It's a good job we're not digging for victory

Well it's a blooming good job we are not digging for victory is all I can say! If we were we would starve!

Of everything we planted not much has survived the amounts of rain we have had or the amount of sluggy visitors we have had in the garden too. Normally we grow a mass of courgettes as we love them, last week we had one and then it got eaten by a slug. Even the rhubarb that was doing well, yesterday got eaten by a rabbit who had managed to sneak her way in past the defences! The only thing that is doing well this year is the apple tree but I won't say too much about that as I don't want to jinx it!

Being eco is not for the busy!

I am sure that being eco is for people with lots of time! I hate to say it but for me it is kinda true. Life got really manic at one point and work was busy busy busy. It was at this time that I found that I was just getting through. It was quicker and easier to go to the supermarket for the household shopping. Can you believe it! As sad as it is it really is true. I simply didn't have the time or the inclination after a hard days work to then spend the time going round lots of little independent shops. As for the garden, well I pretty much gave up and am sorry to say that all the salad has gone to seed.

That is just how it is. I can't say that I am happy about it or enjoyed it per se but equally I think it was kind of important to be this way to appreciate how hard it is for working families. The convenience and time saving just simply takes precedent.

I even found that cooking went out the window. We went out to eat or got take aways. We were actually spending the money we were making at work on feeding our selves because we didn't have time to make healthy cheap food. It is insane when you look at it like that. We were basically working to buy the things that we couldn't do because we were at work.

And you know what, the more money I made the more I spent. The more I wanted to spend too. When I don't have so much it is not a case of can't spend it is a case of not really being bothered as I get my feel good factor from the cooking, gardening and craft activities.

It really is all very nuts!

Forraging - Elderflower Cordial

I just love this time of year, I like going out for a nice walk and seeing what bounties I can forrage!

What people don't know when they smile as they pass is that often I have a carrier bag and a pair of scissors in my pocket! Why I hear you ask, well for elderflowers. I love love love em and the best bit is they are free. I use them for cordial, champage and for fritters. DELISH!!!

For now I have made elderflower cordial and thought I would share the images from the process with you. What sparked it off was this darling little lady bug - so cute I grabbed my camera and from there I thought why not lets shoot the whole thing. Don't worry, the little bug was not harmed in the procees, she was put out to graze in my garden.

So piccies first and the I will share the recipe with you and then some tips on foraging!

Elderflower Cordial Recipe

To make approximately 3 litres

40 heads of elderflower
3.5 Kg sugar
2.5 litres water
4 lemons
150g citric acid
Bottles - Glass looks pretty but you can also use plastic.

1. Shake the elderflower heads to remove any bugs and beasties and also to shake off dead flowers and pollen
2. Trim as much of the green stalks off as possible as these can make it taste more bitter
3. Put the flowers into a large bowl (or two medium sized). Slice up the lemon and add this to the bowl with the flowers. If you would like the cordial to be less torte, use fewer lemons!
4. Pour the water into a large (or two medium sized) saucepan, add the sugar and slowly heat.
5. Once the sugar has dissolved, pour this into the bowl over the lemons and the flowers and savour that wonderful smell!
6. Stir in the citric acid, cover with a cloth.
7. Leave to infuse for 24-48 hours stirring occasionally.
8. Pour into clean sterilised bottles using a sieve or muslin cloth and a funnel.

Can be stored for up to one month or it can be frozen in batches and defrosted to use when required. This is what I do. I use smaller plastic bottles, the type that you buy for a one off drink about 500ml, I fill the bottle 3/4 full and then freeze it. That way I can get a bottle out when I like and not much goes off. It keeps for months and months frozen.

My tips and how to identify the plant

Elderflowers can be harvested approximately May – June.

I had bought cordial in the shops and paid an absolute fortune for it (particularly in the pretty fancy unusual bottles – I am a sucker for that – it must be posh and good if it is in a posh looking bottle, surely? All I knew was that Elderflowers taste yummy, the grow wild and are free. Making things with cordials must be easy and I no longer had to spend a fortune on my luxury cordial, or posh squash as Jon likes to call it!
I want to make elderflower cordial, I had that established but where on earth do I start? Where do they grow? What do they look like? My main worry with picking elderflowers is that I wasn’t entirely sure what they look like. This was our first foraging for free food experience and I was terrified that I was going to poison us!

Once you know what elderflower looks like, you always know. That may sound silly but now every where I go I am like, ooooh there’s one, ooooh fancy it growing there. It becomes an addiction.

The main plant that you could confuse elder with is the Guelder Rose. The guelder rose however is a much smaller shrub. The branches of Elder are very brittle and the bark is slightly corky looking. You can also tell the elderflower apart from the guelder rose by the leaves. Elder  leaves have finely serrated edges on a stem with two or three pairs and then a single leaf at the end. The Elder flowers are individually very small - the whole flower head being of a larger spread than the Guelder Rose. The latter has much larger individual white flowers open around the outside of the flower head, and smaller flowers very similar to the Elders in the centre of the flower head. Leaves are totally different to the Elder, being broader - a bit like a Field Maple shape.
Elderflowers smell of what can only be described as being “Tom cat ish” if they smell too much like tom cat then they have gone over and shouldn’t be used. Anything you make with gone over elderflowers will smell equally noxious!

The other plant that you could perhaps mistake them for is the white cowslip.

I would recommend that you harvest from as high as possible to avoid the concern that a doggy may have already paid a visit and to ensure that you are not harvesting cowslip. Also as ever avoid harvesting from a bush that is potentially polluted, from by the side of a road for example.

ENJOY!!!!

Book Review: Food For Free

I think if nothing else the title should really grab your attention, I mean afterall who wouldn't want to eat for free huh!

It's a Collins Gem book and I tell ya, it really is a little Gem! It is small in size but certainly not in content. I think I paid something like £3 for it and it was well worth it. In fact we keep it in the car so that it is handy for trips out etc but I am thinking of getting another couple and leaving them in bags etc as there are often times when I wish I had this little book with me.

It has details of pretty much everything you can imagine that you would want to forrage and then eat. It has both photographs and drawings /paintings so that you can easily identify what it is. The write up about each food stuff is pretty good and it is certainly a good start if you are thinking of forraging it or not, the only thing I would say is that I have refferred to other books or the internet later on for ideas of how to eat / cook / preserve the items. At the end of the day I don't mind that though as if it had all that information in the book would be huuuuuuuuge and I really want it more as an identifier whilst I am out and about.

Here I am in the tent after a walk along the saltmarshes forraging. I just wanted to show you how small the book is. So what are you waiting for? Go buy the book and go forraging. It is certainly a liberating experience and truly a way to get back to nature.

A HUUUUUUGE Inspiration - Lammas & Living in the Future

I just wanted to share with you one of my inspirations and what has sparked off the change in the way we want to live a more ethical sustainable life. Jon and I are constantly talking about where we want to live and how and this is a topic that we are always talking about with our friends too. We are not certain what the answer is but we keep on discussing it and looking at ways in which we can change our lives.

We came across the Lammas Project and their podcasts on itunes and youtube "Living in the Future" and we were simply blown away by it. If you too are interested in sustainable living and all things eco you too I am sure will be blow away. The pod casts are no more than 10 minutes long, averaging about 5 minutes actually and there are 42 in all (I think unless they have created more). It might be a bit "bitty" to watch but I urge you to watch all of them in order, I think you will be glad you did.

My writing skills don't let me write about how much this has inspired us. I so want to live there, Jon is not ready yet but we are working our way towards being more eco friendly.

Please do watch the first installment below then watch the rest.... there are some really interesting hints, tips etc on how you too can change your life. You don't need me to tell you about it, just watch it and enjoy and we'll see you in Wales!

A gift from the Potting Shed

Even though it has been raining for what seems like forever, we still have major problems with our water reserves and we need, like it or not, to start doing something about it. We can all do our bit to help conserve water and use less than we currently are. The government wants to help us too as does the local water board.

We sent away for our FREE kit from Anglian Water.....

We have used the contents now, it's not massive but it is FREE after all! At the end of the day though every little bit helps as they say so it is just a small step to using just that little bit less water.

Inside the kit there were two bags of gel crystals which you add to your compost, these then swell up when wet and help to retain the moisture in the soil thus saving the need to water, at least as often anyway. Apparently they swell up to 400 times their size and you only need a teaspoon or two in a large container. We have used ours so it will be good to see how efficient they are. We certainly managed to spread them along way.

Also in the kit which we haven't used yet are some mats to line hanging baskets with. Hanging baskets are notorious for needing a lot of water. Again these are supposed to help with water retention.

If you are in our Area and want to claim a kit for yourself all you need to do is go to: The Anglian Water Website

In fact Anglian Water really want us to reduce the amount of water we use so much that there are a whole host of goodies available for FREE here. I am going to be sending away for them to see how much we can save in just a household of two and will let you know how we get on.

At home, we each use an average of 145 litres of water a day. Some of that could easily be saved. Imagine if everyone in your house, your neighbours and in your community dropped that amount by 20 litres, every single day. That’s a lot of water saved for tomorrow.

Our homes aren’t always as water efficient as we imagine. An average toilet flush or  a leaky tap can waste lots of water. Have a quick check around your kitchen and bathroom and you could be dropping 20 litres before you know it.

 There is also lots of information on ways you can reduce how much water you are using. Check out the Anglian Water website to find out how!

Lovely weather for Ducks!

As the old saying goes, isn't it "lovely weather for Ducks". If you haven't heard of that expression, it basically means that it is wet and / or pretty miserable. It has just started to brighten up here but is still pretty wet. It is what we used to call "rainy day play". The pigs and buns are stuck inside as am I. I don't feel hardy enough to go outside today, I am preferring to be inside with a nice warm cup of tea, comforted in the knowledge that nothing really needs doing in the garden, it is all just silently growing away.

I find human nature and the pysche quite interesting in as much as you might not have needed or wanted or planned to go out anyway but as soon as it is raining and you feel like you can't you get all depressed. I don't think we are all that good these days of entertaining ourselves and thinking of things to do. This made me think of the 80s, I remember we used to have lots of power cuts, as a child I used to find it fun, then tedious. Luckily we haven't had a power cut for ages but I wonder what we would all do if we had one that lasted all evening long.

So anyway I am inside, looking out at the rain and thinking of my water butt outside slowly filling.

Taken with my mobile phone - rain drops against my window!

We have a small slimline butt in the garden which collects the rain from the car port. We then transfer water from there into a much larger butt that we have stored in the car port and when they are both full we tend to fill buckets up. This may seem excessive considering we don't have a particularly large garden and lots of veggies but it is surprising in the hot summer months just how much water you can get through. We use it up in no time and then look to using the bath / shower water.

When you start saving water in this way it makes you think alot about how much you do actually use, when it comes out of the tap it is all too easy not to realise just how much you are using.

Growing what we can, where we can!

We used to have an allotment. We loved our allotment, it was a lovely retreat for us after a hard working week. It was quiet and peaceful and still. Bliss. The only thing is we had a rather large plot, far too big for us really. 

When we took it on it was totally covered in weeds and we took it on in the spring so we had our work cut out just preparing the ground before we could even start planting. I will show you what I mean.

This is the state of neglect that we took the allotment on. In hindsight it was too big a job to take on really!

Here we go then, begining the "big Dig"

It seemed to be that we took the allotment on at the wettest time imaginable and every opportunity we got to get down there, it was raining. 

We are getting there - one strip cleared.

Looking good. Now this was only the bottom half of the allotment and as you can see 2/3rds now clear!

Sufficed to say, the weeds took over and we lost the battle. It was not long after that we were asked to leave as we were not keeping the allotment to the standard required. It is a shame and in some ways we miss it greatly but in other ways it was quite a burden and it became more of a chore “having” to go there all the time and the house suffered and our quiet retreat became an errand which is not good.

Top half of the allotment taken from the bottom half. As you can see we were loosing the weed battle!

 

Our idyll, is to have a house with a big enough garden to be able to plant our veggies and do our bit there. We are not talking “The Good Life” kind of drastic by digging up the whole garden, not at all. Well hang on maybe. I could see myself doing that actually. OK let’s wait and see!

Anyway, our house is up for sale, we hope to move soon. In the meantime we are compromising between growing a few veggies and herbs but still keeping the house and garden in an OK enough state for house viewings. We don’t want potential buyers who do not share the same interests as us being put off by it all.

We have stuff hidden all over the place. Herbs are the easiest as they smell so nice and look pretty so we have them outside the front door in a nice border and in pots all over the back garden. Of course it is even harder for us, having four small fluffies who are very partial to the herbs and veg. We have to be careful where we put things. 

Out the front in the shrub bed, Jon has made a discreet little clearing that you can’t really see from the road and planting in there is spuds and lettuce in between the spuds. He was so sneaky I didn’t know he had done it, he actually had to make a point of showing me!

The sneaky pots hidden next to the drive in the shrub bed!

We have stuff in pots everywhere we possibly can. This year it is going to be a case of making do with what and where we can and just hope that next year we are in a new house with land that we can do more with. Fingers crossed. Of course I will keep you updated with veggie growing and with house selling!

I saw this photo on Facebook and thing it is a fabulous idea for those like us with not a lot of space!

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Eco-Village-International-Network/107895505948237

 

 

 

 

Want to grow a salad garden but have no room? Try gutters! Affix them to a fence, slope them for drainage, and voila!

 

An Eco way to get rid of unwanted weeds!

Now that the warmer weather is here everything is going a little crazy! All the weeds have sprung into life as have the flowers. There is a battle of wits at the moment between weeds and flowers.... who will win?




Well, if weeds are getting you down, look no further than Rent-a-Bert! He is quick, leaves very little mess, environmentally friendly disposal, pleasant to work with and happy in his employment. He also comes with a shy timid assistant to help. Your weeds will be gone in no time I can assure you!