Filed under: Doing, Recycling | Tags: music magpie, selling second hand cds
Selling second hand cds using music magpie
I curiously manage to be a hoarder who aspires to have few posessions. Every so often my ruthless streak overcomes my hoarding streak and I eBay, freecycle or put things out on the street to get rid of them.
Music magpie (http://www.musicmagpie.co.uk/) is a service for online buying of second hand cds and I have to say I am pretty impressed by their service. You type in the bar code, they make you an offer for your cds, then they send you postage stickers which you use to post them the cds using recycled jiffy bags which you have been hoarding too. Brilliant.
…and yes I did sell my Burt Bacharach cd… £36 for 27 cds was the final count – that is quite a bit of carrot cake.
Filed under: Collecting, Doing | Tags: climbing, device, fruit, fruit picking, harvest, picker, plum, scrumping, telescopic, tool, tree, wolf garden, wolf garten
Robin picking plums using telescopic fruit harvesting device
I was never quite sure how we were going to get all of the plums harvested from the top of such a huge tree and then someone suggested I buy a special tool to do the job which I must confess hadn’t occurred to me!
A quick bit of googling and eBaying later and… ta da… one ten foot extendible fruit picking gadget. Happy days…
The one I bought was second hand on eBay but if I was going to buy new the one that caught my eye was the multi-use fruit picker made by Wolf Garden – http://www.wolf-garten.co.uk
The rest, as they say, is plum jam, plum pickle and assorted other forms of plum joy history.
The picking team with over 10kg of plums... we only stopped when it got dark!
Filed under: Doing | Tags: 19th july, big lunch, farleigh road, hackney, london, n16
Farleigh Road Big Lunch
Last week Farleigh Road held a street party as part of the national ‘Big Lunch’ campaign (http://www.thebiglunch.com/)
The road was shut, residents of all ages and nationalities pulled together to create a truly awesome feast and the street was transformed for a day.
I took the liberty of carrying furniture and plants from my front room into the street – happy days.
I am lucky to live on such an amazing street – full of diversity and life – a little positivity can go a long way.
Farleigh Road Big Lunch
Filed under: Doing | Tags: barrels, harvesting, rain water, recycled food drums
Joe plumbing in recycled food drums/barrels to increase our rain water harvesting capacity
A little while back I set up a rainwater harvesting system which you can see here – http://hackneypermaculture.org.uk/2009/03/27/rainwater-harvesting/
I decided it needed upgrading as we kept running out of water and after some surfing I found a source of recycled plastic food drums/barrels from this gem of a place in Wales – http://www.dvfuels.co.uk/category.asp?catID=4
Delivery worked out cheapest when buying a palette of eight so I got eight and found others to buy them using the local Transition Town Hackney mailing list.
Joe and I had a fun day plumbing them into the existing water butt. Nearly got the hang of using the power drill now!
Robin trying to fix the pipe in place
Piping and fixtures from local hardware shop
Filed under: Doing, Learning, Planning, Thinking | Tags: fan, fruit tree, grapevine, pruning, training, trellis
When we first cleared back some of the undergrowth in the back garden we discovered an old grapevine stump that looked like it was dead. To our delight it started to sprout a tonne of leaves a few months back so todays job was to start training it up a trellis into a fan.
There is some good advice here – http://www.realenglishfruit.co.uk/content/treetraining.htm
Grapevine at the start of day
Grapevine after haircut - we cut it back to just two leaders
Grapevine with leaders tied to trellis ready to grow into a fan
Filed under: Doing | Tags: cauliflowers, nasturtium, peas, potatoes, rocket, young m27 apple tree
Okay so it is my first growing season which means just like your friends who bore you with baby photos, I have to upload photos of stuff growing.
Sure I am not going to win any awards for photo journalism but THESE THINGS ARE GROWING IN MY GARDEN!!!!
Young cauliflowers planted amongst rocket on the rear raised bed
Potatoes growing alongside an apple tree and nasturtium
Yes, they were as tasty as they look!
Loads of the turkish food places around me leave used oil drums out with the trash and I have taken quite the fancy to their bright colours and patterns and begun collecting them (I have seven different sorts so far!)
They make nice planters…
Newly planted tomatoes in oil drum
So we now have quite the tomato patch in the front room…
Tomatoes take over the front room!
The pond has been getting a little moody so I thought I might buy it a present to cheer it up:
For forty pounds I got a solar powered water oxygenating pump from eBay. It seems to be a standard budget option and it is no frills, only working when the sun is beaming but with the addition of a bit more pond weed too, the pond is now starting to be a bit less grumpy. Pretty sure it was a good investment but I haven’t seen anything similar elsewhere on my wanders to compare it to…
Filed under: Doing, Learning | Tags: apprenticeship, growing communities, Ida Fabrizio, robin grey, ru litherland, sara davies, Sophie Verhagen
I am now half way through my appenticeship working on the urban market gardens at Growing Communities – this photo was taken today after an epic harvest.
Quite how I managed to get three months into the apprenticeship without mentioning it on the blog is a mystery but I have been so busy learning the names of leafy green things that my mind has not quite been on the money in other areas :-)
The fellow front left is Ru Litherland, the head grower, and the person to whom I now owe a huge chunk of my knowledge about plants, especially salad growing and pruning fruit trees.
If you don’t know anything about Growing Communities can I recommend you have a peek around their website – http://www.growingcommunities.org/ – as part of their weekly fruit and veg box scheme they run the only pieces of organically certified land inside the M25 to produce mixed leaf salad and other bits and bobs.
Filed under: Doing, Thinking | Tags: capture, compassion, head torch, prevention, slug, snail, vegan
Okay so slugs and snails can be a bit of an arse. I have tried EVERYTHING. Well, not quite everything as I don’t want to poison or kill/harm the buggers in anyway. Stupid vegan hippie I hear you stay but seriously the way I am going I may be reborn as a slug and I would like a fair innings no matter what shape or size being I become.
So what to do, what to do…
Midnight slug and snail raids with a head torch and a big plastic container to store them is the answer. I have been looking for an excuse to buy a head torch for ages. Then you take them to the nearest patch of waste or common ground and let them go… You will not believe how many of them I have ‘moved’ and it can be kinda fun playing hide and seek with them in the dark… They are quick too!
Midnight slug and snail run with a headtorch
Filed under: Doing, Learning, Planning, Recycling, Thinking | Tags: grey water recycling, Horizontal Flow Reed Bed, reed beds, reeds from seeds, vertical Flow Reed Bed
One of the projects that really stuck in my head after reading my first book on permaculture was creating reed beds for recycling grey water (any waste water from the house except sewage from the toilet).
After a good deal of time spent researching and reading around the topic the time finally came to make it a reality. Luckily there is a builders depo at the end of my street who sell gravel and my friend Morgan was on hand to help me put it all together.
For an average household you need 1m² of reed bed to recycle each persons grey water and you need four reeds per square metre. As I already had two used bath tubs to hand which came to just over 2m² and the three of us who live at 33b don’t use that much water I decided to go with that even if it was a little below the recommended area.
Ten reed plants were bought from Reeds from Seeds who can be found here – http://www.brynpolyn.co.uk/ – The total costwas £27.60 most of which was the delivery cost to London from Wales. They were very helpful people indeed explaining that late April or early May were the best time to plant.
A depth of about a metre seems to be the order of the day from a couple of diagrams I saw. The bath tubs took a maximum of about 80cm so I went with that, filling them with a layer of fine gravel on top of a layer of coarse gravel, about 50/50 of each.
It was decided after some debate to run the water into the bottom of each bath tub with water exiting out of the top. This way it has to pass up through the whole reed bed and cannot flow straight through as some designs seem to indicate. Pipes were fixed in the bottom with bricks and slate to keep them from being crushed by the weight of the gravel and to stop them from coming out. You can see that the first ‘metal tub’ reed bed is above the height of the other ‘mighty white’ tub so the water passes from the house into the bottom of the upper tub, rising through the bed to a pipe which feeds it into the bottom of the lower tub before it overflows through the bath’s original overflow into either the pond or the adjacent bed.
The metal tub was lined with a plastic sheet as it had many holes in the bottom from a previous life as a planter. Making the right sized hole for the pipe fixture was a challenge finally managed with a drill, some elbow grease and a bit of love, hence the three photos!
A lot of designs have settlement tanks and other features. I decided not to go for these yet but allowed space further back upstream to retro fit a settlement tank if needed. Whilst the reeds establish themselves I only plan to put bath and shower water into them and to use only natural grooming and cleaning products in the bathroom so there shouldn’t be anything too nasty for them to have to deal with and not too much by way of solid matter as the plug hole catches all the hairs!
Here are a few other pages of interest -
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~johndecarteret/water%20treatment.htm
http://www.green-water.org/projects.html
Gravel and a sunk bath tub
Morgan planting reeds into the gravel-filled bath tub
Plastic fitting detail shot
Plastic fitting detail shot
Plastic fitting detail shot
Lining the metal tub
Two tier reed beds for recycling grey water
Filed under: Doing | Tags: cloches, dean firth, front garden, netting, raised bed
We have been plotting and scheming for a while about what to do with the front garden, previously an ugly useless bit of concrete. Seemed about time to make something so Dean came over and we played with tools and heavy stuff to make a raised bed…
We now have raspberries, tomatoes, borage, rocket, lettuce, marigolds, radishes and loads of wild mint and lemon balm.
Breaking up the front patio back in december 08
Front garden with path and soil
Building a raised bed onto the mulched front garden
Front garden with soft fruit bed at back, raised bed in middle, and small herb bed at front
Filed under: Doing, Learning | Tags: leaf concentrate, leaf curd, leafu, lime tree, richard godwin
I recently invested in the British permaculture bible, The Earth Care Manual by Patrick Whitefield. It is a truly awesome body of work which I recommend to anyone with a pulse.
One of the first things to catch my eye was a recipe tucked into an obscure corner of the book about making leaf-curd and feeling slightly nervous about where us vegans are going to find tofu when flying it over from the other side of the world stops making economic sense, I thought it time to have a go at making some…
- First I accosted my friend Richard Godwin to climb up the lime tree and harvest some of the lovely young leaves, which just so happened to be a nice lime colour.
- Next we stuck the leaves into a liquidiser until we had a smooth leafy paste which was then strained through a tea towel to remove the pulp.
- The remaining liquid was then boiled and the curd which formed on top collected by skimming from the top of the pan and put into an improvised mould.
- Then we knocked up a quick stir fry and ate ‘leafu’ as it also seems to be affectionately called.
Richard also wrote a column about this for the Evening Standard which can be read here – http://godwin.thisislondon.co.uk/2009/04/permaculture.html
Further research lead me to this PDF document – Leaf concentrate: A Field Guide for Small Scale Programs by David Kennedy and Leaf for Life (1993) which is utterly huge and if you want to get geeky on the topic seems to pretty much cover EVERYTHING, ever that you could ever ever ever want to know about making leaf curd anywhere at anytime with anyone.
Richard Godwin harvesting lime leaves
Lime leaf purée
Leaf curd in improvised mold
Leaf curd or Leafu stir fry
Filed under: Brainstorming, Doing, Learning, Recycling, Thinking | Tags: battle, cloches, copper, defence, drinks bottles, egg shells, recycled, slugs, snails, war
Okay so we had to lose our virginity at some point. You create a nice bed, you plant stuff, it grows, then slugs and snails come and eat it…
One of the first things planted out were some beans which got utterly munched within days. It was clear that some extra thought was required and non-lethal reinforcements came in the shape of cloches made from plastic drinks bottles, broken up egg shells, copper from wire and coins, and midnight slug and snail raids with my brand new head torch!
Not wanting to kill any of god’s creatures, I have just been throwing them over the fence so far which seems to have worked, making a huge dent in the local population and seems to keep everyone happy as next door don’t really do much with their garden and there is lots of nice green stuff growing there.
Our veg is safe for now…
Anti slug defences
Anti slug defences (Part 2)
Cloches made from used drinks bottles to protect from snails and slugs
Cloches and netting to protect young plants
Filed under: Doing, Thinking | Tags: cardboard, claudia pohl, edge, mud, mulching, pond liner
As previously mentioned we now have a pond but quite a bit of the black liner is showing which is kinda bad news as it is more likely to get punctured as a result.
The back story is that it is virtually impossible to make a small pond which is deep enough to keep bugs and grubs happy over the winter without having some steep edges. Depths of over 70cm are advised so frogs and toads can survive the pond freezing but it you only have a metre or two for your pond you are not then going to have shallow enough sides so that any organic matter can sit on the liner for stuff to grow in.
I thought I might have a go at mulching the edges with cardboard and then piling some mud on top to cover it over. In order to stop the mud from falling straight off the cardboard I peeled back the top layer from dampened cardboard to reaveal the bumpy underside, threaded some twigs into the cardboard to create ridges and made very thick icky mud which was really really fun! Seriously – this is an excuse for adults to make mud pies… oh yes.
Seems to have done the job nicely thus far and hopefully plants will start to bind it all together creating a long term organic cover over the liner.
The problem - visible pond liner
Cardboard ridged and threaded with twigs covering liner
The solution - mulched pond edge covering liner
Claudia planting around the pond
It seems that in order to be a half credible permaculture project you need to have a soft fruit area so we cleared a bit of space in ‘The Glade’ as Racheal has now christened the woody bit of our patch and set to work making a new home for our gooseberry and raspberry plants.
The glade - pre soft fruit area
New soft fruit area
Filed under: Collecting, Doing | Tags: butyl, cardboard, elder, liner, old carpet, pond
Dig a great big hole, over 70cm deep so things will survive the winter, leave shallow bits around some edges for plants and creatures to hang out in.
Find some smelly carpet and cardboard from the street for lining and wack on top a huge sheet of butyl bought from Aquatics Warehouse.
Add soil and then fill with tap water. Add some pond water from a friends pond. Be patient and trust mother nature will do the rest:
Dig a big arsed hole
Cardboard and smelly carpet from the street
Angela lining the hole with carpet
Pond lined with butyl and weighed down at the edges by stones
One slightly muddy pond ready for bugs and bits
You will also notice the lovely new stepping stone path which was made from marrying my sledgehammer with the previous concrete monstrousity, the bath tub in it’s new home and the beds which I have marked out using the boughs of some elder which have been recently felled to clear the canopy.
Finally invite over small child to catch imaginery fish
Filed under: Doing | Tags: herbs, planting, propagator, rachael durrant, salad, stoop
So our house has a lovely big stoop which being south facing, gets a lot of sun and is ace for eating, playing music and now hopefully growing…
My new housemate Rachael and I have been busily filling it up with pots filled with chamomile, caraway, wild flowers, a selection of salad leaves and various other bits and bobs.
Note the lovely new watering can and a fancy propagator from my grandparents. Happy days.
Rachael on the stoop
Filed under: Doing | Tags: okra, Propagation, rachael durrant, sowing seeds, toilet rolls
At last, ’tis the time to start sowing!
After waiting an age for some seeds to arrive from Tamar Organics, Rachael and I got involved with some toilet rolls, potting compost, propagating okra and tomatoes.
Everyone seems to have an opinion on the best way to propagate so I am going to break ranks and try everything which means using a rag tag army of bottles, cartons, toilet rolls, food cartons, leaf mulch, compost, soil and love.
Rachael sowing okra
A little while back I ordered two waterbutts from Water Butts Direct – I was hoping I might find something I could reuse around the street but haven’t yet so buying these in seemed like a good option.
Fitting them was a bit of a chore because I can’t get access to the back wall of the house so as you can see from the picture below I threaded a grey ten metre pipe from the black diverting harvesting thingy attached to the drainpipe, down the stairs to the waterbutts below:
