blue flowers on a grey day

Another happy day with help in the garden 🙂

Bob (of tree monkey fame http://vimeo.com/80033718 ) came and did some heavy work for me: clearing a space and planting a plum tree, laying some slabs for a path by the shed and planting a ‘weed’ tree he came across.

The plum tree came to me by circuitous means, someone who has moved to France to raise bees (envy!) had to leave this tree behind at the last minute. As I ended up giving all my fruit trees away when I left Hucknall, this is a very nice turn of events 🙂

There is an elder tree already at this, the drive end of the rockery, and I did consider asking him to dig it out – but then I thought of fruit preserves – I love elder blossom too and I imagine I can keep the guys from chopping it down if I remind them about wine 😉

 

 

I had a last few gladioli bulbs to set and some cyclamen to plant in a ring now the space is cleared (Bob earned his fee!) and will add more now there is a path from the bbq area along the shed side of the rockery. The slabs were lifted from the front edge of the bbq area and chosen because they were smaller or broken. I’m hoping I can wheedle David and Ben to lay the big slabs I freebied from Bulwell Hall Gardens as a replacement and continuing as a path along the side of the new raised bed – which has a pile of organic peat free compost at one end now:

 

I’ll be planting some tomatoes and summer squash there soon, I made a celery, courgette and garden leek soup last week that reminded me why I love picking veg and going upstairs to cook. And courgette leaves are good for making lots of bulk for next years compost 🙂

I planted out my pea seedlings today, easy tip for spoonies:

buy a roll of garden mesh or netting, this was from a £shop, thread some bamboo canes through the mesh to anchor the ends in. Now place extra canes at 12″/30cm intervals and plant your 4″/10cm high pea seedlings by scratching a drill with your trowel and heaping compost round the plant. Press it down with a Dutch hoe (bad back) or your hands. As the seedlings grow, I will tie the plants to the mesh and the mesh to the extra stakes – but right now, I have saved my hands some work and can keep planting.

There are statice seedlings in there too, but they don’t show from this angle. Like the lamium they bring the bees who will pollinate my peas, lovely little friends that they are 🙂

Traditionally in companion planting, alliums and legumes don’t share well, but the green garlic is well on its way and the second set of peas are away to the side, to fill in as I harvest pea SHOOTS as well as peas. I bought an organic home sprouting variety and plan to put them in salads at regular intervals, while encouraging the main shoots to make peas. That’ll be June-ish and I take my garlic out on the solstice, so it’s only 4-7 weeks…

I’m planning to put the hyssop in the middle of a bed as the bees love it, and I only harvest it for scented sachets once a year, so it can be out of reach 😉

I want to get at the blackcurrant sage much more often, so it has gone in next to some bulbs and pansies which are dying back on the near end of the rockery:

I’m hoping some of those millions of tiny green seedlings are feverfew and camomile returning…

Some of the best plants in the garden are total surprises, I love how much green alkanet (thanks Suella and Jen for helping me identify this!) there is roundabout…again, more green manure for the compost when it stops flowering.

 

 

and the bluebells and violets are one of the reasons I chose the flat, of course.

I don’t remember ever seeing mauve bluebells before, these are lilac/pinky. My photography was a bit off today, but I noticed how the spring flowers stand out in the grey light we had today – the blues and pinks all sang out against the soil and the shade… the kind of thing that is very hard to paint but nature manages effortlessly 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

landspirit gardening: raised bed, raised awarenesses

Exciting times in the garden!

and now:

– which made my day yesterday and will be such a joy over the summer!

There were a lot of stages – Spade and Sparrow did the heavy clearing

and left it to overwinter and settle. All I’ve managed to organise since has been replacing the cardboard mulch and a little pruning back. I had a couple of ‘seeing’ sessions where I took time to sit and think about what I wanted, but also what the land wants – this is why I call my approach landspirit rather than permaculture, though I use permaculture techniques. Being still and seeing what happens in a space is really important if you want

to work with the existing patterns and bring out the best in a situation.

The new bed is very central, at a crossroads between different kinds of leisure, growing food, growing flowers, badminton, with paths on two sides used by us and the posties, a slabbed area for the bbq and container garden, access to the carpark, access to the drying yard…

Something I feel the whole garden lacks is a good place to sit and chat. This is a lot to do with being in a city, people stealing garden furniture and not wanting to encourage the sex workers already using our garden and yard…Lots of houses on our street have electronic gates and I get why, but the truth is the more we use the garden, the less others will.

The constant difficulties and obstacles to getting the raised bed in motion had made me question if it should happen at all (the phrase ‘pushing the river’ came to mind 🙂 ) but every time I am in the   garden and feel the joy of its return to colour and

bounty (wildlife and harvest and enjoyment) I feel sure it wants more human presence, not less.. more domestic everydayness anyway!

This is the kind of thing that you either get or you don’t!  And the truth is, you can be a great steward of the land without feeling this. But some extra layer of ‘happening’ tends to occur when listening to the spirit of place, some bonuses come in as though on rails when I engage this process. I feel very convinced by it, because after a lot of work turning round my derelict and poisoned allotment, I saw the results, bushels of healthy fruit and veg, herbs for tea and scent or strewing, bees galore, the pollination rates of the allotmenteers near me shot up… Even the old guys had to concede my ‘messy’ ways worked 😉

Coming back to the garden here, there needs to be an acknowledgement of the transition from kitchen garden to purely ornamental/badminton lawn. The rockery is huge, as long as a tennis court and a couple of metres wide at the narrow end. It has beautiful mature trees and lovely rocks with fossils in and interesting marbled chunks and then a lovely array in July of foxgloves, feverfew, spirea, liquorice agastaches and flowering stonecrops, with alkanet and lush foliages… So looking from my rollator along the curving length of the bed towards the drive, seeing only logs on the raised bed edges would jar.

Instead we went on an expedition rounding up materials from all corners to make a bed that can be a heart centre. Ben suggested pulling some of the rocks lost under ivy from the super dry shady bank that is the front boundary, David found a huuuge sandstone boulder on the edge of the drive and I found big chunky pieces of tree trunk in the wood pile.

David then worked really hard, digging postholes and a channel to support yorkstone slabs on their sides, wedging and shuffling rocks, logs and slabs until it all looked really harmonious. I had suggested that the biggest log, which gets used as a seat on bbq nights became the edge of the bed nearest the slabbed area, and that the boulder made the corner between the rockery and the badminton lawn, and the upright slabs next to it echoed the path, but David had lots of fun choosing where to mingle rocks and tree trunks and big branches 😉 Yes, he ached all over when he stopped!

Called back to view progress I was so touched: a big seawashed chunk of chalk we had used as the top of a miniature quoit in the garden in Hucknall has been put at one corner and the copper, steel and stone mobile that hung near it were fitted in to the corner! So lovely of David to think of this! I put an amethyst and some hyacinths (Andy’s favourites) there too. They had emptied compost from the bin round the corner and the empty container garden over the cardboard and horse manure, so with a bit more topping up, I’ll be all ready to plant 🙂

There will be rose bushes and hyssop for the bees in the centre and then beans, squash and tomatoes roundabout, though I might sneak beetroot and lettuce in to catch crop 🙂

Being able to dream gardens again is so satisfying! And with all that sorted I feel more connected and committed to tending the rockery, which has been possible but not an attractive option when it meant walking past all the  looming ‘beyond my strength’ reminders. It has been a gap, a lost friend even…I feel gardening to be an integral part of my life, my healing, my politics, my art, being at home in the world, a place where the balance finds itself and energy flows… paying attention to my changed capabilities means I have to listen even harder now. Working  with neighbours who have never worked this way before was a challenge! This garden that is a woodland edge in a city needs to be a place where we can play to all our strengths, and yesterday, we did 🙂

fibre tagging

So these are the bedizeners I have been making over the last week, about 3 dozen, which makes a feast of colour and tiny details that get quite overpowering when they’re all laid out on my photography ‘tray’ (an A2 corkboard with black handmade paper laid on top.)

By the way, laying them out is a good idea if you want to keep an eye on colour balance – it doesn’t really matter, as I will be tying these to railings and trees individually, but if they were all being hung from one tree, just like decorating a Christmas tree, total randomness can look less than pleasing!

I discovered I had made nearly everything in shades of blue (leftovers from all the watery blocks on the chiropractor’s quilt) or purple and oranges (C& G Machine Embroidery colour palette) so I stretched myself and deliberately made some pink and green ones, and some black and greys.

I’ve also made hearts, some from complex cloth, which is where you lay out scraps of cloth and stitch them to a backing cloth, (like quilting without the wadding we assume for modern quilting.) I use ribbons, lace, leftover fabric, sweet wrappers, anything that will hold up to the task I intend the cloth to manage.

The slitheriest and most swearingest part was stitching silk taffeta ribbon to satin blanket ribbon…I set myself a target of 100 metres of thread in an ornamental stitch and by the end I was getting the hang of not twisting the ribbon as it unrolled…  😉

I then arm-knitted massive chain from this (like fingerknitting, but huuuge!) and as everything is so slippery, the next stage is stitching hearts to the links to keep them in position…

Of course, the ‘more is more’ school of embellishment means that some at least of these complex cloth hearts are being edged with beads and sequins, photos of that stage to follow 😉

Another set of hearts are knitted and some have a crochet edging. As my hands hurt horribly if I knit more than 2 a day of these small hearts, my lovely Mahjongettes have stepped into the breach. Gold star goes to Elizabeth, who has taken yarn home with her to do more (I so owe her cake!) and the moss stitch hearts are hers, with edging by PoetrySue. Eleanor stuck to garter stitch and had fun mixing ribbons in and making faces over my texture yarns. The results are very pleasing!

And of course, all those ribbons and threads and glittery bits and rustly wrappers are very attractive to Nonie…

waste not, want not: sewing room snippets

I’ve had the loveliest evening, listening to a favourite band with interesting lyrics, while making miniature bunting/ yarn tags/ fibre art tags.

Now, I’m using tags in the graffiti sense, a street artist leaving art that has a strong flavour /signature/ handle that others recognise. These are the first pieces of dozens, maybe hundreds I will be making for an event next month in London.

However, they are very easy and pleasing to do, and you can adapt the technique to make your own festive bunting/ tree decorations/ or even tags for gifts to crafty friends. The best thing is, they CAN be made entirely from leftovers, in fact, they are richer and more interesting if they are! Just like a patchwork quilt where you can look back and see a favourite shirt, summer dress, band Tshirt…twice the happiness!

How do I acquire all these snippets? Basically, whenever I make anything, instead of sweeping the snips and trimmings into the bin, I save them in a clear plastic bag. At a sew or knit event, I’ve been known to sweep up everyone’s snips! Some of  Truly Hooked’s yarn trimmings are in this batch, I am not a great one for pink 😉

Then, when I need a variety of materials and really don’t want to cut into a block of fabric, out come the bags. Seeing what I have available, pulling out particularly appealing pieces and mixing and matching makes the wheels start turning, and then I might seek out some larger remnants or a particular yarn…It’s a really great way to gently ease back into making if you’re unsure what to do next or feeling blocked or downhearted, the variety of colours and textures is like a salve to bruised feelings 😉

So, what have we here? Chopped off bits of felting, leftover machine cords, trimming edges on something in yellow gingham (I am sooo drawing a blank on what THAT was!!) a couple of inches of rust ribbon, a bit of rainbow chiffon with automatic stitch patterns to embellish…hmmm….

Punchinello (the plastic foil sequins are punched out of) can be torn in half, if you start at a corner and work slowly, and then it’s much more bendy, which helps. You can see a seam edge from a charity shop blouse lovely Robyn gifted me, mmm, patterned kingfisher/ teal shiny satin! by cutting very close to the seam I got the most remnant for use, but also created an interesting ‘string’. There is a theory of proportions, called the Golden Mean, the human eye likes things to be divided by thirds, so because the white stitching makes a third of the strip, it looks very pleasing. Otherwise I could make it work by having one third and two thirds of a piece of fabric either side of an interesting line of stitching. Sometimes you can make something jump out by breaking this rule, it snags the eye, it all depends what effect you want whether it’s ‘right’ or not!

Because I have lots of interesting snippets, I can work quite fast, the trouble I have is not getting out everything in the studio 😉  oh, i have a button somewhere that would be just right, or where is that ladder yarn I was using the other day? Staaaaaaaaaaap! Challenging myself to work as much as possible from the one bag really helps 😉

Making a series is good, I get quicker and quicker and then I can string them together by stitching them onto a machine cord or a piece of braid or a ribbon and voila! I have bunting 🙂 Well worth a try, and good fun to do when you are going on holiday and can’t take much with you. Coming to a tree or a railing near you soon, yours or mine?

Complex cloth is good for using up leftover scraps or strips of fabric and ribbon. I used Thorntons choccie wrappers, they are plastic/foil and I need to make some waterproof embellishers too. Cut a 6″ or 20cm square of backing cloth, I used umbrella fabric someone gave me. Pin the wrappers along the fold line so you can stitch anchors in the strong sections – put the needle down first, then sew slowly, with strong thread, using a wider zigzag so the strain is spread across the fragile plastic/foil. Unpin everything, and pick a pattern stitch you like and can curve with, in a contrasting colour. Again, needle down first, start slowly and set the pattern stitch to be wider than usual. Draw lines of stitch to please you, but also anchor your scraps. This is easy for quilters, but just keep it simple and slow, and even beginners can get it right 🙂

Now cut out the shape of your bunting – draw on the back if it helps – and save the scraps! This is a double winning technique!

Here are my hearts, and you can see a pile of scraps to the side – they can be used in the tags or as dolly bunting or as spacers between bigger bunting shapes 🙂

Again, very simple, very pleasing, and a great way to make something fromwhat would otherwise go in the bin, to landfill. Zero waste rocks!

food bank protein bars: sweet and savoury recipes

I have been feeling very upset about the huge rise in people needing to use foodbanks in Britain. There is so much being kept out of the regular news –  http://welfarenewsservice.com/disabled-man-found-fit-work-killed-sickness-benefits-stopped/  [  ‘This article was written by Steven Preece and first published by the Welfare News Service on 26/12/13 and has been reproduced here with permission’] WNS are great and keep reporting what the papers barely touch, including that within 6 weeks of having their benefits stopped, so many disabled people are killing themselves, well over a thousand in 2013, as the bedroom tax has made a bad situation worse.

The more upset I get, the more pain I feel, that’s the way fibromyalgia works sadly, so please understand I am not glossing over this situation when I say I am choosing to make myself feel better by doing what I can: finding a candle to light in the darkness.

I have made a test batch of high protein, delicious protein bars (taste like ordinary flapjack/yummy cake) but will release energy in stages – sugar rush, then fruit, nuts and oats…to get a child through to their free lunch or an adult from one shift to the next.

They’re also great for us pain and fatigue peeps! I’ve been having one 80g slice for breakfast and it keeps me full for at least 4 hours. Of course I’m not doing heavy labouring, but even so, pretty good… It’s like having a small bowl of VERY rich muesli 😉

I’ve also made a savoury version, more like a scone, but again with a much higher protein count, with grated cheese or finely chopped nuts. I’ll add some more photos when the chili nuts come next week and I make the next batch.

Now I’m on disability benefits so can’t afford to spend a lot on ingredients, so how can I use my catering skills not just to adapt a recipe, but to exploit my knowledge of how nonsensical best before dates often are, and use completely safe, but supposedly out of date ingredients from my online bargain store?

I’ve marked AF next to an ingredient if I got it cheaper than normal, and my costings are based on being able to get similar bargains fairly regularly.

My Approved Foods challenge: vegan suet is 5 bags @ 180g for £1!

Savoury Scones

12oz S R flour       6oz/18og suet AF

2oz/50g sunflower seeds AF

6oz grated cheese or 150g FINELY chopped chili or dry roasted peanuts AF

black pepper, mustard to taste eg 1/2 to 1 TEAspoon

sea salt (if no salt with the nuts) AF

10fl oz/ half pint of cold water

Mix the dry ingredients, including the suet, with your well washed hands or a fork. Add most of the water and stir gently with a dinner/table knife. The aim is to make a soft dough, that holds its shape but is NOT sticky, so if necessary add the last bit of water very slowly. One fist of dough makes 2 scones. If you look at the photo, you can see I haven’t needed to use any flour to make the dough workable.

Shape into 12 large rounds (like scones!) or make oblongs and space well apart on greased baking trays, dab tops with a drip of water (or milk or egg)

Bake for 30 min at gas 5/ 200 c / in a warm – hot oven until crisp and golden brown. If necessary turn upside down after  20 mins (my oven’s fan is very iffy!)

If you make a cup soup or hot marmite, you can balance the scone over it or dunk  to warm the scone, so someone in fuel poverty can get a hearty snack with one mug of hot water 🙂

PAN SOUP: CARROT AND CUMIN

I also made a carrot and cumin soup, very simple, just well fried onions and 2 green peppers, add 1 litre of boiling water with 2 veggie stock cubes or 1 TABLEspoon of Marmite/Vecon, then 1 kg of half price carrots, topped, tailed and cut into chunks. Bring to the boil, then simmer for 30 minutes. I whizz my soup with a blender stick, but you can chop the carrots smaller and skip that! This made 6 medium to large bowls, so multiply out as necessary 😉

I added black pepper, sea salt, mustard and 1 TEAspoon of cumin seeds for flavour (and cumin is good for boosting immune system) but you could use any herbs you like 😉

if you’re worried your child might not like it, well, Emilia’s Finn liked both

soup and scone 🙂

There were smiles from another visitor too, who took home two scones for another day 😉 I suggested toasting or warming them, as we had them warm from the oven, which made them extra yummy 😉 You can even fry them, like a stovey/ hash brown.

Easy Flapjack

flapjack can be shaped to ‘breakfast bars’ and make a very nutritious snack/ meal if you use lots of nuts and dried fruits (rich in minerals as well as sweet!) Mountaineers use Trail mix, so think how much energy dried fruit, nuts and seeds have in 🙂

375 g/ 120z vegan margarine gently melted on a low heat with

250g/ 8oz brown sugar and 100g golden syrup

until they bubble

I added:

125g/40z  deluxe fruit and nuts, (walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds finely chopped in a whizzer) AF

[but 100g salted peanuts, 1 TABLEspoon each of peanut butter and lemonjuice is a great variation and cheaper] AF

then 500g/ 1lb oats/oatmeal/ flapjack kits AF

stir until stiff, being careful to not let the ground nuts burn onto the pan base!

Turn out into a large foil case or 2 swiss roll tins and press down well with the back of the wooden spoon.

Bake at 200 c/ gas 5 for 10 mins, then turn tin/s round and bake for another 10 -15 mins until it is dark golden brown.

Leave to cool in the trays! When completely cool turn onto a chopping board and cut into bars, 5 cm/2″ wide. If they are crumbly, cut them into 8cm squares instead and add more golden syrup or less raisins etc next time.

I once baked and sold 800 flapjack slices as a fundraiser on a stall at North Shields Fish Quay Festival! Oh my! Today my hand is really cramped after making one foil tray!

But they taste very good, Elizabeth enjoyed her slice and said what a difference the ground nuts make 😉 and I have had plenty for visitors over New Year as well as my breakfasts 🙂

I am going to keep one of each for as long as it takes to go mouldy so I can put a use-by date on for the food bank. To be honest I’ve never seen mouldy flapjack, too much sugar and fat, it’s a descendant of pemmican and other foods stored by encasing in fat with sugar. The scones I think will be fine for a week, they have sea salt in, but they will get drier – one good reason to use suet rather than margarine, suet pastries are moister, not just because they’re often steamed, but the way the fat is isolated within the flour.. read some Heston Blumenthal for the science 😉

Altogether, I’m very pleased with my experiment, and the tasters agree, challenge MET! There was no indication that discount ingredients had been used, but the batches costed out at roughly half to a third price because margarine is so dear now (particularly vegan) and dried fruit and nuts and even oats are a lot dearer (agrochemicals as well as delivery costs go up when oil prices rise…)

Savoury Scones – 12 large scones £1.60/ 13.3p, say 15p each inc gas and they have protein in and are MUCH more satisfying than a bread roll

Flapjack – 14 large bars (80 – 100g, over twice the size of an ordinary breakfast bar)

£3.20/ 23p, say 25p each once wrapped and labelled, at cheaper than the price of a 40g bar…with protein in…

For £5 I can give 26 high protein meal replacements, well worth it?

And because they look and taste like a treat, I hope people will use and enjoy them, and feel a little more cared for, instead of being kicked when they are down 😉

garden works

Oh, I gave myself such a nice birthday present this year! A hardworking team called Spade and Sparrow (spadeandsparrow@gmail.com) came and spent 2 hours making this:

I forgive you for asking what exactly this is…it’s an unhappy wilderness that has overtaken the north end of the big Victorian rockery. It is a mess of spotted laurel (ugh) brambles with not very nice blackberries (the ones on the other side are lovely) and tatty undergrowth. Under which, but I accept you have no reason to believe this 😉 is a lovely ring of rocks and an interesting old sycamore trunk!

Stretching across a distressingly large swathe of the area nearest the house, and with fibromyalgia, offering no way in… which as I wanted to plant the end of the rockery and next year aim for another raised bed to match the lovely one Ben in Flat 2 built… made for a feeling of failure and disempowerment. The team came and worked wonders, revealing exactly what I’d dreamed of, interesting rocks, lovely rich forest garden soil, and a way to expand the veg garden with a cottage/potager area 🙂

They were really happy to work in my landspirit style, where as little as possible is made someone else’s problem or wasted. Some particularly vicious brambles and holly were bundled up and put in the dry shade top border to add some nutrients as they compost, the laurel was put in a corner I want to knock back (laurel is toxic) as it is growing the wrong things 😉 and the friendly weeds were put in the compost heap. One compost heap was brought across and spread on the cardboard mulch where a raised bed will be, and a second will be set up in this area ready to feed and fill the new bed. Containers that have been in the way elsewhere are now holding the mulch down and I have lucked into some paving slabs and a friend has gifted me another hour of Spade and Sparrow time to re -lay the weedy slabs and the new ones with sand or gravel in the New Year! So exciting 🙂

back to the drawing board

It was lovely to have enough spoons and nothing planned so I could get out my 12metre roll of taffeta, which I’d embellished a little last week, and start trying out more colours and elements with it. This is the breakaway piece, in a very similar palette to ‘whispering wall’, blues, browns and brassy-golds, which is about water and how we waste it in Britain. We flush away toilet waste with prime drinking water (there are some new eco-builds where ‘grey’ water from the washing machine/shower etc is channeled to the toilet tank) and 6 – 8 LITRES at that…waste on waste…At least put a bottle of tapwater in your tank to help fill it and save water, very few times does the flush need to be that strong. My new neighbour in Flat 1 works shifts, so I am trying not to flush the toilet as often – or let Nonie out the squeaky window!

I used to complain about paying water bills until I stopped to consider how much work the company is doing – clean, safe filtered water and sewage/drains for £220ish a year? Bargain! I do wish they were nationalized again, because things for the benefit of the community shouldn’t be trying to make a profit for shareholders when the sewage pipes/tunnels need replacing…but householders shouldn’t be putting substances down the toilet a business would be fined for – British sewers’ number one problem is fat, every time a chip pan gets emptied down a drain instead of put in a bottle and sent to landfill or BETTER YET used for biofuel, it adds another 2 litres to the problem.

I was in the shower this morning and found myself thinking more about this wrong usage and how I would highlight that by sewing mirrors and abalone shells into the coils and chains that make up the torrent of water and waste. I had been feeling a little guilty about not being able to source as much industrial salvage for this, but then it occurred to me that this is a perfect way to highlight the waste, to use ‘treasure’ to embellish the water elements and salvage for the waste. Brace yourself for posts on humanure in the future 😉

I made some more freeform chains with the most delicioso mixes of laceweight, silk remnant, pompom yarn and a gold and black glitter yarn Eleanor gave me, mmm, so next I will bundle these together, with the smaller chains braiding round the big loops of the taffeta. To give you some scale – the taffeta made two loops from a metre of embellished fabric 😉 Big!

The better quality images are taken with my new camera, which due to my main laptop being at the menders, I’ve not had enough playtime with, yet 😉 The poor guy is trying so hard to fix it, and has lent me my hard drive in a spare laptop so I can have a catch up day with blogging and photography etc! So here are some more detail shots of the taffeta, with not much processing as the poorly laptop was on meltdown just holding a 1MB image…anyone who has the Bigdog trojan/malware in their Skype/Logitech, be careful, it’s a pig 😦

waste not, want not: dates on food, food on plates 1

Food waste is a huge problem nowadays, all the way through the chain, from animals eating prime proteins to make weaker proteins and ruining rainforest/ prairie/ pampas etc  while they do it, to the overflowing bins emptied into smelly bin lorries going off to landfills that belch as much methane as the animals at the other end…(stern reminder: POSITIVE, OPTIMISTIC outlook please! adjusts headset and continues 😉 )

If you eat meat, you probably like it and don’t want to change that aspect of your diet, but do be aware there are plenty of reasons and recipes to be meatfree at least once a week! And you’re not a CARNIVORE, you’re an OMNIVORE (eat everything!) unless you’re a vampire (eek! run away!) so the rest of this post might still give you useful tips 😉

General waste: there is so much an average person can do to streamline their buying/ eating/ waste management, from loose to detailed planning of meals for the week, pantry inventory (sharpen a pencil or fire up your psion spread sheets, all welcome here!) home production of herbs, the wonderfoods known as sprouts, fruit and veg grown in containers or mixed in your borders, cottage style, and your own compost (which if you follow my instructions will NOT smell 😉

I grew up in a family where pantry inventory was taken for granted, it was a 20 minute round trip to the corner shop and an hour to the town centre and back, so keeping an eye on levels was automatic for my mother. The women on both sides of my family were good cooks and on my father’s side were in catering, so I took in a lot of information I now realise I am very lucky to have – which I am really pleased to share with you too 😉

WHICH BEST BEFORE DATES MATTER:

MEAT, FISH, AND ALL PRODUCTS CONTAINING THEM unless it has been smoked or salted or dehydrated. Basically if it has been preserved using a method an in-tune indigenous/First Nationer would use, it’ll be fine. Freezing is fine, if you are sure the meat has never gone above -7, you can go past the date, the flavour will just be a bit less, but make sure you are cooking it in a stew and boil it thoroughly. Last dead flesh advice! Apart from, avoid it, it’s the biggest risk for bringing food poisoning into your home, there’s a reason for kosher rules/halal etc, they’re about staying alive in a hot climate when eating high risk items…meat attracts flies and flies spread germs, I put my cat’s dish in the fridge between feeds in the summer and still get flies, a problem I’ve never had before, grrr, something about the evergreen forest out the kitchen window…

DAIRY AND EGGS

EGGS If you’re not sure, salt and water test: mix 2 tablespoons of salt in a pint of COLD water and gently place the egg in, the further it sinks, the better, if it FLOATS, discard it, it’s old and potentially growing salmonella, yuck…

CHEESE/YOGHURT/MILK smell test first: if milk smells sickly, it will make you sick, pour it down the outside drain/toilet and you’ll likely see curds (gag). If cheese or yoghurt have pink or green on them, eek! PINK will make you ill, chuck it now, preferably in a sealed nappy bag! BLUE/GREEN this should be a flow chart! is it stilton or gorgonzola? enjoy! (but far away from me, heave…) is it cheap cheddar? cut the white and blue off and use the rest in something TODAY where it is baked or boiled – eg macaroni cheese. Is it dark green/blue? Out now…

When food dates came in, people were expected to still know how to use their own senses to check for signs of danger. With compensation culture, the dates are being made shorter and shorter until some common sense is beginning to rebel at the mountain of waste made by people who don’t know any better and sling the lot.

Try not to use perfume or smoke before you cook or gather ingredients, smell is your best friend for fresh or chilled food – of it smells wrong, it probably is, eg if it smells of fish (but isn’t!) it has a particular bacteria whose name I forget, but you don’t want inside you, take my word for it, please!

Wash fresh fruit and veg slowly (it’s enjoyable, honest!) and you will spot bruised or infested areas – eg butterfly eggs on cabbage leaves, those grubs that like berries will float out upside down and you can put them all in the compost bin where they are your friends!

CANNED/ JARRED FOODS:

these are the ones where the dates are normally a nonsense….

Anything preserved in a pint of vinegar is going to keep 5 years, maybe 10. It may lose some texture or be less tasty, but it isn’t going to hurt you. Make stew/ broth/ casserole and enjoy the tang! It will make your stew keep on top of the stove without refrigeration for five days unless you live in a sauna.

Anything stored in vegetable oil is going to keep a long time, eg garlic, olives, ginger etc. Again, it may lose a little flavour or texture, so check it and adjust amounts, but it is unlikely to hurt you, but if it smells the least bit fishy, out, otherwise, in that stewpot 😉

Anything stored in brine (salty water) is going to be ok for ages past the date most companies give it, though it may go a bit soft. Sluice the beans/sweetcorn /whatever and then stand in cold water over night, drain and use in a boiled soup/stew.

Anything preserved in enough sugar is going to keep for 3 to 20 years.What is enough? Anything marked low sugar is NOT enough, unless it has vinegar or salt in it too, eg fruit compote might have raspberry vinegar in. Jam can keep for several years, if it has no mould, it’s fine. If homemade jam has mould on the top wafer, the waxed circle was put in upside down, the jars were not sterilised, or air got in. Mostly, you can scrape it out, pour the good jam into a bowl and test it by taste. You can now make wine from it 😉 or make an old fashioned steam pudding or make a fruit cake by the boiling method, or add the jam instead of sugar to a cake and bake it, make jammy tarts, porridge, dodgers…or a glaze for nut roast…lots of things as long as it involves heating the jam till it bubbles.

DRIED FOODS

Um, this may seem obvious, but I’ll say it, as a young friend genuinely didn’t know: sugar and salt cannot ‘go off’. Honey maybe just might after several years if there was a lot of comb left in, but dried sugar, kept dry, will last to feed the post apocalypse roaches. Salt can get wet and dry again and be ok, er particularly if is is sea salt 😉 Sugar and salt are the mainstays of food preservation without big equipment, eg de-hydrators, freezers, and the move to low sugar and low salt foods instead of portion control has made for some odd dilemmas and waste problems.

First Nations people around the world (including europeans!) found out very fast that coating things in honey kept them really well, and that sweet enough fruit pounded into bison or deer/elk etc with lard, made pemmican, a dried meat that kept for  a few months, saving the chore of daily hunting in hardscrabble springs.

Fruit/ herbal teas – if it looks and smells ok, it is!

Dried fruit will keep years beyond the bb4date, if it looks ok, it is ok. If it looks a bit dry (currants do this a lot)  soak the fruit in an appropriate fruit tea for 10minutes before cooking, eg apple rings, soak in raspberry tea and bake in a victoria sponge, oh, nom, currants/sultanas  in darjeeling/any brown/black tea or bilberry/elderberry, ever since I learnt to make Irish brack cake I do this anyway, fruit cakes and breads should be juicy not chewy…

Dried vegetables and de-hydrated vegetables (different processes) will keep a long way past the bb4 dates. Again, if it looks ok, it is ok. Beans and pulses are great proteins and therefore attract critturs, even more if they are organic, so keep them in plastic-ware or better yet jars or old biscuit tins. Plastic can be a problem in humid spaces or Edinburgh tenement flats (hiya Em! waves!!) If in any doubt, pour the rice/ wheat/ beans/ broth mix into a mixing bowl and stir. If anything looks nibbled, examine it and if necessary, sling it – mice droppings will give you nasty illnesses, so anything chewed needs to go out, and scrub your pantry and create better storage, set traps, get a cat etc 😉  Cats were revered in Egypt because they kept the granaries – the wealth of the Pharaohs – safe 🙂

Anything with enough ascorbic acid will keep a way past the date. Basically it’s vitamin C, but I just found out the name translates from Latin as no-scurvy…cool! Scurvy is vitamin deficiency that long distance sailors used to get if they didn’t take barrels of pickled limes with them – preserving saves lives, not just jams! 😉 Sorry, I used to be a professional jam maker and still get very annoyed when people dismiss jam as a luxury confection, not a lifesaving food that gave people the strength to farm in the hungry gap of maximum tilling and sowing, and minimum fresh and stored food available. But I digress 😉

Ascorbic acid is used loads in flours and food mixes, vacuum packed tortillas etc and it keeps them fresh and tends to see off the flour weevils – people still throw flour out a day over the date because it USED to get weevils…it can still, if it is organic/ super rustic, but it’s always worth checking. Open  the packet, and pour it through a sieve into a mixing bowl. It may have clumped with age, but if nothing’s wriggling, it’s ok! It may have lost its mojo, so add a bit of baking powder, half what the recipe calls for, and all will be well 😉

However if anything with flour in MAY have got wet or worse, been kept in a damp place, chuck it. It will have the wrong moulds in and you can get nasty fatigue conditions etc from it, so if the paper looks stained, out with it. Another digression – use anti-bax on your showerhead every couple of months for the same reason  http://www.nhs.uk/news/2009/09September/Pages/Showerheadsandlungdisease.aspx

In the next installment I’ll explain good storage, good cleaning/ hygiene and give some handy use it up recipes 😉

Meanwhile a link back to the perfect anti-waste foods: sprouted alfalfa seeds are amazing, I place my excellent vitamin and mineral levels (the doctor was politely surprised 😉 ) on their shoulders, and anyone with fatigue issues who got this far, they are so EASY!!! better than salad and no chopping/messing, oh joy!

waste not, want not 1: sprouting seeds, growing potatoes

Big Issue Knitathon: Knit Nottingham has fun ;)

So, much laughter, cake and coffee, all in a good cause 😉

Luckily it was a sunny day, if a tad chilly, but hardy Maria (she’s from Russia!) arrived early and stayed late (what a gem! Eleanor and I so enjoyed meeting her 😉 ) and kept me company outside the shop, to raise awareness of what we were doing. Lots of people noticed us and approved, some to the point of donating and one knitter asked for details to quickly knock off more squares to send in – by the sound of it her local group would be up for it too, so I think it was worth it! Of course the KN shop is not large, and as an agoraphobic I would never have made it through to 6pm inside, but Eleanor brought us coffees and the glow of virtue kept us warm 😉

Inside, there were shifts of knitters and sewers – 168 squares were made into strips of 12, another 100 or so squares are yet to come in, we raised £15 on the day, have sponsors of £250 plus to collect and one huge contribution has been sent direct by someone who hit her whole office up for three figures!

There was a lot of fun in this, at some point people started swapping stories of what tall tales they were told as children, Jemma was very amusing…her grandad was a right card by the sound of it, did you know haggises are only born to Scottish sheep? and they have two legs longer than the other to make it easier to climb hills?

I’d brought cake, mmm, sticky crystallized ginger and Eleanor had jaffa cakes to fuel us, and when I left about 6ish, they were still going strong 🙂

Thanks to everyone who helped in any way, I’ll keep you posted on final figures for squares and sponsor money! Anyone who wants to donate direct, here’s a link: http://www.bigissue.org.uk/donate or text  70070  with the message  DOUBO 1 £10

waste not, want not: 20 things to do with a Tshirt

Not all of the ideas in this are mine, so there are a few links in this post – be warned, you may end up spending a couple of hours wombling round thrifty idea-mines 😉

Before you cut a Tshirt up, look closely at it. Is it faded/dull or truly worn out? If the colour is off, but the surface has no pills, holes or anti-perspirant stains, maybe you could dye it? If you seem to accumulate band/ charity/ slogan tees in white that goes scrubby, this may be enough. Home dying is easy if you have a washing machine, and if you have a large pan and use things like onionskins, you can try stovetop dying 😉

These projects are suitable for second-lifing most states of Tshirt:

T shirt to tote: https://singingbirdartist.wordpress.com/2013/07/29/waste-not-want-not-3-tshirts-to-bags-1/

T shirt to gym kit or shoe bag: cut the neck and sleeves off, and any stained area under the arms, run a line of stitching around the edge and then fold it in, making a deep hem/tube at least 2″/5cm deep. Cut the sleeves into a long  spiralling strip and crochet/plait it to make it stronger, then use it as the draw string. To ease the string through the tube, put a safety pin through one end of the string so you can feel it as you tug it through 😉

in the garden: ‘beefsteak’ tomato and pumpkin slings, soft garden ties

for pets: make knotted bundles for dog pull toys, crocheted snakes for cats

make pet beds from your old Tshirts, they find the smell comforting if you need to take them to stay elsewhere, particularly the vets to stay overnight, it really helps them stay calm

round the house: band/message Tees can make  cushion covers for sofa or hard kitchen chairs/ memory quilts for bed or sofa

homemade dryer sheets: http://www.wisebread.com/make-your-own-eco-friendly-dryer-sheets

decorations/ bunting: any fabric will do for bunting, and you can always cut the motifs/words etc out to make a feature of them, or cut shapes, or make tassels to hang between every few triangles.

garlands: make crochet/ fingerknitting chains from the yarn and then ‘chain the chain’ to make chunky/ fluffy garlands. If you twist different colours together and tie with contrasting colours you can really make something from nothing 😉 I’ll do a tutorial on this when I have someone to photograph me!

draught excluders for the doors/windows – make long sausages from the sleeves and across the torso, stitch the neck together and stuff with rolled up scrubby shirts or plastic bags or newspapers

hand warmers/ heat pads: make little pouches and fill them with raw rice and a drop of aromatherapy oil, microwave for a minute to make soothing pads for sore hands, make larger neck pouches etc

baby wipes: keep a stack of squares to hand and mop off the baby as necessary, chuck in the washer, repeat 😉

make yarn.: cut the hem off a clean T shirt and spiral up and across so that you make one very long thread for as long as you can, perhaps 2cm/a scant inch across. As the pieces get shorter, wind them in a separate ball to use in rugs

what to do with the yarn:

knit pot holders and mugrugs/coasters/hot mats for pans/oven ware on the table

crochet it into simple chains and stitch it in a spiral to make round mats – use strong waxed thread and a really sharp needle!

hooky/proggy/clippy rugs – these are very traditional in the mining areas of Britain, and are a great way to use old fabric and hessian sacks. Clippy rugs can use a scrap of fabric the size of your thumb and made with T shirt fabric are super soft and cosy bedside rugs.

this is a Yorkshire version ( I know the Northumbrian style, where the hooks and proggers were made of bullet casings, filched from Vickers Armstrong munitions 😉 though I also had a hook with a metal door knob as the handle, but a dolly peg, with one leg cut off and everything sanded down smooth is fine and much more child safe.)

Make sure you use ‘soft’ hessian, or for a really easy run, use rug canvas, particularly if you want to avoid overworking your hands and wrists.

An interesting story I was told in a community rug making workshop was that in one old man’s family on Christmas Eve, the new rug went in front of the fire, every rug moved round the house, and the oldest and shabbiest went on the compost heap to keep the compost turning over quicker in the winter 😉 Also, your name was in a queue at the coop to get the next sugar sack, as they were the best size for a big rug 🙂

weave rugs on a hula hoop/frame:

http://www.flaxandtwine.com/2012/02/woven-finger-knitting-hula-hoop-rug-diy.html#comment-form

which I’m adapting to suit what I have 😉 I’m sure Anne of flax and twine would be happy with that 😉 she uses one Tshirt for the spokes, but you can use a lot of Tees if you cut them into yarn 😉

And after all that, I’m now off to lie in a darkened room 😉