Steel Kitten

How do you organise yourself?

This post is prompted by a comment I left over on the Down to Earth blog recently. Rhonda was asking how everyone kept organised, whether people had routines or kept lists etc and I replied by telling her about my diary and about the list I keep in my head.

First my diary. I have one of those page to a day diaries and it's become a Godsend to me over the last few months while juggling a job and the preparation for us restoring the racing car. 

The diary has a small list of things that have to be done (so I must post off that letter, get the washing out of the machine and hang it up etc) and these are things that would be important to do on a weekly basis to ensure the basic things of life get accomplished. It makes sure there's always clean underwear in the drawer and bills get paid on time, that sort of thing. 

However, there is a second list of 'nice to get done' items, which might be washing a settee cover if I get a few moments to pop it in the machine, or clean a couple of shelves in the fridge. If I don't get them done, it's no biggie - I just move them onto the next day's list and see if I have time or energy then. The 'nice to get done' things can float across several days, but sooner or later they will get done. Nothing has ever been on the list longer than a week.

However, in addition to these two lists, I also keep a lot of information in there, such as things that happened that day I want to remember (sometimes even things that Martin wants to remember), the dinner I'm cooking that evening and sometimes things I copy down from websites or magazines. I keep track of days when I felt off colour so I can track if it is a recurring pattern. I stick in supermarket receipts so I can keep track of our spending and food price rises and sometimes I also stick in emails or post it notes of recipes I find. It's got to the point where I'd find it very difficult to be without my diary.

The list in my head is something different. It's a revolving list of things that I need to focus on to accomplish mini goals. So if I'm about to go upstairs, I remind myself to take something with me that needs to go, which will help keep the place cleaner and tidier and stop me running around like a headless chicken doing things later. I actually have a stair basket that you can take up and bring down with you. If I'm waiting for the kettle to boil, I give a few items in the sink a wash or wipe down a surface or something so it looks tider and cleaner. 

I've found doing it this way on a consistent basis starts to open up chunks of time where I can relax of an evening and (gasp) go to bed early. In the winter this is essential for me as it's tough to battle seasonal affective disorder when you have to be up at 5:30am and don't get into bed until midnight. I might have taken that too far last Thursday though. I had a whole evening free as I'd already had dinner cooked and just needing heating up, so I was in bed by 6:20pm with my Kindle and asleep by 8pm!

How is the budget doing?

So how are we doing with the big goal, the ones that will put us in the poor house ;-)

Pretty good so far! We are 23 days into January - our fourth week - and are bang on budget. I set my groceries budget for £160 a month, and so far we have spent £114.51. This includes cat food and cleaning stuff. In fact, we have eaten better this month since being on a strict budget than we do normally because I’m trying to be very careful to ensure we get our five portions of fruit and veg a day and make the food as flavoursome as possible.

I base the food for the week around a roast dinner on Sunday evening. Whatever I cook, Martin has the meat from it on Monday and Tuesday for his sandwiches. Tuesday night I then make up something else for him to eat for the rest of the week, usually some kind of pasty or large sausage rolls with pickle or peri-peri sauce inside depending on whether he wants a traditional one or spicy little number. Then on Wednesday I cook up a Chinese. He seems to be addicted to green peppers in black bean sauce at the moment, so I thinly slice up whatever roast meat is left and do that with noodles and/or egg fried rice.

This all works of course because I don’t eat meat at the moment.

If I were eating the roast dinner along with Martin, there wouldn’t be enough meat to last for sandwiches or his Chinese on Wednesday. Instead I have the largest Yorkshire pudding known to man made in a cake tin. Then I pile a load of veggies and roast potatoes into the large yorkie with gravy. Occasionally if I’ve done some kind of pastry based pudding for Martin, I’ll do a veggie slice with cheese and have it without the yorkies and just vegetables and potatoes. This is a mushroom slice with a base of onion relish that I found ‘seasoning’ in the back of the fridge.

I do have a tendency to be a little lazy during the week with my food. If we’re having a big casserole with lots of veggies, I tend to have it too but only put in enough meat for Martin. Then I’ll mix my meat-less portion with couscous. I’ve found that rather than eat a lot of protein in the evning, I tend to eat quite high protein foods during the day, which fills me up and helps me avoid snacking.

So over the last few weeks I’ve alternated cheese and crackers, hummus and pitta bread, egg or cheese salads, lentil soup, beans on toast or in a jacket potato. I also try and have a coffee every day made with milk, as milk has valuable proteins in it too. I don’t like tofu or meat-alternatives like quorn, as I think they are very expensive for what they are and I don’t like the texture when I’m chewing it. For obvious reasons being allergic to nuts has taken out quite an important source of proteins for me. I’m a little concerned I’m not getting enough iron so I want to start taking a multi-vitamin on the days when I don’t think I’ve had enough.

Apart from that, food-wise we’re doing ok!

Any ideas what this is?

 

I was turning another compost pile yesterday and I found this perfect circular hole when I accidently sliced a hard clay crust off it.

I've been wracking my brains trying to work out what made it? Can't be a mouse, rat or hedgehog - it's too big and it's very damp and cold. There are individual indents on the wall (bites?) and a pattern on the underside of the crust almost like - well - something has regurgitated the mud.

That just left me with toads really and I found a couple of likely candidates further into the pile. So, hopefully them being the originators of the little damp nest and potential parents, I left that area without turning it, re-made a cap for the top on top of some twigs as a scaffold leaving a small hole to enter and leave it, then placed the two of them about 6 inches apart orientated towards it and covered them up. 

Hope they weren't two boys...and that it wasn't someone else's hole.

Ooops. 

EDITED TO ADD 24/1 - it does belong to someone else!! It's an old wasp nest! Poor toads...

Anyway, willow. I decided to have another bed, a much larger one this time. I planted two beds last year and one bed failed. All but one plant died, which I think was due to two conifer trees about 6 feet away which were probably using all the available water and nutrients.

This time, I'm going to do an extended bed on the site of the old chicken pen...

I was going to grow potatoes there, but then I realised that potatoes are so cheap now that it wouldn't be worth my while growing them. I'm better off growing some of the more expensive fruit and veg we eat. So instead I'll plant the willow there. 

I have a few leftover whips I can take two foot cuttings from, plus when I trim the main willow supports of my willow fence there'll be around 3 to feet from each of those, so there's plenty of new willow cuttings to plant. Hopefully that will be next weekend, althought the building of this might get in the way!

Yes, we started on the greenhouse today and found out it is 11-sided, not 10-sided, and because of this is actually fits around all of the fruit bushes! I'm still not 100% convinced I will leave the fruit bushes in,as it cuts down the space for growing tomatoes, but the grape vine will stay in and be trained into the roof space in a way that lets light in and its tendrils can get good air ventilation.

Heritage Seed Library

 

Just before Christmas I became a member of the Garden Organic Heritage Seed Library in Ryton. Garden Organic is the working name of the Henry Doubleday Research Association, and its Seed Library conserves many of the rarer vegetable varieties that fall off the UK National Vegetable list. The Seed Library has around 800 vegetable varieties, and each year each new member gets the chance to pick six varieties to try in their garden. Some members go on to be seed gurdians, that is they grow certain varieties in their gardens and give the resulting seed to the Seed Library for distribution to its members. 

A couple of weeks ago my membership pack turned up containing a catalogue of varieties for me to choose which six types of seed I wanted plus a free pack of seeds of a rare vegetable.

 

My free seeds were a climbing French bean called Mr Fearn's Purple Podded. Every variety listed in the catalogue has a description, sometimes a little story of its history (sometimes going back centuries) and often comments from people who have grown the vegetable. Apparently this bean has been grown since before the second world war, gives a prolific yield of juicy sweet beans and is ideal for freezing.

So, one evening this week I sat down, and had a good ferret through all my seeds to see what I needed to get and what six I should choose from the Seed Library. I had no idea that I had accumulated so many. People have also been giving me lots of seed packets that came out of national newspaper etc (I don't think I will ever have to buy a packet of early nantes carrots ever again!)

Anyway, my first choices from the Seed Library were:

Broad bean - Red Bristow

Cabbage - Portuguese

Tomotao - Polish Giant

Squash - Sucrette 

French bean - Hutterite Soup

Onion - Australian Brown 

I've also had to list alternatives in case the seeds I want are gone. I hope they haven't. Some of them are so interesting I'd like to have a go at growing them. I'm not going to attempt to volunteer to be a seed guardian for a couple of years. Many of these varieties need to grown in isolation or they will cross pollinate with another variety, and as you may only get as few as three seeds for some rare varieties I won't be producing enough vegetables to meet this year's goal of growing 50% of our vegetable needs. 

In preparation for seed sowing which will start before the end of the month, I have been making myself some new plant tags. I thought I'd try the plastic from a milk carton to start with, as we get through so many of these I'd like to find a use for some of them. I've never been fond of growing stuff in them as they dry out too quickly while I'm at work and the contents suffer, although I am exploring the idea of filling them with water and using them as heat sinks in our greenhouse when we get a cold spell. I doubt they'd be enough room for a water butt in greenhouse due to it's shape, which would have functioned nicely as a way of absorbing heat in the daytime to raise the temperature at night.

Somewhere round here I have a permanent marker so we'll give it a go and see how they stand up to a growing season.

Living willow hedging

 

Well, what was to be a pruning session with the willow turned into a bit of a hedging effort thanks to hubby, who came up with the great idea of using some of the canes to start fencing off the kitchen garden from the chickens. We always intended to fence it off, but stopped short due to the expense and effort of getting fencing tall enough to stop them scrambling over. I also didn't really want any more concrete in the garden, which would have been necessary to fit fenceposts solidly into the bed.

So, this was the area to be fenced. A line of rosa rugosa would have to come out, which wasn't an issue as they hadn't been doing particularly well where they were. Far from being the thick solid line of thorns that would stop the chickens getting through as we had planned, there was one large plant, several small plants and a few straggly growths here and there formed from runners. Dismal. 

Out it came, the area dug over and some blood, fish and bone put down, and a weed suppressant membrane laid on top. Willow won't grow where there is competition for nutrients from weeds so they must be prevented. 

This is the willow patch before pruning - three different species for basketry, biomass and general purpose garden projects. They've done really well this year. Far from being just a single straight stem in their first year, many of them have sprouted several side canes each already. 

\

The pruning begins, but after a while i notice a weird blood-like substance on my hands. I'm checking everywhere trying to find the source of it. 

 

That's when I spot this on the end of a cane: willow aphids.Sap sucking pests that won't kill a plant but can devitalise it. A major squishing session ensues and I'm covered in red stuff which turns out to be all the old sap inside the aphids. 

The canes are cut and laid out at 20cm intervals along the 14 ft length of bed. I used the willow variety which is often used for biomass, as the canes are thicker and straighter than the rest. 

I cut a cross through the membrane at each point where they will go, and use a metal pole to drive a 1ft hole in the ground to take the willow whip. Willow need to be rooted a good foot into the ground. 

Then I took the thinner shorter canes and began to weave them in diagonally, again driving holes into the ground up to a foot deep. I tied each one in with a rubber band, rather than string, so as the whips grow the rubber will expand with them until it degrades enough to break and fall off. 

The top of the fence is made up of the very short leftover pieces of willow that couldn't be used for the diagonals. However, as you can also see some of the diagonal whips are not long enough. I'm hoping the the new growth will be enough for me to weave them in next winter. 

And this was it as I left it last weekend. Just about a third of the distance left to go!

If the rain holds off, I'll finish it this weekend and then turn my attention to getting the greenhouse up.