Planet Savers blog

Exciting stuff today! I wanted to see how the corn starch bags were getting on in the compost heap. These are the bags Sally uses to bring over the bunny poo with the hay and newspaper as mentioned earlier. They have been under the pile for several months now, the pile has reduced by about half so it was a good day to pull it out and turn it over.

Some of the earlier bags that must be around a year old have broken down pretty well but are still very obvious looking like strips of plastic bag in the pile. The more recent ones, probably about four months in the pile were pretty much intact and their contents still contained. It is very obvious that pricking them with the fork is not enough, I need to slash them open in order for the contents to be able to compost down more quickly.

On the good side, there was a lot of worm activity, not as much as I’d hoped for, but they were there. Hopefully, the weather is warming up enough for them to start increasing in number.

Fantanstic, at last someone is thinking outside the box!
We all need our car, so lets make a car with zero emissions that can be recycled at the end of its life. This is the premise of Riversimple.

Excerpt from Ecologist article:

“Riversimple’s network electric car is a hydrogen fuel cell powered car, with unique technologies that enable it to run on a 6kW fuel cell, with a fuel consumption equivalent to 300 miles per gallon and greenhouse gas emissions at 30g per km, well-to-wheel – less than a third of that from the most efficient petrol-engine cars currently available. 

“It also has the potential to be 10 times cleaner still if the hydrogen is produced from renewable energy.”

If, like me, you are used to a grocery delivery, the recent weather has probably changed things a bit. My Riverford delivery could not get through so I foud myself having to do a ‘big shop’ – not something I’ve needed to do for a long while. I rely on Riverford from my dairy and groceries, Hazeldene for my local organic meat, Darvell’s for delicious bread, and Lucia’s for ham, oil, pasta and anything else that looks tempting. Eco cleaning materials come from Healthright mostly or mail order. Which leaves Waitrose for biscuits and… oh yes, fish…

…well, as you can see, I’m not a ‘big’ shopper’.

But, running low on everything saw me with a piled up trolly in Waitrose. I was turning the clock back about three years and looking at the system with new eyes.

The choice we have! We could be hungry and walk into a supermarket and get confused about what to eat. We are, literally, spoilt for choice. We say: what do I fancy? We hum and ha. What kind of meat? What kind of fish? It’s all there, so much to choose from. You are almost surprised if they don’t have something. Surely they can fly it in from Israel, of the USA, or South Africa. Someone has to have it, we need it for a recipe!

If I’m honest, the site of all that food makes me sick.

Yes, it’s great that people who ‘can’t cook won’t cook’ can pop in and get a ready meal at the end of a busy day. And in our hectic life cooking can take up so much time. I can see how it all happened. It’s all about demand and supply.

But, and it’s a big but for me, if we lose our relationship with our food we have lost our relationship with something vitally important. We eat to sustain ourselves, we eat to keep alive. Food is how we take in minerals and vitamins that sustain our bodies. This is a pretty important stuff.

Yet, here we are relying on some complete unknown commercial manufacturer to make it for us and add ’stuff’ to it so that it will last a week or so longer before going off. Yes, there are rules and regs about additives, of course it’s ’safe’ to eat. But how much goodness is there in it?  And I mean real goodness, not chemically manufactured additives and the nutritionalists recommed for daily intake.

And why does everything contain ‘flavouring’ as if the food doesn’t have any?

We need to have a relationship with our food. We need to know what we are eating. We need to understand what it is to eat the right food at the right time of year. Seasonal food provides the goodness we need for that season. There is a lot of stored energy in root veg.

I nearly didn’t publish this as it sounded like a “bah humbug”, but then I read this article in the Economist.

This supermarket monopsonist system is not sustainable. But who is going to say so? Not the farmers. Not the supermarkets. Not the shoppers who are laregley unaware of the problem. Not the government unless the people ask them to…

It’s down to us, guys. Anyone who reads this and agrees.

It’s down to us…

By the way, it’s home made cottage pie tonight – full of all it’s own flavours;>)

Mr. SqueeRoll

It seems we are not the only ones enjoying the compost heap!

This has become the favoured perch of one of our robins. I’m not sure how he’ll take to this intrusion.

Cute though, isn’t he?

Actually, there is another incumbant. A rat took up residence in the compost heap in late summer. Since the weather got cold, we have seen him darting out from under the shed to help himself to the bird food. A gardener friend pointed out that they do a grand job churning the heap.

That may all be academic now as the cat bought in a gift the other day…. Dropping it on the kitchen floor it skuttled off behind the washing machine. Please tell me, of all the cupboards in the kitchen, how to rats/mice etc. know that this is the one place we find the most difficult to get at them?

Haven’t seen or heard of it since and the cat seems to have lost interest. I reckon the smell should hit us around, let me see, Christmas Day?!

No, of course we wouldn’t!

Yet, we are doing just that

to the planet we live on.

Find out more at

Prince’s Rainforest Project.

If you agree

add you name to the list.

There is so much stuff happening in the news this week that I just had to get back into my Blog :>)

You can tell it’s Autumn and I’m busy storing as much of the natural goodness growing around and about in jars and freezer and what have you. So much so that I haven’t blogged in ages.

BUT

I just had to spread the word about the Age of Stupid world premiere. It’s going to be bigger than ‘Star Wars’ and a lot greener! Read about it in the Guardian.

Then I got my weekly bulletin from The Ecologist and there was the news that the GM companies are moaning about the public believing all the stuff thrown out by the organic lovers. As a result, they don’t trust what the scientist say. Yee-ha, that’s one up to us for a change. So, it’s time to make sure we have the facts, there is about to be a back lash from the pro-GM brigade.

That’s all for now. I’m off to make some pear jam.

I can’t think of a better way to spend a Bank Holiday than by building a composting area. Seriously!  I’ve been itching to get this part of the garden sorted out, compost being close to my heart:>) I had been creating piles of ’stuff’ all over the garden ready for the day I had a compost area. And it just arrived!

We were lucky enough to get hold of some palletts, so we have been recycling into the bargain. Since we are so close to the chalk on this hillside, driving anything into the ground is a lot of hard graft for Bobbie. We needed eight support posts and this meant that the sledge hammer had another outing to push the metposts into the ground.

Thanks to the stalwart work of Sally and Mark’s bunnies, Delilah and Harry (see Sally’s blog for pictures of said bunnies), the first heap is almost complete.

This also means that we are able to conduct something of an experiment on the cornstarch bag front. Sally is collecting all the bunny droppings along with the rest of the bedding and putting it into cornstarch compostable bags which she brings over once a week. Having just moved a pile of them, we found that the bottom of the pile was rotting down rather nicely. However, it is obvious that the bags need to be wet in order to break down into good compost.

The heap is a layered platter of bunny muck, mown grass, and wet cardboard interspersed with kitchen and garden waste as available. Delicious! I’m looking forward to seeing the results:>)

Just a bit of sun and those sharp, hard bullets of blackberries turn into sweet, lushious, melt-in-your-mouth packets of juice. Fortunately, blackberries seem to have evolved alongside our ability to eat them and have a way of spreading their fruiting period over several weeks. We can still see flowers alongside ripe fruit.

This is just as well because six pounds of blackberries takes some managing. Three pounds became jam, two were bottled or dry frozen (bite into one of these and it’s like eating blackberry sorbet – hmmm, there’s an idea…). The last pound was also preservedwith the help of sugar – and brandy! I think I’ll do another batch in vodka so that we can have fun at the comparison stage:>)

Before the Autumn takes hold, I wanted to get our polytunnel constructed. Hopefully, this means I will be able to get some seeds up and ready for planting next year but, most of all, I’ll stand a good chance of having some tomatoes that turn red before the weather turns. England must be the home of green tomato chutney!
All we had to do(!) was bury six poles into the ground a couple of feet, connect the frame parts together, and push them into the pole supports. If you have a nice flat garden with a good layer of soil this is probably not too much to ask. When you have a garden on a slope with topsoil of about twelve inches before hitting the chalk bedrock, this is a little more tricky.
Bobbie had spent a couple of days creating the level base before the weather broke. So, with good weather this weekend, he wanted to make the frame.
This involved sledge-hammering an iron spike into the ground in order to make a hole that he stood a chance of sledge-hammering the support into. It was a hard day’s work but he was well chuffed at the end to find that the frame was pretty much level.
I think the least I can do is imortalise his efforts in this blog :>)

I’m getting used to SolarTwin hot water now. On sunny days we get up to 60 degrees in the tank without any external asistance. The bottom of the tank might be ten degrees cooler, so there is plenty for showers and washing up.
On cloudy days it will be around 28 to 35 depending on how much the sun got through. I check the temperature when I get home from work and flip the heating on for half and hour of so and heat up the tank. Then off again until next evening’s check.
It’s fab :>)