Sowing onions... and the rest

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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!

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:

1. Yes, asbestos was still in common use at that time
2. Sheets of board that look just like plasterboard could well have asbestos in them (OK, the surveyor said it, but still...)
3. The only way to tell whether it's actually asbestos is by shining polarized light at it and looking at it through a microscope
4. 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
5. 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
6. 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!

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

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!
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* 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?