Save the Tree House

I saw this on Allotment Lady's blog. Someone who lives in her village built this tree house out of recycled materials, on his parents land and far away from any other houses. It's not a residence, it's just a project for some students who wanted to "opt out of the drink and drugs culture" and do something worthwhile instead. But now he and his friends are fighting to prevent it being pulled down under planning laws.

Visit the Treehouse website for more information about the project and more videos. If you want to support their fight, please sign the petition.

Spring Poetry

A bit of an old chestnut, this (ha ha), but a splendid poem nevertheless.






Philip Larkin - The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Ali G and the Tree Huggers

"Ketchup should be free", I want that on a t-shirt!

Cartoon as always from Throbgoblins. Click the panel to read the full strip.

Eco Paints

Steph and I went to Homebase today and we spotted a range of eco paints by earthBorn. earthBorn paints are environmentally friendlier because they're VOC free. VOCs are volatile organic compounds - they're the nasties in paint and other things such as paint strippers. They're also what makes new carpets stink, and other plastic things like that. Sick Building Syndrome is thought to be caused by VOCs in paint and carpets etc. They're unpleasant pollutants in the air and water, but confusingly they're also emitted in large quantities by trees, which is why Ronald Regan once said:

Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.

The Great Smoky Mountains in the Appalachians are so called because of the VOCs released by trees in the area, causing a persistent orange smog. To put it into perspective, though, trees also absorb carbon dioxide and give out oxygen, so overall they do more good than harm. The same is probably not true of automobiles or emulsion paint. So if it's possible to make paint without the VOCs it sounds like a good thing to me.

I was surprised to find eco paints in a big DIY chain like Homebase. I thought I'd have to order them off the internet, or maybe drive miles to some small retailer off the beaten track. Next time Stephanie talks me into redecorating a room, we'll head to Homebase and look at the earthBorn paints. I still want to do more research about eco paints and VOCs, but this is a start.

Anagram Competition Results

The voting is now closed on our anagram competition. The most popular anagram of "Dill's Atlantic Giant" was "Titillating Scandal", with 55% of the vote.

So Frank Marsland wins the windmill palm seeds. Congratulations Frank. Honourable mention to Hedgewizard whose entry "Gilt-clad Snail Titan" was also very popular.

Anagram Competition Poll

You've got 3 more days to vote in the anagram competition poll. Titillating Scandal pulled ahead to an early lead, but Gilt-clad Snail Titan has surged ahead in the last 24 hours, and the voting is now level. Lit in Lactating Lads and Instant Digital Call are attracting no interest whatsoever. You'd think at least their creators would vote for them, but apparently not.

Vote now for your favourite anagram of "Dill's Atlantic Giant" and choose who will be the lucky winner of two windmill palm tree seeds.

Anagram Competition

The deadline has passed for the anagram competition I announced last week. The challenge was to make an anagram from the words "Dill's Atlantic Giant". Here are the qualifying entries entries (one entry was disqualified as being too rude to print):

• Lit in Lactating Lads
• Gilt-clad Snail Titan
• Titillating Scandal
• Instant Digital Call

I've put them in a poll in the right-hand sidebar and you have one week to vote for your favourite. The lucky winner will receive a packet of Windmill Palm seeds, which grow into 40' high cold-hardy palm trees.

What are you waiting for? Go and vote!

Pumpkin Seeds

Ed's Dill's Atlantic Giant pumpkin seeds arrived in the post today. He wants to grow giant pumpkins next year, and this is the only variety to grow. Every world champion pumpkin since 1979 has been an Atlantic Giant.

The online supplier that sent the pumpkin seeds also sent us a free gift - two windmill palm seeds. These are cold-hardy palm trees that grow up to 20-40 feet tall. I don't really have any use for a 20'-40' palm tree, so I'd like to offer these seeds as a competition prize.

I will post the palm seeds to whoever emails me the funniest anagram of "Dill's Atlantic Giant". Remember to include your address - the seeds are very light so I don't mind posting them anywhere in the world. I'll publish all the anagrams in one week's time (November 9th) and the winner will be chosen by a poll.

Palm Oil

What is palm oil anyway?

You may never have heard of palm oil but you have almost certainly bought plenty of it. It's the most widely-used edible oil in the world, and is found in many processed foods (it is estimated than one in ten supermarket foods contains palm oil) as well as soap, shampoo, make-up and toothpaste. It is also becoming an important biodiesel crop.

So what?

Well palm oil is pressed from the fruit of the tropical palm tree. Vast areas of rainforest are being cleared to make way for palm oil plantations. It is considered to be the main threat to orangutans, which could become extinct in twelve years due to palm oil. The Sumatran tiger and the Asian rhino are also critically endangered due to rainforest clearance and palm oil is the main culprit. Not to mention the bitter irony of felling our rainforests, those massive ancient carbon sinks, in a bid to grow biofuel which is touted as a solution to climate change.

What's more, palm oil is bad for you. It's one of the few vegetable oils to contain high levels of saturated fat. That's what's so appealing about it, if you're a food manufacturer. It's cheap and it's easy to handle, being solid (or semi solid) at room temperature. But saturated fat is bad for your heart. Yet another reason to avoid the stuff, as if the orangutans weren't reason enough.

What can I do?

VeggieGlobal, the animal and environmental website, says

If you were making conscious efforts to buy "dolphin friendly" tins of tuna, then it's now time to think twice before buying foods or cosmetics containing palm oil

But if it is so ubiquitous, how can you do that? Even reading the ingredients label isn't a sure-fire way to tell if a product contains palm oil, as it is often listed just as "vegetable oil".

But there is good news. In July this year, Asda announced that it would not sell products containing palm oil unless the suppliers could prove that it comes from sustainably-run plantations. They have banned all palm oil from Borneo and Sumatra, the worst affected regions, and hopes to have eliminated all unsustainable palm oil from 500 products within a year. Meanwhile The Body Shop has established its own sustainable organic supplier in Colombia.

So here's what you can do:

1. You can shop at Asda and the Body Shop, or you can write to your usual retailers and ask them why they aren't banning unsustainable palm oil as well


2. You can write to your member of parliament and tell her about your concerns over palm oil


3. You can visit the Palm Oil Action website and learn more about the issue (and see beautiful pictures of orangutans)


4. Find 4 products containing palm oil or vegetable oil and write to the manufacturer


5. Print out 5 copies of the Palm Oil Action brochure and hand them out to your friends, or better still forward it by email and save a tree.

Review: Fruits of the Hedgerow

I picked up Charlotte Popescu's
"Fruits of the Hedgerow" in my local garden centre, which was kind of ironic. Our allotment harvest has been poor this year. The best harvest has been hedgerow forage.

The book covers 17 different British wild fruits, nuts and seeds. Each variety has a short description and then a plethora of recipes such as quince muffins, lemon and elderflower syllabub and hazelnut ice cream. I was particularly attracted by the recipes for rowanberries and haws, which grow profusely near me but which I've never gathered before because I didn't know how to use them.

There are no illustrations in the book, and this is a serious drawback. What does a medlar look like anyway? Even in black and white, a line drawing of the tree/bush, of the fruit and leaves, would have been invaluable. But this book assumes that you can already identify the fruits, you just need some recipes for them.

I'm looking forward to trying some of the recipes in this book, if I can tear myself away from just using them to make wine.

Picking Apples

After asking around I found two neighbours with apple trees who didn't want their apples. So at about half past nine I walked up the street with a ladder in one hand and a plastic trug in the other. It was a glorious autumn morning, bright and clear. I thought it was quite warm, but someone nearby was obviously feeling the cold and had lit a coal fire, so the smell of smoke pervaded the crescent.

I picked about 120lbs of apples from this one tree. There are more apples but I thought I had enough work to do processing this lot, so I'll come back for more later.

I took them home in a borrowed wheelbarrow and washed them. Then, just as yesterday, I set up in the garden to quarter, crush and press the apples. What none of the books tell you about cider making is that you'll soon be surrounded by more wasps that you have ever seen in your life. So I beat a hasty retreat to the house, and will have to retrieve my apples and equipment later, when it gets cold and the wasps go away.

Plan for tomorrow - cider making, indoors.

Apple Time

"Who wants to help pick some apples and make them into apple juice?"

Eleanor, Sam and I headed next door with my longest ladder, a broom and a large bucket to collect apples. We were soon joined by some of the local urchins who were keen to catch the apples I was knocking down, and offer some tips of their own.

"Yes, chucking your tennis racquet into the tree is an effective way of bringing down the apples. I remember from when I was ten. But it runs the risk of damaging the tree, and then the people who live here won't let us pick their apples any more."

I had some strange conversations with my helpers.

"Why are you collecting all these apples? You can't eat them."
"Yes you can eat them. Who says you can't?"
"They're not the same as real apples from the shops."
"They're exactly the same as that"
"But they're not from the shops"
"Where do you think the apples in the shops come from?"
"They come from the shops"
"Yeah, but where do the shops get them from?"
Silence
"I dunno"

Once we'd cleared that up we weighed the apples with an antique brass spring balance Steph gave me (thanks Steph - it beats standing on the bathroom scale whilst carrying the apples, then subtracting your own weight from the results) and found we'd collected 19lbs (about 8.5kg) of apples.

The urchins joined in with cutting the apples into quarters and tossed them into the crusher. More odd conversation occured at this stage.

"Why do they have sweetcorn in them?"
"Let me have a look - oh, you mean the pips"

Then we had a go at running the crusher, after I had given them a graphic description of what would happen to any body parts that entered the hopper.

The crushed apples then went into the press, and again we took turns at operating the press whilst we all watched the brown cloudy juice run into a bowl.

The labourers were rewarded with a drink of apple juice. Just a small one though as the bulk of the juice went straight in the freezer. They all declared it delicious. With any luck I can scrounge up more apples in the coming weeks until I have enough for a batch of cider. You never know, my own army of scrumpers, armed with tennis racquets, might bring me some.

Chegg for Trees

When I was a student, I used to sell my old textbooks at the student union for a pitiful sum, and buy next term's books used at the same place, for, well, less than they would have cost new, but a damn sight more than I had received for my old ones. It saved me money and yet it still felt like a rip-off. Somebody somewhere was making a killing.

We didn't have things like eBay and Craigslist in those days, or Amazon marketplace, or I would certainly have used them to sell my old textbooks myself, and buy others directly from the students themselves. Still, I often find that the cost of postage adds considerably to the price, sometimes making it more economical to buy new instead.

What would be a really good idea would be a sort of local Craigslist in each university. Students could advertise their old textbooks - and also stuff like laptops, mobile phones, bicycles, furniture, all the things that students need. And they could search for textbooks and stuff they needed, and then arrange to meet the seller in the pub to complete the transaction, thus saving on postage. That would be brilliant.

It turns out it's already been done, in the USA at any rate. Chegg.com is an online marketplace for students, arranged by campus, so students can buy and sell textbooks and stuff they need. I love the internet - isn't this sort of thing fabulous? It saves students money, it saves the planet, it's a win-win arrangement.

But it gets even better. Chegg.com came up with TextBookFlix.com, a textbook rental service for students. This sort of scheme can have a great benefit on the environment because paper production is very damaging. The chemicals used to bleach and treat the paper are serious pollutants, including dioxins, some of the most toxic substances known. I find this very depressing as I have a heavy book-buying habit myself.

There's a service called Eco-Libris, where you can plant a tree for every book you buy. Trees can't remove dioxins from the waterways, and the wood cut down to make books ought to come from managed forests rather than ancient forests, so tree-planting for books strikes me as more of a token than a genuine way to correct the harm done in paper manufacture. But hey, trees are nice. I'm not going to complain if someone wants to plant a bunch of trees. When you sign up to the service you get sent stickers to stick on your books saying "One tree planted for this book".

Just to wrap the whole thing up neatly, TextBookFlix has recently formed a partnership with Eco-Libris so that one tree is planted for every textbook rented. Isn't that nice?

Damson Wine

My sister Steph is visiting us again, and today we picked 17lb (about 8kg) of damsons from the tree in our front garden. I'm pretty short and Steph's even shorter, so we used a broom to pull the branches towards us. Then we sat in deckchairs and roughly cut them all and chucked them into a 5-gallon bucket with about 2 1/2lb of barley. We covered it with boiling water, put a lid on it and tucked it away in the kitchen.

When it gets cool we'll add some pectin-destroying enzyme, to make sure we don't end up with 5 gallons of damson jam. We'll give it a stir every day for about three days, until we have several pints of damson juice. Then on the fourth day we'll strain the juice off the pulp, and add some yeast and sugar, and let it ferment.

17lbs of damsons will make 5 gallons (about 30 bottles) of damson wine, which will be ready in time for Christmas.

Real or Artificial Christmas Tree?

We get a real Christmas tree each year which we decorate with tasteful colour-themed decorations, and we also have an elderly artificial tree which the children decorate with all the hand-made decorations that come home from school. But which is more environmentally friendly?

Bob Flowerdew, the famous organic gardener, has announced that he is getting an artificial tree this year which he claims is more environmentally friendly. This flies in the face of popular opinion that real trees are the greener choice. Triple Pundit, the blog which does the maths about various environmental dilemmas, has compared real v. artificial Christmas trees, and concluded that Bob has got it wrong on this one.

But I'm glad that he raised the issue anyway. Some trees are flown great distances for the lucrative seasonal trade, so I recommend asking the seller where your tree was grown. You want to make sure it is as local as possible. Also avoid the shady characters who chainsaw natural woodland by night for a quick Christmas buck. You want a purpose-grown tree which will be replaced by the grower. And do make sure you recycle your tree when Twelfth Night has passed.

Consider other options as well, such as buying a living Christmas tree which will adorn your patio year round and be brought indoors each Christmas. Or you could plant a tree as a Christmas gift for someone, or for yourself to offset the carbon cost of celebrating Christmas.

Deck the Halls

My sister Steph has come to stay for a few days again, to help us decorate and generally get into the Christmas spirit. She went out to the garden in the pouring rain and came back with armfuls of tree branches which she cleverly transformed into a Christmas wreath.

She used a couple of old wire coat hangers as an armature, some string to hold everything together and two of Eleanor's hair ribbons as embellishments.

Whilst I'm typing this, she's making a picture frame out of a scrap piece of MDF, some leftover woodstain from the shed and one of last year's Christmas cards. It's just like Blue Peter in my own kitchen.

Scrumping Apples

The house next door is up for sale. The family have moved out. The apples are dropping off the trees onto the lawn. I had forgotten how much more delicious apples taste when you've scrumped them.

Philosphical Musings About Walnut Trees

I'm still helping dad empty his house in preparation for selling it. We moved there in 1982, six days before Christmas. I was 11. I grew up there, and now dad will sell it to strangers, just as he bought the house from strangers 24 years ago.

People used to live in the house they grew up in, work the land their parents worked. They planted walnut trees, even though walnut trees take 50 years to mature, because they knew their children and grandchildren would benefit, just as they themselves benefited from the work their parents and grandparents had done years before.

I don't know where my grandparents lived. I visited their houses when they were alive, but I don't know the addresses, don't know who is living there now. I won't be planting a walnut tree here. My children won't live in this house.

It seems like that's where we went wrong. One of the places we went wrong, anyway. We lost the sense of connection to the land. We don't know who was here before us, we don't care who will come after. There's no reason to plant walnut trees any more.

Conkers

It's that time of year again when all British mothers of sons (and some mothers of daughters) have pockets full of conkers. The fruit of the horse chestnut tree, conkers are inedible hard nuts a couple of inches in diameter. British boys love to thread them onto strings and take turns to smash an opponents conker with their own. They keep count of the battles their conker has won, and high-tally conkers can exchange hands in the playground for lavish amounts of sweets or trading cards.

Serious devotees know that a conker which has been stored for a year will be much harder than a new season's conker, but few are patient enough to wait. So they resort to artificial aging techniques, such as soaking in vinegar or baking in the oven. British mothers know this well. Painting your conker with matt varnish, or worse, drilling it out and filling it with epoxy resin is considered cheating, and therefore you're better off asking your dad for help with these.

Damson harvest

Damsons are funny things. Last year our tree gave enough fruit to make two poxy jars of jam. The year before wasn't much better. But this spring we had an inkling things were going to be a bit different when the blossom was stunning. My neighbour noticed the same thing with his damson trees, so I think the late, wet spring must have suited them.

Yesterday I picked over a stone (15lbs or 7kg) of damsons from our one tree and I only got about half the fruit down (the tree's quite tall). And my neighbour promised me all her fruit earlier in the year. So I'm thinking a big bucket of damson wine.

Sam and I went to Congleton farmer's market. We actually made it this time. Shouldn't have bothered - it was a big disappointment. Most of the stalls were bog-standard British manky market variety - cheap bathtowels and mobile phone fascias etc. We did pick up some home-made cakes and some ostrich sausages from the few genuine farm stalls that were there. We also bought some cheese in the covered market from a trader who was very surprised when I asked where the cheese came from, and if I could taste it before buying.