Steel Kitten

Going backwards with the gas bill

 

I made a lot of preparations last year for our goal of rebuilding a racing car, all aimed at reducing the household bills and general spending. I purchased a halogen oven back at the beginning of October with the intention of cutting back our gas usage, but until recently I didn't know how much it would actually save.

Now I do :-)

Before I tell you, the Halogen oven cannot claim all the credit for what follows, as we had an unseasonally warm autumn and our heating didn't go on for around three weeks after what we normally would, but I think it has contributed a large amount of the saving.

Between October 15th and January 20th we have used...drumroll please...388 units, a drop of around 200 units over the same period last year. That equates to us using 35% less gas - which is brilliant - and a gas bill of £187 pounds for three months. The electricity bill has also come in and as expected it has increased due to the halogen oven and unexpectedly having to run a fan heater and an oil heater this winter for a couple of days to heat up areas of the house where pipes froze (yes, the water in the washing machine pipes is still freezing in cold weather!). However, it has only increased by around £20, which I'm happy with. Given the recent price rises and the use of expensive fanheaters etc I was expecting a lot more.

Will keep you posted how we get on with this goal for the rest of the year. My hope is that after 12 months our savings will pay us back the original cost of the oven, cover the increase in electricity running it and still leave us with some money to spare afterwards.

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.

How to create a living willow hedge

 

Well, what was to be a pruning session with the willow turned into living willow hedging 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 with living willow. 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 for the living willow hedge 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 willow canes and began to weave them in diagonally, again driving holes into the ground up to a foot deep and placing them in diagonally. I was careful to ensure the weaved whips crossed at the same points front and back. 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. At the base of each set of two diagonal whips I chose to pull them together with a band in such a way that it filled in what would have been a large chicken-sized gap to squeeze through. One day those pesky critter will be faced with this living willow hedge and they're not getting through!

The side of the willow fence is simply willow whips curled around and woven in. The top of the living willow hedge is made up of the very short leftover pieces of willow whips that couldn't be used for the diagonals, and around those were woven the ends of the longer diagonal whips which were sticking out to add strength. 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 the living willow hedge 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. 

New Year gardening

A rose blooming in my garden in January!

The weather has been so mild lately I've been trying to spend an hour in the garden each day this week to get a breath of fresh air despite my raging cold and cough. Before I go outside, I take one of those all-in-one cold and flu remedies and bundle up warm. I can't do a lot, but every little is a step forward. 

I've taken out some of the canes from the spent tomatoes, done a touch of sweeping, cleared away the mini bed paraphenalia from last year in the veg beds, tramped down the rotting foliage and stems and mulched using straw to try and keep the nutrients next to the soil. It sure looks messy but this is the way it's going to be from now on if I'm going to be serious about letting the garden help me grow some food. Every stem or spent plant I take out the ground takes nutrients out that i have to artifically put back, so as much as possible has to be bent over and pinned down to rot against the ground.

Phew. This is after tidying! Do you see something missing on the left?

With help I also took a chainsaw to the buddleja, giving it a well overdue (by about three years) trim and then took down a large woody ribes that was taking over one of the beds and throwing up suckers everywhere. 

The bed just before mulching last year. You can see the size of the buddleja by the spread of its lower branches. It's a good 10 feet high. 

Ummmm...no buddleja anymore! It's still there, though lurking near the ground and will come back in the next few years. 

Today I decided to carefully fleece up the brassicas and let the girls out for a roam.

 

They loved it. First port of call was a large fir tree at the base of the garden, under which was lots of lovely dry crumbly soil that is perfect for a dust bath.Then an extensive roam around the garden for a darn good scratch. 

I do worry about them being penned up all the time. I supplement their diet with lots of veg stuff but it's not the same as them finding those juicy tidbits, little invertabrates and fruits and seeds that nature provides. 

Seeing all the stuff left over from hacking down the plants gave me a solution to a problem I'd been mulling over for years. We have several large humps of topsoil in the garden, under which we suspect are several piles of rubble the previous owners lazily decided to hide. The task of digging them out is too large really and I don't have the energy I used to have. However, doing raised beds would take tons of earth and that would have to be delivered and barrowed into place. 

However, I've just realised how I could do it. Hugulkultur.

Hugulkultur is a method of slow composting using a base of rotting woody materials. This rotting wood is teeming with nutrients and absorbs water like a sponge. You put a layer of the largest woody material you have at the bottom of the pile, and add progressively smaller pieces until you get to a point where you're adding leaves, manure, grass clippings, straw etc. To the top you then add an inch or two of compost. You can add a border round the outside of logs or stone and plant up immediately. 

Photo: Richersoil.com

The bed will rarely need watering as the logs at the bottom will release some of their absorbed water when needed to sustain the plants above. 

I think this is a fantastic idea. I've wanted to plant a cherry tree in this area for some time but was concerned at how uneven and scrappy the soil was combined with the rubble/topsoil pile, not to mention how much work would be involved in keeping the weeds away while the new tree settled. This could sort the problem out really nicely. 

To get an idea of what it will look like, I moved some of our leftover rock to around the edge and it will be a big bed. I'm now worrying it will take everything I've got in the six compost bins!

Anyway, that's work for another day. In the meantime, the last photo of the day was taken at dusk just as Oxo was having a dilemma. All the chickens were in the pen getting ready to tuck up. She wanted to stay out longer but wanted her bed too. Oh to be a chicken!

The last of the jam making

 

Last week I filled my cupboards with jam made from  the last of the plums. I hadn't been able to do as many as I would have liked due to time contraints- about 20 to add to about 5 left from last year - but marmalade season will be upon us soon so I shall make up then. And of course I haven't yet done a hedgerow glean so I could well have a few more pots of jam to do then. 

 

While I was clearing room in the cupboards to fit all of the jam, I happened upon some of my alcoholic experiements from last year - the slow gin and the sloe...erm...I can't remember.

 

I think it might have been vodka in this jar (I remember wanting to do sloe vodka), but I'm just not sure because of course I didnt' label it. Twit. Anyway, that's bottled up now. In an old rum bottle that I haven't taken the label off. Just to confuse things further. Of course it could actually be that it is the rum in with the sloes because it begs the question of where the empty rum bottle came from. Whatever is in there, it needs a bit more time as it was a bit sharp. The sloe gin wasn't. Slurp. Yum. Slurp.

Oh and a bit of a warning. When you pour a whole bottle of alcohol in with the sloes, don't expect to get exactly the same quantity out. Spirits generally come in standard bottle sizes so I thought I was safe. Oh no. The alcohol extracts the juice from the sloes so you end up with more than a bottles-worth. And if you are like me that extra ends up on the work surface and on the floor while you stare in disbelief and try and work out where the excess came from. 

I'm attempting to keep the full bottle of sloe gin on the left for a bit longer to see what it tastes like next winter, but Martin made a lot of nomnomnomnom noises while sampling the half full one on the right and now has his eyes firmly fixed on my full bottle. I sense a struggle in the offing. 

Anyway, I'll be down to the supermarket this weekend buying bottles of gin for this years sloes and I intend to do an awful lot more bottles of it. I'd like to do six or seven, so I can keep half maturing for the next few years and drink the other half throughout the coming year, but that depends on the sloe harvest. 

Now, an honourable mention. My mother has been foraging.

Unfortunately, I was diagnosed as having a mild nut allergy a few months ago, but there's no reason why I can't grind them and use them with flour in cakes for Martin. 

Finally, there's been a lot action at Steeltowers last weekend besides the driveway being done.

I have finally decided to attempt home brewing.

The next post from me tomorrow will be about my forays into the shadowy exceptionally smelly world of making cider.

A splendid way to crack nuts

 

So many tiny little things can bring me pleasure sometimes.

Last week I used an automatic soap dispenser - the ones where you put your hand under the nozzle and it dispenses just the right amount of soap into your palm - and it made me giggle. Of course I went back and did it another four times before I stopped myself because it was a waste of soap. 

It was such an unexpected but simple thing and for some inexplicable reason it brought me a little surge of pleasure, much like the canine nutcracker in the picture above does.

This nutcracker used to belong to Martin's grandparents and I've never come across a tool that makes a hard chore so quick and pleasing to do. I have a problem cracking nuts with standard nutcrackers. I don't have the strength in my hands and often spend more time picking up, trying and putting down nuts than actually cracking and eating them. 

Back in February I decided to tackle a large jar of foraged hazlenuts that had sat on the workbench looking at me for months and spied the nutcracker peeping out from down by the fireplace where he keeps guard. 

It's simplicity itself. Raise the tail, put a nut in the dog's mouth and press down on the tail. CRACK! If you get a hard nut, you can stand up and push down with a bit of weight. 

I went through the whole jar in about 45 minutes, and I have a carrier bag of hazlenut shells to use as mulch on top of plant pots.

A very pleasing and enjoyable task. 

 

Scene from my bus: little

 

Little House on a Small Planet

 

I deviated form my usual pattern of buying books secondhand or visiting the library to buy a new book this month because the chances of it coming up secondhand in the UK was too remote. In the US yes, but the UK? No. Naturally within minutes of it being delivered it turned up secondhand on Amazon. Sheesh.

By the way, am I the only person who likes buying new books because of how they smell? That heady whiff of ink and glue gets me every time. 

So...I've lately become a little obsessed with the idea of a smaller house. Perhaps it's the heady romantic notion that it might not need cleaning as often as this one that does it for me, or maybe the idea of a much smaller mortgage that we can pay off faster and retire sooner. I've been scouring the net for resources on small living and found this: Little House on a Small Planet by Shay Solomon.

I knew I was on to a winner when I read the first paragraph of the introduction:

Many of us know someone who has suffered the consequences of an inflated mortgage, an overwhelming construction project, or a house simply too large to keep clean. Will our dream home always be a celebration of excess, and a drain on our lives?

How much space does it take to be happy? Working in construction, I watched people's dream houses balloon into unmanageable giants. I saw the effect on homeowners, the psychological, social and financial toll, and I looked for new options that could lead them to a simpler, happier life."

The book is geared for the US market, so much of it refers to the phenomenon of those huge spacious homes that are common over there. I can certainly vouch for that, having lived in America for a year in a 'small' two-bed condo that took up the same space as a good-sized three-bed bungalow in England. Yet despite the cultural differences of this book, I can see many similarities. Much like American culture, English culture is starting to believe that bigger is better and that a bigger home is a sign of success. 

However, I'm one of those irritating flies in the ointment that sees a different story (I just wish I'd seen it sooner though!). Bigger house = bigger mortgage = higher bills to run and maintain (plus sometimes extra hired help to do the latter) = more money needing to be earnt = working longer to pay for it all and being tied to the stress of a daily treadmill with no escape. 

The book explores the lives and homes of many people who have already realised this concept is disconnected thinking and tells their story, with a view to helping you rethink what you have and what you actually need to make you happy. 

Tiny home; RowdyKittens photostream on Flickr

We bought our house - a three/four bed semi-detached - because I think we were surprised by how much we could get for our money compared to what we had 20 minutes away down the motorway. That is not a good basis for buying a property and I believe now that was a mistake. 

Including bathrooms we have nine rooms and a large-ish lobby. We routinely use four of them, day in day out. We occasionally visit - and by occasionally I mean once every week to two weeks - another four of them. The last we don't go in more than once a month. In fact, I'd go so far as to say three of the rooms are used as store rooms - my hobby room (not been in for five months although Martin pops in to check the hedgehogs while they are hibernating), Martin's hobby room (he pops in now and then to bring his hobby downstairs in front of the fire) and the back room, which has turned into a complete dumping ground. So that's around half the house. So I'd say half of our mortgage is a wasteful drain on our resources.

How much wealthier and happier could we be in a house about half the current size?  Pretty happy and pretty wealthy I reckon. And a smaller house footprint is more ecologically friendly, cheaper to maintain and easier to clean. The prospect of having that mortgage paid off so all you have to is find the bill money every month starts to look like a achievable reality. 

Small house in Lochcarron, highlands: www.geograph.org.uk

By the way, the book contains an interesting exercise which I am in the middle of doing at the moment and you might want to have a go at: 

• Create a list of activities that you do at home and things you need to do in your house. Be detailed. Stow the list away when you're done. 
• Keep a log of where you go in your house and what you do when there over a period of one to two weeks. Ideally log the time you spend in each place. In large rooms be specific about which part of the room you use.
• Look at the sapces you don't use. Imgaine what would happen if they magically disappeared. 
• Make another list of activities and needs without looking at the first list. Ideally, make a list every few weeks. 
• Pull out your first list and then compare it to later versions. Are you surprised?

If you do this exercise, I'd be interested to hear about any thoughts or conclusions you've drawn about where and how you live. In fact, let me know and I'll do a post about you!

When pressure is brought to bear...

 

Protest signs adorn a tree in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, England. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Sometimes my faith in humans beings is severely tested, usually when I read comments in the press from powerful people who seeme to be...well...so incredibly stupid it's embarrassing.

"God created the earth and he will take it out when he wants to. That's all you need to know about climate change."

Fred Upton, Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Please tell me Fred you were kicking yourself in the bathroom after your made that silly statement. That's why it's so refreshing to see that a monumental act of stupidity has been realised by one of our elected offcials (I use the word 'elected' in a general sense so no emails about the semantics of the election process that landed us with a coalition please).

David Cameron has done a massive public u-turn on selling off our ancient woodland. It's a shame that 500,000 of us had to scream so loudly and that our politicians feared their reputations would be destroyed, but hey! We've managed to stop the sale of 15% of the woodland they planned to put up for sale in April.

Those ancient woodlands are ours.

They do not belong to a Governement of grubby ministers who see a quick buck selling it to developers and businesses. Those woodlands belonged to our ancestors and now we pass them on to our children and grandchildren. They are our link to the past and to generations in the future.

What astounded me about the whole woodland thing was while one part of the government was pushing the environmental agenda and the whole low carbon/zero carbon bandwagon, the other side was selling off the very things that help keep an environmental balance. Trees take carbon dioxide out of the air and return oxygen to us. They are a wheel on the environmental band wagon. Was it so hard for our ministers to see that taking trees out of the equation takes a wheel off your bandwagon?

Obviously.

Morons.

Well done 38 degrees for a great online campaign and for an even better newspaper ad campaign that drew attention to these grubby base plans to steal our national woodlands. Keep on being vigilant because I've no doubt they plan to try again when they think the furore has died down and no one is looking any more.