Review: First Steps in Winemaking

In the past I've referred to certain books as "the bible", the final word in their field. Well C.J.J. Berry's First Steps in Winemaking is undoubtedly the home winemaker's bible. I first started winemaking as a student, to knock up large batches of cheap falling-over-juice, and I've had this book ever since then. The pages are heavily annotated (and stained) and there are other recipes scribbled on scraps of paper stuffed between its pages.

The book has hundreds of recipes, organised by month. This is a really neat feature because if the winemaking mood takes you, you can easily look up what is in season at the moment. In the winter months it gives recipes for things like wheat, tinned fruit, and Ribena wine. If you're searching for a particular recipe there's an index in the back.

Berry (who in life had a really impressive moustache) teaches you not only how to make wine, but also all the "whys". By following the book I developed an understanding of winemaking which allowed me to experiment with my own brews. I think my all time top success was a 5 gallon batch of "everything the greengrocer was chucking out on Saturday afternoon", which resulted in a fabulous wine very like a good Cabernet Sauvignon. Sadly I never wrote down the proportions and so the recipe was unrepeatable. But then again Berry advised me to always keep scrupulous records for this very reason, so the fault lies with the student, not the master.

I don't have any other winemaking books and I don't feel I need any. First Steps in Winemaking has everything I need.

Review: You Can Save The Planet

My daughter, Eleanor, has decided that she is an eco-princess after reading You Can Save The Planet by Jacqui Wines. It's a book for children that explains about energy saving, water conservation, pollution, reduce reuse recycle and so on. It focuses on things children can do, or encourage their parents to do.

For example, there is a checklist to see whether the house is energy efficient:

• I have taken a look and our loft is/is not insulated
• I tested each window in our house for drafts by holding a feather in front of it and seeing whether it fluttered. ___ windows had drafts.
• We have ___ lightbulbs in this house. ___ of them are low-energy bulbs.

... and so on. Eleanor has made a poster saying "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down." and stuck it up in the loo. Lovely.

I had an ulterior motive in buying this book for the kids. Often they thwart my attempts to be green - they can't be bothered to turn lights off, they can't be bothered to separate the recycling, they'd rather take the car than walk or cycle places. When you've got an eco-mum, this is how you rebel, I suppose. But this book makes being green seem like subversive fun. The back of the book says "Your parents' generation have wrecked the planet. Now it's up to you to make them fix it again". It seems to be working, on Eleanor at least. If I want Tom to read it I'll have to slip it inside an Artemis Fowl cover.

Review: Guide to Bees and Honey

Ted Hooper's Guide to Bees and Honey is the beekeeping bible. There are a heck of a lot of books about beekeeping available and I'm prepared to bet that each of them contradicts all the others in significant ways. But Ted Hooper is universally regarded as the last word.

So what, if any, are the drawbacks to a book which unites all beekeepers?

• It's not a light bedtime read, unless you suffer from insomnia. It's extremely dense and detailed. This is what makes it so valuable, but if you try to read it cover to cover (as I did)your brain will eventually dribble out of your ears.


• Hooper writes from a British perspective. For example it deals almost exclusively with National hives, which are by far the most common in Britain. In other countries, different hive designs and even different bees predominate.


• The book tells you everything you might want to know, but it doesn't tell you what to do. I'm sure this is deliberate - I'm all in favour of encouraging people to develop and use their common sense, rather than relying on dumbed-down instructions for every situation. But some of the other students on the course I attended a few months ago yearned for a clear set of instructions, at least when they were just getting started.


• Some of the instructions do seem downright dodgy. For example I read the section on moving colonies very carefully before collecting my bees a few weeks ago. Hooper said one should knock two-pronged staples into the hives to hold them together in transit. My other major beekeeping reference (Yates and Yates Beekeeping Study Notes) disagreed, saying this was a really good way to annoy the bees and make lots of holes in your woodwork. I agreed, and relied on ratchet straps and a lot of sticky tape instead.

If you keep bees, or would like to keep bees, and are British, you really have to own this book. Make sure you get an up-to-date version. The early editions pre-date the varroa mite, for example, and other important recent developments in British beekeeping, but the latest editions have been brought up-to-date. Once you know the book inside out and back to front, you can choose to ignore the advice in it and keep bees your own way. But when you are starting out you should follow Hooper's advice closely, and you won't go far wrong.

Review: A Slice of Organic Life

I always wanted to write a book. Unfortunately someone else has gone and written it. A Slice of Organic Life by Sheherazade Goldsmith (I've been reading too much Harry Potter - that sounds like a great name for a witch) is subtitled "Get Closer to the Soil Without Going the Whole Hog", and it's full of projects you can do to become slightly more self-sufficient. From picking wild berries or raising herbs on a kitchen window ledge, through making compost or growing potatoes in a barrel, to keeping a cow or a couple of pigs, there is a project in here for everyone, whatever your space or your budget.

It's by Dorling Kindersley, so of course it is beautifully designed and lavishly illustrated with such gorgeous photographs it makes pig poo look glamorous. There are lots of suggestions in here I haven't already done, so I'll look forward to using this book as a reference when we get our first goat for example.

I bought it from Borders, so I've already failed in my attempt to buy more second-hand books. But it's a really good book so there. I just wish I'd written it.

Review - Keep Chickens

Keep Chickens! by Barbara Kilarski was the book that got me started with chickens. It's by Storey Press, who publish books about gardening, soap-making, brewing, livestock etc. I've never had a bad book from them.

The book is specifically aimed at backyard chicken-keeping, not smallholding or farm scale poultry. It answered all my questions about keeping hens in a domestic garden - noise, smell, housing, hygiene etc. I've found the information in the book to be practically sound and based on experience and expertise, although it is an American book and so not all the advice was strictly relevant to a British reader. But even if American living habits sometimes differ from British (what is a condominium anyway?), American chickens seem to be identical to their Limey counterparts so the differences weren't very important.

As well as the factual information, I was charmed by the illustrations. There are several colour plates including images of different breeds of chicken and some quirky hen houses. The black-and-white pages of the book are also peppered with 1940's American ads for poultry feed, which give it a fun, retro feel. Also charming is the writing style; Kilarski writes from experience and includes lots of anecdotes about her three "girls". By the end of the book you feel as if you're personal friends with Zsa-Zsa, Whoopee and Lucy.

I've already written about why (almost) everybody should keep chickens. If you're thinking about it, I'd recommend you start by reading "Keep Chickens!" (and of course my series of articles about getting started with chickens, part 1, part 2 and part 3).

Review: How Does Your Garden Grow

Today's book review is a bit different from usual. Normally I review books I have bought myself, or sometimes books I've had for years. But I was sent Chris Beardshaw's How Does Your Garden Grow by the publisher for review. I didn't promise to give it a favourable review though, so from that point of view you can trust what I say.

It's very different from any other gardening book I've seen, because it reads more like a science textbook than a typical gardening book. You'll become familiar with terms such as adventitious growth, auxins and meristems, you'll know your dicots from your monocots and be able to talk about phloem and xylem with authority. Beardshaw explains how plants work, so you'll understand how to help them grow better.

All this science gets translated into practical things you can do to improve your garden. For example, how best to take cuttings (that tip alone will save me a fortune in hormone rooting powder), how and what to feed plants, and how to prepare soil to give plants the best possible growing environment.

It won't be everybody's cup of tea. There's inevitably a trade-off between ease-of-reading and depth-of-information, and Beardshaw seems to think there are plenty of pretty coffee-table gardening books already, but a shortage of information-packed science-heavy gardening books. I agree. If you are the kind of person who wants to know why things work, if you are hungry to understand rather than just know, then I think you will find this book not only enjoyable but immensely useful. If science does your head in, maybe you should pass on this one, but you might still enjoy the online flash game that goes with the book.

Interview with Andy and Dave from Selfsufficientish.com

One of my favourite websites is selfsufficientish.com, the fabulous online resource for urban self-sufficiency run by twin brothers Dave and Andy Hamilton. They both agreed to answer my questions about self sufficiency.

Bean-Sprouts: How did you first get interested in self-sufficiency?

Andy: As a child I remember making nettle soup and picking blackberries. We also had some apple trees in the back garden and a small veggie patch. As I have got older it has been more about asking myself "Can I do that instead of buying it?" When the answer is yes - whether it be growing my own veggies or making a fridge - then I will give it a go. For me it is about under-consumption, trying to live as gently on the planet as possible. Food miles make up for a lot of the carbon emissions and by growing my own and promoting growing your own I believe this can make a difference to the amount of fuel used.

Dave: My childhood experiences were of course very similar to Andy’s. Not long after living at home I moved to a house with rhubarb and nettles growing in abundance in the back yard. The garden was tiny but I was still amazed by the amount I got from these two crops without having to do very much (not even sowing the seed). Some years after that I experimented with growing some herbs then branched out to growing potatoes. The following year I was living in Oxford and had my first full size garden veggie patch. Despite the garden being over shadowed by trees on all sides I got a bumper crop of carrots, courgettes, parsnips, potatoes and in the following spring purple sprouting broccoli. This soon got me hooked and I launched into a two year experiment of growing the majority of my own food. This was a partial success as I managed to put something on the table every day for a year. Since then I have always grown something and am constantly improving my wild food knowledge.


Bean-Sprouts: What are you totally self-sufficient in?

Andy: I am totally self-sufficient in some herbs such as chives, rosemary, parsley and fennel. This year I am going to up the ante and introduce some more of the lesser grown herbs such as hyssop and chervil.
Last summer I was almost totally self sufficient in vegetables. My food bill for myself and my girlfriend was around £5 a week. It would have been well into the springtime this year if my freezer had not packed up, although I still have beetroot both stored and pickled and a load of jam. I am moving towards self-sufficiency in booze also, with a brew on the go almost all of the time and some stored up. I would say that every week of the year I have something that I have grown. I hope to store a lot more this year so that every meal I can have at least one thing on my plate that I have grown. I also tend to forage for mushrooms and other wild foods. If I find the time I dry my mushrooms, which keep for about a year.
It depends on what you call self sufficient for other areas in my life as I cook all my meals from scratch, own a bike not a car and mend clothes instead of buying new ones. I intend to make a solar hot water heater and solar ovens when the weather picks up. I hope to be self-sufficient in hot water for washing up and for some meals as a result.

Dave: It depends on the time of year for me. By the end of this month (March) I will be self-sufficient in salad greens and this year have planted enough fruit to be self-sufficient between at least June and October. This is my first year on my allotment in Bristol so all going well it will be from summer this year then ongoing that I will be self-sufficient in most of my food. I decided not to buy seed trays this year as I am recycling old yogurt pots, mushroom and drinks containers for my seedlings so I am also self-sufficient in those. Similarly I would have made enough compost to be self-sufficient in that soon. I intend to build a shed from scrap material at the allotment and will be harvesting rain water from the roof for my crops. I’m also reusing my bath water at home in my third floor flat for my seedlings.
A handful of other things myself and Andy do to be a little more self-sufficient (or self-sufficientish)
· A by-weekly forage in Bristol (sometimes more often in mushroom season)
· Both of us own a solar phone charger
· My desk top computer is made from salvaged parts.
· Andy makes bikes from salvaged parts
· Making own cleaning products
· Re-cycling and re-using everything possible!


Bean-Sprouts: What was your goal in setting up selfsufficientish.com?

Andy: No real goal as it were; we just wanted to share our experiences with others. I guess the closest to a goal would be the ideology of selfsufficientish, which is to reduce your impact on the planet by doing as much yourself as you can.

Dave: I very much saw the website as something that went hand in hand with what I wanted to do. My eventual goal has always been living in a self-sufficient environment and I saw the website as a way of sharing what could be done whilst living within the constraints of every day life. At the time I was a student living in a shared rented house and as most students are I was completely skint. Rather than let this limit me I decided it would be good to share the experiences I had in my chosen lifestyle. It was also a virtual way of sharing ideas.


Bean-Sprouts: What advice would you give someone just starting out in "greening" their lifestyle?

Dave: Don’t look at all the things you can’t do and let it put you off but see all the things you can no matter how small they might be. The first easy example that is always used is to change your light bulbs to energy savers as this is a sure fire way to cut down on carbon and reduce your electricity bill. Other tips are to put backs on your curtains to conserve heat, re-use your bath water in the garden or with houseplants, grow your own salad leaves or herbs on a windowsill. In short try and see what you do from day to day and see if there is a greener alternative – there usually is if you look for it.

Andy: I could not agree more with Dave on this question. Although I would add don’t fly to the list. I am off on holiday to Germany soon by train – my girlfriend is flying and I shall meet her there. I am not saying this makes me a better person, if I was some kind of eco-saint then I would not even use the train and instead cycle everywhere. I do think that we fly too much and even if you don’t think that man is changing the climate, flying still pollutes more than a train does.


Bean-Sprouts: What does the future hold for selfsufficientish.com?

Andy: We have just recently signed up with Hodder and Stoughton to write a book. It was not what we intended when we first started, but is very welcome. We hope that we can extend our message to much wider audience. We hope that it will be a book that you will be able to turn to whenever you want to do anything selfsufficientish. So it will cover topics from jam making, foraging and vegetable growing but also cover ethical shopping and how to make do and mend. We don’t want it to be another book that tells you that you are living your life un-environmentally, its not going to be written to give anyone a lecture. Instead we hope that people will be inspired to make small changes that make a real difference. We hope it to be the book that every selfsufficientisher, in fact everyone, will find invaluable. If you live on a small holding and have tons of spare time or in a bedsit and work all the hours God sends then you will find something you can do in this book. The book is called the selfsufficientish bible and is out in May 2008.



Thanks a lot, Dave and Andy. Good luck with the book, I'll look forward to that coming out.

Review: Scenes from a Smallholding

Scenes from a Smallholding by Chas Griffiths is without a doubt the funniest book about self-sufficiency ever written. Along with its sequel, More Scenes from a Smallholding, it made me laugh out loud every few pages. It also made me cry (at a beautifully-written scene when a baby calf is born, with some difficulty). And it taught me a lot I hadn't known before, about the relationship between farmers and supermarkets, about soil erosion, and about exactly what's involved in living off the land. I saw another review of the book which said "I was sorry when I finished it because I didn't want it to end". That's just how I felt.

Even if you're not interested in the subject matter (and you probably are because you're reading this blog) I reckon you'll enjoy this book. It's just so well written and so funny that you'll recommend it to everyone you meet.

Review: Living The Good Life

I really enjoyed "Living the Good Life" by Linda Cockburn. It's the story of an Australian family who spend six months without spending any money, but still living a fairly normal life. They had already converted their half-acre garden to a fruit and vegetable plot (with chickens and a goat called "Possum") to provide all their food, and installed solar hot water, photovoltaics and water catchment to provide electricity and water.

It's also peppered with facts and figures about the harm our modern lifestyles are doing to the planet and to ourselves, including the table I reproduced a couple of weeks ago in "Consumerism v Humanitarianism". These help explain why the family felt motivated to do such a thing, and perhaps should motivate readers to make some changes in their own lifestyles. But if you really don't like that sort of thing you can easily skip those parts because they appear in coloured boxes, so you can just go to the next bit of narrative about the family.

One factor that made it an easy read was that I really liked her. I'd like to meet her and just hang out, because she seemed funny and relaxed, whilst also passionate and serious about things that I agree are important. She kept that balance which (dare I say it) some eco-warriors tend to lose. So there is plenty of humour in the book. For example when their six-year-old son loses patience with the project and declares:

I don't care what's for dinner as long as it comes with a free toy!

Maybe I'm weird (well I know I'm weird) but when I read about how they went six months without buying new clothes (even though they all lost weight and their clothes were dropping off them), or new shoes (and had to mend their own flip-flops), or books (gasp!) or anything else, I really envied them and wished I could do it myself. So many aspects of their lifestyle seemed idyllic, that even their hardships didn't seem as bad as struggling to do the weekly shop in the rain, queueing up for hours at the checkout and then sitting stuck in the traffic on the way home, or the other "hardships" of normal modern life.

The end of the book describes their first couple of weeks "post-project". They had looked forward to having a huge blow-out, eating all the fast food they could get, and buying all the posessions money can provide. But they quickly found it wasn't nearly as enjoyable as they had anticipated. The dad had spent the whole six months cycling home from work past a KFC and trying to resist the alluring smell of hot chips. but when the project was over and he could have gone in and bought them if he wanted, he found he didn't really want to any more.

I recommend you read this book. For one reason, it might open your eyes and motivate you to make some changes in your lifestyle that would benefit you and the whole planet. It certianly did that for me. But that's not the main reason you should read it. The main reason is that it's a good read. I think you'll enjoy it.

Review: Liz Cook Charts

I have a chart from Liz Cook in my kitchen which I find very useful. It's about different nutrients your body needs, and what foods contain them. I also have charts by her about natural cleaning products and natural first aid remedies. I refer to them often because they are constantly on display rather than in a book tucked away on a shelf somewhere.

Although it only lists vegan foods, you don't have to be a vegan to find Liz's nutrition chart useful. I mainly use it as a reminder about what foods we're not eating. I'll look at the chart and think "We haven't had Brazil nuts for ages", then go and buy some. It helps us make sure there aren't any gaps in our diet. It is also a daily reminder that food isn't just about convenience, or simply a way to stop hunger pangs, but it is a central part of keeping healthy and avoiding illness.

I also love the way they look. They look hand-made (which they are) with hand-drawn lettering and little drawings of fruits and vegetables. They make me smile when I see them stuck up in my kitchen, and whenever I see them elsewhere, I know there is someone around that I have something in common with.

You may be wondering why this is written as a book review when it is about a series of wallcharts. Well, each chart has an ISBN number and you can buy them from Amazon, or directly from Liz's website.

Consumerism v Humanitarianism

I am reading "Living the Good Life" by Linda Cockburn. It is about an Australian family who spent 6 months without spending any money. They planned it for years in advance, building up a vegetable garden and keeping chickens and a goat to provide all their food, installing solar panels on their roof and rainwater catchment tanks etc.

Iam enjoying it so far, it is a good read. I'll probably write a proper review when I've finished it. But for now I wanted to share with you the following table from the book. When I read it, I wanted to cry.

CONSUMERISM V. HUMANITARIANISM
Consider the priorities in global spending in 1998
Global Priority......................................................$US Billions
Basic education for everybody in the world.......................6
Cosmetics in the United States.......................................8
Water and sanitation for everyone in the world..................9
Ice cream in Europe.....................................................11
Reproductive health for all women in the world..................12
Perfumes in Europe and the United States........................12
Basic health and nutrition for everyone in the world............13
Pet foods in Europe and the United States........................17
Business entertainment in Japan.....................................35
Cigarettes in Europe.....................................................50
Alcoholic drink in Europe................................................105
Narcotic drugs in the world............................................500
Military spending in the world.........................................780

Review: How To Grow More Vegetables

I bought John Jeavons' How to Grow More Vegetables recently, hoping it would live up to its promise of showing me:

"How to grow more vegetables (and fruits, nuts, berries, grains, and other crops) than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine"

I got pretty irritated wading through several chapters of irrelevant waffle that kept promising this amazing new technique would allow me to grow between twice as much and thirty-one times as much per unit area as "conventional" methods (which I assumed meant whatever method I am using now), but which never spelled out what this method was. When I finished chewing my way through the book I was disappointed. All this "new method" is, is just:

• Grow organically
• Use raised beds, not rows
• Use loads of compost
• Use intensive plant spacings
• Companion planting

Just about every gardening book I've got advises those exact same things.

It also contains some advice I consider dubious:

• Planting by phases of the moon
• Planting shedloads of stuff (60% of your available area) purely so you can turn it into compost
• The author isn't keen on animal manure or green manure

In retrospect I'm glad I read it, but I wish I'd got it out of the library instead of spending money on it. For one thing, it does contain some helpful information, but buried under a lot of crud. For example, information about the depth of the root systems of various crops.

It also makes very clear what a "raised bed" is. For a long time I thought it meant building retaining walls full of earth and planting stuff 2' in the air surrounded by brick walls. It doesn't mean that at all - it means having areas where you plant, with paths in between. You don't walk on your beds (you have to make them about 5' wide or less, so you can reach the middle for weeding and harvesting) so they don't get compacted and don't need digging every year. Within those beds you plant intensively, so leaf growth covers all the soil, stopping weeds growing and water evaporating. The book makes that much clearer and if I had read it sooner I could have saved a lot of confusion about raised beds.

I also like its emphasis on the soil. It talks a lot more about soil than plants. For example the fact we are destroying soil far faster than soil is being replaced. This is going to be a very hot topic in the near future, although the public have heard very little about it so far. I'll write more in a future post but remember you heard it here first. The book describes all the different components of soil - organic and inorganic, living and dead. It talks about the ideal structure of soil as a "living sponge cake". In the section about watering it emphasises that you are watering the soil, not the plants because plants don't take in water through their leaves, only their roots. All these are things I have felt for a long time and it is nice to see them expressed so clearly.

The thick cheap paper and goofy line drawings may put some people off but I love that sort of thing. My favourite illustration from the book is of a bearded hippy sitting cross-legged on the ground sowing seeds in a bed. I find that sort of thing charming, and it captures my imagination much better than the modern style of glossy photographs which manage to look less "real" than drawings do. In fact, I wish I had the 6th edition instead of the 7th, because it had a picture of a quilt on the front with appliqued fruits and vegetables.

But it's not going to help me grow loads more crops than I have in the past with some radical new approach, because I was doing all those things anyway.

If you want my advice, buy this book if you see it cheap in a charity shop, or ask your library to order it for you. It is interesting, and a useful part of building up your understanding of vegetable growing. But don't believe the hype - you're probably already using most of the methods it advocates so it won't tell you how to have vastly bigger yields.

Beekeeping Books

The meeting of the local beekeepers association last night was very interesting. It's an active group with lots going on - regular talks, shows, competitions, courses etc. They're a friendly bunch. I was immediately taken under the wing of the first member I met, who signed me in as his guest, answered all my stupid questions and introduced me to other people. The next meeting is in March and I'm looking forward to it already.

These two books are recommended pre-course reading for the beekeeping course I'm going on in May. I ordered them and they arrived today, so I'll be getting stuck in.

I've also been reading "Honey Bee's Hive", one of the children's series "Minibeast Worlds". The whole series is very good, full of accurate information presented in an interesting way and with amazing close-up photography.

I thought this book was fantastic because it was about bees and I liked the queen bee. She's the one who lays all the eggs. The beekeeper paints a dot on her. I liked all the pictures and I liked the waggle dance. There's a picture of a lady in beekeeping clothes and she looks like mum.

(Sam, aged 5)

Review: Home Preservation of Fruit and Vegetables

I cannot for the life of me think why Her Majesty's Stationery Office would bother to produce (with the aid of the Women's Institute) a book about jam making. It's one of those quirky little things that makes me glad to be British. But they did - in several editions from the 1930s onwards, and an excellent book it is too.

Mine is the 1989 edition which covers jams, jellies, marmalades, fruit cheeses and butters, mincemeat, bottling, canning and pickling amongst other methods of preservation. The many recipes are excellent, but the outstanding thing about this book is the detailed instructions. Everything is explained - the different ways food can spoil and how preservation techniques foil this, which technique works best with different varieties of fruits and vegetables, how to choose the best produce for preserving rather than eating fresh, exact storage conditions, how to present preserves for competitions, and so on.

Don't expect sumptuous photographs a la Nigella or other modern gastro-porn. Home Preservation of Fruit and Vegetables contains only a very few black and white pencil sketches, demonstrating how to use an upturned kitchen stool as an improvised jelly strainer, for example. This is a practical how-to which has already stood the test of time. Although it is now sadly out of print you can often find used copies on eBay or Amazon marketplace, or if you're lucky in charity shops or second-hand bookshops.

I have other books which include instructions and recipes for jam making - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's books, for example or Food From Your Garden - but this is the only book I have specifically about preserving, and it is the only one I need.

Roast Pheasant

I plucked, gutted and roast the two pheasants I bought the other day. Dad and I enjoyed them, but to be honest they were pretty tough and not all that much tastier than a really good corn-fed organic chicken. The flavour was different from chicken, but not as different as I was expecting. Maybe I overcooked them, or maybe that's just what pheasant is like.

The gravy was fabulous though (made from the thickened meat juices with a slosh of Weston's organic cider), and the vegetables we roasted along with the birds were delicious. I had a lot of fun preparing the birds, and seeing them turn from feathery creatures with heads and wings, into roast meat on a plate entirely through my own doing. I've never done that before and it was very interesting.

And now for something completely different: I've been asked by Friends of the Earth to include the following announcement, and I'm happy to do so.

Friends of the Earth would like to hear from you. They've recently launched a new online bookshop and would like feedback from the green community. All you need to do is answer 10 short questions for your chance to win over £150 worth of environmental books. Click here http://www.foe.co.uk/shop

I wasn't offered any inducement to include that (more's the pity). You need to browse the bookshop before you answer the questions, which are about how easy the site is to use and things like that. Good luck, and if you win the £150 of books, please send me one.

Review: Soap Maker's Companion

Sometimes I like to make things because it's cheaper than buying them, and sometimes I like to make things because I can make them better than I can buy. But mainly I like to make things because I just like knowing how. I get a huge kick out of thinking "I can do that" for as wide a range of things as possible. I think that's the reason I love to make soap.

One of my favourite soapmaking books is The Soap Maker's Companion by Susan Miller Cavitch. It has detailed enough instructions to be excellent as a beginners' book, but also plenty of information that would be of interest to a more experienced soapmaker. It wasn't my first soap making book, but I learned a lot from it that isn't explained anywhere else.

The batch sizes are on the large side, which some beginners might find offputting but in fact large batches are a lot more likely work well than small batches. This is because slight inaccuracies in weighing are more significant in small batches, and they also lose heat quicker than large batches which can lead to problems.

There are no photographs, but I love the quirky line drawings and woodcut-style illustrations. In fact "quirky" is a good word to describe this book, along with "earthy" - two of my favourite adjectives. The recipe names will give you a flavour of what I mean; "Build Me a Buttercup", "Down the Garden Path", "Blowin' in the Wind Laundry Soap". The recipes I have tried have all turned out very well, and there are plenty of tempting recipes I want to try in future. I have several soap-making books but this is definitely my favourite, and I'd recommend it to complete beginners and old hands alike.

A Pocketful of Rhyme

My 8-year-old son, Tom, is a published poet. His poem "Wings" was a winner of a national children's poetry competition and was published in the anthology
"Pocketful of Rhyme". I'm so proud of him. I have written my share of poetry, but I have never had any published. So here it is (with permission from the author).

Wings

If I had wings
I would touch stampeding winds in a tornado.

If I had wings
I would taste water from the very crust of the world.

If I had wings
I would listen to a meteor crash to Earth penetratingly.

If I had wings
I would gaze at the burning American forest fire.

If I had wings
I would dream of flying with geese in the shape of a V.

If I had wings
I would join the American army and explore the Pentagon.

If I had wings
I would touch clouds and see the wind giants, who argue a lot.

Review: Food From Your Garden

At first glance the Readers Digest book Food From Your Garden contains the same information you can find in almost any book about fruit and vegetable gardening or allotment gardening. The main part of the book contains entries for lots of different crops, with information about how to prepare the ground, when to sow, how to cultivate and when to harvest each different type. It's out of print so the information is not even up-to-date; organic methods for example are not discussed and the authors are quick to advise readers to use a terrifying range of pesticides and herbicides, most of which are probably now banned anyway. So far, so run-of-the-mill.

But this would be the one gardening book I would save if my house was on fire, because it has several features which make it stand out from the crowd. The most obvious are the recipes. Lots of books will tell you how to grow cardoons, but how many tell you how to eat them? Each crop has four or five suggested recipes, and they're good recipes too. Sugar-browned kohl rabi anyone? How about mushrooms in sour cream, or loganberry ice cream?

There are also several pages devoted to seasonal cooking, with recipes organised by season, and the only photos in the book (which is otherwise illustrated with beautiful colour line drawings). The photos sadly are that curious kind of 1970s food photography which always makes me lose my appetite entirely, but we'll gloss over that.

Another excellent feature is the "how many to grow?" information for each crop. Vital information which is missing in most other books. e.g.

A 20 ft row should produce about 25lb of globe beetroot or 45lb or a long rooted variety for winter use.

Then there is the Home Preserving section with detailed instructions for freezing, making jams, jellies, and chutneys, such as you could find in lots of different books. But it also describes lesser-known preservation techniques, such as how to make fruit cheeses and butters, syrups and juices, pickling, sauces, bottling, drying and salting. Most of these techniques come with lots of recipes.

There are also sections on foraging, wine making (again, with lots of recipes) and even keeping bees and poultry.

I would not be without this book. For years it was my inspiration and although I only used it to make the recipes using shop-bought ingredients I dreamed of growing all these things myself. Now I have started doing just that, it has become a handbook and a practical resource.

Review: 21st Century Smallholder

I won a copy of Paul Waddington's 21st Century Smallholder in a selfsufficientish.com competition. I'm glad I did because it is a great book. One of the things I like best about it is that it isn't printed on glossy paper with loads of huge full-colour photos and very little useful text, like so many other books these days. Instead it provides a fairly detailed overview of a range of topics, from growing fruit and vegetables, to conserving water, to keeping livestock.

Subtitled "How To Go Back To The Land Without Leaving Home", the emphasis is on finding things that anyone can do with an average suburban semi or even urban apartment, such as growing herbs and salad leaves in a windowbox, or worm composting. Waddington is realistic about pointing out the disadvantages of these choices as well as the advantages, and avoids the guilt-trip so many "green" books place on the reader.

I didn't like the section on different fruit and vegetable crops, however. He rates the different varieties according to space, time, gourmet, season, hassle and beauty (each represented by a little icon), on a scale of dark yellow (excellent) to dark purple (not so good). I couldn't intuitively grasp that a pale yellow leaf meant "pretty good season", or even understand what "pretty good season" actually meant. And I have no idea why he rates kale (a rough-tasting cabbage substitute), for example, as "excellent gourmet" but aubergines (one of my favourite veg) as "not so good gourmet". It didn't make any sense to me.

But overall it was an interesting overview of a wide range of topics, with a detailed bibliography to enable you to find more in-depth information. Rather like John Seymour's The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency, it is wonderful for inspiration, perhaps less useful as a practical ", how to", and a valuable addition to my bookshelf.

McDonalds Forced to Close

Here's a heartwarming news story about a McDonald's restaurant in Tavistock, Devon, which was forced to close because people preferred to eat the excellent local food available. I'm lovin' it!

In other news, I won a copy of Paul Waddington's 21st Century Smallholder (subtitled "how to go back to the land without leaving home") in a competition on Selfsufficientish. The book arrived today - thanks! I've had a quick flick through and it looks great, full of useful and interesting stuff. I'm looking forward to reading it cover to cover.