they'll no doubt turn into small plants to annoy me later in the year.

The King Edwards, on the other hand...

Sprouting King Edwards

There seem to be an awful lot of these, which should make me happy, but as they're all rather small and fiddly, and in urgent need of using up, it doesn't. They've been sitting in the kitchen for about a week, which probably doesn't help with the sprouting. This morning I was trying to avoid a less appealing task, so I picked out a heap of them to make into chips. One tray is currently freezing and another is waiting its turn for freezer space.

Somewhere along the line I must have got my calculations wrong. I thought I'd harvested a year's supply of spuds, but all I have left is about six pounds of chips and roughly the same again in the sack (including shoots). By my previous estimate of using two pounds per week, that's enough to see us through to late March, even assuming they last that long. I guess we must eat a lot more potatoes than I thought, or perhaps when we have sacks of spuds in the store room we eat more of them than I thought. But then, if I had planted a lot more, right now I'd be facing even more soft, sprouting tubers.

I think the answer is that we can eat lots of spuds from mid summer through to the end of winter, but only what I've frozen in spring and early summer. That would be the period known as the hungry gap. I'm very glad I have a freezer! Of course, I could always give in and actually buy some. We ran out of frozen peas in mid January, and carrots not long after that, so I've bought both of those recently. There may still be carrots in the ground, but they're increasingly slug-eaten, difficult to find now the tops have died off, difficult to get out of the frozen ground once I've found them, and on top of all that, I still have to cut away the carrot-fly damage. I've pretty much given up getting carrots from the garden.

In the meantime, when I was in town recently I noticed that Charlie's were selling seed potatoes from the same grower that I bought from online last year, so to add to the saved Desiree, I bought a bag each of Foremost, which I grew last year, and Red Duke of York, both first earlies.

Some potatoes have done more chitting than others.

So the year comes full circle.

Living with the new heating system

2012-02-04T20:01:00.000Z

As expected, it took us a while to get used to using the new heating. To start with, we treated the stove as we had an open grate - building small fires that burnt well enough, but didn't really do much for us. For the first week or two we despaired of ever getting the water in the tank properly hot. So much for worrying the tank might be too small, I got seriously concerned that it might be far too big for the stove.

Then we gradually learnt how much wood to put on (more than that... no, even more) and how to control the air flow using the ash flap, and we're now pretty good at getting the tank up to temperature. I should point out that using the ash flap to manage air flow is not the recommended means of controlling a stove, in fact some would say it's downright dangerous, but we keep a pretty close eye on it and haven't seen any sign of overheating. This may have something to do with the fact that this is a multifuel stove but we're only using wood on it. We went through the whole design process working with the nominal heat output for this stove then right at the end, as a passing remark, the plumber said, Of course, if you're just using wood, you'll only get about half that. Now he tells us!

It's possible that our system is somewhat under-sized, but we got used to using it. Even after we'd learnt how much wood the thing eats, we still had to adjust our habits. We'd been used to lighting a fire at about 4pm, and it took quite a big adjustment to get used to lighting it in the morning. We had to remind ourselves that the specification of this system was to give us a couple of hours of heating in the mornings, so we'd be able to get dressed and breakfasted in some comfort before lighting the fire. As we got better at managing the fire, the time we needed to light it varied between about 9am and 4pm. We have two thermometers on the tank, one at the top and one in the middle, so we have a pretty good idea of how much stored heat we have at any one time. One of these days we'll get round to putting the doors back on the airing cupboard and then it won't be quite so convenient to check!

The system consists of three circuits. The first, stove to tank, is as simple as can be; stove back boiler - pipe - tank - pipe back to boiler. Hot water rises, creating a current round the circuit, taking heat from the stove to the top of the tank, and cooler water from the bottom of the tank back to the stove. Something we hadn't anticipated, but which is obvious when you think about it, is that this circuit flows in reverse when the tank is hot and the stove is cold. This isn't a big problem, as it just takes some heat back to the sitting room, but it reduces our level of control a little.

The hot water circuit is only slightly more complicated. There is a coil of pipe immersed in the middle of the tank through which mains water flows. When the tank is hot, the flowing mains water absorbs some of that heat and emerges hotter than it was when it went in. The slight complication is the thermostatic valve that mixes in a little cold water if it's too hot when it comes out. Actually, I have my doubts about how thermostatic that really is - hot water temperature seems to be heavily dependent on tank temperature. Apart from that, I love the simplicity of this system. There's no waiting a few seconds for a valve to notice that you've switched the tap on before it starts to deliver hot water, nor even a valve to wear out, like there is with combi boilers.

In contrast, the underfloor heating is very high-tech. Each room has a separate loop of heating pipe (apart from loo, bathroom and hall, which are all on one loop) and each loop is controlled by its own electric actuator valve. These sit in a row in the airing cupboard so we can see the little buttons pop up on the tops when they're open (you can tell why we haven't put the doors back on, can't you? It's not just because I've lost the screws.) These valves are controlled by a little computer, which receives information from these:

Thermostat. This one's for the hallway, as you'd probably guessed.

Each room has one of these fancy wireless, programmable thermostats. Learning how to use these was a challenge in itself. I felt sorry for the guys plumbing the system in, because they had to set it all up but they'd never seen this system before. They also felt they had to explain to the customer how to use it but I let them off that bit as the customer (me) had, after all, chosen the system in the first place!

We can choose between manual mode, in which we just set the desired temperature, and program mode, which toggles between daytime and nighttime desired temperatures at the programmed times (variable by day of the week, if you like). The fact that there is no off in the programme confused us at first, until we realised that off is replaced by comes on only when it's very cold, so you set the off temperature to the minimum you want the house to get down to.

We thought we had a problem with one of these when the bedroom heating started coming on at unexpected times. Eventually we realised that this was the auto on function, which starts the heating before the programmed time, so that the room gets up to temperature by the time you've asked it to come on. We soon turned off that function because the rooms were never getting up to temperature. We also pretty quickly changed the night/day temperatures from the pre-programmed 18/21 deg C. We were quite surprised by how low the temperature is that we find comfortable in the house: Between 14 and 16 deg C. I've heard that underfloor heating feels warmer at any given temperature, so that may be it.

So there we were, getting used to the fancy-pants electronic controls as well as coming to terms with just how much wood a wood burning stove will eat, and generally keeping quite comfortable, when the weather changed. We've been lucky to have a very mild winter so far, but the last few days have been very cold. We'd get the house up to a toasty 16 or 17 deg C and the tank full of hot water before going to bed, then by morning it's dropped to 11 or 12 and the tank has used up all its heat. This morning I started the fire at 7am and by about 9 it looked like this:

Hot fire; dirty windows

I'd built the fire up nicely, though it was still struggling to keep up with the demands of the heating. Shortly after this the temperature in the tank suddenly shot up. I'm guessing this was the effect of the outside temperature going up. This house is obviously far too affected by the temperature outside: We need better insulation.

And another thing... you may notice that those stove windows are filthy. This is an old stove and it does not have Clearview/Airwash/insert-trademark-of-your-choice technology, so the windows need cleaning frequently - every other day, ideally. This doesn't happen because by the time I remember that they need cleaning I want to get the fire lit, and cleaning them when it's hot is not a good idea. I have learnt about an excellent cleaning paste, though: Vinegar and ash. Do try to avoid contaminating your best spirit vinegar with ash, though, as I did. D'oh!

Nearly forgot to mention: Warm floors are looooovely!

A Blue Peter project

2012-01-27T10:34:00.000Z

After the crisis of the soggy seeds, I felt the need for a more waterproof container than an old shoe box for my seeds. The gloop we used to cover the mould in the spare room came in a a sturdy plastic tub that would do nicely, but I don't really want Polyfiller cover-all or whatever it was written all over my seed pot.

I got myself a heap of gardening magazines (received free over the last year), a tub of PVA glue, which I always think of as primary school glue (bought for sticking down flotex flooring), scissors and a paintbrush, and spent a happy evening doing this:

Decorated tub for storing seeds

I finished it with another coat of glue, for waterproofing. That made the paper a bit wrinkly, but it's not obvious, and the finished object is still a lot prettier than it was to start with.

I nearly called this post Useless Beauty, pinching Susie's blog title, because I think this is the first project I've done which makes absolutely no difference to the functionality of what I'm working on. The tub would have worked just fine as it was (once I'd cleaned it), but it's much nicer now it's decorated. I think I have room for a little useless beauty in my life.

A little decorating, while we're at it

2012-01-26T23:52:00.001Z

Many house renovation projects tend to expand as other tasks get drawn in, While we're at it. So it is with the heating project. Having moved all the furniture out of a room and replaced the floorboards, the obvious thing to do is redecorate before moving the furniture back in. At the very least, floor covering of some kind must be laid. Here is the carpet we used to have in the dining room:

The dining room before we took the floor up

This carpet is not to our taste and besides which, does an extremely good job of hiding anything that's dropped on it, including pieces of dead mice, later to be found by stepping on them. We decided not to put this carpet back down.

Our kind neighbours had some Flotex going spare which they generously gave us. Before getting to the floor, though, it seemed like a good idea to give the room a fresh coat of paint.

We thought this paint was closer to the old colour. Oh well, we like the result.

There was just one more thing to do before laying the flooring. Whilst the new heating boards were the same thickness as the old old floorboards, the new old boards (distinction between the old part of the house - floorboards possibly 200 years old - and new extension - floorboards 30 years old) were thinner, so some padding would be required where the two met. Furthermore, the difference seemed to vary throughout the room. I've no idea how this happened. In some places the difference was about 3 mm, which turns out to be roughly the thickness of cork tiles, in other places less. I used a mixture of cork tiles (spares from the old bathroom floor, left in the house) and lino from the kitchen.

Bits of lino and cork used to level the floor

Now to the flooring...

Pebble supervises the laying of the flotex flooring

Sorry for the poor quality of these pictures, we've been a bit short of daylight lately. I don't seem to have a picture of the room when it was finished. We furnished it with slightly less furniture than we'd taken out of it, and it was lovely for a while. Then about a month later we decided to reclaim our bedroom. We were expecting friends to stay for the weekend and felt that it would be good to have our bed in the same room as our wardrobe so we didn't have to wander the house in search of underwear. At this point we had to take the rest of the stuff out of the bedroom, so the dining room isn't quite so tidy any more.

We'd like to redecorate the bedroom at some point, but for the time being it's OK, so a new look for the bedroom will have to be a future project. I suspect that will disappear into the distant future, but (because) it's not that important. I mean, how much time do we actually spend in the bedroom and conscious? We just put back the old carpet - perhaps should have been more careful about not folding it while it was up - and put the bed, blanket chest and chest of drawers back in there.

That left the spare room more-or-less clear for decoration. Step 1: Clear out last few things. Step 2: Strip wallpaper. Step 3: Recoil in horror at the extent of the black mould behind the wallpaper.

Mouldy wall

Actually I didn't recoil all that far. I'm getting used to mould - it's everywhere at the moment. I did try scrubbing it off, with some success, but it was still pretty grubby by the time I'd finished. The brush I used was completely worn away by then, too, so any failure wasn't for want of effort. Ian went into town to buy paint while I got started with some white paint we already had. We'd discussed colours and agreed on white for three walls and primrose yellow for the fourth. Would you trust your partner to bring back the right paint colour? I even got out the wildflower book to show him what colour primroses are...

After extensive application of a polyfiller/paint mix to cover the dark patches, the white paint went on well enough. Ian's choice of yellow was influenced by experience with the dining room, when the colour ended up lighter than we'd expected. That yellow was a bit much! I mixed in some white for the second coat and the result was very nice. And some point during this process we'd gone out and bought - yes, actually paid for - new carpet. It's cheap, felt-backed carpet, so not too much insulation against the underfloor heating, and it's purple, not that you can really see it from the picture below...

The finished room, partly furnished.

This may be the spare bedroom, but it also has to serve as the music room and craft room. It now also contains futon, desk, treadle sewing machine, spinning wheel and fabric cupboard. There wasn't enough room for the guitars and I haven't yet worked out what to do with a second stash of fabric that I came across the other day. The built-in cupboard in the corner is now full of sewing and knitting things, which frees up a drawer in the dining/room study for various computer-related bits of wire, which reduces the amount of crap we have sitting about the place. It's very satisfying to have proper homes for things!

Heating project: Register plate

2012-01-21T23:05:00.000Z

Now, where was I? Ah yes, the heating is all plumbed in and working, and heat is escaping in all directions. The first step in keeping the heat in the house was to block up the gaping hole that is the chimney. This now has a relatively narrow flue pipe taking the smoke out of the house, leaving a big space all around, through with warm air gushes up to the sky. I had thought that dealing with this would be part of stove installation, and the plumber seemed to think that the stove installer would do it, whilst the stove installer seemed to think that the plumber would do it. That'll be my job, then.

The device needed here is called a register plate. It's very simple, just a heat-proof sheet of something across the chimney, around the flue pipe, closing up the gaping hole. I had my eye on a suitable piece of metal: We replaced our washing machine when the old one rusted through in a critical place, and I fancied that a side panel from the old machine would be ideal for a register plate. Step one was to dismantle the old machine, which was a lot of fun.

Washing machine in pieces

At this point I discovered that the case didn't come apart into panels easily and would need cutting, which was a bit of a pain. I tried using a hand saw, which was effective if very slow. It might have been quicker if the saw hadn't been missing so many teeth. We then got hold of some metal-cutting blades for a borrowed jigsaw. That was much quicker and extremely loud. Earplugs were deployed. Eventually I had not only cut a suitably sized sheet, but also cut a hole in it for the flue to go through.

At this point I was feeling very pleased with myself. Once cut, I then tried to fit the plate into the chimney. At this point I discovered why neither of the tradesmen had fancied this job. Let's take another look at that plate:

Relevant dimensions marked 'A' and 'B'

Consider that 'B' is the distance between the back of the flue pipe and the back of the chimney space (it must be, because I cut this plate to fit the space). In order to the the plate in place, the back part of the plate to the left of 'B' must pass through that space. That means that the back left corner must swing round through a space the length of 'B'. Notice the length marked 'A'. There aint no way 'A' is going to get through 'B's space. That didn't stop me trying though.

There was a bit of space for manoeuver in the vertical direction, but not nearly as much as I tried to convince myself there was. The sheet was flimsy enough to bend up out of the way, but limited vertical space meant that wasn't as useful as it might be. After a bit I gave up and cut off a piece at the back, making dimension 'A' roughly the same length as 'B'. There was still a lot of struggling to get it in place (note similar issues with the right hand back corner) and there may have been quite a lot of swearing.

Eventually I forced the thing into position, uncurled the curled-up bit, added the extra rectangle to fill the space on the left, ignored the scratches to the brass soot door on the flue, and stuffed some spare rockwool above it to assist with the heat loss reduction efforts. Apparently I didn't take a photo of this momentous occasion, but you can see the plate lurking behind the holly and sparkly things in this picture:

One slight downside to this design is that the paint on washing machines is not designed to withstand very high temperatures, and smells a bit when the fire gets really hot. On the other hand, that does let us know that the fire's getting really hot! As to whether it works, disappointingly, I can't say we noticed much difference in the sitting room temperature after this was installed, but I'm sure it was necessary. I need to believe that!

The truth about last month

2012-01-20T10:35:00.000Z

The last few posts here don't really convey the fact that this is a bit of a low time of year. In the run up to Christmas I was getting very stressed about the heating project, and wishing that Christmas would just go away until I finished the work. Then I realised that Christmas wouldn't go away, gave in and left the work to attend to the festivities. Since then, well, I haven't really managed to get back to it.

I'm firmly of the belief that humans should hibernate, to some degree. These cold, dark days in the middle of winter should be spent eating and sleeping, and doing very little else. It is my ambition to arrange my life so that this is possible, but I didn't quite manage it this year. At least, I have done very little, but as there's stuff that needs doing, I feel bad about it, which really isn't the intention.

Focusing on the positive aspects of life and writing up-beat blog posts is an attempt to cheer myself up, and to a large extent it's worked. The recent few days of bright sunny weather helped a lot too, coming as they did after about a month of this:

The view from the window today. As you can see, the sunshine has gone away again and normal service has resumed.

Although I haven't been doing the big, urgent jobs, I have been getting some things done, and I will tell you about those, along with the rest of the heating project, oh, sometime soon, I promise!

Gather ye rosebuds...

2012-01-16T21:52:00.000Z

I should be getting on with the heating project (it's insulation that needs doing at the moment) but we have a brief spell of glorious sunshine after a month of drizzle, interspersed with rain, sleet, hail, fog, and other varieties of drizzle for which I don't have words (maybe if I learnt Welsh I'd find there are more words) and it would be such a shame to pass up the opportunity for a walk.

Sheep in the low afternoon sunlight

On the way back we called in on Jasper, who was mending his roof.

Look closely. See, there he is, by the chimney.

As we walked back the sun had dropped behind the hills, so we were in the shade, and flippin' cold it was too, but the light on the far hills was still beautiful.

So how's it going then, this self-suficiency lark?

2012-01-05T21:57:00.000Z

I've written one review-of-the-year post that's entirely pictures, so here are some words to go with it. I started to write an end of year review in October, not because I got confused about the dates, but because that was one year after we moved to Wales. That post got very long and boring so I abandoned it. This time I won't try to go through everything and evaluate it all - as the previous post shows, I have done rather a lot of different things this year! I may write a more systematic post about the garden at some point, but this one will just be thoughts and reflections.

When I resigned from my job to start this new adventure in Wales I decided to give it a year and judge at the end of that year whether things were working or not. I didn't have any clear idea of what criteria I'd use to decide whether things were working or not, which wasn't terribly bright of me...

I guess money was a big part of it. Giving up my income and part of Ian's was very scary, so I was worried about whether we'd be able to make ends meet. Well... we can. Money's tight, but we get by, so that's OK.

A more nebulous concern was whether I'd be able to do the self-sufficiency stuff. This led to quite a bit of anxiety about the garden in June, which I worked through with the help of blogging friends. I feel a lot more relaxed about the garden now. I might not be saying that if a storm had wiped out the whole lot, but it didn't, and some things were very successful (potatoes and peas), others weren't (squash and tomatoes) and there were some things I just didn't plant enough of (parsnips. I ate the last of the parsnips this evening. I love parsnips and now they're all gone! *sniffle*).

As well as growing things, there's been a lot of making things too, not least in the kitchen. I've found that cooking on a very low budget requires a lot more time and attention than using ready-prepared ingredients (and I'm talking things like pizza bases and chips, not ready meals) so I spend a lot of my time thinking about food. That's stating the obvious, I know, but I had to live it to really appreciate that fact.

We eat simply (determined as much by Ian's preference as by budget) but oh so well. You know sometimes you have bread that's so fresh it doesn't need anything else with it, except maybe butter? Well we have that every third day. A lot of our veg has been picked less than an hour before we eat it (peas and beans in the summer, cabbage and leeks now), and hotdogs made by wrapping dough round the sausages before baking are about as far from the convenience food kind as you can imagine. Come to think of it, quite a lot of things I've learnt to cook this year are convenience foods; chips, burger buns (I've always made burgers from scratch - just squish mince into shape), hotdogs, ketchup, and of course, baked beans (I haven't given up on those yet...)

There are other improvements to our quality of life as well. We spend a lot more time outdoors and gardening is good exercise. I found that I stopped comfort eating when we moved here. I didn't even know I was doing it before, but every evening I'd get in from work and sit down with a drink and a bag of crisps. I don't feel the need to do that any more, and I lost a lot of weight in the first few months. We're both a lot healthier and fitter than we were in our old life.

There's a lot more flexibility in this lifestyle. I always have a fairly long to-do list but scheduling is up to me. We can take time off when the sun happens to be shining, not just on days beginning with 'S'. And at this time of year, we particularly appreciate not having to get up before sunrise.

Something we never anticipated being so good so quickly is the sense of community. Some of this is here, online. I've met some great people here in blogland and on the 'Ish forum and feel I've made some real friends, even though I've never met you in real life. The internet is a wonderful invention! But I do venture out into the real world occasionally, and we've found the locals here to be very welcoming. We've made some really good friends already, which makes me feel incredibly lucky. This is not something you could possibly plan for. Some neighbours turn out to be horrible and make your life a misery, and some are lovely and you want to invite them all over for tea, which is exactly what I did one day last week, and a very pleasant little party it was too.

The best thing about this new life, though, is that I get to spend a lot more time with my husband. The working day is mostly spent doing our own things, but every lunchtime, every tea break, every I-just-fancy-a-cuddle-right-now break is spent together.

We don't have photos of us just taking a tea break, but here we are at my cousin's wedding last year

A year in pictures

2011-12-31T18:04:00.000Z

Inspired by The Inelegant Gardener, here's my year in pictures (though I'm not disciplined enough to restrict myself to one picture per month, so this might take a while to load).

January

I made marmalade

and learned to knit

February

I planned the garden

and was delighted by early signs of spring colour

I picked wild food

and did lots of digging

I got the hang of knooking (with dirty fingers)

and saw burnt gorse seen on a coastal walk

March

More digging

Experiments with home made soap (very successful)
and laundry gloop (less so)

Attempting to tap a birch tree for sap

A wonky baby blanket

Many seedlings

Starting to make a camera bag.
Um... must get back to that project at some point

April

I made baked beans

and picked many dandelions, most of which subsequently went mouldy

Things grew, slowly

and the cherry blossom was very pretty.

May

The first major work of the heating project:
Opening up the fireplace and laying a hearth.

Mushrooms - probably morels - in the store room

I found sorrel, but not wild garlic

I collected oak leaves to make wine and cordial

did battle with monster slugs

made wild green pies

and showed you around the village

June

I made elderflower champagne

and brown bread ice cream

The blackcurrant harvest began

I learnt to make socks!
(People have found this blog with an image search for Mature women wearing socks. Do you find that a bit disturbing?)

I cleared space for my tomatoes in the conservatory

I took a class in spinning

and knitted the wool with broom handles

July

I made blackcurrant ice cream

and insect repellant (from a plant that I thought was wormwood,
but turns out to be southernwood)

and soap (from lard rendered from bacon rinds)

and cakes, with more blackcurrants.

The potatoes got blight

but nonetheless yielded a good harvest (this is just a small part of the total crop)

The store room shelves collapsed

and I started harvesting the peas.

August

Slugs ate my cabbages

as well as pumpkins, carrots, and even onions.

My dad came to stay and we converted my sewing machine
to run on treadle power

I made baguettes

started harvesting runner beans

and saw a fabulous caterpillar on the crocosmia.

September

I made a party dress with my treadle powered sewing machine

picked bilberries

and field mushrooms.

I made chips

and fruit leather

and admired the sunrise.

October

I made sponge pudding

and considered the merits of different types of light bulbs.

In fact, I was very busy laying new floors during October, which is why not many blog posts were written.

November

I attempted to declutter

and wrote about the planning stage of the heating project.

December
Some of this month's blogging was catch-up on the heating project.

We replaced most of the floors in the house with underfloor heating panels

removed (suspected) asbestos tiles from the garage ceiling

and had the rest of the heating system installed professionally.

I made sloe wine

and croissants

which we enjoyed in front of our newly-installed stove on Christmas morning
(the croissants, that is. The wine was for later)

and the gardening year has already started, far too soon, as my seeds got wet and needed urgent attention.

Sowing onions... and the rest

2011-12-30T19:49:00.002Z

My dad always tells me that Boxing Day is the time to sow onion seeds, and as I woke up on Boxing Day morning, the weather did seem a little brighter than it had been recently, and I could hear birds singing, and for the first time in ages I felt like doing a spot of gardening, so I investigated my saved onion seeds. I'd had a few red onions in the cupboard that started growing, so planted them and let them flower for the seeds. I managed to get one head of seeds from the three plants and had put a paper bag over it and brought it into the conservatory to dry.

Red onion seedhead

I carefully dismantled the seedhead, separating everything that might be a seed (black bits) from everything else (brown bits). I think I had about fifty seeds, but it's quite possible that most of them were nothing of the sort. I went out into the garden to fetch some compost from the heap (product of last winter's digging) and some of the nice fine soil that I rescued from under the wood store (that is, the soil was there first, in flower beds, and I dug some out before we buried it under the wood store) and put a mixture of these in a seed tray, then planted my seeds.

Having got started, I thought I might sow some other varieties of onion seeds - I have some spring onions (free seeds) and some perennial Welsh onions left over from last year. I sowed and planted plenty of the latter last year, but the slugs got most of them so I'm going to try again, with better defences, this year. In the interests of tidying up, I'd taken my box of seeds out to the greenhouse shortly before Chrismas, and when I went to fetch it, I found to my horror that it was full of water! I knew tidying up was a bad idea!

Some of my seeds were saved, either by me (peas) or by a friend (two varieties of beans) in paper bags, and the bought seeds were mostly in opened packets, partly used last year. None of these are particularly watertight and I had visions of the whole lot being ruined. In addition, I'd noticed a few days earlier that the onion sets (my onions didn't grow very big last year - most of what I harvested were sets, so I'll be putting those back in the ground this year) were starting to grow roots.

I had a lot of seeds in need of urgent attention. If things had started growing and I let them dry out again, they'd just die. Of course, they might die anyway from being planted too early, but I felt I had to give them a chance. I started with the onion sets, as I'd noticed those first and couldn't really face examining the rest of the seeds too closely straight away. Most of the onion sets went into little module-pots, but those that show no signs of roots I've kept back. The beans-from-a-friend had spilled all over the box, so I tackled those next. There were two varieties and one, District nurse had clearly absorbed water and swelled up, so I planted those in newspaper pots - some I had left over from last year and some I made new. The other beans didn't look so much affected, so I spread them out to dry and examined the other seeds a bit. Tomato seeds were damp, so I spread those out to dry - well I'd already done that once already, so I doubt it will make much difference doing it again. A lot of paper packages were wet, but foil packets inside were unaffected, so that was not nearly as bad as it first appeared. Some carrot seeds were wet, but as I didn't think much of the carrots we got this year, I threw those away. The ones that really needed attention were the peas.

Peas sprouting in their paper bag, after sitting in water for a few days

The pencil note on the bag informed me that there were about 180 seeds. It also told me what variety they were, but I didn't note it down and the bag is now too muddy to read. I started by making more newspaper pots, but by the time I had fifty I'd run out of newspaper. I could have bought another, but it was taking ages to make all those pots, so I decided to risk the rest outdoors. After fetching more compost/soil and sowing fifty of the peas in little pots, I prepared a bed outside. Prepared means weeded really. This was so much easier than last year - I just went over the bed with a hand fork, lifting mostly shallow-rooted weeds. It still took a while, but much easier than digging out all those deep roots that I did a year ago.

Although the weather varied from slightly damp to steady rain while I was working, it wasn't cold, so not too unpleasant until the rain soaked right through my hat and down the back of my neck. Once I'd got the bed cleared, I made a couple of shallow trenches with the fork, sprinkled a little lime in the bottom (read: accidentally tipped a heap of lime at one end them tried to spread it around evenly) then spaced the sprouting peas at intervals of about two inches. Before covering them up, I added mouse defences. This was a trick my dad suggested, and it seemed to work last year: Spread holly leaves over the peas. Since we still have Christmas decorations up, I asked Ian to pull down a few branches of holly for me, as my hands were far too muddy to take indoors. There may be a few sparkly bits in with the peas this year.

The weather's very mild at the moment, so they're not getting any additional cold protection just yet. I'm intending to keep an eye on the forecast and pile on mulch and/or cloches made from a few sheets of greenhouse glass if a frost is expected. What are the chances of me actually doing that before a frost hits? Place your bets...

I don't have a picture of the outdoor peas - it's pretty boring, just a newly dug bed with the occasional holly leaf poking through, so here's the greenhouse instead:

Midwinter greenhouse, unseasonally full of new-planted seeds

Sorry the picture's so dark, but that's a pretty accurate representation of the weather here at the moment. Those who called the sun back at the solstice, could you not have called it a bit more urgently?

Sloe wine

2011-12-27T19:15:00.000Z

People rave about sloe gin, but it just doesn't feel right to me to start making an alcoholic drink by buying an alcoholic drink. If I've bought a bottle of gin, I'd rather just get some tonic water to go with it than turn it into a different kind of drink. I wondered if I could make a similar drink starting from sugar and yeast, with the sloes for flavour, of course.

These are not my sloes, they are my neighbour's sloes.

On the 'ish forum I'd heard about feeding wine to make it stronger. Apparently this is a technical business involving mastery of a hydrometer, but basically it involves adding sugar gradually as the wine ferments. I think the reason is that too much sugar can kill the yeast, so you don't want to add it all at the beginning. Now, I don't own a hydrometer, but how hard can it be? I suspect the technical mastery is only necessary if you want to know how strong the finished drink is.

I looked up a few online recipes for sloe wine, and they all included grape juice concentrate. I'm not keen on buying fancy ingredients and I'd heard - again on the 'ish forum - that elderberries are pretty much identical to grapes apart from the sugar content. Elderberries seemed much more in line with my way of doing things, but by the time the sloes were ready to pick (after the first frost), the elder tree in my garden was bare.

I considered raiding the elderberry wine (which I haven't even tried yet) but then one day, out with friends, I spotted elderberries! Picnic leftovers were evicted from plastic boxes and the tree was raided. The next day I picked all the sloes from the tree in our garden and weighed the fruit. I had twelve ounces of sloes and eight of elderberries, which wasn't a huge quantity, but enough to be worth using.

All the fruit went into a bucket (after I'd picked it over) with the same weight of sugar and a kettleful of boiling water. That made it up to about three litres, which seemed about right, based on the recipes. I should link to those really, but I have no idea where I found them. I'm sure you can find them by googling, if you're interested. Once the water had cooled enough not to kill the yeast, I added about half a teaspooon of wine yeast.

Once I saw bubbles in the bucket, which happened after a couple of days, I added a bit more sugar, and repeated this every few days - stir to see if bubbles rise and if they do, add a tablespoon or so of sugar and stir until dissolved. There was one other major departure from usual wine making procedure. Bearing in mind that sloe gin is made by leaving the fruit in the gin for quite a long time, I left the fruit in the wine. In fact, I just left the whole lot in the bucket. It was really very easy.

By mid-December the bubbles had slowed to the point where I wasn't sure whether it was still fermenting. I put one last spoonful of sugar in, as I wanted the finished drink to be a bit sweet (sloe gin includes sugar, too) and left it maybe a week longer. Maybe not that much - I can't really remember. A few days before Christmas I decided it was time to bottle it, so strained it through muslin as I would for cordial. I also squeezed the pulp to get every last drop of wine out, but kept this last, squeezed batch separate from the rest. I got about three and a half bottles of wine, which was well worth the modest effort involved. The whole process took six and a half weeks, which is not bad either.

Even the unsqueezed wine wasn't clear, but who cares? This stuff is gorgeous! It's exactly what I was aiming for - a strong, sweetish drink that's packed with flavour. I was intending to keep one bottle back to see what it's like when it matures, but I'm not sure it's going to last that long...

Season's greetings

2011-12-24T21:21:00.003Z

In honour of Susie, who has eloquently explained that this season's festivities are all about celebrating the return of the light, and sod all that cultural baggage...

... Happy Susiemas!

Croissants

2011-12-24T21:18:00.000Z

We love croissants, and would like to have then for breakfast on Christmas morning. As the chances of finding a boulangerie open on Christmas morning in Devil's Bridge are slim, to say the least, this means learning to make them myself.

A few days ago, with a view to practicing this recipe, I dug out the Larousse Gastronomique that I inherited from my mother.

This cookery book is not for the faint hearted

I had owned this book for several years before I plucked up the courage to open it and discovered that it is not, in fact, written in French (yes, I know it says so on the cover, but I hadn't actually looked at it that closely). This helps, but not all that much. The entry for croissants informed me that they could either be made from puff pastry or using the yeast-based recipe below. I tried that one first, as best I could. Croissants have a lot of butter, but it didn't specify salted or unsalted butter. Since I associate unsalted butter with France, I guessed at that option. At three points in the recipe, I was instructed to leave the dough to rise. No mention of how long, or until what point, so I had to guess. Finally, the cooking instruction was, Cook in a hot oven. Exactly how hot and for how long was left to the cook's discretion.

The result was approximately croissantish, but very bland. That would be salted butter, then. The texture wasn't quite right, either - too bready.

For the second attempt, I tried puff pastry, the recipe for which I eventually found under Dough. This recipe takes a lot of attention. First a simple flour-and-water dough is made, then left to stand for ten minutes. Then it's rolled out and butter added in a layer end enclosed in the dough, then left to stand for ten minutes. Next it's turned which means roll into a long rectangle then fold into three, then leave to stand for ten minutes.

Puff pastry after one turn.
You can just about see the yellow of the butter showing through.

Repeat another five times, which means pandering to this piece of dough for over an hour. Luckily, I had other kitcheny things to do, so I could fold the dough then do something else in between without too much inconvenience. I took enough dough for a couple of croissants - two egg sized pieces - and rolled them out into thin oval sheets as instructed (well, it didn't say thin, but the first ones didn't seem quite right when I rolled them thicker) before rolling up and curving the ends round into crescents.

Second attempt at croissants

These were much better, but as you can see from the picture, the outside was almost burnt whilst the inside (not visible, obviously) was still doughy. By this time I'd concluded that the hot oven instruction was wrong.

For the third attempt, I rolled out a couple of pieces and shaped the croissants before going to bed, then cooked them this morning, this time on gas mark 4. I also remembered to brush them with milk before cooking, which I'd forgotten for the second attempt. These didn't fluff up so much, but did cook through without burning on the outside. Maybe it should be gas mark 5. I'll find out tomorrow - if all goes to plan, we'll be having fresh squeezed orange juice (we have oranges) and fresh baked croissant for breakfast on Christmas morning. And tea, of course.

Heating project: The plumbing

2011-12-13T23:16:00.000Z

This project seems to be going on for ever. Maybe if I tell you about the next stage I'll feel a bit more enthusiastic about carrying on with the work. So, the plumbing...

The plumber* called us a couple of times in the week before he was due to come, to confirm arrangements (two of his guys arriving on Tuesday) and check we'd be ready. I think he was hoping we wouldn't be. We were, but were quite glad of the extra day, and were working right up to the last minute. It wouldn't have been quite so near the wind if it had just been laying the boards, but at about 9pm on Monday evening we realised that the airing cupboard would need gutting to make way for the tank. It was still full of scarves and gloves, towels and old net curtains, and the tool box, and all those other things that live in airing cupboards.

The cupboard not only had to be emptied, but the shelves needed taking out. Those shelves were not installed with a view to future dismantling. Many pieces of the frame were nailed in two directions, meaning they couldn't be just pulled apart. No, this isn't enthusing me to get on with the work, I'm just remembering how hard it all was.

Anyway, we were pretty much ready by the time the plumbers turned up on Tuesday morning. For the rest of the week we didn't have much to do apart from keeping out of their way and making the occasional cup of tea. By the end of the first day, the stove was in place...

Scavenged stove in excavated fireplace

... as was the tank.

New tank - sorry, thermal store - just about fitting in the airing cupboard

We'd replaced a piece of glass in the stove door and straightened out the blanking plate at the back of the stove (covering the hole where the flue might have gone, in another life) before we got to this stage, and a last piece of shelf in the airing cupboard needed wrenching out at the last minute because it was in the way.

The pipes you see in that picture were actually added on the second day. These connect up with the stove - the top one brings hot water into the tank and the bottom one takes cooler water back to the stove. The plumbing all went fairly smoothly, though our electrics caused some consternation when it came to connecting up the immersion heaters and pumps. Where there should have been electricity, there was none! After a bit of poking about an electrician was called, who poked about a bit more and found the mysteriously cut off wires, connected it all up again, and hey presto...

Lower gauge on the tank, showing warmth

... we have heat! Actual hot water came out of the taps - such luxury!

The photo was taken during the test of the immersion heaters. At this stage, all the plumbing is in place, electrics are connected up, everything is ready to go apart from one thing. We still don't have the stove installed.

Rather than do the job ourselves, we'd decided to get it done properly, i.e. by a HETAS approved installer. The plumber was not such a man, so he subcontracted this part of the job to someone else. Unfortunately the stove man wasn't available straight away, so we had to wait until Thursday of the following week for him to come and connect the flue pipe. It felt like forever, looking at our unusable stove as it sat in the fireplace.

When he did turn up, it was at 7:20 am. We were not terribly impressed. We were even less impressed when he stuck his ladder through the greenhouse (he assured us the cost of repair would come off the bill). However, the flue was stuffed down the chimney...

... and into the fireplace.

After a bit of connecting up, the stove was finally functional!

The installer failed to mention that the white disk was in fact a protective film over the brass plate underneath. That was also irritating.

It was wonderful to be able to get the fire lit and the underfloor heating running. Pebble was a bit confused by this at first, but she soon got the hang of it.

Underfloor heating - we only did it for the cat.

Having got heat into the house, the next stage was (is) to keep it there...

---
* I'd usually put a link, but he doesn't have a website. It was Mike Jerman of BMJ Plumbing & Heating Ltd, Abernant, Troed Y Garth, Y Fan, SY18 6NA, Phone/fax: 01686 411121 – Mobile: 07778 809002, Email: bmjplumbit@aol.com

How much salt do you eat?

2011-12-04T15:20:00.001Z

I was reading an article in New Scientist yesterday about salt (Question: Have the health risks of salt been overstated? Answer: No, that's just propaganda by the salt industry) that had the following sentence highlighted:

Try calculating your own salt intake and you'll soon learn how hard it is to meet even modest targets

Out of curiosity, I did just that, for all the food I ate yesterday.

Breakfast:	muesli made from	oats	trace
		apple	-
		raisins	trace
		hazelnuts	trace
		milk (400ml)	1 g
	Cup of tea	...	trace
		with milk	0.05 g
Lunch		one slice of bread	0.5 g
		with butter	0.3 g
		celery	0.1 g
	houmous made from	chick peas	trace
		lemon juice	-
		garlic	trace
		nuts	trace
		olive oil	-
	mince pie made from	flour	trace
		lard	0.05 g
		butter	0.05 g
		sugar	-
		mixed fruit	trace
		apple	-
		treacle	-
		cordial	-
		brandy	-
		spices	-
	Another cup of tea		0.05 g
	with another mince pie		0.1 g
Salty snack!		bacon crispies	0.8 g
Dinner		brown rice	trace
	with stew made from	chick peas	trace
		tinned tomatoes	0.2 g
		onion	trace
		bacon	0.9 g
		celery salt	0.1 g
		Worcester sauce	0.1 g
		herbs	-
		pepper	-
	Orange squash		trace
Total			4.3 g

Against a limit of 5 g per day, not that hard at all, it seems. I wasn't even trying. I wonder how different that would have been if I'd been eating processed versions of these foods, rather than home made. A couple of my items appeared as examples in the article, so I could compare. One slice of wholemeal bread with butter was cited as containing 0.7 g salt, which is about the same as mine (I probably put more butter on - half an ounce per slice - I weighed it) and a bowl of cereal with milk was cited as 0.4 g, less than half of mine, but then I probably ate three times the quantity. My bacon crispies (byproduct of rendering lard, and very tasty, especially when fresh, which these weren't) were also higher in salt (OK, that was largely guesswork) than the salty snack in the article - a bag of crisps at 0.5 g.

So where does all this excess salt come from, then? How about the mince pies? We're always hearing about the hidden sugar and salt in things like cakes (OK, more sugar than salt here). Tesco value mince pies (nutritional composition easily available online) have 0.1 g salt per pie, same as mine, and Greggs put 0.2 g salt in each pie. Maybe the houmous, then? Tesco come top for information, again, and have 1.2 g salt per 100 g houmous. After Tesco, most of the search results were about soil structure. Anyway, there's some added salt that I didn't have, but it's hardly going to push me into dangerous levels of salt consumption. It must be the main meal then. I have 1.7 g in mine - do people eat meals with a lot more salt than that? I don't know.

I'm honestly baffled as to where all this excess salt is coming from. Do you have any idea how much salt you eat? If you can be bothered to write a day's food diary, I'd be really interested to know what you find.

Final thoughts on the decluttering challenge

2011-12-02T17:15:00.001Z

Well, I didn't do very well with the November decluttering challenge. I certainly didn't manage to get rid of something every day. It seemed like a lot of effort and frankly, wasn't a high enough priority for me at the moment.

On the other hand, I did get rid of some things, and the challenge motivated me to do more than I would have done, so it wasn't a complete failure. Commenting on this challenge, Water Pegasus points out the importance of organising stuff as part of decluttering, which I can really relate to. During November I did quite a lot of tidying that didn't involve actually getting rid of anything, so I didn't include it in the challenge, but the effect was definitely less clutter.

At the same time, my resistance to throwing things away was reinforced by one stage of the heating project. I haven't yet written about the insulation, but to hold up floppy insulation we wedged short lengths of whatever we could get hold of between the joists. Whatever we could get hold of included strips of cardboard that had protected the heating boards when they were delivered, plastic conduit that had covered heating pipes running down the walls, bits of polystyrene packaging from various things, and offcuts of chipboard from the new boards. All of these things would usually count as rubbish, but I'd kept them, thinking they might be useful - and they were!

Whilst my hoarding instinct has been reinforced, I think organising things helps me put a limit on how much I keep. I find that whilst I think things, might be useful, there is a limit on what quantity of each thing I feel might be useful and/or how much space is appropriate to fill. When Louisa told me about her father-not-in-law stashing building materials at relatives' houses, I thought, When it goes beyond your own house, that's definitely too much. On a smaller scale, when I tackled the plastic bottles that were threatening to take over the kitchen, I put a new shelf in a cupboard and when that was full I threw the rest away. I could look at a shelf full of bottles and think, Surely that's enough for what I'm likely to need.

So, I'm still an unrepentant hoarder, but I'm learning how to put limits on my hoarding, and organisation is key to that. When the mess have taken over the house (or even just the garage) it can be a huge job to sort it out, but it's so rewarding. We built some shelves in the garage yesterday out of old floorboards and offcuts of chipboard. Whereas we used to have stuff all over the floor, we now have this:

This makes me very happy.

Heating project: Now the work begins!

2011-12-01T23:44:00.000Z

Continuing the saga of our central heating...

Luckily, both heating and tank suppliers were able to deliver quickly, though our driveway proved a challenge to both, but that still gave us only two and a half weeks to take up all the floors in the house and lay the new boards with heating pipes in.

Heating boards filling the garage. We didn't expect all the plain ones - they evidently expect us to replace all the floors, not just the bits we want to heat.

Although all the boards are the same size, the pipes are fitted into different spaces within the boards. We have a selection of full length, half, 3/4, 5/8, 3/8 and 1/4 sized boards, and a plan to tell us where to put them all. They're also labelled 'T' and 'G' depending on whether there's a tongue or a groove at the end where the pipes emerge to be connected up. It's important not to mix those up, or they'll never fit together. The boards then have to be cut to fit the space available, avoiding cutting the pipes.

Before that, though, we had to get the old floorboards up. This is a particular challenge when you're living in the house at the time. Step 1: Empty the spare room. New homes were found for bed, piano, treadle sewing machine, spinning wheel and several guitars, carpet and underlay were lifted, rolled and taken up to the loft, and we were ready to begin.

I consulted the Readers Digest Complete DIY Manual, which I've had for years, on how to lift floorboards. I'll give you my facebook status updates for 4th Oct, for a flavour of how useful I found that (with apologies for bad language):

16:23 - From the Readers Digest complete DIY manual, on lifting floorboards:"Once you have loosened one or two sets of nails, push the handle of a hammer under the board as far from the loose end as possible, and press hard on the end. This sends a shock wave along the whole length, loosening nails farther along which you can remove."No it bloody doesn't!

19:22 - has reduced several floorboards to matchwood. Need beer now.

To illustrate the problem, a couple of pictures:

The boards tended to splinter rather than lift.

No amount of shockwaves through floorboards was going to loosen those nails.

My second facebook update of that day prompted a friend to offer help (thanks, Jasper!). He came the next day armed with considerably more experience than we had and several tricks up his sleeve, but even he resorted to smashing floorboards to pieces before too long. It got worse before we'd finished the room as some of the boards were fixed with flat-headed nails. We managed to get one of them up, with much damage to the joist below, but gave up after that. Given the choice between a board fixed with flat nails and one thoroughly cemented into the wall, we tackled the wall.

We thought we might trim the new boards to fit that space, but decided that would go too close to the pipes, so had to get that far board out of the wall instead.

We lifted the boards through the holes in the floor from downstairs.

Heating boards, ready to lay.

I don't seem to have pictures of the next stage, but don't worry - there are plenty more! Cutting the boards to size got a lot easier after a friend lent us his jigsaw (thanks, Geoff!). That fitted cupboard in the corner caused us particular difficulty. Having been fitted after the floorboards, it was nailed down to them. Once we'd dragged the boards out, the nails were still there, running top to bottom through the space we needed for the new boards. Chisels were deployed, and hammers, and much swearing, and we got the space clear in the end. I wouldn't be keen on re-doing that particular board, though. There were good bits too. It was very pleasing as I finished the room that the small wedge-shaped pieces I'd cut off the ends of the boards were exactly the right size to fill the gap down the edge.

Right, on to the next room! All the bedroom furniture - well, all apart from the fitted wardrobe - was moved into the spare room. That wardrobe was a pain because it was on top of the carpet, which we want to keep (I say want to - it's not a carpet we'd choose, but it's OK and it'll save us buying a new one for that room). I cut round the wardrobe. It remains to be seen how bad this looks when I put the carpet back.

Once clear, the bedroom floor presented its own challenges. Firstly, the joists were in the wrong place. We'd been expecting to find one under the partition wall, but in fact it was just on the kitchen side. If we used the next one, we wouldn't have space for the boards that were supposed to go there. Hmmm... Some studying of the plan later, and I decided to swap the four 5/8 sized boards from the bedroom for three half sized boards from the dining room and one 3/8 board that we couldn't be bothered to fit in the doorway of the spare room.

That decided, we lifted the old boards. This was much easier than the spare room because the boards weren't tongue and groove and the nails came out much more easily, possibly because they'd been replaced before. The previous replacement also meant that we didn't have to cut along the joist and fix an extra support for the new boards, which saved quite a bit of work.

Having got the boards up, the next particular challenge was revealed. The joists in this room were a long way off right angles with the walls. When fitting rectangular boards that need the ends resting on the joists, this isn't good news. There wasn't space to swing the boards round and in any case, we'd already fitted one, through the doorway to the kitchen, before we discovered the problem. Luckily, with two foot wide boards, it was possible to fit them so that the end rested on the joist at an angle, but it took a lot of measuring.

Marking the end-line on the joist and yes, that is a roll of carpet top left. I can replace a floor without removing the carpet from the room.

Sorry for the poor photo, but you can make out the stepped line in the middle as the joins in the boards follow the wonky joist and hey! It's a finished floor!

Moving swiftly on, furniture (and quite a lot of junk) was moved from the dining room/office into the bedroom...

Not everything fitted into this room, so quite a lot went into the spare room.
We now have no idea where anything is.

... another carpet was lifted, another radiator removed (I forgot to mention the radiators, didn't I? Well each room had one and they all had to go), and another set of floorboards to lift. The dining room was in the extension, so these boards were relatively new. Would you believe it, the nails actually came out? This meant that Jasper's tricks and, dare I say it, the Readers Digest instructions, finally proved effective.

Pebble kept a close eye on proceedings.

I've just noticed the radiator pipe in that picture. That caused minor alarm when I forgot how long it was and tried to draw it up through the hole in the ceiling into the loft. You may also notice the insulation under this floor (glass fibre - ugh!) The extension includes the garage downstairs, which actually has a ceiling. At least it did...

Since the heating pipes needed connecting up from underneath, we had to get that ceiling (and insulation) down and out of the way. While we had easy access to it from above, I gave it a few wallops with a hammer, just to see how easily it would come down. Not very, as it turned out, and I really shouldn't have done that. You see, there was an issue with that ceiling...

The results of our house-buying survey came back with a cautionary note about that ceiling - could be asbestos. At first I didn't believe it - I mean, the extension went up in the eighties - surely they wouldn't have still been using asbestos by that time, would they? I then ignored the issue until I absolutely had to face it, which was roughly the time I was walloping the ceiling with a hammer.

OK, a bit of time out from hitting things with hammers in order to learn about asbestos ceilings. I spent about half a day of online research (which felt like a lot of time to be losing in our tight schedule for floor replacement) and learnt the following:

Yes, asbestos was still in common use at that time
Sheets of board that look just like plasterboard could well have asbestos in them (OK, the surveyor said it, but still...)
The only way to tell whether it's actually asbestos is by shining polarized light at it and looking at it through a microscope
It's nothing to worry about if you're going to leave them alone (actually I knew that already), but precautions need taking if you're going to move it
If you insist on tackling this stuff yourself, wear a disposable protective suit, boots, and a P3 rated respirator, and damp everything down with water to stop dust flying around
When you've removed the stuff, wrap it in two layers of polythene, label it, and get it disposed of properly

Point 5 was the really useful information here - how to deal with asbestos yourself. I had a pair of wellies, and it turned out that the rest of the protective gear could be bought from the local builders merchant for about a tenner. So here I am, ready to tackle the garage (actually, almost ready. I wore goggles as well.):

I hate wearing face masks. The most annoying thing about this was, P3 rated masks are not suitable for people with beards, so Ian couldn't share the pain.

The next bit was really not fun, and even less fun that it would have been if I hadn't walloped the ceiling with a hammer. If you scroll back up to the top of this post and have a look at the picture of the the heating boards in the garage, you may notice that all around the boards there is stuff. Quite a lot of stuff. In fact, pretty much all of the floor that wasn't covered in boards was covered in a layer of small things. Some of these things were useful, a few were quite valuable (tools and whatnot), but a lot was rubbish. And all of it had a thin layer of (possibly) asbestos dust all over it.

Every single thing had to be picked up, wiped over with a damp cloth (rinsed at frequent intervals) and removed from the garage.

So that was what I did.

Once out of the garage, Ian sorted things and transported the useful and the valuable to the workshop, with the result that the workshop became almost inaccessible (much like the store room, in fact).

Eventually, the garage was cleared. The suspect ceiling boards were pulled down, nails were removed and nasty, itchy insulation was transferred to the loft... and we returned to the floorboards. Work on the dining room led out into the hall...

... which made it quite interesting getting to the bathroom. At one point, there was a hole in the floor right in front of the loo, through which the garage could be viewed. This was more inconvenient for Ian than it was for me. From there we progressed to the kitchen floor...

... some of which crumbled alarmingly. Evidently the woodworm had had a good time in here. We did worry about the state of the floors under the kitchen units, but not enough to seriously contemplate taking out the entire kitchen to replace the floor. Chatting to a neighbour about this, we were reassured that the previous owner had been very worried about the woodworm, and treated the house thoroughly. Three times. This was good to know.

For Pebble, the kitchen floor was a step too far. She shouted at us a lot.

The disappearing joist problem that we'd had in the bedroom was present here, too, disappearing just under the edge of the cupboards, and there was no getting away from it this time. This was solved by the ~~ingenious~~ bodge of fixing another floorboard underneath, itself supported by a square section length of wood fixed to the joist. (Sorry I don't have a photo to illustrate that.) This meant that we couldn't fit the new boards as we went along, as we had been doing, but had to lift all the old boards first.

This was pretty hairy to walk across, so we didn't hang about getting the new boards laid here.

Look! Another new floor! No, look at the floor, don't look at the washing up!

By the time we finished that, we were almost there. There was just one more awkward bit to do in the doorway between the kitchen and the extension.

It was a right fiddle getting these boards up with the door getting in the way. I did consider taking the door off, but the screws were firmly painted in place - it just wasn't going to happen. For the last piece I had to resort to cutting it in half to get it out, as you see in the picture. We deliberately didn't lay the last heating board here, though, because this was the likely route for all the heating pipes. When you realise that what you see in that picture is the tops of two solid walls, one very old and one new, you'll understand that it's worthwhile taking this doorway route with the pipework.

The plumbing can wait for another post. I'm quite exhausted just writing about all this work!

Waste food? Me? Never!

2011-11-29T20:07:00.001Z

This week's Change the World Wednesday challenge is to waste no food during the week. Whenever I see people talking about food waste I feel a bit smug. I don't waste food - I'm the queen of leftovers, me! But then I had to admit to myself that there were two clementines in the fruit bowl that had to be thrown out because they were going rotten. And come to think of it, there was that time last week when I made cheese straws with leftover pastry and forgot about them so they burned. That captures two areas where I could improve - buying too much fruit/not eating it quickly enough (it tends to be citrus fruit) and letting things burn in the oven.

At the weekend I begged some cooking apples from a friend to make mincemeat (and consulted her on the recipe. I'd volunteered to make mince pies for a village event without really thinking about the fact that I've never made them before). I only wanted one or two, but she'd given me nine before I could stop her. Two went in the mincemeat (which after a couple of days is looking and smelling very much as it should, which is a relief), leaving seven sitting in a bag.

They were windfalls but even so, it would be a shame to let them go off. As the were windfalls, some of them were bruised and starting to go bad already, so I'd have to use them quickly. Ian doesn't like stewed apple, so it's a bit of a challenge thinking of ways to use cooking apples. I decided that the best thing to do would be to stew the lot and freeze it, so that's what I did.

When I'm freezing sauces that are essentially ingredients rather than a main part of a meal, I prefer to freeze it in the ice cube tray so I can take out just as many cubes as I need. They also thaw more quickly than a bigger block. Seven apples-worth of sauce were going to take several goes of the ice cube tray, though. Then I opened a cupboard and spotted my new chocolate moulds (inspired by Susie) - they'd do nicely. When I opened the freezer I saw another silicone tray that I'd forgotten about, this one with heart-shaped moulds. So now I have seven stewed apples freezing in a variety of decorative shapes.

Stewed apple in several trays, ready for freezing. It tastes better than it looks.

I still don't know what I'm going to use it for, but at least now it's preserved and as an added bonus, not in a bag on the kitchen floor.

Oh, and those bits of beef fat that I forgot to put in the fridge last night? Pebble didn't think they were wasted!

Heating project: Planning and design

2011-11-08T22:27:00.000Z

This has been a mammoth project (and it's not finished yet), and blogging about it seems almost as great a task. To avoid this post becoming unreadably long, I'm breaking it down into stages, starting with all the thinking and planning that occupied me for several months as I tried to figure out how to get the heating system I want.

It's been quite a while since I last wrote about the heating project, and there's a good reason for this: We did very little work on it for over four months (hmm, notice a similarity with the last post?) Although not much physical progress was made during that time, I did do a lot of thinking and planning and yes, learning about central heating systems.

To recap, the plan is to replace our standard gas-fired combi boiler that heats water for taps and radiators, on demand, with a wood burning stove with back boiler, the water from which is stored in a tank that in turn provides hot water to taps and underfloor heating. This tank will also have input from solar panels (thermal, not electric).

The solar heating is obviously thoroughly green, as the sun's energy is freely available, endlessly* renewable and totally clean. Wood is slightly more debatable as burning wood obviously releases CO₂ in the same way as burning coal, gas or oil. However, more wood can be grown in a relatively short timescale (relative to making more fossil fuels), which then reabsorbs the CO₂, so provided that enough trees are planted, wood doesn't add to the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Also, it's renewable, meaning it won't run out like fossil fuels. It's debatable whether it's sustainable when you consider the amount of land required to grow enough trees to heat one house (i.e. we don't have enough land for everyone to heat their houses this way**) Finally, burning wood isn't very clean in the sense of smoke and particulates. The prettier the flames, the less efficient (clean) the burn. I'm sorry, but I do like pretty yellow flames in my fireplace.

Back to the project. So far, we have a stove:

Second hand wood burning stove

We were at the local hotel one day and spotted this outside on the pavement, where it had previously been in the bar. We asked how much they wanted for it, and got told we could have it for nothing if we'd take it away. Needless to say, we didn't need telling twice! It needs new glass in one of the doors, a new handle on the other door, and a new grate, but it was definitely working before they took it out. It has an integral boiler, which we wanted, that was linked up to radiators in the hotel. I reckon the space heated by the stove and those radiators is about the same size as our house, so the stove should be about the right size for us.

Part of our research involved finding the information plate on the front of the stove and contacting the manufacturer. We now know it's a Charnwood 40B (the B is for Boiler) and they were kind enough to track down the installation instructions of this obsolete stove, so we also know that its nominal output is 3.2 kW to the room and 7.5 kW to the water, which is pretty much ideal. They also sent us a price list for spare parts, and since they were so helpful, we ordered replacement door glass from them, even though we could have got it cheaper elsewhere. The grate bars were over £100 for a set, so we passed on those. We don't want to burn coal anyway, and wood prefers a solid bed, so we scrounged a couple of fire brick from old storage heaters (from the hotel again) which fitted nicely.

We contacted Thermoboard requesting a quote for underfloor heating. We were thinking of their pipes-in-polystyrene system, to be fitted under the floorboards. There's excellent access to the underside of our floor, but getting the pipes in the right place would involve a lot of drilling through joists and fiddling long lengths of uncooperative pipe through the holes.

When the quote came, it wasn't for that system at all, but for pipes embedded in chipboard flooring. At first I thought they'd made a mistake and quoted for the wrong thing, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the right solution. We had wanted to polish the floorboards instead of covering them with carpet or whatever, but if I'm honest, they're nothing special. I'm sure they're not as old as the house (which is nearly 200 years old) and probably much more recent. I'd had a feeling for a while that this project wasn't quite right and that Something had to give. Maybe that something is the floorboards.

So, we have the stove, give or take a few repairs, and the specification for the heat distribution. I was glad to see that the requirements of the underfloor, namely 5.2 kW, were in the same ballpark as the output of the stove. What we needed next was to specify that tank to link the two together. Even if we didn't want input from solar panels, we'd still need a tank to store the heat from, e.g. lighting the fire in the evening through to warming the house for getting up in the morning. Having the heat stored also allows more control of temperature, which is necessary as the underfloor heating operates at a relatively low temperature - relative to what leaves the stove, that is.

Through the 'ish forum, I got in touch with a couple who are installing a similar heating system and have done a great deal of work investigating exactly what they need. As luck would have it, they live about twenty miles from us, so we arranged to visit and pick their brains. Over tea and cake, we looked at the design for their tank. It has a couple of features to solve problems that had been bothering me. 1. If you have input from the solar panels in the bottom of the tank, it will preheat the water for the stove when you have the stove on, but what about in the summer when you're relying on solar alone and only need hot water, not heating too? Won't you end up with a big tank full of luke warm water? Solution: A chimney type arrangement running up the middle of the tank. This takes hot water from the bottom of the tank straight to the top. It also has holes, so when the water at the top is hot, it starts to diffuse into lower areas of the tank. Brilliant! 2. What do we do if we go away for a week or two in the winter and need to keep the house from freezing? Solution: Have a second immersion heater in the bottom of the tank (you have one halfway up anyway, for hot water when the summer sun is being a bit Welsh), but above the chimney thing. This produces the tankful of tepid water that we were trying to avoid when we want a shower, but is exactly what we need to keep the frost off the house.

Our new friends also recommended their supplier, Newark Copper Cylinders, who are very helpful and will make a tank to whatever specification you want. Their prices aren't too bad either. This was an enormously helpful meeting (and it was very nice to make new friends, too!) which solved a couple of problems and saved me a lot of work researching tank manufacturers.

I still had a couple of questions regarding the tank***, namely where to put it and how big to get. 1. Where? I want the stove-to-tank system to run without electricity, i.e. on the principle that hot water rises, so I'd originally assumed we'd need to put the tank in the loft. This puts serious constraints on the size of the thing, especially considering that it would be over our heads, and loft joists aren't always particularly strong. Alternatively, we have plenty of space below the stove (in the workshop) but that would require a pumped system. If we had a power cut, we'd then have to put out the fire in case the water in the back overheated and it exploded. 2. How big? In general, the advice for a thermal store (the kind of tank that stores heat for future use) is, The bigger the better. That's not very helpful if you'd really like to put the tank in the loft and want to know how small a tank you can get away with.

There is an online space I know of where experts dwell and talk in detailed technical terms about designs for green houses (that's eco-friendly houses, not places to grow plants). I've been aware for some time that the answers to all my questions may be found here, but scared to venture to that place, for fear of not understanding a word that's said. It's like mastering just enough of a foreign language to ask a question, then not having a clue what the answer means. That place is the Green Building Forum.

Having got my tank problems down to two questions, I plucked up courage and posted my questions on the Green Building Forum, with suitable pleas not to talk in jargon - and they didn't! I got some really helpful advice on positioning, namely the suggestion that I consider putting the tank on the same level as the stove. This was something that hadn't occurred to me, as I'd assumed that a thermosyphon system (i.e. working on the heat rises principle) would require the tank above the stove. Apparently not. After some discussion, we came up with a plan to put the tank in the airing cupboard. This is on the same level as the stove with the kitchen in between. The flow pipe from stove to tank goes up over the kitchen ceiling and down (a little) into the tank, then the return pipe runs from the bottom of the tank down under the kitchen floor and back up into the stove, so we have a circle of pipes around the kitchen, with stove on one side and tank on the other. As the hot water rises from the back of the stove, it sets a current flowing round the circle, drawing cold(er) water into the bottom of the stove via the return pipe. As the tank is halfway round this loop it gets filled with hot water on its way round.

Another piece of advice I got from the Green Building Forum was to get in a professional plumber. Apparently designing a central heating system is not a job for an amateur. This posed a bit of a challenge. We had tried to get quotes from plumbers earlier in the year. One was very enthusiastic, insisted that what we needed was a pumped system with the tank downstairs, and sent us a quote that was several thousand pounds over our budget. Another was very reluctant to give advice and kept asking what we wanted to do, which didn't inspire confidence. A third seemed convincingly knowledgeable, but never actually quoted at all.

Since the third plumber seemed to know what he was talking about, I got in touch with him again. He remembered coming to visit and was quite embarrassed about not quoting. He'd been busy and by the time a few weeks had passed, assumed we'd have found someone else. Well, we hadn't and this was three months later - would he quote please? And would he mind if I sent him all the information I'd amassed in the meantime? He agreed, but even so, it took several weeks and more phonecalls before he eventually sent us a quote, though before he did, he called to discuss some of the details, which I felt was a good sign. We accepted the quote and booked him in for the last week in October, giving us less than a month to order the underfloor heating and tank, and lay all the heating boards ready for him to connect up the pipework.

At the time I called the plumber, I still didn't have a clear answer to the question of how big the tank should be. Advice from two contributors to the green building forum was, "Standard rule of thumb gives 400 litres," and, "There's no way that's going to be big enough." Our friends from this 'ish forum had said, "I wouldn't want to risk anything less than 450 litres," and when I spoke to the plumber he said, "With this sort of system people would usually have 800 to 1000 litres." All this was pointing to a very big tank, but I still wasn't convinced.

There are two approaches to determining tank size; big enough to absorb all the heat you might generate or big enough to supply all the heat you're likely to need. I had a feeling it was the first approach that was leading to the very large estimates, whereas the second approach seemed more sensible to me. Surely if the tank's full of hot water we can just burn less wood? There was also some of the second approach, but assuming we'd light the fire fairly infrequently and want the tank to keep us supplied with a day or more's heat between lightings. We really only want a couple of hours' worth - after that we'd be happy to light the fire again if need be.

I did various calculations for how much water we'd need, came up with various answers, and generally got stuck halfway through. Eventually I found an approach that convinced me, if no-one else. The quote for underfloor heating included a figure for flow rate, which I multiplied up to the two hours we wanted, then multiplied by 1.5 for the rule of thumb that heating uses two thirds of the tank and hot water one third. That gave me 350 litres and that was what I ordered, ignoring all advice to go for bigger, and also ignoring advice from the tank supplier to go for smaller!
---

* Yes I know the sun will burn out one day, but that's really not a timescale that concerns me.

** This is the argument I've heard. I have no idea what the figures are, but it sounds plausible.

*** I know I should call this a cylinder, especially if I'm talking to a plumber and trying to explain where a problem is, but it's a big vessel containing water. It's a tank, OK?

November decluttering challenge

2011-11-02T17:45:00.000Z

The challenge is to get rid of one thing every day, not just as a way of getting rid of thirty things, but to build a new habit of looking at things and asking, Do I really need that? Getting rid of doesn't necessarily mean that the thing has to leave the house that day, but action must be taken towards that goal. We have some things in the probably valuable to somebody category, which means either selling them or freecycling. Selling is harder, but the money would come in handy. I'm planning to advertise these at the start of the month, then if they don't sell in two weeks, freecycle them. Other things will go straight to freecycle, and I have a shiny new freecycle account ready for action! Other destinations will be box for charity shop and bin though that last one may hurt.

So here we go then. I'll be updating this post throughout the month with details of what I'm getting rid of each day.

Nov 1st. Electric Hob

Rather smart halogen hob. I prefer gas.

This had to be the first one. It was installed in the kitchen of our last house when we moved in, and I quickly had it replaced with a gas hob. That was about four years ago and we've been meaning to sell it ever since. When I fetched it out of the store room I found it wasn't as clean as it might be, so I spent much of the morning polishing it, then Ian took a photo and posted an ad on Preloved.

Nov 2nd. Back issues of New Scientist

Terrible photo of heaps of magazines, but you get the idea.

I've subscribed to this magazine on and off for some years, and have always kept old issues thinking that I'll want to re-read them. I have to face up to the fact that I just don't, and these are clogging up the house. A friend mentioned something she'd read in New Scientist, I asked if she'd like my old copies, and she said yes. Easy!

Nov 3rd. Two bottles of squash

This squash has sweeteners in.

Neither of us like the taste of artificial sweeteners, to the point where we can't really stand drinks with them in. I also have a principled objection - I like my food honest. If it tastes like it's full of calories, it should deliver! Unfortunately these additives are so ubiquitous that we occasionally buy products with them in by mistake. These then sit at the back of the cupboard for ages while we attempt to palm them off on guests. When my friend came to collect the magazines, I remembered that she drinks squash with sweeteners, so gave these to her, which is a much better use for them.

Nov 8th. Books and shoes

I needed to go into town for food shopping so took the opportunity to take some things to charity shops while I was there. That heap of books is the result of a quick book audit. Some of these I've had since childhood and really don't know why I was keeping them, others are books bought more recently, read once and not likely to be read again. Ian contributed some too, making up a total of 35 books (one item or 35, depending on how you're counting). As for the shoes, this was prompted by going to a funeral recently and choosing my dark burgundy boots over my black shoes. If I don't need black shoes for a funeral, what else do I need them for? I used to wear them to work, but as I hardly ever wear them now, they're very uncomfortable when I do. I found a couple of other pair of rarely worn shoes, making up four pairs in various conditions (one item, four or eight, depending...)

Nov 9th. Satellite dishes and extractor fan

We've been meaning to take these off their respective walls since we moved over a year ago. Both are ugly, the extractor really shouldn't be over that type of cooker and we don't even have a telly! In the interests of getting rid of stuff, we finally got round to doing both jobs, and Ian took them to the tip. (Apart from the smaller dish, minus bracket, which I'm keeping for use as a garden sieve, though it's currently being used to dry acorns).

Nov 20th. Old papers and contents of a drawer

These four box files were full of papers relating to old jobs, specifically data from experiments conducted back in the day when I was actively involved in research. There are good reasons to keep old data - many journals require that data should be kept for at least five years after associated reports have been published, in case other scientists want to examine the details. Some of my papers fell into that category, but more than five years have by now elapsed, and in any case I'm no longer in contact with my colleagues, so they wouldn't be able to get hold of the data even if someone asked for it. Other papers were more difficult. These were results of experiments I'd conducted more recently (though still at least four years ago) but never written up and published. Throwing these away means accepting that I'm never going to write up those experiments. If I'm honest, I think some of them weren't very well designed anyway.

If paper's only printed on one side, I put it in the scrap paper drawer for re-use. For this lot, I was going to need a bigger drawer (actually, quite a lot ended up in the recycling bin, too). I chose a suitable drawer in the study, which happened to be filled with an assortment of odds and ends. I am now prepared to reveal to you the entire contents of that drawer, and the destination of each item.

Contents of a drawer, laid out and numbered for your perusal (click to enlarge)

Travel iron, in bag. This is quite useful, at least it used to be in our old life. I've used an iron just once since moving, though my skirt did get compliments from two complete strangers on that occasion, so I think it was worth it. Anyway, I'm not getting rid of the travel iron yet. Destination: In the cupboard with the other iron.
Hot brush. This was useful when I had a job which required respectable hair. I don't any more - this can go. Destination: Umm, could be saleable... maybe freecycle.
Ribbons used in our wedding ceremony (it was a handfasting). I can't get rid of these! On the other hand, what's the point of keeping a bit of ribbon? I'll probably use it for something at some point. Destination: Sewing drawer.
Press studs. Destination: Sewing basket.
Bangles from Bengal. A friend gave me these, but they're too small. Destination: Give them to someone who might be able to wear them.
Garden wire. Useful stuff, that. Destination: Greenhouse.
(Ian said rude things when he saw this picture and refused to let me demonstrate its use) Massage roller. I'd like to keep this, but unless I can persuade Ian to join in, it's not much use. Destination: Umm, I dunno.
Wire with in-line fuse holder, complete with fuse. This is a classic, "But it might be useful!" Deep breath now... Destination: Bin.
Occarina in soft pouch. I bought this at a country fair when I was about eight. I may even have played it a bit at some point. I really should get rid of it, but... I've just found the tune book that goes with it! Destination: Umm...
*Too much information alert* Mooncup. I had to change which type of pills I take several years ago, and haven't had periods since then, so I don't need this at the moment, but I'm hanging onto it in case I need it in the future. Destination: A drawer somewhere.
Hair brush. Useful as spare and future replacement when one wears out. Destination: Bathroom cupboard.
Pretty red cord. Destination: Sewing drawer (though it's just occurred to me that this could be ideal for knooking).
Cloth for cleaning glasses. Destination: I think I stuck this in a drawer.
Strap for mobile phone. It has one of those little clips for attaching it to a key ring. Those can be quite handy if you happen to need one. No, really. Destination: Some drawer somewhere.
Handle and base of shaver (no shaving head). This isn't even mine, so I get out of making a decision on this one.
I can't remember what came in this case, but it currently contains a couple of fabric flowers that I wore to my sister's wedding. I have since given away the dress that they went with. Destination: Bin. I'm keeping the case, though.
Scrunchy. I don't wear these, but I might. Destination: Dressing table drawer.
Toothbrush and tiny tube of toothpaste received on a long-haul flight. I can't remember where the flight was to, or even whether it was me doing the flying. However, a spare toothbrush and paste could be handy. Destination: Bathroom cupboard.
Zip-lock case from same flight. One side is transparent. Useful for taking pens and things into the National Library and other such places where they like to see what you're carrying. Destination: Some drawer or other.
Small plastic containers that once contained gloves for use with hair dye. I have one in my handbag with glucose sweets in it, but haven't managed to find any other uses for these. Destination: Bin.
Plastic pieces of goodness-knows-what. Destination: Bin.
American Express travellers cheques that I received in payment for taking part in some online study. I never got round to finding out how to put dollars in my bank account. This is ridiculous. Destination: Handbag.
Cover for my last-but-one mobile phone. I don't think I used it even when I had the phone. Destination: Bin.
Eye mask from aforementioned flight. Umm...
Brushes for cleaning electric shavers and suchlike. Destination: Bin.
Old receipt for petrol. Destination: Bin.
Keys from my last-but-one house. Many were cut because the old lady who used to live there had a habit of buying them in the garden. These aren't going straight in the bin because we're planning to weigh in some scrap metal at some point soon. Destination: In a bag with old nails.
Small purse, one of two, that came with a belt. I used the other one for keeping change for the car park in my car, until Ian cleared it out. Now if I could find that one it might be useful... Anyway, not throwing this away. Destination: Some drawer or other.
Scented wipes. I say scented... they reek. Still, wipes are often handy when camping. Destination: Sponge bag.
Old hanky that I used to practise some embroidery. This can resume its original function. Destination: Hanky box.
Strip of muslin. Very useful for straining jams and suchlike. Destination: Kitchen cupboard.
Reel of thread. Destination: Sewing basket.
Nasal spray, out of date. Destination: Bin.
Epilator. I don't use this because it gives me a rash (and hurts). We pinched its power supply for something else - electric keyboard, I think. Anyway, who'd want a second hand epilator? Destination: Bin.
Battery from aforementioned mobile phone. The trouble with batteries is they're not very convenient to dispose of. Plenty of shops take them, but it's remembering to pick them up before you go out. We have rather a lot of dead batteries... this one's going to join them.

Some thoughts on clutter

2011-11-02T10:48:00.000Z

I've had the draft of a post turning over in the back of my mind for a while now, called, In praise of clutter, but then Louisa set a decluttering challenge and I'm forced to admit that this would be really useful for me to do. So you see, my feelings on clutter are somewhat ambivalent.

Why on earth would anyone want to defend clutter? Pretty much by definition, clutter is excess stuff that gets in the way. We are bombarded with advice on how to declutter, the orthodoxy being that too much stuff is the bane of our affluent lives. This is my problem: It has become an orthodoxy, and this is particularly true amongst the simple living community. Now, I'm all for simple living and opting out of the consumerist treadmill. For me, shopping is a chore not a recreation and the latest new gizmo rarely holds any appeal.

So what is it about the decluttering movement that bothers me? I'm a hoarder by nature. I hang on to things not so much for sentimental reasons, but in case they might come in useful one day. I do have a lot of old junk and occasionally give in to the pressure to get rid of some of it. I always regret it shortly afterwards. I once looked in the boot of my car and and thought, I've never used those things - I don't even know what they're for, and threw them away. That included the jack. Luckily, by the time I had a flat tyre and needed it, I was with Ian, who not only had his own jack, but also knew how to use it.

Advice is always given in terms of how recently you last used the thing (example above: Never).Be merciless. If you haven’t used it in the last year, get rid of it. The last year?! I'm currently making a camera bag (ahem, yes, well, I really must get back to that project) from fabric that's been in my cupboard since I inherited it over twenty years ago! Even I admit that's a little extreme, but one year does seem a ridiculously short timescale. Is that just me?

I don't buy the idea that owning things uses up mental resources, either. Yesterday I was standing on a step ladder to paint the top of a wall and thought, This would be much easier if I used the other ladder. Then I couldn't remember when I'd last seen that other ladder. I asked Ian, Am I imagining it, or do we own another step ladder, that's shorter, with a table bit at the top? He looked baffled. Eventually I remembered - I used to own such a ladder, when I lived with my first husband. It must have gone with his share of our things (it's not just books and CDs you have to split). On that occasion, a ladder I no longer owned used up far more mental energy than it would have done if I'd still owned it.

Eco Cat Lady shared her revelation (it took me ages to find that again, and when I did, I see she used pretty much the same title as this post. I'm not copying, honest!) that nobody really owns anything. Stuff exists and we give it house space for a while. Why should we give up our precious space when the stuff could just as well go off and exist somewhere else? We could always go and get stuff when we need it. I tried this thought on for size. I turned it around in my head and pondered it a while, but I just couldn't make it fit. Eventually, I figured out why I didn't feel comfortable with this idea.

Having stuff stored elsewhere, to be got when needed, clashes with the idea of self sufficiency. Now, I hope I don't go as far as thinking of myself as an island, capable of meeting all needs without input from anyone else (even as an ideal - obviously not in practice) - I do value the interdependent nature of community - but the idea of self sufficiency is very appealing to me. When I'm thinking about what to have for dinner, my first thought is, What have I got in the garden? When I need a new set of shelves (to store all the junk that I can't bear to throw away - yes, I know), my first thought is, Do I have any suitable materials in the workshop?

I love having stuff available when I need it. I love reusing things that other people would throw away. I love the challenge of turning something into something else (as I write this, my husband reads to me from 2CVGB News, Laura Ashley fabric has cunningly turned four wheels into a pair of sturdy fireside pouffes - I think I could pick up some creative storage tips there!) Having to go and get stuff when needed takes either money or considerable time to find exactly what you need second hand (and still some money too, usually).

I remain an unrepentant hoarder!

But still, we do have too much stuff...

There are things we own that I definitely intend to get rid of: An electric hob that we took out of our last kitchen to replace with a gas one, toys bought for a party and not used again, many back issues of New Scientist that I'm never actually going to get round to re-reading... When we moved house we hired a 7.5 ton truck, and couldn't get all our stuff in it. At that point we agreed that we have too much stuff and must get rid of some. We've done nothing about it since, so Louisa's November decluttering challenge is the kick up the backside that I need. I'll write about it in a separate post, but the challenge has started. In the meantime I must go and fit an air vent into the floor and finish painting that room.

Choosing light bulbs

2011-10-25T23:51:00.001+01:00

As part of my ongoing mission to reduce our electricity consumption, I've been using low-energy light bulbs for years. We still have a few of the old-style incandescent bulbs in rooms where we switch the light on only briefly (i.e. the loo and bathroom) because the low-energy ones take a while to get going (actually, the newer ones probably aren't too bad. Ours are mostly quite old). This chimed nicely with last week's Change the World Wednesday challenge, which was to replace at least one incandescent bulb in the house with a low-energy bulb.

Having said that we only have old fashioned bulbs in rooms where they're switched on briefly, I have to confess I wasn't telling the whole truth there: We still had halogen bulbs in the kitchen. We'd been meaning to replace them with LED bulbs, but had had trouble finding any in local shops. By coincidence, in the same week as the challenge, one of the halogens blew and Ian ordered a set of four LED bulbs online (they're nowhere near as expensive as they used to be, by the way).

LED bulbs replacing halogens in our kitchen

So, challenge met with zero effort on my part! I have to say, we don't like the new bulbs very much. They're a very cold light and, being so directional, make the kitchen seem much darker than with the same amount of light more evenly spread around. I'm sure we'll get used to them in time.

This isn't the end of the story, though. The challenge prompted some very interesting discussions of the pros and cons of different types of light bulb, both in comments on the original blog post, and in linked blogs. In particular, Argentum Vulgaris had quite a lot to say about the cons of CFLs (compact fluorescent lights - like the old fluorescent tubes, but smaller), following up his earlier post on the same subject. I was quite shocked to learn that there are lots of reasons not to like these increasingly ubiquitous bulbs, and set about doing some research. Here are the various objections and what I've learned about each one.

They contain mercury. Do they? Well I never knew that. Not only do they contain mercury, but the way they produce light it by vapourising mercury. This poisonous chemical is their very essence! While the mercury is safely contained within the bulb, this may not be a very great concern, but what if one breaks? Mercury vapour is not something you want to be inhaling. Luckily, it turns out that the concentrations of mercury vapour in the air that might result from breakage are nowhere near high enough to do you any harm (though I probably still wouldn't bend over to clear one up straight after it had broken, just to be on the safe side).

That's not the only concern, though. It seems that the main worry about mercury is that, once released into the environment, it gets into the food chain and particularly builds up in fish (presumably not good for the fish, though no-one seems terribly worried about this), which we then eat (not good for us - a major concern). So if all these CFLs that we're now fitting in our houses end up in landfill, will they release a lot of mercury pollution into the environment? One answer that I came across in various places is that the amount of mercury they'll release is outweighed by the savings in emissions of mercury from coal-fired power stations. That claim has to be worth a bit of investigation.

First fact: Coal burning is the biggest human-generated source of mercury in the atmosphere. There are non-trivial amounts of mercury involved here. Estimating how much is tricky, though, because coal is not a pure substance - it's a mixture of all sorts of stuff, varying from place to place. The amount of mercury in coal varies enormously. I did manage to find some estimates, though: The amount of mercury in coal varies from 0.012 mg/g to 33 mg/g, of which 90% is released into the atmosphere. The next question is: How much coal is burned to generate one kWh of electricity? That answer is fairly easy to find: It's 0.36 kg, or 360 g of coal. Using the very lowest figure for amount of mercury in coal, we can calculate that generating 1 kWh of electricity by burning coal releases 3.9 mg of mercury into the atmosphere. Coincidentally, that's almost exactly the same as the amount of mercury in a CFL bulb.

That means that if you can save just one kWh of electricity with your CFL bulb, and if your electricity comes from a coal-burning power station burning the very cleanest coal, then the CFL is releasing less mercury than the incandescent bulb. I feel a graph coming on...

Electricity used by incandescent and CFL bulbs

If you replaced a 100W incandescent light bulb with a 30W CFL (and that's a fairly high powered CFL on the usual equivalents), by the time you'd used the light for 15 hours you would have saved the same amount of mercury in power station emissions as the mercury you might release when you eventually throw the bulb away. Remember, that's with the very cleanest coal; the dirtiest coal contains several thousand times as much mercury as that. Of course, this only applies if your electricity is produced by a coal-fired power station. I'm not sure whether mine is or not, but this analysis persuades me that mercury is a non-issue.
CFLs emit electromagnetic radiation. Well if they didn't, they wouldn't be much use. Light is electromagnetic radiation!
CFLs emit UV radiation. OK, this is a bit more specific, and yes, they do. So does the sun. It's possible to get sunburn from CFLs if they're within about 30 cm of your skin, so you may want to consider how close you put your desk lamp.
In a cradle to grave analysis, CFLs use more energy than incandescent bulbs. I have to quote this one: An International Association for Energy-Efficient Lighting (IAEEL) study conducted in Denmark, explored some carbon footprint factors, but not all, showing it took 1.8 Kwh of electricity to assemble a CFL compared to 0.11 Kwh to assemble an incandescent bulb. That means it took 16 times more energy to produce a CFL. Yes, but we've already seen how quickly a kWh or two can be saved when using these bulbs. The study did not include the fact that a CFL is much heavier and is more dangerous to handle, and will thus cost more to package, to ship, and to sell. Um, much heavier and more dangerous? I don't think so. Maybe a little bit heavier, but it's not going to make that much difference. This research also did not calculate the energy required to safely dispose of a CFL and reclaim the mercury. The cost of removing mercury from the landfills was also not considered. As already discussed, the quantities of mercury involved are trivially small compared with that released by burning coal. There will be no cost of removing it from landfill. If such a study could be done, and considered all the negative contributing factors, it would show a CFL has a massive carbon footprint, one that would dwarf a regular incandescent light bulb. I doubt it.
The waste heat produced by incandescent bulbs makes a valuable contribution to heating our homes. Heat rises. Do you really want to heat your ceilings?
CFLs emit ultrasound. This is interesting. (Actually, most of the article is really annoying, but the bit at the end is interesting). Yes, it seems that CFLs have something known as electronic ballast, which turns the power on and off very rapidly to stop a runaway reaction in the bulbs, which would destroy them very quickly. This operates at a very high frequency, too high for humans to hear but within hearing of just about every other animal. Well, all I can say to this is that my cat doesn't seem overly bothered by it. On the other hand, older fluorescent tubes, which operate at a lower frequency, can be unpleasant to work under, and Mrs Green reports that they give her insomnia and dizzy spells. In my opinion, this is the only good reason for not using CFLs.

After all this research, I've found only one good reason (and there were others that I can't be bothered to go into here) for not using CFLs, and I'm lucky enough not to be affected by this. Don't fall for the scare stories!

'tis the season of mists and warming puddings

2011-10-06T19:49:00.000+01:00

After our brief summer (five days of sunshine and I was in meetings for two of them!) the weather now feels properly autumnal* rather than just a continuation of a rubbish summer. This is the time of year for hearty stews and proper puddings, both of which tend to take a bit of forward thinking. We don't usually have dessert, but this evening as we finished our stew (including four different vegetables, all from the garden), we both fancied something more. Ingredients in the house were limited, but did include flour, butter, sugar, and one egg, which suggested sponge pudding to me.

A quick google found plenty of recipes - Delia's included three eggs (though that did serve four to six) and required steaming for two hours, so that was no good. Then I spotted this microwave recipe, which called for only one egg - bingo! I'm not generally a fan of the microwave - it doesn't feel like proper cooking - but sponge pudding in fifteen minutes? It had to be tried. The recipe even had the advantage of being easy to remember; two of everything apart from the egg, though I doubt an extra egg would hurt it.

At the third time of making this, I persuaded Ian to take a photo before eating it.

Sponge pudding in fifteen minutes? That's practically convenience food!

---

* What's the American equivalent of this adjective? Fallen?

Electricity monitor: Unexpected benefits

2011-10-04T23:26:00.000+01:00

Way back in March, we got a free electricity monitor from Southern Electric. In spite of early misgivings, I've quite enjoyed having it. When I link it up to the online software, it gives me pretty graphs...

Our electricity usage for September. Can you see when the weather got cold?

... and I like nothing better than a pretty graph. Actually, that's not true. I like many things better than a pretty graph (clear, informative graphs included), but let that not detract from the appeal of seeing my electricity usage displayed graphically.

One function the monitor has is to display usage in terms of cost, rather than kWh. By the end of April, I was able to use this function to see that I could expect my bill to drop to £25 per month, which was excellent news as we'd started off paying £35 per month. Imagine my dismay, then, when instead of falling, my bill actually rose slightly, to £38. Surely some mistake? I checked the meter and sure enough, it matched the reading on the bill. Hmm... the meter says our bill should go up but the monitor says it should go down. Something's not right here.

The obvious explanation was that the new gadget wasn't working properly. After all, electricity meters are strictly regulated and carefully calibrated, so unlikely to be at fault. On the other hand... I'd been watching the monitor quite closely, as it was a new toy, and it did seem to correspond to appliance useage pretty well. More investigation was needed. I put the two devices next to each other and watched them. Not all the time, you understand (though at times it got close) - I noted down readings and compared useage recorded on the two devices. It soon became obvious that there was a huge discrepancy: The meter was reading about 80% more than the new monitor and still, the monitor seemed plausible.

I called Southern Electric to let them know, and they sent me a new monitor. As soon as it arrived (which it did promptly), I connected it up, linked it to the computer, and started monitoring. After a week, I was noting the same discrepancy: The meter reading was 80% higher than the monitor. To get exactly the same discrepancy twice couldn't be a coincidence. I called Southern Electric again, and this is when the fobbing-off started. What browser are you using? Well it was Firefox 4 when this started, but it's Firefox 5 now. Yes, we've had issues with Firefox 4 and 5. That'll be the problem. What?! Oh, you connected it to the computer straight away... you should have left it for seven days before doing that What?!!!!! You'll have to leave it running for a month and only connect it to the computer once in the middle of the month and once at the end. I could see by this time that rational argument was getting me nowhere (and I did try more than What?!) so I gave in and accepted the additional month of monitoring.

By the end of June, I had another month's data and guess what? The meter was still reading 80% higher than the monitor. I called Southern Electric again and explained my belief that the meter was faulty. But the readings aren't particularly high, That's because I don't use very much electricity. The monitor readings are even lower. This proved a real sticking point. Investigations of faulty meters are triggered by unusually high readings. If the readings are in the normal to low range, how could it possibly be reading too high? It's very unlikely that the meter is faulty. I know, but it's also very unlikely that two monitors would under-read to exactly the same extent. We have to choose between two very unlikely things. Eventually that argument proved effective, I refused to complete the questionnaire on typical useage that would loop straight back to Point 1, found out how much it would cost to have a check meter installed if I turned out to be wrong (£31.80, or roughly the amount I'd already overpaid since noticing the fault), and persuaded them to send a man out to install a check meter.

A very nice man came to install the check meter in early July, then we had to wait until both meters had clocked 200 units (kilowatt hours). Against all their expectations, this took the best part of two months (I told them it would). For the first week or so of this, I continued to keep a close eye on my three electricity measuring devices. As before, the discrepancy between the old meter and the monitor was 80%, but between the old meter and new check meter, only 50%. The check meter was reading lower than the old meter, but still higher than the monitor. This was most peculiar. I spent some time investigating this, and discovered one circuit in my house that was completely ignored by the monitor... and then got rather bored of the whole thing.

When the check meter eventually clocked up its 200 units, I got in touch with Southern Electric again, and they sent a meter reader round to confirm my readings. Fair enough - they can't just take my word for it that the meter's wrong, I might be a complete idiot incapable of reading a meter. The meter reader turned out to be the same very nice man who'd installed the check meter. Let's just bypass the office folk, he said, and installed a nice new meter for me there and then. He also managed to solve the mystery of the ignored circuit - we have some rather peculiar wiring in our house, it turns out.

So now, after several months of investigation, I have a nice new meter and over £100 credit on my electricity account. All I have to do now is persuade them to transfer that to my bank account...

Light paintings

2011-10-03T17:25:00.000+01:00

My friend Anna Halfpenny took/created some amazing photos with a long exposure and a torch. I just had to share them with you!

2CV parked in front of a barn

A cyclist approaches....

... but meets with misadventure.

The perils of cycling without lights!

Reducing car use

2011-09-30T10:36:00.001+01:00

This week's Change the World Wednesday challenge is to replace at least one car trip with a bicycle or walking trip. Living out in the sticks, that's pretty tricky. I generally only use the car to go to places that are too far away to walk. The car journeys I'm making this week are:-

Visit Sarah in Capel Seion: 8 miles
Meeting in London - drive to Aberystwyth station: 12 miles
Club AGM in Warwickshire: 130 miles

The last is obviously out of the question, but the first two are the kind of distances that people cycle. Could I...? Have you seen the hills around here? My car struggles with some of them! This begs the question: Why am I hanging on to my bike?

My bike.

I bought it when we moved to the flatlands, determined to get fit and cycle to work (8 miles). Apart from the fact that my route to work was nowhere near as flat as much of the surrounding countryside, I discovered that it was very busy and the roads weren't wide enough for two cars and one bike. This is not good if you happen to be on the bike and there are two unbroken streams of cars. Frankly, it was all too scary, and I never did cycle to work.

Now I'm a lot fitter and the roads are less busy, but they're still pretty scary, with many twists making for poor visibility. They're also much steeper. When the shortest journey I make regularly is as much as eight miles (sixteen, counting coming back), that feels like a big mountain to climb. Do I admit that I'm never going to use my lovely bike, or do I man up and get in the saddle? I don't know.

I do reduce car use in other ways, though. I loathe going to the supermarket, so I go as rarely as possible. I've managed to reduce the frequency to one every five or six weeks - just ten times a year - which I'm pleased with. For perishable food we either go to the village shop (300 yards) or try to combine shopping with another trip. Ian volunteers as a community bus driver, which takes him into town once or twice a week. I give him instructions to go to the butcher or the greengrocer while he's there. This means that shopping very rarely means an extra car journey.

This is all very well, but none of this is helping with this week's challenge. There was one thing I could do with this week's car journeys. I picked up the phone:

Hi, it's Rachel. Do you want a lift to Sarah's tonight?

By offering a friend a lift, I cut out one car journey. I haven't always been in the position where car sharing is practical - I certainly knew nobody who did the same journeys as me where we last lived - but here it is, at least some of the time.

Sunrise

2011-09-27T18:43:00.001+01:00

I slept badly last night and at some point amidst the tossing and turning I noticed that it was starting to get light. I got up and looked out of the window to see a beautiful clear dawn.

First light of dawn

Once out of bed, there didn't seem much point going back, so I got dressed, made myself a cup of tea, and went outside to watch the sunrise. I watched as the soft grey clouds turned vivid pink.

The pink faded and I stood, drinking my tea. I listened to the birds announcing the new day, sometimes just one, sometimes several. I saw a buzzard flying back and forth across the valley. I listened to the constant rush of the stream, loud enough to all but drown out the dawn chorus. I saw a bat circling, but got distracted before I saw where it went when it headed home to roost. I was taken by surprise by a baa! behind me, from a group of lambs not used to seeing a human so close at this time of the morning. I saw the trail of an aeroplane climbing from the horizon, first a dirty smudge in the sky, then a streak of pale gold as the sunlight caught it.

I saw the sunlight first on distant hills, then a while later the tops of the oak trees above me acquired a soft golden glow, then distinct shadows on the ground below, until they were fully, beautifully lit by the rising sun.

Sunlit trees, while the ground below is still in the shadow of the hills.

Fruit leather

2011-09-26T17:22:00.000+01:00

Even when we can't grow fruit and veg ourselves, we still try to buy local, seasonal food, which isn't great for fruit in winter. Last winter I got pretty fed up of apples. In the interests of more variety this year, I've been thinking about preserving fruit by drying. I did try straightforward drying for a handful of blackcurrants, just by spreading them out in a basket in the conservatory. That worked, but took quite a while, and I'm not sure it would be so easy with larger fruit (and most fruits are larger than blackcurrants).

As an alternative to drying fruit whole, they can be pulped first and spread out to make fruit leather. I tried this for the first time last year using a mixture of rosehips and haws, and it was delicious, so I'm repeating that as well as extending the range this year. Haws (fruit of the hawthorn tree) are invaluable for providing pectin, which is essential for fruit leather. My first batch was made with blackberries and haws picked when foraging in Wiltshire. I stewed the fruit in a pan together, roughly equal quantities of the two kinds, and kept stewing it until most of the water had evaporated.

Once I had a thick, stodgy mess in the pan, I pushed it through a seive to remove the pips and stones. This is hard work and takes ages, but can be done whilst watching telly, so it's not too bad. When I got fed up of trying to separate pulp from pips and had a suitably thick paste in the bowl, I tasted it and added a bit of honey to sweeten. You could use sugar, but I fancied honey - not the runny kind, though, because I didn't want to add too much liquid. Once it tasted about right* I spread it thinly on a non-stick baking tray.

Spreading fruit pulp on a baking tray. This one's damson. I did have a better picture of an earlier batch, but deleted it by mistake. Sorry.

This then needs drying. In warmer weather I could probably do this in the conservatory, but it would need protection from flies. As it's pretty cold and damp here at the moment, I'm using the oven for drying. This means putting the tray in the oven on a very low temperature for an hour or two, then turning the oven off and leaving overnight. If it's still sticky in the morning, put the oven on again for a bit. I think opening the door periodically would probably help, too.

I did try being economical by putting one batch of leather on a low shelf while cooking cakes on a higher shelf. They don't need the oven very hot, so I thought that would be OK. It was OK, but the resulting leather had a strong taste of caramel, which might not be what you're aiming for.

When dry, fruit leather looks like this:

Fruit leather (damson again) being peeled off the baking tray.

As these were stickier on the tray side than the air side (unsurprisingly) I decided to fold them over so they stuck to themselves and made double thickness leather, which I then cut into snack bar sized pieces.

As you'll have picked up from the rest of this post, I've made several batches of this. The first was blackberry and haw, using the Wiltshire hedgerow fruit - most delicious. The second was bilberry and haw using local fruit. The bilberries were right at the end of their season and the haws were barely at the start of theirs, so neither fruit was at its best. This was OK, but not as good at the blackberry one. The next batch was damson (no haws in this one as damsons are high pectin themselves), using a pound of windfalls that next door's tree had dropped onto our driveway. I couldn't bear to see them sitting there going rotten! That one was very tasty but possibly a bit too sharp. I probably should have added a bit more honey.

I have another batch of damsons on the go now (I got permission from the neighbours to actually pick their fruit). This time I've left the stewed pulp fairly wet and hung to drip for cordial first, then I'll make leather with the remaining pulp. I'm assuming the flavour will be less intense as I'll have taken some off for cordial, but damsons have a lot of flavour to start with, so there should be plenty to go round. I'm also planning a rosehip one, as that was so nice last year... in fact, as the haws are now a bit riper, I might just go and do that right now!

---

*One advantage of fruit leather is that it needs much less sugar (or honey) than other methods of preserving fruit, such as jam,

Save energy: Clean the fridge

2011-09-20T12:04:00.000+01:00

I'm not talking about the cleaning the inside of the fridge, here, but the back. A fridge is a heat exchanger; it takes transfers heat from the inside of the fridge out into the room. The part that sends the heat out into the room is a radiator type attachment on the back. If this is coated with an insulating layer of dust, it's going to have to work harder to get the heat out there, so the fridge is less efficient, overall.

Cleaning it is such a no-brainer that I shouldn't need any prompting to do it, but... well, I'm rubbish at housework at the best of times, and out of sight is out of mind, so this job tends to get neglected. I am therefore very grateful to Small Footprints for this week's nice, easy Change the World Wednesday challenge: Check your fridge. This gave me the nudge I needed to go and do that small job.

It really is a very small job; move fridge away from the wall, dust back of fridge, move it back. Of course it wasn't quite that easy. I used a cloth duster first, and though that removed some of the dust, there was obviously still quite a lot left. I then tried a fluffy kind of duster, which wasn't much better. I decided that what I really needed was a paintbrush to get into all the little gaps, and wondered where I'd left the brushes after the last time I used them. A bit of poking about revealed one brush on the kitchen windowsill (not sure what happened to the others). That worked much better than the dusters, so then it was a matter of a few minutes to clean the back of the fridge.


Before and after photos of the back of my fridge. As you can see, years of neglect left it seriously dusty. I don't know why the grill in the right hand photo appears lower. I didn't move it, honest.

It's not completely clean now, but there's a lot less dust trapping the heat in the grill, so hopefully my fridge is now breathing a sigh of relief that it doesn't have to struggle against this blanket as it tries to do its job.

Foraging near and far

2011-09-13T23:12:00.000+01:00

I'm afraid this is a no-picture post. I did have some, but I just deleted all 76 photos on my phone instead of just one, as I intended. Sorry about that. Anyway, on with the post.

We've been away a fair bit this summer and when we were in Oxfordshire over the August bank holiday, I noticed elder trees laden with ripe berries, while the fruit on mine is still (even now) hard and green. The following weekend we went to my cousin's wedding in north Wiltshire (I'm not sure that's technically correct, but it sounds better than near Swindon doesn't it?) and stayed for the weekend, giving us much of Sunday free. I found a large carrier bag and set off on Sunday morning along a footpath beyond the church that my cousin had shown us last time we visted.

I was hoping to find elderberries, but didn't see them in the quantities I'd seen in Oxfordshire. I did see blackberries, but thought I wouldn't pick those as they're already ripe in Wales, too. I saw a few elderberries, and picked those I could reach. Then I spotted bright red haws (fruit of the hawthorn). As a fruit in its own right, the haw is pretty rubbish. It's small, mostly stone, and tastes very bland. However, it is very high in pectin and what flavour it has is similar to apple, which makes it very useful in combination with the dark berries that are ripe at this time of year. I picked some.

A little further on I spotted something very exciting - damsons! These may not be exciting to other people, but I've never seen them growing wild before. In fact, I had to look them up when I got home to be sure they weren't wild plums, or some other related species. Not that it would have mattered if they were, but I like to know. So, small plum-like fruit with dark skins and a beautiful blue bloom, sweet flesh and very sharp tasting skins - those are damsons. I picked some of those, too.

Moving on, I picked a few more elderberries, some more haws, then spotted such abundant, ripe, accessible blackberries that my resolve weakened and I gathered some of those - quite a lot, actually.

On my way back by this time, I tried a different turning, and found a large grassy area by a tiny lane, and here were the elderberries I'd been seeking! Two or three trees, heavily laden, with branches hanging low enough to make picking easy. I gathered as many as I could, along with some more damsons that were also growing there. Satisfied with my haul, and indeed struggling to carry the full bag, I headed back up the hill, deciding to pick no more fruit. But then...

Then, right on the footpath that I'd walked down earlier, I saw hazelnuts! It is very rare to spot these before the squirrels eat them all, and here was an entire tree's crop spread out all over the footpath. Again, my resolve weakened, and I stopped to pick up as many hazelnuts as I could find.

The final haul was: 5lb 2oz elderberries, 1lb 4 oz haws, 2lb 15 oz damsons, 2 lb 6 oz blackberries, and 1lb 14oz hazelnuts. In total, pretty heavy!

So what to do with this bounty? Whatever I did would have to be quick - berries go mouldy remarkably quickly, especially blackberries. After all that foraging (about three hours) and travelling back on Sunday, I didn't have any time immediately, but got to work on Monday. First the elderberries - the purpose of my mission.

I've heard that elderberries make excellent wine. My dad make elderberry wine once. I don't remember the quality, but a great deal of it was consumed at my eighteenth birthday party. I looked to the 'Ish forum for a recipe, and found a simple one. As I had five pounds of berries, I increased the quantities by about a quarter, i.e. added an extra half pound of sugar and a bit more water. I didn't bother with the lemon juice, though, as I didn't have any - surely elderberries are acidic enough anyway? I also couldn't be bothered with the freezing first, but I did spend quite a bit of time squeezing them, so hopefully that will make up for it.

After four or five days (I lost count), I laboriously strained the liquid from the pulp. This was complicated by the fact that I had plans for the pulp, so needed to keep it. Eventually I got the whole lot strained and into a demijohn. As instructed, I topped it up until it was pretty much full. This turned out to be a mistake, as I discovered it the next day trying to escape! There wasn't a huge amount of mess, but the top of the air lock had disappeared, being replaced by a cap of breathing purple sludge. I left it to calm down a bit...

Having set the elderberries on their way to becoming wine, I turned my attention to the other fruit. A little more jam wouldn't go amiss, so that was the destination of the damsons. I thought they'd be low pectin, but according to the internet they're not, so I didn't bother adding anything to them, apart from sugar, of course. Although the mixture passed the wrinkle test, the jars of jam didn't set entirely. Either I didn't give it long enough cooking, or damsons are, as suspected, low in pectin. The jam's a fairly thick gloop, so can be spread on bread, which is OK, but I could have used lemon pips to improve it.

I wasn't sure whether Ian would like the damson jam, and he was out at the time so couldn't give feedback, so I decided to make more jam with some of the blackberries. I know these are low in pectin, so I mixed them with half of the haws (10oz). I can't remember how many blackberries I used, but it was considerably more than the haws. I think I picked some more from the garden. Anyway, after more stewing, pushing through a seive, adding sugar, boiling and pouring into jars, I also have some blackberry and haw jam, or bramble jelly if you prefer.

I had one more plan for this batch of foraged fruit. I'd kept back half of the haws and a similar quantity of blackberries to make fruit leather, which I'll tell you about in a different post. Apart from that, I picked the leafy bits off the hazelnuts and spread them out to dry so they won't go mouldy. I can deal with them another time.

The title of this post is foraging near and far, but I've only told you about the 'far' as yet. A week later I went out foraging closer to home. I've noticed a few hazelnuts and beechnuts on the ground, so I was hoping to find more of both of these, as well as more blackberries and anything else I could find. I know I've seen roads lined with hazel trees, but I obviously misremembered the location, because they weren't there when I went out looking. I did find blackberries along that road, though, so I picked some of them.

I then went to a spot with several waymarked walks, including Ancient Beech Walk. If I was going to find beech nuts anywhere, surely they would be here. I did find the prickly cases on the ground, and when I prised them open they had small nuts inside, but they did look very small. Sure enough, when I stuck a fingernail through them, they turned out to be empty. I did try quite a few, but no actual nuts. Maybe I'm too early - is this the beech tree equivalent of the June drop of apples? Never mind, the trees were very beautiful. I wish I could show you pictures!

On my way to the beech tree walk I did find some more bilberries, proving me wrong about their season being over. Although they were small I stood and picked them, getting rather cold in the process, as the edge of Hurricane Katia was just starting to make itself felt. Further on, I found and picked more blackberries, and more haws, though had to move on because of the cold. Foraging is not a very energetic activity.

As I walked back across the fields, I looked out optimistically for more field mushrooms, but didn't see any. As I got back to the village, though, I did find a few hazelnuts on the ground.

What to do with this lot, then? Well the blackberries were destined for wine, as I'd read on the 'Ish forum that this wine can be drunk young, i.e. by Christmas. I'd have to wait a year for the elderberry, so it'd be nice to have some red that I can drink soon. The reserved elderberries were for this wine, too. They'd have plenty of wine yeast in them and hopefully give the wine a bit more depth of flavour. I stuck my pound or so of blackberries in a bucket with a pound of sugar, the reserved elderberries, and some water. I was too tired to do more with it that night.

The next day, I looked up recipes for blackberry wine. Most called for at least four pounds of fruit to the gallon, some considerably more. They also all required six months to a year of fermentation/maturing. Oh well. I obviously needed more fruit, and while there's plenty around, I do get a bit annoyed by websites that tell you that an hour's picking will easily yield five pounds of berries. Um, not when I'm picking, it doesn't. Even when berries are easily found and abundant as they are at the moment, I pick around two pounds in an hour. Not a problem - just saying.

I started by picking all the berries I could get to on the steep bit with the oak tree with only moderate risk to life and limb (it's steep). That brought my total up to about three pounds. More berries needed. I checked the railway timetable to make sure no more trains were due that day, and set off along the railway line. Blackberries always grow alongside railway lines, don't they? Sure enough, I didn't have to go far before I found plenty. Another hour and a half's picking brought the total quantity of berries up to 5lb 9oz. All these went into the bucket, along with another pound of sugar, and I mashed it up with a potato masher. I don't have a hydrometer (would it work in amongst all that fruit pulp?) but blackberries are quite high in sugar, so I didn't think I'd need too much. The total volume is rather more than a gallon, but there's an awful lot of pulp, so by the time I've strained all that out I may be down to a gallon. If not, then I'll have more wine!

I had about 6oz each of haws and bilberries, which I used to make more fruit leather. I will tell you about this, I promise, but right now it's bed time, so I'm going to stop blogging. Night night!

Zero waste week update

2011-09-13T20:51:00.000+01:00

In fulfilment of my pledge for Zero Waste Week, I had planned to hem the offcuts of my new dress to make hankies and find or make a couple of pouches for keeping clean and dirty ones in my handbag. But I didn't get round to it. There was much foraging to be done (which I'll tell you about shortly), and though that's a fairly lame excuse, it's all I've got.

I did make some progress, though. Commenting on my post, Eco Cat Lady advised that old T-shirts are easier because they don't need hemming. This was very useful information! I have a big heap of old T-shirts reserved for gardening, as they're not fit for wearing in public (actually, some of them probably are these days, as my standards have slipped somewhat). I fished one out from the bottom of the pile, set to with the scissors, and made myself a heap of washable tissues.

Next, I found a plastic box that used to have fruit in it, and a little plastic pouch in which underwear were sold. These became my new tissue box and dedicated bin/laundry bag for the used hankies.

Replacement for box of tissues and bin

The theme of this year's Zero Waste Week was Reducing waste away from home. Hmm. Replacing the tissue box is very much at home. Well, I did go out a few times, and I stuffed one of my new tissues into my pocket, so that when I needed to blow my nose, that was what I used. I didn't quite do what I intended, but I succeed in reducing waste and I can say that I have used no disposable tissues since making the pledge.

Chips

2011-09-09T18:03:00.000+01:00

I decided that the best way of preserving my blighted potatoes would be to turn them into frozen chips. We used to buy chips ready frozen, so making them from scratch is something I've learnt to do in the past year. I had some trouble finding instructions for how to do so, and eventually found what I was looking for in Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book.

She starts by saying that deep frying has no place in a domestic kitchen, especially with children around: I know we should not over-protect them, but I draw the line at boiling oil. Having said this, I admit the book would be incomplete without instructions for making these delicious kinds of potato. I tried making chips according to her recipe, which involves cooking them in small batches. They're crispy enough when they first come out of the oil, but by the time enough small batches have been cooked for a meal (and there are only two of us), most of the chips have gone soggy.

I started experimenting with an alternative method. We used to cook oven chips, so could I replicate those? The final stage of cooking is obviously in the oven, but they're coated in fat before we buy them, so I'd need a first stage of cooking to apply that coating. I tried deep frying, but that still led to sogginess - probably too much oil absorbed. Then I tried shallow frying, again in fairly small batches, which was much more successful. I experimented with different fats, including sunflower oil and various meat fats, before settling on beef tallow as my favourite, closely followed by lamb tallow. Lard is no good as it burns too easily.

The recipe is pretty simple:

Cut potatoes into chip shapes, thickness according to preference.
Heat fat in frying pan to a medium heat.
Add chips to pan, in small enough quantity to make a single layer with a bit of room to move about.
Stir constantly while cooking, to coat chips all over in fat and keep them from sticking to the pan and each other. Any bits that do stick to the pan should be scraped off so they don't burn.
When chips are just starting to colour, transfer to a baking sheet.
--- Chips can be frozen at this stage, if storing ---
Cook in oven preheated to gas mark 6/200°C/400°F for 10 min (longer if thick, or if frozen. Even longer if both thick and frozen).

Chips after first stage of cooking, ready to freeze or finish cooking in the oven

We think of chips as being high in fat, and the deep fried kind certainly do absorb a lot of oil. However, when I look at how much fat is absorbed when cooking a portion of chips this way, and consider how much butter I'd add to boiled or baked potatoes, I find it's about the same. For me, then, chips are no more fatty than any other way of eating potatoes, but that probably says more about how much butter I put on my spuds than the healthiness of this chip recipe!

I have to do something about those slugs!

2011-09-08T19:05:00.000+01:00

Last time I posted about slugs eating my veg, Mrs Green asked whether I was sure it was slugs? Perhaps it might be voles or mice? Well, we certainly have those, and that would explain why my attempts at slug-deterrence were utterly useless. But...

Caught in the act

... yes, I am sure.

It's clearly time for action. Actually, it's well past time for action - I should have done something about this ages ago. My problem with slugs, apart from the fact that they're eating all my veg, is that I can't bring myself to kill them. This is entirely illogical as I want them dead. I would be very happy if a hedgehog or a toad, or preferably whole families of both, moved in and munched through the lot of them. I just can't make myself deliberately turn a living creature into a dead one, not even the most vile and repulsive creature on the planet that is the slug.

I need another approach. Graham suggested relocating them - that's something I could cope with. At least, I could if I could face handling them. Yeuch! I donned gardening gloves and lined a flower pot with some weeds. There were several reasons for doing this. 1) to close up the holes in the bottom of the pot, 2) so that the slugs wouldn't all be stuck to the sides of the pot when I tried to tip them out, and 3) in the hope that the slugs might be less inclined to escape if they had some nice vegetation to munch on. This last turned out to be in vain.

Urgh, urgh, don't let it touch me!

Although screaming like a big girl's blouse isn't entirely conducive to deliberate action, I had a plan. Along one edge of our garden, there is what must be a pretty effective barrier.

Surely not even the most determined of monster slugs would cross
a railway line in search of carrots?

A dozen or so slugs have been relocated to the other side of the railway line. I will repeat this operation for as long as I see their horrid slimy bodies making for my veg, and hopefully get the population down to a number I can live with. None would be nice, but I'd be happy with any number that allows me to harvest a few courgettes and maybe a pumpkin.

Field mushrooms

2011-09-08T16:32:00.001+01:00

Chatting to my sister about a year ago, we both agreed that our quality of life would be improved by the ability to confidently identify even one wild, edible mushroom. Well, now I can!

I was out for a walk with Ian recently, crossing a sheep field when I spotted these:

Field mushrooms, but not actually in a field. Sorry.

I rushed over and started picking them. Ian was less enthusiastic, Don't eat them! No, it's OK, I said, These are good. They're field mushrooms. An old lady of his acquantance had told him that it's a good time of year for field mushrooms, so that gave some credence to my claim. I promised to look them up carefully when I got home, which I did, and this confirmed my identification, so I added them to the pasta sauce we were having for dinner that night (well, to my serving. Ian doesn't like mushrooms).

Did it improve my quality of life? Well, yes. My dinner was improved a little and it pleased me greatly to be able recognise a common edible mushroom.

WARNING: Do not rely on this photo to identify field mushrooms. Consult three reliable field guides and pay particular attention to poisonous mushrooms that look similar. In this case, the death cap mushroom looks remarkably similar from above.

Bilberry fields forever

2011-09-08T14:08:00.000+01:00

I should have written this post a couple of weeks ago. Bilberries have a long season, but not forever and I suspect they're over now. Even when I went out looking for them in mid August, I worried that this might be all I'd find:

One slightly withered bilberry clinging to a bush

My sister was staying in early July and while we were out for a walk, she spotted a good place for bilberries, complete with several people who had clearly just been picking said berries, and were at that time wiping the juice off their fingers. Being a bit slow to get round to things, it was over a month later that I set out with plastic tubs in my backpack, down through the dark forest...

I'm not sure whether this picture captures just how steep that path is,
but let me assure you, it is steep.

... to the nature reserve beyond, where many bilberries may be found:

Bilberries as far as the eye can see. Well, not quite, but lots of them.
The purple bits are flowering heather.

Bilberries are never very densely packed on the bushes, but I was relieved to find that they weren't quite as sparse as I'd initially feared.

Several bilberries, all on the same bush

For those who don't know, bilberries are similar to blueberries, but smaller. They grow wild in moorland and hilly areas, including this bit of West Wales. With such an abundance of wild fruit on my doorstep, I feel almost duty bound to collect it, though it did take rather a long time. After about three hours of foraging (you really have to enjoy this activity to do it - the returns aren't worth the time invested otherwise), I had a couple of pots full of berries...

Bilberries in a pot

... and a husband on the phone wondering if I was planning on coming home, you know, ever? He kindly offered to come and fetch me in the car, which meant I didn't have to climb up that very steep path.

I would have climbed this path, but I wasn't looking forward to it

It took Ian longer than he'd expected to get to me (short walk along the path, long drive around by road) so while I was waiting, I picked a few blackberries that were growing near the spot we'd agreed to meet. By the time we got home it was well into the evenings (hence the phone call) so I left processing the berries until the next day. I did, however, put a desertspoonful of lemon pips, saved for this purpose, into a small pot of water to soak overnight. The reason for this is that bilberries are low in pectin, so won't set easily as jam, and lemon pips are a good source of pectin. Preparing the berries the next day wasn't really that much work, just checking them over and picking off the stalks, but it still takes a while. I weighed them...

1 lb 5 oz of bilberries

... put a few aside for adding to cakes, and started stewing the rest, with the lemon pips in a little bag, to make jam. They mushed down pretty quickly, and I shook some sugar in. I wasn't very precise about this, but I was aiming for about a pound, to then add more until it tasted about right. OK, about half a bag goes in... oh hang on, that's a TWO KILO bag, not two pounds! PANIC! First I added the ounce or so of bilberries I'd put aside for cakes - that wouldn't make much difference, though. I also added the blackberries, which I'd decided not to use in jam because of the pips. Still not enough. I rushed outside with a colander and picked blackberries growing by the driveway, along the railway fence. The train only goes past four times a day, so the pollution shouldn't be much of an issue. I've no idea what quantity of fruit I ended up with, but the resulting mixture ended up tasting pretty much like jam - a bit too sweet, but not excessively so. Phew!

Because I'd added the pip-laden blackberries I seived the mixture before boiling it to jam-stage, which was a nuisance. After that came the boiling and the wrinkle test, then I ended up with seven jars of slightly-too-sweet bilberry and blackberry jam. It set nicely, or possibly like toffee - I haven't tried any from a jar yet, though I had a little that never made it into a jar, and that was very tasty.

Bilberry and blackberry jam

First project on treadle sewing machine: Party dress

2011-09-06T23:33:00.000+01:00

It may seem like an ambitious place to start, but I needed a dress to wear to my cousin's wedding. I had a dress I'd worn to another wedding earlier in the summer, but that was a) an evening dress, so not really appropriate for a daytime wedding, and b) in need of many safety pins to hold it up. So, with just under a month to go before the happy occasion, I decided to make myself a new dress.

Taking inspiration from a dress worn by a friend recently (that I've just spent, oh, far too long trying to find a photo of) I had an idea of the design I wanted. This consisted of a simple top - basically triangles over the bust, though I'd want a bit of shaping - set into a high waistband, with a skirt made of curved strips of different fabrics. Sorry I couldn't find a photo to make this clearer!

The first step was to find some suitable fabrics. As I no longer work in an office, I have no need of office-wear, so headed to my wardrobe and identified several shirts in co-ordinating colours that could plausibly be turned into a dress.

I no longer need these - they shall be sacrificed!

I decided to start at the top. I'm not sure why, but it seemed as good a place as any. When I say top, I mean bust, not straps. I chose the plain purple shirt for this bit, and the obvious place to look for fabric was the equivalent part of the shirt. Unfortunately this didn't suit, as a shirt is not entirely symmetrical, having buttons on one side and buttonholes on the other. Nevertheless, I started unpicking, and as I got to the top of the sleeves thought, That's quite a nice curved shape there. Use what you've got - that curve became the top line of my dress.Having identified my pieces of fabric, I cut them approximately to size and set to work rearranging the flat pieces to fit my not-flat chest. There was much holding of fabric against myself, pinning and adjusting. No, you don't get photos of this bit! Once I'd decided where to make darts, extensive tailors' tacks were applied to mark the positions, so I could transfer them accurately onto the other piece before stitching.

Extensive application of tailors' tacks.

Now I was ready to start sewing. Well, not quite ready. I'd found a small space in the spare room for the sewing machine...

A space for sewing

... but hadn't actually tried using it yet. Soon fixed. I picked on the cuffs as unlikely to be of any use, and tried a few lines of stitching.

Test stitching looking OK, actually

After a few goes, I was happy with it and stitched in the bust darts and moved onto the next bit. I picked the collar and cuffs of the striped purple shirt as a suitable waistband. Together, they were easily big enough and had the added advantage of a button and buttonhole to close the back (use what you've got), though I'd need another to go with that.

Opening the collar/waistband to fit the top into

By the time I'd stitched those together, I essentially had a large bra. I did try it on, but no, you're still not getting pictures! Next step was the skirt. I measured my waist, the length of the drop to somewhere below my knees, and the length needed at the hem (I looped the tape measure round my legs and adjusted until it was about loose enough). I divided two of these by six and transferred these measurements onto a piece of paper, then drew freehand curves connecting them all up.

Pattern for one of six skirt sections

As I drew, I realised that one curve was longer than the other, so I measured along that curved edge, and drew another line for the bottom edge, to make sure they'd fit together.

Adjustment to pattern so the pieces would fit together.
Quite advanced, I thought.

I'd thought that I'd need to make these pieces up in patchwork, but when I looked at the shirts I realised that if I went across the shirt, I'd be able to get the length and, get two pieces out of each shirt...

First skirt piece

... just.

Second skirt piece. Of course that fits! Who needs hems?

Right, we're really going some now! Cutting and pinning, cutting and pinning...

Skirt pieces pinned together

Pebble helped.

Once I'd got the whole thing pinned together, it was time for another fitting.

First fitting of pinned-together dress

For once, I'm glad this photo's terrible because it was at this point that I realised I'd forgotten one crucial measurement: My hips. Oops. Oh well, all was not lost. I'd been fairly generous with the hem allowances... maybe if I just moved all the pins closer to the edges it would be OK. I tried it on again, and it was definitely better. A little tight, but probably OK. I sewed it up.

I should probably say something about the experience of using the treadle at this point (given that I didn't say it earlier). Obviously it was more difficult than an electric pedal. My big problem was keeping the wheel going in the right direction. Because I was going slowly, it kept stopping and reversing, which tangled the thread round the bobbin and broke it. I found that if I put one foot right across the treadle and one with just the toes resting on the edge, I could get better control, but I still liked to keep my hand on the top wheel to stop it going backwards.

I got better at it with a little practice, and I certainly had plenty of practice with this project. The only really difficult bit now is going backwards - I need one hand on the wheel to make sure it's going forwards and one hand on the reverse button, which leaves no hand for guiding the fabric. Still, once I got into the swing of it, I was quite happy with the results.

Stitching. Not perfect, but quite tidy.

Anyway, back to the fitting. Um, no, it wasn't OK. Right then, unpick and add another bit in. Then do it again. Then tweak that seam again. Then squeeze another bit of purple in there...

There was quite a lot of unpicking involved in this project.

Unpicked thread

When I was finally happy that I had enough fabric in the skirt, it was time to hem the bottom edge. All that fiddling around made a mockery of my carefully aligned pieces, so I needed to start again with finding the length. Luckily I have a nifty little hem marker gadget. I thought I had a photo of this, but can't find it. I have a cat draped across my arm now, so I'm not getting up to take another pic. Here's an identical one that was for sale on etsy:

Don't you just love the box?

This gave me a series of white chalk dashes around the hemline...

Marking the hem

... which enabled me to sew a more-or-less straight hem.

Getting there now. At some point in the many tryings-on I noticed that the top wouldn't cover my bra at the back, so I needed more fabric there. Remember me thinking the purple cuffs were unlikely to be of any use? Wrong! They were exactly what I needed. So, more unpicking before adding another row of cuffs to the back. Straps were added, made from the lower sections of the pink collar (use what you've got), then I had to face up to the extra buttonhole.

Buttonhole fail

Hmm, that didn't go very well, did it? I gave up on that and did it by hand instead.

All I had left to do after that was to iron the dress into submission, and I think that brings me to the end of the project. No... not quite. I tried on the dress and asked Ian's opinion. Um, it does look a bit Madonna. I'd set the bust darts too close together and given myself a torpedo bra - really not suitable for a wedding! Minor last minute adjustments later, and..

...Here I am wearing the dress at the wedding, posing next to the cake that I had piled fruit on earlier that morning.

I was quite proud of that cake, if I do say so myself.
The dress was OK, too ;-)

Pledge for Zero Waste Week

2011-09-02T10:24:00.000+01:00

Next week is National Zero Waste Week, and Change the World Wednesday has adopted it for this week's challenge, making it a truly international event! The idea is not, in spite of the name, to avoid producing any waste at all for one week, but to take steps towards producing zero waste in the long term. In other words, don't do something just for the week, make a change in your habits that you can keep up all the time. Even if that change is quite small, the cumulative impact will be greater than making a big effort for a short period of time.

I do try to make changes like this on an ongoing basis, the most recent example being the way I store cold meat. When we've had a roast dinner, I cut the remaining meat off the bones, boil down the bones for stock, and put the meat in the fridge. I've always put the meat on a plate and covered it with foil, but I realised that I could avoid using that piece of foil each time if I just use one of my extensive stock of plastic boxes instead of the plate.

Making use of a box saved from a chinese takeaway had with friends about a year ago.

However, the theme of this year's challenge is Reducing waste away from home. This really is a challenge for me, because I spend most of my time at home these days. These means that when I'm out it's not part of my daily routine. Making changes to my habits that apply in non-habitual situations takes a bit more effort. Then the other day, I was looking at my dressing table and thought, I must put that back in my handbag, shortly followed by, That's a wasteful thing I could tackle. What was the offending item?

Wasteful packet of tissues

It was a small packet of tissues. These are particularly wasteful as not only is each tissue thrown away after use, but for every ten tissues there's a plastic packet that is also thrown away. I confess I have a weak spot for disposable tissues, both at home and away, and I really need to address that. Now is the time! I pledge that for National Zero Waste Week, I will replace the packet of tissues in my handbag with washable hankies (and some suitable containers to keep both fresh and used hankies).

Humph

2011-08-31T10:52:00.000+01:00

That is all I have to say on the subject.

This keeps happening.
I don't think I'll be getting any pumpkins this year.

I'm going to have to get those carrots out of the ground ASAP

OK, this is beyond a joke.
What, apart from humans, eats onions, for goodness sake?

First harvests: Carrots, runner beans and tomato

2011-08-24T15:36:00.000+01:00

I've been a bit lax in my updates (as if you were interested!) on garden produce. I think once the excitement of getting any food from the garden wore off, I no longer felt compelled to tell you every time I picked something new.

I first dug up carrots three weeks ago:

First carrots

They're a bit short, in fact some of them are very short, so I need quite a few for each meal. They also have some damage which I think is caused by the dreaded carrot root fly. It's not catastrophic - if I cut the damaged bits out there's still plenty of edible root - but it does reduce the yield somewhat. I'm a bit disappointed with the flavour, too. I'm sure carrots of my childhood were deliciously sweet when pulled straight from the ground, but these are slightly bitter, just like supermarket carrots.

The runner beans are just getting big enough to harvest; I picked the first ones a few days ago.

First runner beans

There are no disappointments here: No sign of pest damage (yet) and they're just as delicious as they should be! There are plenty of small ones on the plants, so with luck I'll be freezing some of these as well as enjoying them over the next few weeks.

I've been watching the first tomato getting gradually redder and redder, and the other day decided it was time to pick it.

First tomato

Frankly, this was disappointing, too. I know what fresh picked tomatoes should taste like, and this wasn't it. It was slightly better than supermarket varieties, but not much.

Oh, well. When the disappointing crops are much the same as I would have bought if I wasn't growing them, and the good ones are much tastier, that's still a pretty good result on average.

Flora and fauna

2011-08-19T15:34:00.001+01:00

Again, I find myself thinking along the same lines as Mrs Green, who was stopped in her tracks by the beauty of a cobweb.

Do you remember the rather uninspiring brown clumps of crocosmia that I painstakingly moved, way back in February? Well, they're flowering now.

Crocosmia (formerly montbretia) flowers.
I don't know why the name was changed.

They're not the exuberant splashes of colour that they can be, but they're nonetheless very pretty and, more to the point, still alive!

I was admiring them the other day when I spotted this fellow:

Stripy caterpillar. I believe he will grow up to be a broom moth.

Isn't he magnificent? A little googling identified him, and found some stunning photos of his relatives. Until I saw those, I hadn't noticed the pattern on his sides - I thought he was plain brown between the stripes, but if you look closely (you can click on the picture to enlarge it) you can see the intricate markings.

It's amazing what you can see if you take the time to look.

French bread

2011-08-19T14:34:00.002+01:00

I've been making bread using the no knead method about twice a week since before Christmas, so it's pretty much routine now. Having got the hang of that, I thought I might get adventurous and try making French bread, which is one of the few foods that Ian really loves. I thought it must be difficult and/or require fancy ingredients to get such delicious loaves, so I was quite surprised when I looked up recipes to find that they were very similar to the one I was already using. In fact, I learnt that French law requires bread sold there to have only four ingredients; flour, salt, yeast and water.

So what makes it so special then? As far as I can gather from these excellent instructions, it's how you handle the dough, and how you cook it.

Handling: when forming the baguettes, fold the dough lengthwise and pinch the edges together several times to form a backbone.

Cooking: turn the oven up as high as it will go and put a shallow pan of water in the bottom to create steam. This should be taken out roughly half way through cooking to allow a crunchy crust to form.

This morning, partly because I'd forgotten to make dough before I went to bed last night, and partly prompted by Mrs Green's recent post on the same subject, I decided to make a couple of baguettes.

Baguettes

This was my second or third attempt at making them, and they came out very well, if I do say so myself! I forgot to take the water out of the oven (that is, I remembered, but ten minutes too late, by which time the bread was cooked) so the crusts are a little soft, but the bread is as delicious as it looks - yummy!

Potato yield

2011-08-15T19:39:00.000+01:00

This is just a quick update on this morning's post about potatoes. I've now dried (more or less) and weighed all the spuds, so I can report the yields:

Foremost first earlies: 29 lb 7 oz (I found a few more this morning)
King Edwards maincrop : 51 lb 9 oz
Desiree maincrop : 41 lb 1 oz

Total : 122 lb 1 oz

If we eat potatoes twice a week and use one pound per meal (which I do), then a year's supply would be 104 lb, and we've comfortably exceeded this. If I get the storage right and the blight doesn't ruin the lot, then I've successfully grown an entire year's worth of spuds, which makes me very happy :-)

Sacks of spuds destined for the store room. Those that were dug too soon, or that I stuck the fork through (rather a lot of the Desiree) are in the kitchen, for using soon or turning into frozen chips.

Treadle powered sewing machine

2011-08-15T12:05:00.000+01:00

I'm on a constant mission to reduce the amount of electricity we use and as part of that, I look at my various appliances and wonder whether there's an alternative to using electricity for that job. By happy coincidence, this week's challenge at Change the World Wednesday is about reducing electricity usage, so I can write about this project and link it to that challenge.

I have a 1970s electric sewing machine that I inherited from my mother. It's very, very heavy, but that's it's only downside. It's a robust bit of kit and has survived a good twenty years of neglect in my ownership without the slightest complaint. Examining the back of the machine, I found that the motor is attached to the back with a bolt-on bracket, and drives the mechanism by a simple belt. This might have been sold as an electric machine, but appears to be based on an older, probably treadle-powered, design.

I also have a treadle. My dad gave this to me some years ago, nicely powder coated (that's a way of applying paint, by the way, not a powdery finish) with a glass top to make a decorative table. It's certainly decorative, but it's also functional, and working the treadle makes the wheel spin smoothly in a most satisfying way.

Could I put these two together? Wandering around the internets, I came across treadleon.net, a website for people who want to actually use (rather than make museum exhibits of) old, human-powered sewing machines (isn't it amazing what you can find on the internet?!) Somewhere on this site* I found instructions for converting an electric machine to treadle-power. Bingo!

What I needed next was a sturdy table top to go between the treadle base and the machine. Since I needed to cut a hole in it, this needed to be solid, rather than strips that would separate when cut. I decided that I wanted something fairly big. Although the treadle would have originally had a fairly small top, not much bigger than the machine itself, I'm used to having the whole dining table to spread out on when I sew. I'm not going that big, or I'll never find house space for it (to be honest, that's going to be a problem as it is), but I'd like a reasonable amount of table to support the fabric as I sew.

Whilst visiting a wood-working friend of ours, a general offer of wood was made, so I mentioned that I was on the look-out for a table top, and he said he had just the thing cluttering up his workshop. It was a hefty lump of pine (strips glued together, but very strongly), 4' x 2'2" and an inch and a quarter thick. He was even kind enough to plane the edges for me, to remove the rather unattractive varnish (we agreed that it would be much nicer used upside down, removing just a little varnish to take it back to the natural pine colour. I did have to remove a couple of lumps of chewing gum, too.)

Where are we now, then? I have the machine, the treadle, and the table top to go between them. There's just one more thing I need, and that's the drive belt. A bit more internet research found Alan's Alterations. As well as altering things, Alan sells industrial sewing machines and traditional leather machine belts, as well as who knows what other unlikely things. He has a shop in Machynlleth which, would you believe it, is just down the road! Well OK, it's thirty miles down the road, but that's really not very far away and happens to be the same town as the Centre for Alternative Technology, which is an interesting place to visit.

My dad came to stay for a week and before he came, he said I should line up a project for him to help me with. I considered the home-made solar panels, but decided that the sewing machine had a better chance of being completed within a week, considering 1) I had all the bits lined up, and 2) we'd probably want to do other things in that week, too.

It turned out that I didn't quite have everything I needed. Dad said we'd need a wide, flat drill bit for the corners, so we went out and bought one of those. After all that preamble (most DIY jobs seem to take more work in the preparation than the actual doing), here's what we did.

First, assemble all the bits.

Sewing machine, table top, and various tools. There are other tools too, that didn't make it into this picture.

At this point I'd already removed the drive wheel from the machine so we could use it to gauge the length of the belt needed.

Next came lots of measuring, head scratching, and marking out of where the hole should be cut in the table top.

A pencil is the most important tool in many jobs

You may notice that the Cut out arrow doesn't go to the edge of the marked area. This is because the front edge of the sewing machine is set into the table, but supported. The instructions told us to cut the hole right through then screw another piece of wood underneath, but I thought it would be stronger, and neater, to leave the original wood in place and just cut a rebate (lowered bit) to take the machine.

While Dad started drilling holes...

Let the drilling commence!

... I removed the electrical gubbins from the machine.

No more electric light in my sewing machine! I wonder if I can fit a little candle into the space where this used to be?

Then came a lot of sawing and chiselling (for the rebate) that I don't have photos for, so you'll have to use your imagination for those bits. Eventually we removed enough wood that we could fit the machine into its new home.

Sewing machine in place, with string belt for lining up with the treadle

At this point we discovered that the slot for the belt needed to go quite a bit further back than the hole for the machine. Here, the rasp came in very useful. We just filed away until the dummy belt (bit of string) went round both wheels without rubbing against the table on the way.

All the measuring and cutting took about a day, and the next day we went up to Machynlleth to visit both CAT (being tourists) and Alan the sewing machine merchant. He sold us six feet of leather machine belt and a staple to hold it together. When asked, he even told me how to combine the two. He also said that after a few weeks' use (um, I don't think I'll be using the machine that frequently, but still) the belt will have stretched, so I'll need to take the staple out, shorten the belt, and join it again.

The next job then, was to cut the belt to size (easy) and join it together with the staple (very difficult). Punching the holes in the belt with a nail was hard enough, but when we'd got the staple posted through both ends we had to close it up with pliers. This was extremely difficult to do as the pliers tended to skid off. I'm really hoping I can get away without adjusting the belt when it's stretched with use, but I guess if it needs it, then I'll just have to do this job again.

Staple in leather belt. Much harder to do than it looks.

Finally, there was a bit of jiggling to make sure the machine was lined up with the treadle wheel** (never mind getting the table top square to the base, it's the machinery that's important) before screwing the table top to the base (or vice versa, as this was done from underneath).

So here it is, all put together, and whadda ya know, it works!

Sewing machine with treadle, all assembled and functional

I still have to sand down the table top to get rid of the old varnish and the pencil marks, then finish it with teak oil (making sure there are no traces of this left when I start using it for sewing). I should really take it all apart to do this, but because it's difficult to take the machine off its hinges, I probably won't.

I haven't yet tried sitting at the machine and actually using it, but I have pushed the treadle with my foot and got it all going round, with the needle going up and down and everything. No doubt it will take a bit of practice to learn to sew with this, but I'm looking forward to it!

---

* I can't actually find it again, but it must have been there somewhere. Although I couldn't find the instructions again, I remembered important bits, such as using the hinges of the machine to support the back. I didn't even know it had hinges before that!

** I found that the belt was in a different place when going round than it was when stationary, so it now rests against the edge of the hole, but hopefully will be clear of it when in use. I may yet need to make that hole a bit bigger.

Buried treasure

2011-08-15T10:00:00.000+01:00

It's been rather longer than the recommended two weeks since I cut the tops off my blighted potatoes but my dad was staying, and then it was wet, and...

Well anyway, I finally got round to digging yesterday evening. It's backbreaking work and it left me with sore and blistered hands, but this moment is pure magic, every time:

That moment when the earth breaks, revealing beautiful potatoes

I couldn't manage the whole lot in one go, but I woke fairly early this morning so I decided to get up and dig up the rest before breakfast. So it was that by 8 am, my potato patch looked like this:

Potatoes drying in the morning sun

I was constantly amazed at how numerous, and how big, the spuds were. I'll weigh them when they're dry and I've brushed most of the dirt off, and let you know (and record for myself) the total yield.

I even managed to find the sacks I bought to store them in, but Pebble has claimed these.

Thank you for putting out these nice sacks for me to sleep on!

All fall down

2011-08-12T15:30:00.000+01:00

This post has nothing at all to do with the previous one, except perhaps for the inclusion of peas. We have quite a lot of peas at the moment; I may be slightly preoccupied with them.

There are quite a lot of plants that are usually offered support by gardeners. I don't mean a shoulder to cry on or encouragement to buck their ideas up, though these may be offered too, I mean canes and bits of string and suchlike. I have been observing some of these plants closely this year, and have come to the following conclusions:

Some of them, including peas and cucumbers, have no interest in standing up on their own, and actively seek out support. You really can't get away without the bits of string for these plants.

A cucumber plant seeking support. The clue is the tendrils.

There are other plants, including broad beans and tomatoes, that show every sign of falling over deliberately. They start out growing vertically, but as the fruit/pods form, they take a more horizontal approach. I used to think this was because we'd bred plants with larger and larger fruit, until the plants could no longer stand the weight of them, but looking at the plants in my garden, that theory just doesn't hold up. The key point here is that the stems aren't floppy and collapsing; they're just as firm as they ever were, but heading in a different direction.

Tomato plants going over there, if you don't mind.

It's my belief that this is a strategy on the part of the plant to get its seeds as far away from the parent plant as possible. Working on this theory, I haven't bothered to support these plants (it's not just laziness, honest!) The main disadvantage is that it's a bit more difficult to find the crop when it comes to harvesting. In addition, bean pods sitting on the wet ground are a bit more likely to go mouldy than those held up in the air, but I haven't had much mould damage. We'll see how it goes with the tomatoes, but for the time being, I'm letting them spread themselves around, if that's what they want to do.

On the dangers of peas and the marvels of reflexes

2011-08-12T14:48:00.001+01:00

To be honest, it wasn't the peas as such that were dangerous, but if I hadn't been harvesting peas for dinner, I wouldn't have been out in the rain, and I wouldn't have been hurrying back in, wearing crocs, across the slab of wet slate that starts the steps to our front door.

Wet slate steps. It's raining now, too.

There I was heading into the house, then the next thing I knew, I was flat on my back. The peas went flying (later recovered) and the colander suffered a small dent, but apart from the shock, I seemed to have got away with no greater injury than a bruise on my well-padded behind.

It was about 24 hours later that I realised why my neck was aching so much: I had whiplash. It was only then that it struck me: I didn't bang my head. In the time it took me to hit the deck, which was far too fast for consciousness to keep up, my reflexes had responded to the situation by tensing my neck muscles in such a way that my head was protected from an abrupt encounter with the concrete patio. Isn't that amazing?

We humans tend to pride ourselves on our conscious reasoning, but the animal parts of us are also pretty darned impressive, when you think about it.

Who's been eating my cabbages?

2011-08-11T10:16:00.002+01:00

I spent ages yesterday picking small green caterpillers off my cabbages, and a fair few little snails too, only to find this bad boy making himself at home this morning.

Everyone's been eating my cabbages!

Challenging times

2011-08-04T09:27:00.000+01:00

I have mixed feelings about the challenges that people post on their blogs. I quite like occasional ones, like Mumma Troll's eat for £1 a day challenge. These are a nice way of starting conversation and links between blogs, building little communities in blogland. On the other hand, I'm not so sure about the regular ones like documenting your plastic waste every week.

I'm not quite sure why I feel uncomfortable about these regular challenges. Louisa touched on one aspect in her post on extreme frugal challenges, which was the competitive, one downmanship. There's also the regular commitment required. Of course, this can be a good thing, if it encourages the development of good habits. In the context of writing a blog, though, this is not something I want. Some people use weekly features to structure their blogs, and I often enjoy reading these, but for myself, I'd rather write about things as they occur to me; I don't want the blog to become a chore because I've set myself the task of writing about a particular thing each week.

There's also the nagging feeling that by signing up to someone else's programme of challenges, I'm letting them do my thinking for me. In general, I don't think it's a bad thing to find someone whose principles you agree with and follow their guidance on the day to day decisions in life. I'm aware that humans, as a species, do most things on auto-pilot and if we think we're making conscious, deliberate decisions about every aspect of our lives, we're kidding ourselves. On the other hand, I'm as vlunerable to the illusion of conscious control as the next person, and so I choose not to delegate my decisions to someone else.

All that said, I've been following Change the World Wednesday for a little while now. The idea of this blog is to have a little challenge each week that lots of people can sign up to, and spread the word about, with the aim of encouraging widespread behaviour change for greener living - a most laudible aim. Notwithstanding my reservations about signing up to things, I've tried the last couple of challenges.

The first challenge I tried was reducing shower times to five minutes. Ironically, since I stopped using shampoo, I tend to spend longer in the shower. Without the routine of shampoo - rinse - conditioner - rinse, I just stand under the water and my mind wanders, for 15 to 20 minutes sometimes. I've been thinking I need to do something about this, and the challenge was the nudge I needed. I found the timer function on my mobile phone, set it to five minutes and put it on a shelf in the bathroom as I stepped into the shower. When the timer pinged, I finished rinsing off the shower gel or whatever, and got out. Easy! I'll be sticking with that new habit.

The second challenge was to avoid using paper towels for a week, which confused me until I realised that this are what I call kitchen roll. I thought this one would be easy, as I hardly ever use them anyway, but then I remembered one thing that has me reaching for the big tissues without hesitation:

Cat sick, hiding on the hideous carpet. I'm so glad this wasn't a few inches further over, or I'd have stepped in it with bare feet.

I use washable cloths for cleaning up other things, but couldn't face the thought of cleaning out a cloth after using it for cat sick. I had a bit of a think - might there be an alternative to kitchen roll that I could use once and dump straight on the compost heap? How about big, soft leaves? I have comfrey...

As comfrey plants go, this one's quite small.

When the inevitable happened, I headed out into the garden and picked a few leaves. The first thing I discovered was that comfrey leaves don't hold together so well as paper towels - it's quite easy to put a finger through one. However, with two leaves together and a bit of care, that wasn't a problem. Once the bulk of the mess was gone, it was a bit more difficult to clean the remnants off the carpet, as the leaves started to disintegrate with scrubbing. If the puke in question had been wetter, I think I'd have had to give up and use... well, I could probably have coped with a cloth for that bit - it's a bit less icky by that stage.

So, could I give up kitchen roll for cleaning up cat sick? I'm not sure. The leaves are only available in summer, and this time it happened to be a nice, sunny morning and I wasn't in a hurry to do anything else. The leaves also weren't very good. I did manage to clean up the mess, but kitchen roll would have done it better. Still, the important part of that is that the leaves did work - the job was completed successfully. It's more faff and not as effective. Maybe I'll do it this way sometimes, but mostly I suspect I'll be back on the disposable paper, just for this.

How could she be guilty when she's so cute?

Things I have learnt about blight

2011-08-02T10:14:00.000+01:00

Since my potatoes got blight, I have learnt a few things about this condition.

DO NOT dig the potatoes up immediately. Oops. The reason for this is that the fungus spores will fall off the infected leaves straight onto the tubers, given half a chance.
Instead, cut the tops (haulms) off and remove them, preferably burning them. If you're being really fussy, cover the ground at this stage to stop any spores from washing into the soil when it rains. Leave spuds in the ground for a couple of weeks and then dig them up.
A minor infection on a tuber is no big deal. It may show as a brown patch on the skin, which can be cut off easily and the rest of the spud is fine.

Blight on potatoes, slightly more serious on the right hand one, but both possible to cut out and use the rest of the potato.

If caught early, blight is essentially a storage issue. Blight spores on the tubers will make themselves at home, more quickly if the skin is damaged, and gradually ruin the crop. If the spuds can be used quickly enough, it really isn't a problem.

I lifted about half of my potatoes straight away, so they're no goood for storing. This meant that either we had to eat 45 lb of spuds in a few weeks... or I had to think of some other way of preserving them. The answer could only be chips!

Weeding

2011-07-26T22:53:00.000+01:00

As I hacked my way through the jungle that used to be a tidy path between raised beds, I thought maybe I should have tackled this job sooner. Like housework, weeding is never finished, but the longer you leave it the worse it gets. The flip side of this, for both weeding and housework, is that you really notice the difference when you finally get round to it!

This is what one of my beds looked like this morning:

Can you spot the onions in there? Bonus points if you can see the parsnips too.

After spending most of the day weeding, this is what the same bed looked like this evening:

Still weeds in the foreground, but parsnips, onions and sunflowers now have their bit pretty much to themselves.

Non-gardeners often think weeding is difficult because you have to know what everything is so you don't pull up precious plants by mistake. In fact, for conventional veg gardening at least, it's not that difficult. On the basis that a weed is just a plant in the wrong place, if you know what plant should be there, telling the difference is a simple binary classification: Pea or not-pea? If you go in for companion planting, it gets a little more complicated: Onion, carrot, or neither-onion-nor-carrot?

As my plant knowledge grows this job actually gets harder. Instead of not-pea I'm now starting to see buttercup, forget-me-not, and sweet rocket. It's much easier to rip something out by the roots if you don't know its name. Mostly, everything has to go, but I will make an exception for wild pansies:

Wild pansy, hiding out amongst the peas.

Last of the blackcurrants and first of the peas

2011-07-26T22:18:00.010+01:00

I have been very remiss with my blogging. This post should have been written early in the month, but my sister was staying, so blogging seemed a bit unsociable at the time, and then I got distracted...

As the title indicates, I picked the last of the blackcurrants from our bushes. These are the ones that I left first time round because they weren't ripe enough yet. They were certainly ripe by the time I picked them and I got about a pound, which isn't a huge amount, but enough to be worth picking. I got about 250 ml cordial out of them, and one jar of jam. When I first boiled up the jam I thought I'd gone too far and made toffee, panicked and added some water to thin it down to make two jars of jam. I obviously added too much water, as it didn't set, so it all went back in the pan, boiled a bit longer and into one jar, which set beautifully. I don't know whether it's toffee or not.

I also picked a handful to throw into some cake mix:

Blackcurrant cupcakes - most delicious

As for the peas, well, the supports are showing the strain a bit. I give them a shove from time to time and they haven't broken yet...

Pea canes struggling under the weight

They are well laden with pea pods:

Lots of yummy peas - well, they will be soon anyway

I started picking them a couple of weeks ago. They were too small then, really, but I wanted to share them with my sister, and they were very tasty!

Pod of peas picked at just the right time

I've been harvesting them every few days since then, getting a few ounces at a time. I'd like to say I'm getting better at judging when the peas inside will be big enough to be worth harvesting, but it's still pretty hit and miss. The pods get big first then the peas inside swell up to fill the space. It's not easy to tell whether that has happened or not.

We went away last weekend, and on Friday I noticed peas ready to pick that would be old by the time we got back. These were picked, cooked and frozen. Stocking up for the winter has begun!

Store room catastrophe... and more mushrooms

2011-07-19T11:23:00.000+01:00

I was next door having a nice cup of tea with the neighbours when Ian turned up, saying, We have a problem in the store room. The shelves have collapsed. I rushed home and this was the scene that greeted me:

Aftermath of shelving collapse

Actually, that's not quite true. The first thing I did was pick up the demijohns - thankfully not broken, in spite of having been on the top shelf - to see if anything could be salvaged of the contents, and ditto the air-locked bottles of blackcurrant wine. Ian also refused to let me mess around taking photos until I'd dealt with anything potentially explosive. If you look at the right hand edge of the above photo, you can just about see the escaped stopper of the one glass bottle of pink elderflower champagne. I also had two glass bottles of not-pink elderflower champagne, presumably equally pressurised. These were carefully removed and depressurised outdoors - they didn't seem all that explosive, actually.

So... these had been salvaged by the time I took a photo of the chaos.

Almost a demijohn-full of oak leaf wine, just over a pop bottle-full of blackcurrant wine, and two intact bottles of elderflower champagne

It could have been worse. I'm putting off dealing with the rest of the mess until I have somewhere to put things. We now have no shelves in the store room at all.

At the same time, elsewhere in the store room, I spotted these:

More mushrooms growing in the store room

This morning I went down and picked one, so I could take some better photos:

I've looked at a few websites, but I can't identify it. Any ideas?

Leftover soap

2011-07-14T17:55:00.000+01:00

This is not a post about bits of soap that are left over from nearly using up a bar, but soap that is made from leftovers. I've been saving meat fat for some time now. I was using it for cooking to start with, then it occurred to me that it would be healthier to cook with oil and make soap with lard, rather than vice versa. I've been saving it up for a while, and the little pots are cluttering up my fridge.

Two pots of chicken fat, two of lard, and one of lamb tallow, which turned out to have lard in the bottom as well.

As you can see from the picture, whilst this stuff keeps fairly well, it's not perfect and there are little bits of mould that needed scraping out before I used this. Some of this has probably been in the fridge for well over a month.

I looked up the sap values* and found that for these three fats the values were all the same, which meant I could mix them and weigh the whole lot together, reducing the inaccuracy of weighing lots of small amounts. Having weighed that (pretty much exactly 1 lb in total), I added a bit of hemp oil (2 oz) that I still had in the kitchen, untouched since last time I made soap.

I then turned to a couple of online calculators to work out the final details of the recipe. This one has a neat little adjustment where you enter the size of the mould you're using and it resizes the recipe to fit. Using these, I added a bit of sunflower oil (1 oz) and tweaked the superfatting** adjustment to 7% so that I'd get a nice round number for the quantity of lye required (2.5 oz). Just for completeness, the amount of water in this recipe was 5.8 (a slightly generous 5 3/4) oz.

Having settled on the recipe, I put all the fats and oils in a big bowl*** and put that in the oven, which was still hot from bread-making, to melt the meat fats. While that was melting, I weighed the water into a plastic jug, carefully sprinkled the required weight of caustic soda into that, then took it outside so it could give off noxious fumes into the atmosphere rather than my kitchen.

When the fats were melted, I took them out of the oven and scooped off the small amount of scum that had floated to the top. Hmm, that could be a drawback of using saved fats. I may not have got quite all of the bits out, but still, I'd have plenty of time to fish them out while waiting for the mixture to trace.

Melted meat fats, looking an uninspiring brown colour

Being rather less nervous about the whole process the second time around, I may not have waited very long for the two liquids to cool down before mixing them together. I did, however, follow John Seymour's advice and added the lye very slowly to the fats, stirring as I did so. The fats started to change colour immediately.

What amazed me was how quickly this reached the trace**** point. I didn't time it, but it seemed barely five minutes before I saw the first signs of it, and not more than twenty at most, before it was definitely tracing. I didn't even use a blender - I was stirring with a good old-fashioned spoon. Forget your fancy Castile soaps, this is the way forward!

Somewhat less than 24 hours later (i.e. this morning), I turned the soap out of the mould and cut it into blocks.

Ten small bars of meaty soap

It was very soft when I turned it out, but it's hardening (and getting paler) with each hour. Just in case you were wondering about the smell (and I suspect you were), it smells lovely! Not at all like meat, just very soapy. Now, does anyone know how long lard soap takes to cure?

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* Saponification values, that tell you how much lye to use for a given amount of fat or oil.

** The amount by which you adjust the quantity of lye in the recipe, to be on the safe side, i.e. erring on the side of a sloppy mess rather than something that'll eat through your skin.

*** Last time I used a bowl that was only just big enough to hold the oils, which made it difficult to mix without sloshing over the edge. I learnt from that mistake and used a very big bowl this time.

**** When moving a spoon through the mixture leaves a 'trace' behind in the surface. This is the sign that you can stop stirring and pour the soap into a mould.

Blighted spuds

2011-07-12T18:13:00.000+01:00

I'd been warned by neighbours that we're very vulnerable to potato blight here. This isn't catastrophic if you get it, provided you notice fairly quickly. If you spot it at this stage...

Early signs of blight in a potato plant. At least, the higher leaves have early signs - I'd say it was a bit more advanced in the lower leaves.

... you just dig up the spuds quick and dispose of the leaves, preferably by burning and definitely not on the compost heap. This one, on the other hand...

Much blighted spud

... may have gone a bit far - oops.

Surveying the potato patch, I saw that the telltale yellowing leaves were pretty widespread. Oh dear, I'd better get digging, then. I started off by digging only those that had signs of blight, but fairly soon realised that the number of first earlies that needed lifting was, All of them. I got that done yesterday, and one of the maincrop, just to see how it was doing. All the potatoes looked pretty healthy, even the ones from the seriously blighted plant in the photo above. Here's what I harvested:

Blight-stricken first earlies, all safely harvested, plus one King Edward's worth of spuds (those are the ones loose on the table)

I couldn't believe how many potatoes I got from that King Edward: That's two and a half pounds from just one plant! It's no wonder they're so popular with gardeners.

Having lifted all the first earlies, I was able to tot up the total harvest: I lifted just over 19 lb yesterday, making the total harvest just shy of 29 lb. The cost works out at 30p/kg, which compares favourably with around £1.35 for new potatoes from the supermarket, and I'm not even looking at the organic ones for that comparison.

I was planning to save some of them as seed potatoes for next year, and I've put aside 15 of the biggest (the seeds I bought were pretty big) for that purpose. Now I'm wondering whether that's a good idea, as I know these plants have been affected by blight. There's no sign of blight in the tubers, but could it be lurking there unseen? Will I get early and vigorous blight wiping out the whole crop if I try to grow from these?

Today I tackled the maincrop. Encouraged by the quantity I got from the King Edward I dug yesterday, I did think I'd lift the whole lot today. On the other hand, it would be nice to leave them to grow for a while longer (and not have to dig the whole lot in one day!) What I actually did was to dig up all those that had clear signs of blight, which was quite a lot of them. These were mostly in the middle of the bed, so taking them out will allow a lot more airflow around those that remain. I'm hoping this will be enough to discourage the blight from advancing too aggressively, but this is probably wishful thinking. I'll be monitoring it closely now, and may well be digging the rest of them within a week or so.

After today's digging

The next question I have to think about is storage. The first step is to let the skins harden. Common advice is to leave them out in the sun for a few days for this purpose, but I'm not sure this is such a good idea. I've noticed the skins hardening on spuds I've stored in the cupboard for a few days, so sunshine can't be critical. Also, we all know what too much sunlight does to potatoes*. In any case, dry weather can hardly be guaranteed round here.

I've left them out in the sun for a few hours to dry out, but now I'm going to bring them in, and try to figure out what to do with them next. Spreading them out somewhere dark seems like a good idea, I'm just not sure quite how to achieve it. For long-term storage, I had thought about a press, which is a big box full of sand or dry soil. However, I'm not sure I'm up to organizing one of those in the time available. I did buy a couple of hessian sacks with the seed potatoes, so I think I'll be using those instead.

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* It turns them green and toxic, in case you didn't know.

Apricot kernel biscuits

2011-07-08T17:54:00.000+01:00

Health warning: Ingredients contain cyanide.

No, I'm not suggesting ways of poisoning your friends, I just felt I ought to include a disclaimer. People have died of eating too many apricot kernels, but too many is a lot more than I used in this recipe. The Straight Dope offers the following helpful advice: Ingestion of about a cupful of any of the above seeds is pushing things a bit.

Right, with that bit out of the way, where was I? Oh yes, I love apricots! Having eaten the delicious fruit, there's more yumminess to be had by cracking open the stone to get at the kernel inside.

The stones aren't the kernels. You have to crack them to get at the nuts.

They taste like bitter almonds and I think they're delicious, though I'm a little wary because of the whole cyanide business. Actually, getting at them this way, I'm unlikely to eat enough to cause me problems, but still. Rather than eating them neat, I thought they might make a nice flavouring for biscuits, so I made some plain biscuits (4 oz each of butter and sugar, 8 oz of flour and one egg yolk. I haven't decided what to do with the white, yet). Having cracked four nuts open, I mashed them up in a pestle and mortar and added them to the mix.

The biscuits are delicious, but the bitter almond flavour is undetectable. It must be there because without it I think these would taste very plain, but you wouldn't know it was there. Next time maybe I'll risk a few more than four kernels in this recipe. I'll just have to eat more apricots!

Insect repellant is pretty effective, actually.

2011-07-06T13:52:00.000+01:00

I made some insect repellant cream from wormwood* a little while ago.

Possibly wormwood, but more likely southernwood

I've been using it quite a lot since then, and it works. It's not 100% effective, but then I doubt anything is. Mostly, I only get bitten now when I'm going out briefly and don't bother to put any cream on. My sister has commissioned a pot for her baby because, while she doesn't mind putting nasty chemicals on her own skin, she's not too happy about doing that for a two-month old baby.

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* At least, I thought it was wormwood. I'm now thinking it might actually be the closely related southernwood instead. Both have insect repellant properties, so it doesn't really matter.

Laundry gloop isn't very good

2011-07-06T13:17:00.000+01:00

I tried making laundry gloop a while back. At the time, it seemed fine, but as I've used it more I've been less impressed by it. It's OK for things that aren't very dirty - clothes that have been worn once, mainly - but things that need a bit more elbow grease - towels that perhaps should have been washed a bit sooner, maybe - it leaves them smelling, well, much like they did before they were washed. If they're then hung on the line in the fresh air, they get that lovely fresh smell from the breeze, which I believe is ozone, but if it's raining and I have to hang them indoors, that's not so nice.

I wondered if choosing a recipe with borax in would give better results, so set about finding some borax. This turns out to be more difficult than you might think, especially if you're reading American websites. It turns out that the EU have recently classified borax as a hazardous substance, which makes it somewhat less available than it used to be. In my investigations, I got the impression that this classification is not to protect the consumer, but to protect the miners who did the stuff up, and are inhaling the dust all day every day. This is health and safety doing what it should: Protecting the workers.

It's still possible to get hold of borax, but at a much higher price, presumably to cover the cost of the extra protection for the miners (she hopes, naively). There is also 'Borax substitute' available:

Borax substitute: Sodium sesquicarbonate

I say available; it's still not that easy to get hold of. I prefer to buy from actual shops rather than online, where possible, so I trawled around town, eventually finding it in the second of the two excellent hardware shops in Aberystwyth (in the first I tried, no-one had ever heard of borax).

So, I made up a new batch of laundry gloop, using larger quantities of soda crystals as well as the new borax substitute, together with a bar of grated soap. Result: No discernible difference from the first batch. You know how lists of tips for reducing your carbon footprint often include Turn down the temperature on your washing machine. Modern detergents can cope with cooler temperatures? Well, this isn't a modern detergent.

I looked up what borax substitute actually is as I wrote this blog post and found that sodium sesquicarbonate is probably just a mixture of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) and sodium carbonate (washing soda), so it's hardly surprising that adding it doesn't improve the performance compared with plain washing soda.

I have another idea for laundry liquid that I'm going to try in the autumn, but in the meantime I've gone back to buying Persil. The clothes do smell nicer, but it's striking how artificial that freshness smells to me now.

More blackcurrants than you can shake a stick at

2011-07-04T12:22:00.002+01:00

In fact, if you shook a stick at the blackcurrants in question, you'd hear a series of little thuds as currants jumped off the bush and landed on the ground.

On Tuesday evening of last week, my neighbour came round to ask if I'd like some of her blackcurrants. She'd already harvested twenty pounds and had run out of freezer space and enthusiasm for blackcurrants. Of course I said yes.

On Wednesday afternoon I spent a pleasant, if somewhat back-aching, couple of hours picking currants in her garden. I then realised that as we were going away on Friday, I'd need to get them topped and tailed, stewed and strung up before going to bed on Wednesday so I could make things from the juice and pulp on Thursday. Furthermore, I had an idea for using the seeds (which belongs to another post) that meant I wanted to top and tail thoroughly, removing the little hard disk from behind the flower. So it was that I took a sharp knife and removed the flower (as well as anything else that needed removing) from every blackcurrant in that five-pound-plus harvest.

Topping and tailing late into the night

Actually, that's not entirely true. As it got towards two o'clock in the morning, I was getting pretty fed up with this, and got selective. I picked out the biggest, ripest currants and left the small and unripe ones. I ended up with five pounds processed, and the plus (about five ounces) left over. Stewing and stringing up didn't take long and I got to bed at about 2:30 am.

The bag kept dripping juice well into the next day, and it was early Thursday afternoon that I turned my attention to the next stage of processing. First, I added sugar to the juice to make cordial. That yielded about 750 ml, or one and half small bottles, which was a little disappointing - I'd expected at least a litre.

Next, I pushed the fruit mush through a sieve to separate the pulp from the seeds and skins. That was very hard work, especially when I put too much in the sieve at once.

Pushing pulp through a sieve

This yielded a huge quantity of pulp, lots more than the juice I'd used for the cordial. First I made ice cream with it. I had an idea that a ripple ice cream would be nice and as I had the ingredients, I went to the effort of doing it properly.

Step 1: Heat some double cream left over from birthday scones with milk to make it go a bit further (maybe 400 ml total?) and a vanilla pod that I knew I had in the back of the cupboard somewhere. Leave that gently heating and infusing for a while.
Step 2: Separate two eggs. Put the yolks in a big bowl and whisk a bit.
Step 4: Fish the vanilla pod out of the milk/cream and wash it (it can be used again). Pour the hot milk/cream onto the yolks, whisking. Put back in the pan and heat gently, still whisking, until it thickens. At some point in this process add some sugar until it looks and tastes like custard, which is what it is. Leave to cool.
Step 5: Add sugar to some pulp until it tastes about sweet enough for a ripple.
Step 6: Beat egg whites until fluffy and fold two-thirds or so into the custard. Put this in the freezer. Ideally, this should be taken out and stirred at frequent intervals as it freezes, but I couldn't figure out how to do this at the same time as adding the ripple, so I did it once or twice before...
Step 7: Fold the rest of the egg white into the blackcurrant pulp. Add this to the half-frozen vanilla ice cream and stir just a little bit. Put back in the freezer to finish freezing.

It may be rather solid, but it looks fabulous:

Blackcurrant ripple ice cream.

We haven't tried it yet, but my sister's coming to visit with her husband and baby, so I'm looking forward to sharing it with them. The baby will not be getting any ice cream.

I also made sorbet, which is much simpler. Just add water and sugar to the pulp and freeze. I did the taking-out-and-stirring-during-freezing thing with this one, so hopefully it won't be too solid. Without the egg whites, that could easily end up as a lump of ice.

After all that, I still had some pulp left over and started thinking about jam. Now, if you're making jam you'd usually use the whole fruit and if you're making jelly you'd usually use the juice and throw away the bit I had left. On the other hand, I don't really care whether my jam is cloudy or not, and this pulp must have plenty of pectin in it for setting. I put it in a pan (actually the same jamming kettle I'd stewed the fruit in the night before. It was already covered in blackcurrant juice...) with some water and quite a lot of sugar (keep adding until it tastes about as sweet as jam) and turned on the heat. I left that boiling while I did the washing up, stirring and checking from time to time (the hand towel got quite soggy). I also put some jam jars in the oven to sterilise.

When a drop dripped onto a chilled plate passed the wrinkle test (it really did - it wrinkled!) I quickly poured it into jars (easier said than done when manhandling a jamming kettle) and put the lids on. I got three jars full (two of which are small jars) and in spite of ignoring the usual procedures, I think I've got some pretty good jam:

Blackcurrant jam. Its resemblance to toffee is minimal.

The final job for these currants was to clean the seeds as best I could and spread them out on a tray to dry. I also picked out the small but ripe currants and spread those out in a basket to see if they'll dry into the kind of things you put in a Christmas cake. Now I just have to decide what to do with the rest of the currants on my own bushes, which are probably ripe and falling onto the ground by now.

Why don't I get things done?

2011-06-29T02:10:00.000+01:00

This isn't a whiny, Oh I'm so useless post intended to make you say, Oh no you're not. I know I get things done, but there are other things that don't get done. This post is about those other things.

Susie's try something new challenge has been very interesting because it's made me look closely at something that I wasn't getting done. I chose what I thought was a relatively small project, learning to knit socks, but even that turned out to be more complicated than it first appeared.

It wasn't just the knitting of socks, there was the problem of yarn being expensive so I thought I'd unravel a jumper, and then I had to make a thinner knooking hook as well. Looking more closely at the task I'd been putting off, it turned out to be several different tasks, all challenging. It was made managable by firstly finding cheap yarn (solving the first problem) and then finding that one of my existing hooks was suitable to use with that yarn (solving the second problem). Then the main challenge wasn't nearly so bad.

Potting on the tomatoes was another task that wasn't getting done. Subsidiary tasks were clearing the conservatory, sourcing containers, and sourcing compost (more expense problems). These were tackled all at once, and it was a big job. The only reason I made myself do this was that the tomatoes would fail if I didn't, and I'd already invested a lot of time and effort in them. I also want to eat the tomatoes!

Other potential something new challenges were making liquid soap, making a solar panel, converting my sewing machine to treadle power and learning to spin. By chance, I've made a start on the last of those, but further progress still involves arranging to fetch a spinning wheel*, finding a source of suitable fleece, learning to wash and card the fleece ready for spinning, and finding space for all this activity.

Similar lists emerge when I examine any of the other projects. They all expand into several different challenges, all difficult. So it seems that the reason I don't get things done is that I bundle things up into big, complicated problems with many difficulties. Alternatively, maybe some of the things I want to do just come as big complicated bundles, and I need to recognise that and learn to unwrap them into smaller, more managable challenges. If I can think of, for example, fetching the spinning wheel as a challenge in itself, rather than part of something bigger, maybe it will be easier for me to focus on getting it done.

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* A friend has promised me long-term loan of her wheel, but she lives in Yorkshire and is extremely busy.

Learning to spin and what to do with 30 g of hand spun yarn

2011-06-29T00:29:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I was clearing out my handbag and found a flyer for the Wool and Willow Festival in Llanidloes, about 25 miles from where we live. Looking through the list of workshops, I saw one on spinning taught by Joanna Kingston, less than a week hence. There was a limit of five students and when I called to check availability, six had already booked. Nonetheless, the organiser called me back later to let me know I could still attend the course. It turned out that a couple of students were taking their own spinning wheels, so I was in luck!

You may wonder why I haven't included this in the try something new challenge. The reason is that happening to find a course nearby and spending the day with a helpful teacher guiding me at every stage didn't really feel like much of a challenge. It certainly wasn't something I'd been putting off trying - it was more something I thought I'd get round to at some point in the future (that's not the same thing, honestly!)

I didn't take any photos on the day, as I was too busy concentrating on learning to spin, so here's a photo of the kind of wheel we used, taken from the manufacturer's website:

Ashford traditional spinning wheel. Traditional in this context means slow enough for a beginner to handle.

The day started with an introduction to the various parts of the wheel, which was essential for someone as clueless as me. Then came a very important step - practising using the treadle. Even so, there were times during the day when I was concentrating on the yarn so much that I forgot about my foot and the wheel stopped. Once I got the hang of keeping the wheel going without thinking about it, I then had to learn to stop it when I needed to. The wheel had a bad habit of snatching the wool out of my hands and running off with it.

Once we knew our way round the wheels, Joanna demonstrated how to spin, teasing out the wool as she fed it into the orifice of the bobbin, holding and realeasing the wool to twist and wind up in turn, counting as she did to ensure an even twist. When we tried for ourselves, I soon discovered that trying to do all of that all at once is a mistake. I also discovered the importance of the brake. When this is at the correct tension, the bobbin stays still when you pull against it to twist the yarn, then spins to wind up the yarn when you let go. Or possibly the other way round. I can't claim to understand this fully, but I did learn that if the brake tension is wrong, it's damn near impossible to spin a yarn.

So, I cut the counting, learnt to prepare my yarn before spinning it so I had the right thickness bundle of fluff for a single strand, and got the hang of keeping the wheel going at the same time as concentrating on the wool. Yippee! I was spinning! Then I got to the end of the bundle of fluff, the wheel snatched the yarn away from me, and suddenly I wasn't spinning any more.

Eventually I learnt to stop the wheel at that point, and some time later also got the hang of joining the spun yarn to a new bundle of fluff. That was progress indeed. By this stage I was feeling very pleased with myself, and really didn't care that I had little control over how tight the finished yarn was - I can learn that later. As it happened, I was spinning too tight, which means the yarn is less likely to fall apart than if I was not spinning tightly enough.

All that was in the morning, and in the afternoon we got to put our new skills into practice with some fabulous merino/silk fluff. This stuff was absolutely gorgeous, so no matter what we did with it, there was a good chance of ending up with some lovely yarn at the end of the day. And so, with much concentration, carefully preparing bundles of fluff and spinning them one at a time, stopping and starting the wheel as I joined in each new bundle, I ended up with two bobbins of spun yarn, which I believe are known as singles at this stage, being just a single strand each. We were then taught to ply, or twist together, these two, resulting in a two-ply yarn.

Joanna told us to gently wash and dry the yarn when we got home, to set the twist. She also mentioned to me that she used to tell people to hold it over a steaming kettle, but didn't say that any more for risk of people burning themselves. Right, that'll be the kettle for me then. Sure enough, the yarn seemed to relax in my hands, just as she'd said it would. I then wound it into a ball, and this is what I ended up with:

Finished product from the spinning class.

I have to say I'm very pleased with that. It's not just the end product, of course. I very much enjoyed the class and think this is something I'd like to do more of. I also think I learnt enough to get started on my own, provided I don't leave it too long before trying again. Once I've got started, I suspect I could make a lot of progress with just practice, though there's probably a lot I could learn from other people, too.

Having got a lovely ball of yarn that I'd spun myself, I very much wanted to do something with it. Out of curiosity, I weighed it. As you may have guessed from the title of this post, it was 30 g, which isn't a heck of a lot.

A friend had recently showed me a shawl she'd just bought, which was very pretty indeed. It looked like a rainbow cobweb. Close examination revealed it to be knitted very loosely from fine ribbon. Maybe if I knitted my wool loosely enough I might have enough for a scarf, perhaps? With that in mind, I made my biggest knooking hook yet.

My first attempt at knooking with the new hook was not encouraging. The knitting was fine, but nowhere near loose enough, and I was getting through yarn very quickly.

Not very loose knooking

I looked over at the shelf where all my mum's old knitting needles live. There is a huge pair in that set (labelled No. 1); perhaps I should try actually knitting for a change. This was an improvement, but still not quite what I was after.

There are gaps in this, but it's still a long way from cobwebby

I was chatting to a friend on skype whilst doing this, and she was also knitting (with plastic bags). She said that she'd seen people knitting with broom handles - what a good idea! If I was going to do this regularly, I'd buy a new handle, cut it to a managable size and shape the ends, and possibly polish it too. However, for a one off experiment...

It would have been easier without the black plastic bit on the end of the mop handle

It wasn't easy and as you can see I used the hook to catch the yarn and loop it around the handles. Each stitch was rather slow, but there weren't very many of them. The result was exactly what I had in mind, but sadly, not a scarf's worth.

Table-mat sized piece of lacy knitting

Now, does anyone have any ideas about what I could do with that?

Bagging-on tomatoes

2011-06-28T23:33:00.000+01:00

I've been putting off the job of potting-on tomatoes for a while now. This is because it's not just a matter of putting plants in pots and adding compost. I had neither pots nor compost and furthermore no space to put the tomatoes once potted. Here's where I planned to put them:

We've been using the conservatory as a junk room since we moved.
If you look closely, you can see a cat in this picture.

The first job then, and it was no trivial task, was to clear space in the conservatory.

The next problem was the pots. I was impressed by Louisa's planters made from scrap wood, and thought I might have a go at something similar.

I could get four or five tomato plants in one of those

The trouble was, I lacked a ready supply of scrap wood, or the skills to make planters out of it. As the tomatoes got increasingly insistent in their demands for a new home, I decided to bite the bullet and just buy some pots. I looked up prices and found that you can get suitable tomato-sized pots (and they're big plants) for a pound each. That didn't sound too bad until I counted the tomatoes in need of pots. There were 44 of them. That's the best part of fifty quid. Ouch. That's before I've even thought about compost to put in them or trays to stand them in. Maybe I wouldn't resort to buying pots just yet...

Over on the SelfSufficientish website, AngeB had recently won a competition with her money-saving tip for the garden:

Spuds for life - potatoes growing in sturdy carrier bags

Hmm, I did have a lot of empty compost bags in the greenhouse that I'd kept, just in case they came in useful. Now could be their chance!

The final component was the compost. I had two bags of bought compost, and stretched that by mixing it with garden soil (first weeded - another job along the way). When that ran out - and it went a surprisingly long way - I opened up the big compost heap. That is, I lifted some of the weeds that were growing on it and dug into the side of it. Hey presto, compost! It was pretty coarse, and not as dark and rich as some I've made, but still definitely compost. That also got mixed with soil before giving to the tomatoes.

So, with all the elements in place (and having tidied the conservatory), the procedure was:

Collect compost bags, gravel bags, whatever I can find, and roll down tops of bags until they could pass for pots
Fetch stones* and lay a layer in the bottom of each bag for drainage
Cut comfrey** and add a layer of leaves on top of the stones, because I've heard that tomatoes like it
Fill bag with compost/soil mix and one or two tomatoes, depending on size
Carefully push down the compost around the plants until they're nicely snuggled in
Repeat many, many times, digging and mixing more soil and compost as required
Water

It took me two days, and now I've finally finished, the conservatory looks like this:

There are forty four tomato plants here, though not all of them are in this photo.

You won't see a cat in that photo, no matter how hard you look, because she was on the roof:

Pebble on the conservatory roof

Ignoring Pebble's dastardly deeds and returning to the tomatoes, I am very excited by the first tiny fruit:

Let this tiny tomato be the first of many, and let them all grow big and juicy.
Well, maybe not the cherry tomatoes.

I'm feeling very pleased with myself for doing all that, especially as I managed to avoid spending any more money at all.

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* This was another incidental tidying up job. Our garden is full of stones and I keep digging them out of the soil and leaving heaps of them about the place. One heap on the patio got sorted, leaving the largest stones in a neater pile and taking the smaller ones.

** The comfrey has been making a nuisance of itself trying to spread its seeds all over the potato patch. I wasn't sorry to cut the horizontal stems and, by the time I'd finished, most of the vertical ones too. There are plenty of new leaves growing from the base.

The second sock

2011-06-28T20:36:00.001+01:00

It's possible that the weeding may have been neglected this week, and the runner beans may be desperately searching for support, and the tomatoes may have been begging for new pots, but I did get my second sock knooked.

My first pair of hand knooked socks

I think the left one may be slightly shorter than the right, but never mind. Because there is a left and a right, I added little blobs of purple to the outside of the ankles, to make it easier to tell them apart.

Another picture of first socks

They are very nice and snuggly. Pebble agrees.

Out of interest, I weighed my pair of socks to see how much yarn I'd used: It was 40 g. I could get ten pairs* out of that cone of wool. That's 50p a pair, which isn't bad at all.

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* Yes, I know 40 goes into 452 eleven and a bit times, but I'm allowing for maybe making some slightly longer socks, or perhaps a more complicated pattern. I may get bored of plain stocking stitch after a few pairs.