I hope I’m not too late for late potatoes, but the weather’s still quite warm so…

Today I went to the local tyre-fitting shop and asked for 5 old tyres to make a tyre tower with.  I’ve dropped them off at the allotment and am going back tomorrow morning to plant my potatoes.  I found these simple instructions for a tyre tower at the Ravenswood Community Garden website.

If you have some old car tyres you can grow some potatoes.
Spread some newspaper on the ground.
Stack two tyres on the newspaper, and fill them with straw or soil.
Bury ten potatoes in the straw or soil and water your tyre tower.

When potato sprouts peep through, add another tyre and fill up with more straw or soil. Keep doing this as your potatoes grow, until you have at least four, five or six tyres in your tower. After the plants flower, take the tower apart and count your potatoes.

Photographs to follow and potatoes for December (I hope). 

Lying in bed on Saturday morning listening to the radio I was just a little amused by the news that a German company has been bugging our wheelie-bins.  It transpires that it’s not the Germans that are keeping an eye on us, but our very own councils who requested that the electronic bugging devices be installed by German companies.  So I went out to have a good look at our wheelie bin this morning, and lo and behold, we’ve been bugged!  This is a picture of our bug.

Apparently more that 500,000 British wheelie bins have been secretly bugged, and now the news is out, what do people think about it?  Well it seems that although some of us have reacted initially with amusement and then wary acceptance, others are taking this matter far more seriously indeed.  Here are some excerpts from the thisislondon.co.uk’s article on the bugging of our bins and a selection of public comments submitted in reaction to the article:

The official reason for the bugs is to ‘improve efficiency’ and settle disputes between neighbours over wheelie-bin ownership. But experts say the technology is actually intended to enable councils to impose fines on householders who exceed limits on the amount of non-recyclable waste they put out. New powers for councils to do this are expected to be introduced by the Government shortly.

But the revelation that the bins have already been altered ignited a ‘Bin Brother’ row over privacy and taxes. Conservative MP Andrew Pelling said burglars could hack into the computer system to see if sudden reductions in waste at individual households meant the owners were on holiday and the property empty.

He said: ‘This is nothing more than a spy in the bin and I don’t think even the old Soviet Union made such an intrusion into people’s personal lives.

‘It is Big Brother gone mad. I think a more British way of doing things is to seek to persuade people rather than spy on them.’

If I find one on my bin, I shall

1) Cease all recycling
2) Take a black & decker to said device

- Peter Chalmers, Oxford

As with many people in urban areas and London especially, I live in a block of flats with communial bins. If one of the residents insists on putting recycleable rubbish in the normal bins, what will they do? Will all the residents be rounded up and interrogated until the culprit owns up?

I’m off to wrap my bin in tinfoil.

- Neil Marklew, London

It occurs to me that now might be the time to form Anti-neighbourhood Watches with the aim of meeting once a week with your wheelie bin and swoping it with another member at random, thus at one masterfull stroke negating all the data collection.

This doesn’t stop them collecting the data, just that all their time and effort will be wasted as the data collected will be useless.

- Quantox, Wokingham, UK

Infringement of Civil Liberty? Still trying to fathom that out but to say I’m furious is an understatement.

I fail to understand why bugging my Green (paper) bin and my Grey (plastics) bin will help the council determine how much non-recyclable waste I am producing.

I have no concern over collecting metrics regarding waste but I am very concerned about the sneaky, underhand method used by my council to determine MY waste output.

- Peter S, Crewe and Nantwich, Cheshire

Again I’m finding some of this amusing.  I recycle as much as possible and try where I can to reduce non-recyclable waste, everyone else should be doing this too and if they aren’t there should be consequences.  I don’t like the idea of robbers hacking into the council’s website to find out when I’m away on holiday, but, quite frankly, it seems quite unlikely.  What do you think?

UPDATE: I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and my final word on the subject is: I’m far more scared of global warming than I am of having my "civil liberties" infringed upon by a council who is trying to encourage recycling. 

We’ve hit a snag with the installation of the Water Two valve that we’ve been so excited about.  The grey-water pipe that we had planned to fit it too is a "dead" pipe with no water flowing through it, and the pipe that carries the basin- and bathwater is too short to attach valve.  So, we need to extend that pipe, reduce the height of the hopper, and then fit the Water Two.  This won’t be happening for at least a few weeks, hence the need to start siphoning bathwater into the garden with a hose.

Our Water Two valve arrived in the post yesterday.  What a clever little contraption!  It is a switch that you fit to your bath/shower waste-water pipe that you can switch on and off to divert the grey water to your water butts when there isn’t enough rain.  We hope to have it fitted within the week, and I’ll post a picture once that’s done.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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.

The old tractor tyre has worked brilliantly as a sandpit for Piper, and she is thoroughly enjoying it.

Pete managed to get it onto the car’s roofrack with the help of a friend and then sunk it slightly into the lawn and filled it with sandpit sand.

… is another man’s solar panel.

We are delighted that the radiator that we removed from our dining room to make space for our new french doors to be installed has been Freecycled to someone who is going to be making it into a solar water heater on his shed roof.

We want to make a sandpit for Piper, and even Ayrton to play in and have managed to find an old tractor tyre through Freecycle that we just need to go and collect from a smallholding about 15 minutes drive away.

We are going to sink the tyre slightly into the lawn in the back garden and then fill it with sand.

I found a couple of good links to ideas for sandpits:

Burke’s Backyard
New Zealand’s Ministry of Education

I have recently discovered Read It! Swap It! A free website where there are currently 37672 books available for swapping with your unwanted books. You agree a swap by someone asking to swap a book with you and you choosing one of their books, or you browsing the library and requesting a swap with someone who will browse your books and either agree a swap, or there is the option to reject a swap if none of their books take your fancy. Books are posted between members, and your postal address is kept secret until a swap has been agreed. This system only operates in the UK. Since joining last week, I have had 10 agreed swaps, and received my first book yesterday. What a fun and economical way to reuse books. Come along and swap a book with me!

We bought our new carpet today, although it won’t be laid until the end of June when we finish work to the house.  It is a 100% British Wool carpet that will be laid on top of an underlay made from 100% recycled old car tyres.  It will go in the entrance hall, on the stairs, and all of upstairs (except the bathroom).

I am thoroughly enjoying the new series on BBC2 about how the Strawbridge family is restoring an old Cornish farmhouse and land and turning it into a permaculture paradise.  It is our dream to fulfill a similar project in the future, but being in our early thirties with little children, it is on rather a larger scale that what we can afford in both monetary and time terms.

Last night’s episode of It’s Not Easy Being Green had a message on recycling woven through it, inpiring me (and hopefully many other viewers) to improve our own recycling system to make it more efficient and easier.  We are fortunate to have a local council who collect some of our recyclables every second week, and we are responsible for delivering our own glass, batteries and clothing/shoes to a local recycling point.  The recyclables that the council collects are stored in a wheelie-bin in the front garden, but the glass is a far more disorganised affair that lives in the shed, and only gets delivered to the bottle bank once the mountain of bottles nears toppling point.

I suppose the root of the problem is the messy shed that poor Pete spends lots of time trying to organise, and I keep putting more and more things into it and cluttering it up.  This week I’m going to endeavour to tidy up a corner of the shed to stand the recycling bags for our glass near the door, and work out some sort of system to remind myself to take it all away whenever I am going to be going near a supermarket or car park that has a bottle bank.

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Here is another example of a sustainably-minded blogger being inspired by the Strawbridge’s.  Ken Boak of Sustainable Suburbia lives in the Redhill area of Surrey and is planning some major changes to his garden.

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Watch It’s Not Easy Being Green on Tuesday nights on BBC2 at 8.30pm.