Steel Kitten

Beware the lure of free kindle books

Oh Dee Cee what have you started?!

A couple of weeks ago DeeCee commented about kindles and how amazon has a discussion board which features a post with free kindle books every day.

Beginning of the end really!

Every day I go on there and download the most interesting non-fiction books I can find. I now have in excess of 70 free books. Some I'm glad I didn't pay money for and some are just fantastic.

If you have a kindle and don't know about this place yet you can click here and go straight to it.

Also, last night I found this site with free kindle books and unlike the kindle forum you can search by genre and filter to get the newest. At the moment there are over 1500 books on there.

Be careful though, free ebooks are addictive! While I was writing this post I downloaded another 10 books - six on various cooking recipes and four on financial matters. 

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.

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. 

We know when it's cold...

..cats start taking over the furniture.

Finding a non-hairy spot in this house is getting difficult. I spent 10 solid minutes getting the fur off one of my cardigans this morning, much to the amusement of my work colleagues. It became a team sport in the end.

We do try and arrange special cat beds for them but they just look at them and us with disdain as if to say: "why don't YOU sit there instead."

Talking of looks of disdain, Fleagle's diet has started properly and she's dishing the dirty looks out left, right and centre. She has to lose 2kg by the summer and she's fighting it by alternating cuteness with fury.

Exhibit A: poses like this to try and get food out of us will not work, especially as it just serves to accentuate her large tummy.

Bad move Fleagle. The art of getting away with being a fat cat is to know how and when to arrange yourself in slim poses.

Epic fail.

Goals for 2012

 

"Gather round chaps, this is the plan..."

Well, it's January and time to get down in black and white my goals for the year. I have one very large goal and a few smaller ones, the majority of which will support the larger one.

Let's get the smaller ones out of the way first.

Drop two dress sizes

I need to go from a 14-16 to a 10-12 by Christmas 2012. Unfortunately, me and dieting don't mix. I discovered last year that if I go on a diet to lose weight I don't succeed. I get bored too easily and distracted. I've even found that some days I got so busy I forgot I was on a diet until I got back in the house in the evening.So, this year I'm going to try something different.

1. I'm going to be switching to a vegetarian diet, which I know from past experience helps me lose weight automatically plus I don't feel so bloated after eating and have more energy.

Mmmmm...mushrooms and stilton

2.Exercise. I'm currently doing an exercise programme on my treadmill. Yes, I have a treadmill! I can't remember if I blogged about this at the time, but around March last year I picked one up dirt cheap on ebay. The pre-set programmes change the speed randomly and without warning, so I've found that to be quite challenging and interesting for me. Also a friend has lent me a workout DVDs to try and I think I have a couple of exercise videos in the loft I could transfer to DVD too so I have a few workouts I can rotate. Somewhere upstairs I also have a weights bench and free weights - just a question of finding somewhere for them to go.The combination of all of these things may very well keep me interested in exercising for a lot longer than I usually last.

3. There'll be very little in the way of bought lunches, snacks, takeways or other naughty luxuries to throw me off course due to the large financially-based goal that I'll describe later. It's always at the forefront of my mind so I have less incentive to spend money on extras.

In the last two weeks of doing these three I've managed to lose half a stone already so I'm on the right track ;-)

Crack the non-chemical hair products dilemma

One of my minor irritations last year was never being able to crack the dilemma of my hair not liking non-chemical shampoos and conditioners. This year, I'm going back to basics and examining different natural plants and products that could clean my hair without turning it into a bird's nest. This might mean growing and finding ways to used plants with saponins, or investigating natural food stuffs that could do the trick. And of course, hopefully this will be a cheaper alternative to buying shampoos and conditioners, the more expensive the better as far as my hair seems to be concerned.

I will also spend some time dying my hair various different types of henna to see if I can get a dark brown shade rather than my current copper-toned light brown, which will also help with the condition of it.

Permaculture and growing our own

I need to grow at least 50% of the fruit and vegetables we will be eating this year to help support our large goal (later). This neccessitates a complete overhaul of the third major bed by the house to a productive bed plus the planting of several new fruit trees and bushes.

The third bed: it always looks 'interesting' at this time of year

I also need to sort out setting up some kind of greenhouse arrangment, because the tomatoes outside did not ripen until the end of September last year and there were still many green ones when the frosts hit. 

To this end, I have already managed to pick up a greenhouse on ebay.

Such a fantastic shape! I squealed when I saw it. As my birthday is near the end of the month, everyone has pitched in to help buy it. So my task for next weekend is to get it up.

Read a book a week

This will be easier to achieve than you might think due to Martin buying me one of these for Christmas.

I have found that my treadmill time is ideal for reading ebooks! It just seems to make the time fly past and I'm surprised when suddenly the treadmill goes into cool down phase. At the moment, I'm reading Living the 80/20 Way by Richard Koch. There are thousands of free ebooks and thousands more for less than £2.

Get to Expert level at Microsoft Excel

I need to start addressing my Continued Professional Development. Learning excel to expert level will benefit me at work both now and in the future, as well as help me develop better tools for financial management at home.

I bought two books about a month ago. The first is Learn Excel 2007 Essential Skills with the Smart Method, which will give me a thorough grounding in the basics. The second is Learn Excel 2007 Expert Skills with the Smart Method, which will get me to a completely new level of knowledge.

The first book has 113 lessons in it with exercises, and my aim is to complete these by the end of June. Then I will do the Expert skills, which has 136 lessons. I think I will complete the first book quite quickly as some of the detail I already know, which is just as well as the second book will take a lot of effort to complete by Christmas.

*********

And now for the big goal.

I alluded in my last post to having a goal this year that was going to be financially painful. It's actually a joint goal with Martin, and I think probably our first one in the almost eight years we've been together. We've had some goals before, such as pay off the mortgage, but that was a general plan to pay off as much as we could each month until one day it wouldn't be there any more, rather than set out a specific goal to pay off a certain amount across a certain number of payments.

Rebuilding a rare racing/road car

Martin will be spending the next 8 months rebuilding another Fairthorpe car, far more expensive this time as it is being built for both racing and the road. It's going to take all of his income and some of mine to do it and we estimate it will cost between £10,000-£12,000 to do up. That's up to £12,000 to find spare in eight months.

So we're going 'bare-bones' frugal. 'Rice-and-beans' frugal. 'What-shall-we-have-for-dinner-tonight-because-there's-nothing-in-the-fridge-and-just-spinach-in-the-garden' frugal. I'll have to use *everything* I know about frugal living to get us through this.

I am covering all the household expenses for the next 8 months (if not longer if we can make this work). Once a week I look at how much has been spent by Martin on household bills and expenses (have already set limits!) and I transfer the money to him from my own account. Any surplus in my account at the end of the month goes to him.

Why are we doing this?

First, it's time to do it. Martin's father would dearly love to see this car on the road, has been wanting to see it on the road since the 1980s, and at 82 with cancer that he's currently having chemo for, time is now of the essence. For anyone who has a relative with cancer, you'll know *exactly* what I mean but just can't bring myself to say. This car rebuild will give Martin's father the boost he needs to get him through the gruelling rounds of chemotherapy ahead of him, and keep him with us for another few years. He's extremely excited already and sometimes it's the only bright glimmer he has on the horizon when the side effect of the chemo are really bad.

Second, we're also doing it as an experiement. If we can live on my income for eight months, we can live on it for a year. If we can do a year, we can do it for two. How much could we accomplish with that amount of money at our disposal all the time? We could hit the mortgage hard and pay it off completely. Save some cash for investing. Pump our pension plans up. Martin could retire early and perhaps set up his own car business.

The possibilities are endless. And very powerful.

What does it involve?

The amount of management and preparation that has gone into this plus continuing daily financial vigilance is huge. I was in planning mode for three solid months up to Christmas. Everything I know about money management, finance and stretching pennies will be needed as well as much persistence and patience as I can muster when a filthy tired husband crawls into bed at midnight every night reeking of grease and petrol.

I have taken over the food and grocery shopping entirely now and menu plan down the minutest detail.

• My monthly food budget is £160, and that includes cat food. So far I've been under every week but that's only because I have so much meat stashed in the freezer.
• I have gone vegetarian to lose weight, learn to cook veggie food and cut down on the grocery bills. Only Martin will eat meat, which is probably the most expensive thing I buy every week. I have no issue with that as he has a manual exhausting job and I get to sit behind a desk all day.
• I have built up a food store (about a month's worth of dry and frozen food) over the last few months in case we run out of money at some point
• I will be growing at least 50% of our vegetables and around 25% of our fruit. The fruit is the hardest, as much isn't ready until late summer or autumn and it doesn't last long.
• All superfluous direct debits and standing orders have been cancelled. And by superfluous I mean anything that isn't an essential household bill or car-related.
• No buying magazines or physical books. Library only. In fact, no buying of anything unless every avenue has been exhausted first.
• I've built up a cushion of savings in case of emergencies, like the boiler breaking down (again) or the cat going to the vet.
• Our efforts at overpaying our mortgage have had to stop for now so I can cover all the normal bills.
• We can do one lunch a month and have one takeaway a month (but if someone else pays that's fine we'll eat more ;-))

Also eBay is taking a bit of a pounding at the moment. We have a lot of surplus stuff we're getting rid off to help fund the project, which is having the added effect of making the place a bit cleaner and clearer. Martin in particular has a lot of hobby bits and pieces he is selling and I'm slowly rooting through boxes of my stuff to add to it.

I must confess I'm looking forward to being lean. Over the last 12  months we've replaced a lot of broken stuff and bought some things we had been putting off which would make our lives run more efficiently and productively. But in all honesty it's made me a bit flabby round the edges (and not just physically!)and I need toning in every respect. 

I like challenges, especially really hard ones that take a lot of ingenuity and effort. My brain needs the exercise to stop it going into hyperdrive and keeping me awake all night coming up with ridiculous ideas and scenarios.This project gives me something I can really get my teeth into and brings a lot of our interests together. Now, rather than doing them in isolation, they will all be interwoven into one big goal, which will really help when the going gets tough and we feel like giving up.

We'll need each other like we've never done before.

I have not disappeared...

A new purchase from ebay...

...I am still here and have lots to tell you when I can draw breath and sit down for an hour, hopefully tomorrow night.

There's cooking and live willow weaving and henna hair dying and a new greenhouse and goals for 2012 and...oooo...lots good stuff. I'll try to split it up over several posts so you don't have to wade through one huge post ;-))

How did I do? Goals...

Georgie frequently has goals. This one was to be the first cat on the precarious stack of photo albums and stay there as long as possible until the top album slid off...

I stopped blogging about my goals in the summer, as I had too many (as usual) and the posts were turning into epic narratives. However, that doesn't mean they were forgotten.  Oh no. I've still been trotting along doing what I can and as it is New Year and time to set more goals, I'll go through what I managed to achieve over the last year. 

...while this goal was to be the first cat to ascend the bookcase. That was until the red container slid out from under him, scratching the table underneath and breaking all the china bits and pieces within it that were destined for the charity shop.

Reduce unwelcome drains on my time

Stirling effort on my behalf, if I do say so myself. At the beginning of the year I was suffering under a busy woman complex. In an effort to make up for the fact I work I was spending all of my free time cleaning the house. I rarely relaxed for a second unless I was ill. I was also drowning underneath my husband's car hobby, and was frequently talked at about cars for long periods of time by my father-in-law as I was too polite to stop him. I was also being disturbed constantly at work by noisy personalities and spent too much time on moneysavingexpert.com and ended up feeling lousy.

Fast forward 12 months and I reclaimed my life back from my house and husband et al and am enjoying my time a lot more.  I have an internal time alarm clock that goes off whenever cars and car parts are mentioned, at which point I change the subject or excuse myself go and get on with something else. For Martin about 10 minutes is my limit - there's only so much talk about axles, bolts and welding I can take - and I encouraged Martin to have a blog about his cars so now he can ramble on there. But for my father-in-law the shutters come down the second he starts talking, as it is very difficult to get a word in edgewise once he's in flow. 

Moneysavingexpert.com has been kicked to the kerb. Over the last three months I've been on there twice. I have no desire any more to be a voyeur of all the terrible things that are going on in other people's lives.

I'm also now more likely to stop myself from being a whirlwind and sit down for a cup of tea and some knitting for half an hour, than run myself ragged and never take a break. There's been lot of knitting, a fair amount of reading, some crafting and a fair bit of cooking from scratch, the latter of which had fallen by the wayside for a while due to how busy I was at work. And there's been time just to sit and think. 

Reduce my use of chemicals 

At the beginning of the year I was out of control. There were chemcials everywhere and I was having the odd problem with skin reactions and wild untameable hair. Over the course of the last 12 months I've switched all of our cleaning products to Ecover, and reduced my reliance on nail polish. I threw out all of them, but a brief setback in July due to my bosses wedding made me rethink this on and now I wear polish only for special events. 

I haven't been able to do much permanently in the way of non-chemical hair products, despite trying a huge amount of (usually) expensive SLS-free products. My hair is fine for a few weeks and then rebels before I've even finished the latest bottle of jollop. However, for New Year I decided to henna my hair, despite previously saying I wouldn't, as I had heard this natural alternative to chemical hair colours can tame a mane.

You may not believe it, but this is tame. 

I'm pleased to report that it seems to have done the trick, although the colour isn't right so I'll be doing it again. I will keep on oiling the ends after washing. I've also now switched from olive oil to jojoba oil which is better and more akin to the natural oils in hair, and I use it on my skin as a mosituriser. This means I have been able to do away with expensive face creams. 

Permaculture

At the beginning of the year it was just an idea. In 12 months I've overhauled two of the beds by the house and turned them into productive veg beds, planted several new currant bushes, a grape vine, a mulberry tree, hazlenut bush, willow beds and a new plum tree. I also have a sweet cherry and a fig to go in the ground soon. The chickens have been penned in permanently now, although some days I still get them out if I'm doing some garden work so they can have a rake around. We have a new shed up and painted that is currently acting as a wood store. 

My attitude to what we grow has changed and I've been thinking much more about what we eat, as oppose to what I would like to grow. All veg growers out there I'm sure will have had those moments where you admire a fantastic bit of veg you've been growing and then realise you don't like it very much. But hey, it looks fab  ;-)) I've realised I can't keep doing that! I'm also thinking a lot more about heritage breeds of veg rather than using F1 strains, whose seeds don't produce the true parent plant, but haven't yet been able to do much about it so it remains a thought.

So lots done here and still more to think about.

Reducing waste

At the beginning of the year, I was wasting a lot of food every week. I did well for the first part of the year, being careful with my food shopping and menus and making sure I used my freezer more, but I started to slip towards the end of the year. We went through a period where we were so busy we didn't get to eat the food in the fridge and my freezer was so full I couldn't fit it in, so it ended up in the bin. That happened three weeks on the trot. And right now I know there is a lot of leftover food in my fridge that will have to be binned, not meat thankfully as I made a large turkey, beef and cranberry pie with mushrooms and leeks in the week and that fed us for two days.

 

However, there are the small remains of two trifles, some sausage rolls and a hundred weight of red cabbage that has gone past it's best and I can't give to the chickens as a treat. So I wouldn't say I've been succesful here as I'm back where I was last Christmas.

Also, I still haven't got around to sorting out a dedicated area for composting the wood-based tray litter the cats use, which I should do as there is around 20kg being generated every three weeks or so. 

Fluff the nest and gratuitous spending

These two joined hands in the middle of last year. Last Christmas I realised that I was spending money like water on silly things, but putting off spending on more important things for the house. We'd put off making so many purchases the place was falling apart. Some I think was out of a sense of guilt as we try and live by the old war mantra "use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without" but we were living in shabiness among broken posessions and that's not on. 

We have spent a lot of time and money this year in updating things in the property, which at Christmas included:

• a new driveway
• new plastering and altered pipework in the back bedroom ready for decoration
• an overhauled clean and tidy laundry area
• a new TV (while sorting out the living room I damaged our ten year old one but there was money saved for it)
• a new laptop (Martin's Christmas present from me) to replace the eight year old tower system that was on its last legs
• a new duvet and pillows to replace the two year and seven year old ones respectively, both as thin as biscuits and uncomfortable 
• a classic Fiat 500 to halve our monthly petrol bill
• a new Green Frog chicken coop for the girls to combat red mites
• a halogen oven to save money on our gas bill

The only thing I didn't do was get a front opening freezer to slot in a gap underneath the kitchen cabinets, which would have helped me bag some more food bargains and reduce our shopping bill even further. 

There were many other things that had to be done along the way to fix and update bits and pieces around the house, too numerous to go into now, but I can honestly say I think Martin and I accomplished a hell of a lot in only twelve months.

So what now?

Now it starts all over again. But this year Martin and I are attempting something very ambitious which is going to hurt financially. A lot.