I am very sorry for the spam

Some sort of automated spam bot has been sending messages in Chinese to every single Bean Sprouts post ever. This is irritating enough, but it means that people who have commented on the blog are receiving lots of unwanted emails telling them about followup comments, which are nothing but spam.

I have now added word verification as an anti-spam measure, which I hope should stop this particular spam bot. I apologise to Bean Sprouts readers if their mailboxes are full of this garbage. Imagine what my mail box looks like!

Thanks to VegPlotting for alerting me to the spam bot and sharing the solution with me.

Wet Moon

I saw a beautiful "wet moon" tonight; the crescent moon is tilted on its side. It looks like a bowl, or a smile. If you are in the Northern hemisphere and the sky is clear where you are, why not go and have a look at the wet moon? As in the photo, Venus is quite close by the moon tonight.

I used an astronomy website to make the following sky map. You'll need to know your latitude and longitude to get an accurate map for your position, but thanks to the wonders of the internet it's very easy to find that out too. I used this latitude and longitude finder. If you plan on a bit of stargazing tonight, you could print off a star chart for your own location so you know what you are looking at.

Potatoes in Bags

In October or November my dad ordered me a kit from Marshall's for growing potatoes in bags. His intention was that I would have home-grown potatoes for Christmas. But the kit only arrived a week or so ago, so today Steph and I planted them up, with some help from Eleanor and Rebecca.

You put about 8" of compost in the bottom of the bag then put three chitted spuds on top and cover with about another 4" of compost. Keep it watered, and as the shoots appear you cover them with more compost until the bag is full. I've had friends who used this method and they were amazed at the size of the crop. They told me the bag is just jam packed full of potatoes by the end.

The kit came with three bags and fifteen Swift seed potatoes. The instructions said to put three spuds in each bag, so we jabbed some holes in the bottom of a half-empty compost bag and planted that up as well. There's nothing magic about the bags that Marshall's sent me - you can grow spuds in any sack or bag or bucket of roughly the right size. The only "magic" is that receiving a kit through the post gave me a kick up the behind to actually do it. Thanks, Dad.

Allotments All the Rage

The BBC is reporting that allotments are all the rage. A combination of the credit crunch and eco-awareness is driving a huge interest in vegetable growing. National waiting lists for allotments are said to be over 100,000. According to the BBC:

In some areas, it's more difficult to get an allotment than it is to get in to the most exclusive London clubs, with waiting lists running to 10 years - those that have not been closed altogether.

In order to feed the demand, the National Trust is releasing enough land for 1000 allotments. What caught my eye about the story though was a link to Landshare.net. With a strapline "Linking people who want to grow their own food to space where they can grow it", it struck me as a brilliant idea whose time has come. The ubiquitous Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall appears in a video on the site explaining how the idea works. Or at least that's that it says - I couldn't get it to play. But from what I can gather it seems to be encouraging people to offer their underused gardens in exchange for some of the produce.

So if you can't get an allotment why not sign up to the Landshare website and see if anyone near you has a garden you could use to grow some produce? Or if you have good intentions to do something with your garden but you never seem to actually do it, why not offer your land to someone who desperately wants it? You get to see your garden looking cared-for and productive. You get a share of some of the produce. You get to build up relationships with people in your local community. It's a real win-win arrangement.

Back to the Allotment

Ed and I went back to the allotment today for the first time in 2009. We were almost scared of what we would find, and it certainly looked weedy and neglected when we got there. But we harvested some leeks and some borecole (a curly cabbage-related thing). And we found most of the weeds were shallow, surface-rooted things which came up very easily. In an hour and a half we had cleared about an eighth of the whole plot, which is very encouraging.

I'll go back later in the week and plant something in the ground we cleared. Broad beans and garlic can go in at this time. And we'll return once a week to clear a bit more. By the time spring really gets started we should have it all shipshape.

I enjoyed myself enormously. I had forgotten how much I love going there. It helped that it was a beautiful day. The sky was blue and the sun was shining, although there was an inch of ice in the water butt. But after only a short while of digging we had stripped off our layers of woolies and were in our shirtsleeves. I chatted to one of the allotment holders who filled me in on what had happened since I was last there. I took stock of what is still there - my soft fruit bushes, my apple tree, the rhubarb is already coming up and so are the daffodils. Ed and I planned what we would plant in the coming season.

It's good to have dirt under my nails again.

Happy Christmas Bean Sprouts Readers

Happy Christmas to all Bean Sprouts readers. Unlike last year, I haven't been keeping you up-to-date with all my festive preparations. Sorry about that. But the preparations have been going on nevertheless - making decorations, giving carol concerts, making gingerbread houses, attending the children's nativity plays, making pickles, playing music, getting ready for dad's arrival from Ireland, and lots of other activities. December's full moon was observed, and the winter solstice remarked, but I didn't share them with you all. I feel bad about that, it's not you - it's me. I simply let myself get out of the habit of regular blogging. I promise to do better in 2009. But for now I wish you all a very merry Christmas, and see you again soon.

Tumble Dryer Again

A lot of people commented on the Tumble Dryer story I posted last week. Many were surprised that I admitted to having a tumble dryer. Simon Sherlock said "I'm astonished anybody can afford to run a tumble dryer at the moment, and amazed that Mel even considers one." And Compostwoman said "We don't have one...never have , never will..we dry stuff on the line OR in the house and if it looks wet, I don't wash stuff until another day."

But others were pleased I had written about it. Lizzie said "I felt a lot less naughty for occasional use of the tumble drier when I read your post Melanie. I cant dry on radiators at the moment as that would involve putting the heating on, which we havn't so far this year." and Anonymous said "It's easy for those who don't use tumble driers to feel smug - however consider that other people's life styles, house size, family size might make life more difficult for them to do this"

If people can dry their clothes without using electricity then obviously that's great. It's great for the environment, it's great for their finances, it's great for their clothes too - nothing feels or smells the same as line-dried clothes.

But for some people (me, for example, and several Bean Sprouts readers too) it's not an option all the time. And I guess for some people it's not an option any of the time. I don't feel bad about this. I do other things for the environment and for my bills. I am confident that I am doing what I can do. And I keep trying to learn more and do more to do my bit to live more sustainably on the planet.

I'm thinking of changing the tagline on this blog to "Bean Sprouts - Greener Than Thou". Just kidding. I'm actually thinking of changing it to "Bean Sprouts - You Don't Have To Do Everything". You don't have to do everything. You just have to do something. You don't have to live in a cave. You don't have to go about in damp clothes if there's just no green way for you to dry them. You don't have to save the planet single-handedly. And you don't have to feel bad about the things other people do that aren't practical for you. There's almost certainly something you do that they don't do, anyway. It's not a competition to see who's greenest. What it is, is a feeling of personal responsibility that I should do my bit. And I do, so my occasional use of the tumble dryer doesn't bother me.