This carrot was meant for last night’s salad, but I think it had other ideas.

I am so disappointed.  My garlic crop has got rust, again!  It happened at around the same time last year, and despite rotating the crops, we’ve got it again.  My initial thought was that I should pull out all the garlic before the rust spreads to the onions and leeks in the same bed.  Then I thought, to hell with good intentions and organic gardening, I’ll be damned if I let these beautiful plants fall foul to this fungus.  Off I went to a local garden centre.  The manager told me that there wasn’t an organic fungicide that I could use and recommended Dithane 945.  I bought it and took it home.

The symbol on the back of the packaging tells me that this product is dangerous for the environment.  How can I even consider using it?  I’m glad I have the receipt still, I’m going to return it tomorrow.  Then I’ll go back down to the allotment, pull up the garlic and bring it home to hang up on the fence to dry in the sun.  Small garlic is better than no garlic at all.  No garlic is worth damaging the environment for. 

I’m at a loss as to what eco-friendly cleaning agent to use to mop our treated (oiled) wooden floor.  Ecover floor soap is not recommended for treated surfaces.  What can I use?  Any suggestions will be gratefully accepted.

I like to think so.  We use eco-friendly cleaning products, sustainable DIY products and natural materials in our home.  Yesterday I bought a new bottle of Ecover washing up liquid that had a leaflet attached to it asking me whether mine is a healthy home and inviting me to enter a competition to win a top-to-toe house clean plus a hamper of Ecover ecological cleaning products.  I entered the competition, and thought that I’d check whether Ecover considered my home to be healthy, by working through the checklist on their website.  I may even add what we are doing in our "Done & Doing" list, and those that we are still working towards on our "Forward Thinking" list.  Here are my findings:

Bedroom

Unplug your chargers and transformers when they’re not being used. All those little power supplies to charge cell phones, toothbrushes, and other personal gadgets are burning energy when they’re not in use.

 Yes, this is something we do religiously.

Change conventional light bulbs for new energy efficient ones. They can last ten times longer and keep the equivalent of half a ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere over its lifetime.

We’ve changed about 80% of our light bulbs to energy efficient ones, and the figure is still rising.

Draw your curtains at dusk when its cold outside to stop heat escaping through windows – that way your room will be cosier come bedtime!

Pete and I still don’t have curtains in our bedroom, neither does Ayrton (we only have blinds), so only Piper is achieving this energy saving in her bedroom.  We are planning to put curtains into both of these bedrooms before the winter.

—

Living Room

Re-use or recycle more of your household waste a scrunched up dry newspaper is great for cleaning windows, and you can still recycle it afterwards.

We recycle all paper and newspaper with our local authority kerbside collection scheme.

On bright days open curtains and blinds to let the sun warm your home for free. Even on cold winter days, sunlight streaming through a window into a room can raise the temperature by several degrees and all that sunshine will cheer you up too!

Sunshine is very welcome in our home.

Turn off lights and other electrical appliances like televisions and dvd players when you’re not using them. Its pretty obvious but surprising how many times we forget.

We try to achieve this, I am in the habit of switching things off, but it can be harder to get the children to remember to do it.

—

Kitchen

Consider home composting your kitchen waste - as well as fruit and vegetable peelings you can compost egg cartons, coffee grounds and teabags too. Up to two-thirds of food each household throws away could be composted.

We compost and vermi-compost kitchen waste (including cooked vegetable matter in the wormery).

Remember to help conserve water when you wash your dishes. When you wash your dishes by hand, remember to turn your tap off in-between rinsing. And don’t rinse dishes before you put them in a dishwasher - that’s what the machine is designed to do - just scrape all the excess food off the dishes and let the machine do the rest.

Our Miele AAA-rated dishwasher saves us around 400 KWh of electricity (worth £30), 7,000 litres of water (equivalent to 40 baths) and 500 hours (3 weeks) of our time every year.  I’ve also stopped rinsing everything before it goes into the machine since I started concentration on saving water around the house.

Save cash and energy with each cuppa - just boil the amount of water you need for one cup of tea/coffee, rather than a full kettle every time.

We bought an Eco-Kettle about a year ago after the demise of our previous kettle, so are saving lots of electricity for every cup of tea we have.

—

Utility Room (or the under-stairs cupboard in our house)

Try not to wash clothes just for the sake of it - outer layers of clothing can be worn more than once without laundering, sometimes its just habit to take things off and chuck them in the wash basket.

Penney Poyzer’s "smell test" is applied to all items of clothing that don’t have obvious dirty marks.

Consider switching to an ecological washing detergent like Ecover’s. If everyone in the UK switched to an ecological washing powder we would eliminate the equivalent of 700,000 tons of detergent from our sewerage plants and waterways each year.

We currently use Ecover’s non-biological washing powder and fabric softener.

Give the tumble dryer a rest - it’s the second biggest household energy user after the fridge. Dry your clothes outside on fine days and invest in clothes airer to dry your clothes inside on a rainy day.

Already doing this too, we’ve never had a tumble dryer and didn’t bother getting a new switch for the dryer part of our washer/dryer when Piper broke it.

—

Bathroom

A shower uses 2 / 3 the amount of water as a bath – keep it short and turn off the shower head while soaping to earn extra karma points!

We all shower 99% of the time, except for Piper who is still too small and has a small daily bath.  I don’t relish the idea of shivering with the water off while I’m soaping up, but do use the "eco" setting on the shower that slows the flow and reduces the temperature of the water by a few degrees.

Start reading the labels and avoiding harsh chemicals – Chlorine in particular is one of the nastier chemicals found in bathroom cleaners – and subsequently in sewers.

You won’t find any nasty chemicals in our bathroom.

Keep your hot water heater down to 130°F (54°C). This is hot enough to kill bacteria and still save energy.

I have ours at 45′C.  What bacteria?  I always mix the hot with cold anyway!

—

Toilet

Use white recycled toilet paper - colour dye in the paper is just more unnecessary chemicals for the environment to deal with. If you don’t think it’s significant, imagine the amount of paper 50 million people in the UK flush into the sewerage works and the sea every day!

Tick that box!

To keep the air smelling sweet don’t reach for the air freshener - hang an orange studded with cloves and rolled in a mixture of cinnamon and orris root powders in the room and replace every few months.

I mix up some water with essentials oils in a spray bottle for the worst smellies, and the window is open all summer.

Simply filling a one litre bottle with water, replacing the cap and carefully placing in the cistern will save one litre of water per flush.

There’s a Hippo in our cistern.

—

Garden

Re-use bits of household rubbish in the garden - ice-lolly sticks are great for labelling plants, old egg boxes can be used as seed trays. Plastic soup containers, yoghurt pots and cut down milk cartons all make good flower pots.

Wherever possible we are already doing this.

When you have to water your lawns ad garden, water very early in the morning or late evening to reduce evaporation.

I’m not always so good at this one, I water whenever I can, usually quite early at the allotment (8.30-ish) but the home garden often is watered during the afternoon.  I will try harder!

Set the blades a little higher when you mow your lawn, then it will require less watering and provide a better habitat for fauna.

The lawn is Pete’s obsession, often a bit of an irrational one, he likes it neat and short and perfect.  What to do?  He’s a pretty good greenie most of the time.

As Mark Twain once said: "It’s better to read the weather forecast before praying for rain".  I managed to miss the forecast for the past few days so the overnight rain and the drizzle today took me by surprise.  It’s a welcome surprise, I don’t have to water our allotment today, or the garden, and the water butts are filling up with rainwater.  It’s been about a month since we’ve had any rain to speak of, so we’ve been hoping for a good downpour for at least the past two weeks.

When we planted our cherry tree in spring 2005, we were a little disappointed that it didn’t blossom and that there wasn’t any fruit in the first year.  It probably had a lot to do with the shock of being transported from the nursery in our car and then transplanted from its tub into our front garden. 

This year it has given us a small bowl of cherries that taste great.  They are a pale variety called Vega that are every bit as sweet as the more prevalent red ones.

We had the very first of our carrots, sugar-snap peas and salad onions as part of a salad with our Summer Solstice barbecue last night.  Our lettuces are also ready to tuck into, the strawberries are starting to ripen, and I will be harvesting bucketfuls of red-currants this weekend.  Does anybody have a good red-currant sorbet recipe?

Happy Summer Solstice to everyone!  We will be having a barbecue tonight, spending the evening outdoors and letting the children stay up late with the sun.

I took my children to Burpham Court Farm Park this morning for a little outing.  It’s an ideal morning out  because it’s so close, the kids love to feed the animals, play and have a picnic, and farmer Bob is full of interesting facts and happy to show the children what he’s doing.  I also like to pick up some local non-intensively reared meat for the freezer while we are there.

Our chat with farmer Bob today wasn’t as upbeat as usual.  He is a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.  He has been having problems with the National Trust, who have flooded his land more than 20 times in the past three years by opening its weir gates fully across the Wey Navigation, flooding fields, ruining hay crops so that his cattle are starving and introducing liver fluke to water logged pastures where over 70 sheep died before the parasite was discovered.

The crux of the matter is that farmer Bob, a tenant farmer who has put his heart and soul into conserving rare breeds and educating local children about farming in an environmentally friendly manner is now impoverished, struggling to keep the farm open and as a result of him having taken on the "big boys" and lost is facing having to cover the legal costs of the National Trust and Guildford council, a whopping £400,000.   If you’re interested in farmer Bob’s story, read his full account of what has happened here.

I was pleasantly surprised to see representatives of www.surreywaste.info standing outside my local Sainsburys yesterday when I popped in for a few necessities.  I was given a cloth shopping bag, a household waste guide, sustainable shopping guide, and a nice lady offered me lots of advice on composting, vermi-composting and asked me to consider buying food with less packaging while shopping.  It’s about time, and funnily enough, that’s the name of their campaign.

I’ve recently had the pleasure of meeting (online at the Friends of the Earth forum) a kindred spirit who goes by the name of Ladie Lizzie.  She is a suburban girl trying to tread lightly on the earth, and you can follow her efforts at her blog, Green Is The New Black.

I bank with smile, the internet bank.  Have done for the past 6 or 7 years.  They really are a super bank, great interest rates, friendly and eager to please, their online interface is easy to use, very secure, and whats more, they are as ethical as a bank comes.  Just incase I had forgotten how much I liked them, they sent me a bag of sunflower seeds last week, to grow my own bouquet.  I’m smiling!  There’s even a contest to see which customer can grow the biggest sunflower.  What a cool bank!

And, if anyone reading this is interested in joining smile , they are offering you 12 bottles of wine to you and to me (for up to 3 people signing up for a current account as a result of my praises of them).

Here’s the technical stuff:

To make sure you get your wine, you’ll need to enter your special offer code when you apply: BCHAEIBHDAFG

Visit http://friends.smile.co.uk now to apply – it’s easy peasy.

And just in case you were wondering what else you might be missing out on with your current bank:

• 3.04% AER (3.00% gross) on every penny when you’re in credit
• £500 12 month fee-free overdraft, to help out when you need it
• a dedicated team to make switching simple and hassle-free
• 24/7 control over your account
• the only on-line bank with an ethical policy.

You don’t have to take our word for it either, since a massive 95% of our customers would recommend us to their friends! *

* Nunwood customer research, November 2005.

 

I came across this water-use calculator on the FOE forum, and was horrified to find that we are still using around 90 litres per person per day even with our water saving efforts.  Must try harder!

There’s been such incredible growth at the allotment over the past few days, some of the plants have literally doubled in size since Monday.  I took some photographs this morning when I went down for my daily watering session.  From left to right we have peas, lettuces and sugar snap peas, courgettes, cabbages and sweetcorn.

It seems that a good thunder shower can really get your plants growing.  The tomatoes in our home garden have also grown amazingly, and we have the first tiny tomatoes appearing on the tumbling cherry tomato plants that we are keeping in pots on the back patio. 

That’s the truth, every day I take the camera with me when I go down to the allotment to water/weed/sow/tend but I get so engrossed in what I’m doing that I only realise that I haven’t taken any pictures once I get home and find the camera still tucked into Piper’s pushchair.

We spent a few hours on our plot this morning doing some much needed tidying. Pete mowed the paths between the beds and I weeded thoroughly under the nets (over the brassicas) that I don’t usually take off during the week because it’s much easier to put them back on with another grown-up to help.

Most people at our allotments are complaining about the germination rate of carrots this year. Ours have been rather pathetic too, although those that have come up are looking great and will soon find their way into our bellies.

I’ve sown a third lot of beetroot seeds and am crossing fingers and toes that something will come of this lot. I’m not sure what the problem is, but I’m sure we’ll beet it!!

We’re also trying some leef beet and silver beet leaves. Our friend Ilse in Dorset grows loads of this sort of salad leaf, and makes terrific salads, so I’m going to be trying these and reducing the numbers of lettuces that I grow this summer. They were sown last week, I’m hoping that in this warm weather they’ll put in an appearance by the end of next week.

There’s very little left in the coldframe at home now. All of the tomato plants have been planted out onto the allotment or into our home garden, and the first batch of leek and cucumber seedlings have gone in on the allotment. We have a second sowing of leeks gathering strength in the now always open coldframe, as well as a couple of newly sown cucumber seeds.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll have some photographs to share!