food

Ok so it was cold on sunday..... Just right to get out in the garden and pull the last of the cauliflowers. These were really only baby cauli's and were about 2" across but were very sweet. I also got to pull up the leaves and soas not to waste anything where possible I cut the stalks out and shredded the green leaves of the cauli plants and blanched a couple of caulinders full. I froze these in freezer bags and in total got about 2 pounds of greens before the pain in my back and arms got to be to unbearable. The remaining leaves and stalks went next door to my neighbour for his rabbits to eat. The leaves I had blanched are now ready to add body to stocks and soups, also as the cabbage type element in bubble and squeek and indeed as greens for the dinner plate.

The upshot of this is that the ground is now clear and ready for my wife ot make some deep beds this weekend as i really need to get my garlic and shallots into the ground. I know they should be planted on the shortest day ( 21st of December) and lifted on the longest day of June 21st but if i can get them in next week then all the better.

I'm off next week also to get my chickens for the christmas shenanigans. I buy Cob ross chickens reared by a bloke called David Knipe who farms in the lythe valley in cumbria. Oh man if you love chicken then find out which farmers market he is attending and go see the chicken man !!

What is "being Green" or "Environmentally friendly".

This missive has been prompted by other postings I've seen on forums I'm in so it's not a new idea but one that has got me thinking again.

So what is being green really about? Is it something that you have to do or is it a lifestyle thing? How hard is it and can you opt out for a bit?

For me being green is hard, damn hard. I was a tee total, celibate, vegetarian Buddhist greenie back in the early 90's and a very committed some say militant one at that which was extremely hard work and after 9 years everything fell apart, mentally and physically and my wife got a husband back all be it a car owning beer drinking swearing couldn't give a toss type of person.

Since then I've got a lot more mellow in my old age and in the last 3 years I've became a born again greenie but this time I'm not chaining myself to railway lines to stop nuclear waste moving for re processing etc.

However being a greenie has it's drawbacks. I mean it's hard work trying to get through to a 16 year old shop assistant that you don't want a plastic bag for the carrots and another for the apples, courgettes, bananas etc. It's also hard when you are buying a cucumber and get thrown out of the shop for removing the plastic coating and giving it to the shop manager to dispose of.

Why don't shops provide paper bags for the fresh produce? They do it for mushrooms so why not everything? Carrier bags, why do they have to be strong plastic? A bag for life can be made from cloth just as easy as plastic... I've made several bags from old pillar cases and duvet covers. One which my wife snaffled away was made out of a pair of jeans.....

Why do local councils insist on you putting out all the recyclable items in separate boxes and bags then the collectors proceed to put them all in one side of the bin waggon.

In years gone buy you shopped local and didn't need to recycle because everything was fresh. you bought things you needed from separate shops. you bought cloth from a haberdashery, paper, cellotape etc from a stationers, fish from a fishmongers, meat from a butchers who had probably slaughtered the beast in the back of the shop so you knew it was fresh.... not now, convenience is the game and Te£$o is the name. Mind you it's not the total fault of these big companies because i fear we have become more lazy in the last 20 years or so. A lot will say it's because women have to go out to work to help pay the mortgage..... why do you have to own a house? why can there not be much more social housing?

I remeber living in a street house and everyone knew everyone else and looked after each other. Now you get up go out of the house into the car go to work come home in the car and go in the house probably without speaking to anyone on the way to or from work......

Is it green for a rich person to pay a lot of money "to be green" or is being green more ethical if done on a shoestring? For instance if a rich person pays say £40,000 for an electric car is that being green er than a person who has not got much money and has to use the bus? both could be classed as being green but which one is greener?

I feel being green is a lifestyle change just the same way as it is going from full fat milk to skimmed milk or 3 sugars to none. One of the greatest jolts to the system I have had recently was to actually look in my wheelie bin and see what was there. I lost a bearing and I knew it was in the bin via the hoover so i emptied the bin out in the back yard. Thankfully there was no dog waste or food waste but masses and masses of plastic wrappers from various bits we had bought. Just out of curiosity I weighed all the plastic and it came to 2.95 kg..... 6and a half pounds of plastic that our council don't take for recycling because " they would have to send it to Cheshire" 3kg a fortnight ( don't get me on about 2 weekly collections" 72kg a year from one house on average.... 39,000 houses in my town.......

2B cont,.,

the wonders of the internet

How the world has changed since I were a lad.........

This Internet thingy isn't half good you know....... apart from all this blogging malarky you can buy all sorts of things on t'intenet.....

I've waited a long time to see knickelback and each time they have been over here I've been unable to see them, mainly due to money and the fact that the didn't venture up to the darkest north east like. Anyway, now just found out that they will be at Newcastle in May 09 so the Internet has enabled me to buy 3 tickets for this great band. Also on the use of the Internet, another band appearing in Newcastle this weekend is Black stone cherry.... I think there is some clips on the video bar of BSC so why not hover he mouse over one of the pictures and click when you see BSC appear.... and rock the time away.

winter has arrived.... again

By goodness it was cold last night. We took the dog round the block about 7 pm and it was icy cold, cutting wind that must have taken the wind chill down a few pegs that's for sure. Safely back at home we kept warm all night but when we woke this morning there was a deep layer of snow on the floor. I say deep, it was all of 2 inches but in these climatic changing times that was deep compared with the last 15 years or so.

I took my wife to work today in the car, i know a softy at heart but that's me... anyway trying to get the car off the drive and up the bank was a trifle difficult as it normally is in bad weather and driving in the snow made me think of the future and how my disability would be affected in bad weather.
Still it got me thinking... as I do and as I'm well on the way to a wheelchair now and I'm one of these cantankerous types who if told to do something chooses to do something different. Like for instance i was "advised" to start looking at using one of these granny scooters to get round town on. I mean, A granny scooter.... I'd much rather have a quad bike to tear up the shopping centre in rather than a GS....

So having a bit of time to day dream I got to thinking about building one of these disability scooters only doing one that could be environmentally friendly and give me some fun racing cars. So I set about looking at getting a cheap granny scooter and replacing the motor etc with a golf buggy motor as these can't half shift and if they can take on the hills and ditches of a golf course then they could take on the potholes in my town. I'd also be able to get into the shopping centres / malls and have some wheelie good fun there.

Anyway, plans went into dreams and eventually over the days to come whilst looking on the net for golf buggy motors I came across this site www.neurotikart.com Whoa what fun.....

All I need now is to sort out some solar panels and I'm good to go..... a 60 mph ecological granny scooter........

cutting down on electric.

I've been asked how i have reduced my amount of electric I use so here are a few of the things I have done. Some worked some didn't but here goes. I don't want to teach granny to suck eggs so if you are doing these things please bear with me.

Firstly learn how much electric you use and how much this is costing you.

I do this by taking daily meter readings of the gas and electric.I call this my "power diary" I can then tell how much I've used in the previous 24 hours. I tend to do this as I get up so it's now a matter of routine where I get up, get washed, go down stairs read meters do breakfast and bait for the wife and then start the daily chores.... I'm a house husband see.
It's a good idea to do a "power diary" and you can go further by doing an hourly power diary. it gets on your partners nerves but after a few days they "understand".
In a power diary I wrote my daily meter readings and in the hourly version I would write the meter readings immediately before i say... put the oven on then when I switched it off I would take another reading and work out how many units per hour of use the oven was costing. I would then do my cooking in batch form and freeze a lot of it for the following week thus using the full oven. After use I'd then open the oven door so the heat would "escape" into the house and not out into the vents to outside.

Once you know these figures you can go about reducing them. I started off in June with around 24 kwh per day and got that down to 18 then even further to now in November I was using an average of 8.56 kwh per day. The first half of the month the average was actually 7.6 but then we had the workmen in with their power tools so it's gone up a bit by the end of the month.
Once you know the units you are using you can check each individual appliance with
the aid of one of these meters that you can either plug into the socket and then the appliance into the meter or a second type clips onto you main in feed cable and that tells you what you are using. The idea is then to go around your house and switch everything off. Then switch one item on and take a reading, switch it off and do the next item etc.

I found this tedious and it lasted about 5 minutes and 3 appliances before it went out of the window and being of an age when I was able to Learn maths at school I was able to calculate the average use over 24 hours. Say a 100w incandescent bulb could get 10 hours for 1 kw or unit of electricity. So to run this bulb for 10 hours would cost me 11 pence inc vat. However if I used a 20w energy saving bulb i could run that one for 50 hours for 11 pence. It then became a game to see how much I could alter and by using an 11w low energy bulb I could get nearly 91 hours for my 11 pence.

Some things can't be switched off or altered such as the house alarm and other security features. However those 500w security lights can now use low energy bulbs of 24 w. We went away for a few days so I switched everything off that could be switched off and the background useage for the likes of the fridge, freezer, house alarm and satellite / cable box was about 4.7 units a day. Late on in the year we went away again for a couple of days so I switched off the fridge and freezer and the background electric was 1.2 units a day so the fridge and freezer used about 3.5 units a day which is quite a lot apparently. They are over 10 years old and are under counter jobbies so this will account for some extra use. Having researched this I am told that under counter is the worst place as there is little or no circulation so heat builds up and this causes the cooler to work extra. I plan to take the fridge and freezer out of the work benches an stack them on top of each other to see if this makes a difference. If not the next step would be to look for an A rated or A+ rated FF.

I switch off all the lights as much as i can, i use candle light in the bath. My explanation to the wife is it's relaxing but really it is saving electric, lol. I don't automatically put the telly on, i switch the clocks off on ovens and microwaves. it's been reported recently that we use more energy having the clock display on a microwave that we do cooking the food. It's not hard to flick a switch to put the microwave on like any other electrical appliance. I've learnt that the fan in this computer is rated at 333watts so I can have this on for 3 hours for one unit of elecy or I can use my laptop for 8 hours for the same unit.

We used to use the hoover to clean crumbs up in the kitchen now we use a soft bristle brush and a dust pan. Actually it was a better idea but it also saves electric.
Because I'm on ebico as my power supplier and i pay 11.31 pence per unit for electric inc vat my cost of electric for October was £27.32 and November £29.11 corresponding gas was £44.49 and £64.67.

I pay £50 each month for each supply so now I know that in the last 2 months I've used £111 on gas and £57 on electric so I'm going to phone the power company up and reduce my electric DD thus keeping money in my account rather than give them interest.Edit note:: This I've done today, 02.12.08 and reduced my electric to £30.00 and increased my gas to £60.00.

Gas is much the same as the electric. I went about checking the units it used to run a full bath of hot water and worked out a costing from that. It was something like £2.20 and i have a hot bath every night. I changed my habits from running a full hot bath and then waiting an hour and a half for it to cool down ( playing on the computer really) to running a 1/4 bath with hot water, putting in cold water and getting in straight away. alternatively get in whilst the bath is running and it saves more hot water. I've actually got the cost of a bath down to 51 pence now so I can have a hot bath 7 nights a week for the cost of 2 previously.

A lot of people will say it's being a miser or they couldn't be bothered but when I say my power bill is going to be around £1020 this year down from over £1700 last year they look shocked and ask how it is possible..... so I tell them.

Publish Post

..... It also reduces your carbon footprint if that is important to you.......

making sense of things

I got to thinking today whilst the decorators were in and I had nothing to do and i was thinking what pure, total self sufficiency would be like. Indeed what is self sufficiency ? I want to be self sufficient and this came about because of the power companies taking up for a ride and the government not having the balls to do anything about it. In France EDF is the major supplier of power. It is 51% government owned. The French government will not allow competition in the utility sector and EDF are only allowed to increase prices by the rate of inflation so I'm led to believe.

In Britain, EDF is a major player in the power game and can raise prices by what they want. Are we in Britain subsidising the French power system ??

Anyway, what is self sufficiency?

To me it would be total Independence from everything and everybody. You would be self sufficient in power, food production, transport and housing. This is not every one's idea of SS but for now lets expand on these ideas.
1, Total Independence of the power companies.

To achieve this you would certainly need to be all electric as you cannot produce your own gas. (we will come to wood soon) Well you can but that's just because you ate too many beans and you cannot use methane very well. So to live a 21st century lifestyle with computers, Ipods, TV's et al you will need to have a hefty bank of solar Photovoltaic cells on the roof. The average household uses 4800 kwh of electric per year. I think the average falling on the Uk is 900kwh per year per 1KW panel. Therefore to get 4800 kwhrs out of your system means you will need to install panels to the value of 5.5kws. This would cost in the region of £12000 to £15000 so you would need a lot of roof space also as a basic 130w panel is about 1.2m x 2m so to get 5.5 kw you will need around 43 panels.... quite a roof space indeed and it would need to be facing south.

2, Food production.

Like many people, I like to grow some veg in the back garden but could I become self sufficient from the main shops like T****'s and Asda ? I certainly couldn't keep any animals in the back garden so I would need to become a veggie again ( I was veggie for 9 years until fish and chips summoned me in Whitby one day......

So if I were to become a veggie again what could I grow to keep me healthy all year round. I've done some research and I'd need a garden at least 40 ft long by 80 ft wide and the research offers a proviso that the land would need to be "worked hard" to produce enough to keep a couple and 2 small children.

We have nearly as much garden, ours is 45 x 60 but there are trees, a pond,flower bed and dog running area to think about and we don't have any children at home... well one darling son comes home from Uni every now and then when he has no food but plenty of washing, lol. So, I would be down to 4 deep beds of 6m by 1.2m ( see post below where my wife is going to make these).
So if I had enough land I could be self sufficient in food providing I was veggie and didn't drink milk or eat cheese.... life would cease to exist without cheese.... but then eggs would be a problem so I'd have to keep chickens which, if you read all the magazines is a wonderful thing but cleaning chicken crap out on a morning in December is still cleaning crap out and when they get diseases etc, which even with the best husbandry I suspect they will still get red mite and worms etc they will cost money to cure in either self medication or vets bills. If you buy good stock chickens you are looking at £15 each so for 10 birds you are looking at an outlay of £150 without a house for them, food and other bits needed. I worked it out in the summer and I would need to spend in the region of £800 to set up a 10 bird egg line but then asked how much organic free range eggs cost and to get my initial outlay back I'd need to keep the chickens laying eggs every day of the year for nearly 2 years. In reality the timescale is probably more like 4 years so that's out of the question. As for working the land hard. .. Oh I forgot, I'm quite disabled so working the land hard is out of the question.......

Water

We all need water to survive, no doubt about that but to be totally SS you need your own well or spring water source. I was reading the latest edition of Home Farmer and this excellent magazine has a feature on water supply which was quite revealing. We, or at least I do take water for granted. I turn the tap on and it's there. That's not to say I'm not frugal with it and I have even trained my wife to switch off the tap when brushing her teeth and only taking a 4 minute shower. Although we are not on a water meter yet I'm confident that I could at least save a bit of money if I were to go metered. I'm saving water at the moment and have over 2000 ltr of it ready to fill my garden pond up when I get to clean it out later this month. I was going to sink a large tank into the ground to collect the rainwater properly and then use this for washing the clothes and toilet flushing but money isn't there yet for this project and whilst our mains supply is still quite cheap it makes no sense to swap.

Self Sufficiency is a great idea and one we could all aspire to but one that only a very few could ultimately achieve.





....... to be continued

renovations

For a while now we have needed to have our house renovated. It's served us well over the last 17 years but now it needs updating and revitalising.
So because we want to reduce our dependency on the major power companies we have lagged the floor and outside stair wall as in the blog ...insulation below.

The update of this is that the plasterer has now been and gone, the walls have dried out and the decorator is coming on Thursday followed by the carpet fitter on Friday. Already we have seen a reduction in the amount of gas used and the house is far too hot for my liking at the moment as we have had a new radiator put into the hall. It's a smaller one than the one we have replaced but the output is massively improved so the heat out put is heating all of the hall and stairs.
The rest of the rads have been bled and as I say the house is too hot for me but my wife is what is known locally as a cold arse, lol.

The end of the month is coming soon so I will be able to update my blog on the amount of fuel used and I am hoping that it will be substantially reduced although I must take into account the fact that there have been workmen in and lights, drills and all manner of other tools have been used, many of them using electric.

Once this is done my wife is going to make some deep beds for the garden. She doesn't actually know this yet but when the scaffold boards arrive and I show her how to hold a hammer and nails or even screws and a screwdriver for the posh version she will soon get the hang of it. After that she will also learn how to plant broad beans and garlic........lol.

Scared

A few years ago I was walking home from town when two drugged up scroats thought they were more entitled to own my I -pod than I was. The major word here being "thought". I had saved up for a long time to get the money for that I- pod and I was buggered if I was going to give it up to these two who would swap it for a £10 wrap.
Anyway the upshot was that they were both put in hospital and 3 years on one is still on crutches which brings me to the point of this blog message.... I'm being followed.......Yeah !!!!

Not in a bad way of course but on this blog.

Hi Rick and Pat and thank you for following me. Rick and Pat are living the good life in Portugal and long may they continue. I'll delve into your welcoming site more over the weeks and hopefully pick up some pointers as to how to have a great blog like yours.

I'm new to this blogging lark so I don't know what will be of interest to you but I will enjoy being followed this time I'm sure, lol.

Insulation

It's been 13 days since I last blogged...... if that's the correct word nut I've been busy and ill at the same time.

As I said in the last post I was getting the inside of the outer walls lagged with 2" of insulation and then plaster boarded over. This would then be skimmed by a pro plasterer. As it happens the bloke I had organised to do the work decided not to turn up and repeated phone calls fell on deaf ears or rather a voicemail..... bloody mobiles.... you can't have a decent whinge these days, humph.

So I decided to do it myself..... can't be that hard, it's only a bit of wood and insulation..... 3 hours and my spaka back got the better of me along with my shoulders, neck, and legs giving up the ghost I decided it was time to call it off as a bad idea. I got another bloke in and the pro plasterer is coming on Monday.

So it's taken 13 days of rest and massive amounts of pain killers to repair the damage of 3 hours work.... Mind you it has given me time to think about things whilst I was in agony as I'm a great believer in occupying he mind as if you don't it will occupy itself and not always for the better.

So in my thinking I got to the point of catching up on the daily meter readings. Whilst i was out of it in bed my wife took it upon herself to read the meters for me, good lass so we have got it down to an average of 1.8 units of gas per day and an average of 6 KWh for the leccy so the cost so far for November is around £9 for leccy and£12 for gas and we are nearly at the half way stage of the month. I know the weather has been a bit warmer for this last week but maybe the insulation is doing it's job in a big way. If I can get away with around £30 for gas and £20 for electric for the month of November I'll be well chuffed as I was paying £157 a month at the dearest time last year with Eon.

So to recap, I'm feeling a bit more normal, well as normal as one can when doped up on all sorts of pain killers, or rather pain modifiers as the tablets never actually "kill" the pain off but just dulls it a bit. My staircase is lagged and ready to be plastered by Nick the Plasterer.... who is a thoroughly good bloke and a demon plasterer to boot. Then it's off to take the wife to look for a arpet in time for chrimbo and that's another year more or less done for.....

The cold snap snapped......

Well the last few days of October certainly let us know that winter was just around the corner. It were bloody freezing in our house!! As in my last post I said we were away for 3 days so being on a bent to reduce our dependency on the large immoral power companies I switched of as much as I could including the heating.

Our average heating for a day was around 2 therms so a saving of around 6 therms was achieved but by the house was cold when we came back. i mean not only cold enough to chill the bones but the fabric of the building, the walls and floors were cold to touch. It just goes to show how much heat is sucked out of the buildings by the walls.

The upshot of it all was we had to leave the gas heating on for a lot longer than normal to reheat the house and in the end used 6.2 therms of gas but suffered for the day until it warmed up..... which brings me to another point. We are getting the walls and floors insulated on the inside as it is a cold house so hopefully by next winter we will see a significant reduction in our energy useage and be as warm if not warmer than now.

Our actual gas useage for the whole of October was 51.2 therms of gas which when converted into kwh it works out at 1642.33 kwh and we pay 2.86p per kwh so that equates to £46.97. We also used 350 kwh of electric. The electric I am particularly well chuffed at as we used to use 18kwh per DAY in June which would have increased to around 24 units in October so to reduce this overall down to an average of 11.29 a day pleases me a lot. As we are on Ebico, a charity power company www.ebico.co.uk we only pay 11.41p per kwh so our electric for October came out as £39.94 inc vat.