Hen House Cleaning

I thought I was so clever, using shredded waste paper as chicken bedding. But the problem is that shredded paper, when combined with chicken poo and left to dry, becomes a kind of combination of papier mache and adobe. It's almost completely impossible to remove from any surface it adheres to, including hens' ankles. On the other hand, I may have inadvertently invented an exciting new environmentally-friendly building material.

Yesterday's News

Steph and I went to my favourite art and craft supplies shop, Fred Aldous in Manchester. And one of the things we bought was a set of coloured pencils made from recycled Chinese newspapers. The newspapers are so tightly wrapped around the coloured lead that it feels like a normal wooden pencil, and can be sharpened with a regular pencil sharpener. But you can read the text on the outside of the pencil (if you can read Chinese). The packaging seems to be made of Chinese newspapers too. Very groovy.

You can also buy them online for £2.99 from Giftmonger.com

My Biggest Fan

If you are drying clothes indoors, either through choice or necessity, an electric fan speeds it up considerably but it still uses a lot less juice than a tumble dryer.

Sunday Funny

Sorry I didn't post yesterday. I haven't vanished again. But my sister Steph has arrived for a visit over half term. We've been learning to draw in pastels (well I've been learning, Steph is already very good at it), decorating the house for hallowe'en, shopping for our brother-in-law Andrew's birthday presents (happy birthday Andrew!) and generally having lots of fun.

Since it's Sunday, here are some funnies:

After an exhaustive three year study, scientists at the University of the Isle of Dogs, East London, (UIDEL) have discovered what they think could be the real cause of global warming - people all over the world hanging out their washing to dry writes special washing correspondent Barry Rooster.

The boffins say that when freshly-laundered clothes - especially whites and light coloureds - are hung on washing lines, they reflect the sun's rays upwards, leading to an increase in the greenhouse effect.

Head of Research Gunther Smallpiece comments: "We've previously been told to reduce the temperature on our washing machines to save electricity, but this is fact counter-effective. We will recommend to the government that the population use the full drying cycle on their machines, instead of hanging the garments outside in the fresh air". And he goes further: "This is so serious, we'd like to see hanging washing outdoors to be banned in the same way as smoking indoors.""We'd like to see it become, if you like, a 'hanging offence'!", he jokes, proving conclusively that even dull scientists do have a sense of humour.

From The Spoof.

Cartoon from Throbgoblins. Click on the panel to read the whole strip.

How Bean Sprouts Can Help You Survive the Credit Crunch

So, the Credit Crunch. Funny to think that when Bean Sprouts began its sabbatical at the end of August, the credit crunch was part of the lesser-read financial news. Now it seems like it's on the front page every day. Today, for example, the announcement that Britain has officially entered an economic downturn and in all probability is in recession. So how can the Bean Sprouts archives help?

Well there is a wealth of articles in the archives tagged "frugal" which can help anyone who is tightening their financial belt. By far the most popular is How to Make Greek Yogurt, and if you don't like the Greek stuff you can also find out how to make regular yogurt and how to make Philadelphia-type soft cheese. You might also want to check out the very popular How To Get Started With Chickens - Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 3.

It's also worth looking at the posts tagged "foraging" to find out if you can pick any leaves, fruits, nuts, berries or mushrooms and get food for free. You can also find out how to make them into wine, jam, liqueurs, chutney and so on.

You might also consider signing up to Freecycle or one of the alternatives. You might want to join the Freeconomy community.

For a more general discussion of using your brain to reduce overconsumption without hardship, check out Money-Saving Toothpaste Tip, and if you're feeling blue and deprived then watch The Story of Stuff and console yourself that by saving money, you're also saving the planet. Find out Why You Should Know Your Hourly Pay. And if you're wondering why we're all in this mess in the first place, find out what sustainability means and think about why anybody could seriously expect that the economy can keep on growing forever.

Cartoon from Throbgoblins. Click the panel to read the whole strip.

When is an A-Rated Appliance Not?

When is an A-rated appliance not an A-rated appliance? When it only last 2 years before irreparably breaking down. Five years ago we bought a White Knight A-rated tumble dryer. As far as I know it was and still is the only A-rated dryer available. We really liked it. It has some nifty features like reverse tumble - it changes the direction it tumbles every few minutes, so your clothes don't end up in a tight sausage, bone dry and hot on the outside and wet in the middle. It has a sensor, so it goes until the clothes are dry then it stops automatically. I used this feature to test the tumble dryer balls a couple of years ago. You can set it to full-eco-mode where it takes all day to get your clothes dry but uses very little energy in doing so (this is the A-rated mode), or you can set it to murder-death-kill-mode where it blasts your clothes dry in an hour or so. But even in this mode it seems very gentle and I have stopped being fussy about what I tumble-dry and what I air-dry because nothing has ever shrunk in this dryer.

But just over two-and-a-half years after we bought it the drum ripped clean off the bearing leaving a huge ragged hole in the back of the drum. We inquired about getting a replacement drum but it was totally uneconomical - it cost more to do this than to buy a whole new appliance. So we bought another identical dryer. After all, we liked the model very much. Maybe it was a freak manufacturing fault which made it fail so quickly. But just in case it wasn't, we took out the optional 5-year-warranty.

It is more "green" to replace a part than to replace the whole appliance

We're very glad we did, because 2 years and 1 month after we bought it, the exact same fault happened again. And this time the warranty-people have ordered a replacement drum. I don't know why it is economical for them to do it when it wasn't economical for us, but hey-ho. I feel a bit ambivalent about this. It is more "green" to replace a part than to replace the whole appliance, so that's nice. But if they had just sent me a cheque to buy a new dryer, I would have avoided this model like the plague. I feel sure the new drum will also fail in another two years - or more likely in about 3 years, when the 5-year-warranty has expired.

How much energy have I saved by using an A-rated appliance compared to another appliance? I don't know. it depends on exactly how often I have used it, which varies from season to season. And it depends on how much I have used it on A-rated mode and how often I used it on regular mode, which also varies. I put slow-mode on when Ed is at work all day and I just tune-out the sound of the endless rumbling. But in the evenings and at weekends when Ed and the kids are at home I put it on fast-mode. There is enough noise in the house at those times without adding to it.

the embedded energy of the appliance

But how much energy is there in the extraction and processing of the materials that made the appliance? How much energy was used in its manufacture and transport? This is the embedded energy of the appliance. Think of it like the cost of owning a car - if a car is very cheap to run, then that's nice. But if it is very expensive to buy in the first place then that weighs against the cheapness of running. Maybe it still works out cheaper overall, as long as you keep the car on the road long enough. But if you buy an expensive car that breaks down after two years, then it's always going to be uneconomical compared to a car that lasts a long time. I don't think the White Knight dryer deserves to call itself A-rated if it only lasts two years, because I suspect the embedded energy outweighs the energy savings in use.

it is better to dry clothes on the line, and I do this when I can

P.S. yes, it is better to dry clothes on the line, and I do this when I can. But it has rained in England almost without let-up for the last two years. OK that's not strictly true, but it feels true. We have certainly had an unusually wet period for two years now. So line drying has been difficult, and I find a dryer is an essential emergency back-up when every surface in the house is covered in wet clothes and the kids need clean school uniforms by the morning.

Sad News

On Saturday I spent some time in the garden sketching things in charcoal, including the chickens. They all seemed fine. On Sunday I got dressed up in old jeans with holes in them, an old faded t-shirt, marigold gloves, headscarf and wellys (with a fetching cow-skin print) and went to clean out the chicken coop and run. It's a mucky job, and long overdue this time, but satisfying. I spotted one of the new Rhode Island Reds lying in the run, apparently dead. She moved a little when I went to investigate, but shortly afterwards she did expire.

I don't know what was wrong with her. She had seemed fine the day before. All the other chickens are healthy and well except for a mite infestation, which is why I went out to clean the housing and treat it. Anyway mites on a chicken are like fleas on a dog - they're annoying but not lethal. There was no sign that anything had got into the run or harmed her. She was only 18 months old.

We have two older chickens, both hybrid layers, which we got at the same time and have always got along well with each other. Then we got two Rhodies in January, and they were pals with each other but the older girls bullied them a bit. Well whilst I was cleaning the hen house, the surviving Rhodie went over to her dead sister, lowered her head to her and made soft clucking noises. I don't think we should anthropomorphise animals (anyway, they don't like it), but it was impossible not to interpret it as saying something like "Elsie? Are you OK? Elsie, what's the matter? Get up!" And she pecked at the dead bird a couple of times as if prodding her to move.

I buried her at the back of a flower bed. I might pop a few spring bulbs on top later.

Did You Miss Me?

Sorry for the long break. Nothing horrible happened to prevent me from posting but thanks for all your concern, I'm really touched. After I came back from London, dad came to stay for a few weeks. I kept telling myself "I'll get back to blogging when things get back to normal", but somehow I didn't. Call it "the blogging blahs", call it getting out of the habit, call it sheer laziness, I don't know what.

I've got a new guitar, the first guitar I have ever bought for myself, so I've been playing a lot. I have been learning to draw and putting my drawings on a "secret" (or at least un-publicised) blog purely so my family far away can see them. But some of you have found it, you crafty things. I'll probably put some drawings on Bean Sprouts when they are relevant to the posts, but this isn't going to turn into an art blog. It will remain about living sustainably and our family's search for the good life. I've been watching old musicals with my 8-year-old daughter, like The King and I, and Calamity Jane. That's been a lot of fun. One of our chickens died from unknown causes. The allotment has been utterly neglected, we're thinking hard about what we want to do with that. Sam turned 7. I'm looking forward to Hallowe'en, Stephanie will come up then and I'm sure we'll hook up with Lindsey too. Life has been going on as it always does.

I already have ideas for the next few blog posts. More about our chickens, about keeping chickens in general, and particularly about pest control. When is an A-rated appliance not an A-rated appliance? And getting started making home-made Christmas gifts, but realistically. It may take me little time to get back into the "post every day, or more" habit. But I'm back now anyway, and it feels good. I missed you guys too!

Gunga Din

It rained the whole time in Ireland, but we had fun despite it. We went to the boat my dad keeps with his friend on Lough Derg. We went to Bunratty castle and folk park, we played a D&D game with the kids, and we invented our own board game and played that. I taught Steph to crochet granny squares and we started work on an afghan for dad. Dad read us poems by Robert Service, Rudyard Kipling and Banjo Patterson whilst we crocheted. I practiced a new bluegrass fingerpick I was learning on the guitar until I drove everyone crazy (but they all agreed I had improved by the end of the week).

The kids played in the Irish farmland surrounding dad's house come rain or shine. They shoveled up gravel from a heap and scattered it all across the yard; on the last day Steph and I spent an hour sweeping it back into a heap. The kids furnished a "den" in the hedgerow by the lane and spent a lot of time carrying stuff up there.

We watched a clutch of swallow chicks in dad's barn get bigger and bigger - before long they'll be ready to fly. We identified most of the wild flowers we found on dad's land (ragwort, greater plantain, ribbed plantain, welted thistle, creeping thistle, creeping buttercup, herb robert, yarrow, short-fruited willowherb, selfheal and others) and we identified all the birds (goldfinches, house sparrows, dunnocks, wrens, robins, chaffinches, blue tits, great tits, greenfinches, jackdaws, hooded crows, wagtails, swallows, and others).

Tomorrow we're off on our travels again - to London this time with Ed (he didn't come to Ireland) for our main family holiday of the year. I'll resume normal regular blogging when I return.

Going to Ireland

The kids and I are going to Ireland to stay with my dad for almost two weeks. My two sisters will be there too, with my nephew and niece. Poor old Ed is staying at home, but we'll be having our family holiday together when we get back. I've lined up some blog posts to be published every day whilst I'm away. But my dad's Internet connection is absolutely abominable so I won't be able to respond to emails or comments until I get back.

Hedgerow Wine

Hedgerow wine, 2007 vintage. A ripe blackberry nose with overtones of elderberry and haws leaving a damson finish on the palate with just a hint of sloes. This isn't nonsense wine-journo-speak, it's because it is made from blackberries, elderberries, haws, damson and sloes. Quaffable, and outstanding in its price bracket of about 20p/bottle.

Sunday Funnies

Well, OK, he's not being very funny in this clip but he's bang on the money.

There can be no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. Anything else is just decadent

Preach it, Rob.

Cartoon from Marc Roberts at Throbgoblins

Weed of the Week - Rosebay Willowherb

Rosebay willowherb is also known as fireweed due to its habit of colonising areas devastated by fire. It also flourished on bombsites during the Blitz. It's not usually a problematic weed. You can easily pull it out when it pops up. If you take over a neglected patch of land there might be plenty of willowherb growing on it, but it's nothing like as troublesome as bindweed or couch grass or any of those difficult weeds. Do pull it up before it sets seed though, as it makes downy seeds which float up and spread everywhere.

I think it's a very handsome plant, and apparently it was introduced as an ornamental. I'm not at all surprised, and I don't know why we don't still grow it as a flowering garden plant. I think it looks a lot better than some of the things you can buy in the garden centre. I've seen some references that say you can eat it, but it doesn't seem to be a great delicacy. You can eat anything that isn't actually poisonous, but whether it's worth the effort is a different question.

Newspaper Mirror

My sister Stephanie and I have been on a real recycled mirror kick recently. Stephanie made this one from newspaper, thread, cardboard, and a piece of mirror tile. She rolled sheets of newspaper into tubes and flattened
them, then she stitched them onto a circle of corrugated cardboard. She cut out the hole in the centre and glued a piece of mirror behind. Then she backed the whole thing with a piece of thin card. Everything was recycled. I think it looks very effective, and it is hanging on my wall close to my computer.

A Holiday, A Holiday

We're off to the Cropredy music festival today for four days. We've gone every year since we were teenagers. We love the camping, the music, the food, the shopping, the atmosphere, we love meeting up with our friends, we even love the weather. I've written some blog posts and saved them to be published automatically whilst we're away. But I won't be able to reply to emails or comments until I get back. And even then I'm only back for a couple of days before I head straight off to my dad's house in Ireland.

Make Do and Mend Challenge

I recently had a generous offer from a skilled woodworker I know - he offered to repair any damaged guitars belonging to my young guitar students, without charge. The children usually buy a cheap instrument to learn on and I don't blame them. Most of them drop lessons after a few months and their parents don't want to invest in a quality instrument without being sure the child is committed. But these poor-quality instruments often end up breaking even without rough handling (although undoubtedly some of them do receive rough handling), and the cost of repairing them far outstrips the cost of replacing them.

I can do minor guitar surgery myself, and frequently do. But there were several instruments that were beyond my skills to repair. I took a variety of busted guitars to my friend's house, and he returned them all amazingly fast, and better than new. He wouldn't accept any payment, and said he enjoyed doing it. As well as a skilled craftsman he is also a keen musician - he has a beautiful tenor voice and I know he enjoys attending concerts as much as he enjoys performing music. So it gave him a buzz to help encourage a new generation of musicians. The children and their parents were delighted, too. And I was over the moon to see the new motivation my students had once their instruments were repaired - many of them had had their enthusiasm dented by having to use a damaged or borrowed instrument.

Repairing something is much better than replacing it, and not just for the obvious reasons of saving money and saving the planet's resources. When we repair things we start to see ourselves as competent and skilled. Consumerism takes that away from us. When we repair things we build up a relationship with the item we repair, it has a history for us and we respect it more than something we "just bought". When we have repaired a few things and we start to become good at it, we have a skill we can share with other people, whether for money or just for love and friendship. We can earn good will and respect from people by sharing our skill with them.

Repair something this month, and tell me how it makes you feel differently about your belongings and the world around you. Don't forget to vote in the poll in the right-hand-sidebar when you've done it.

Put a Plug in it Challenge Results

July's challenge was to put a plug in the bath whilst you shower to see how much less water you use in a shower compared to a bath. It only really applied to people like me who have a shower unit over their bathtub. So I was really surprised to see that it got a good response. 58 people took part in the poll and the results were as follows:

• I put the plug in the bath when I showered! 30 votes (51%)
• I don't want to put the plug in the bath when I shower! 7 votes (12%)
• I haven't got a shower over my bath! 21 votes (35%)

It's so easy to tell ourselves that it doesn't really make much of a difference what we do, whether we try to be "green" or not, whether we have a bath or a shower, so I liked this simple way of seeing directly just how much of a difference it does make. I'm not the only one; TopVeg commented:

I much prefer a bath - & have been telling myself for months that it really does not use much more water. So, I felt quite bad when I took up your challenge, put the plug in & had a shower. The water did not get above my ankles! A converted showerer..

Some commenters shared the inspiring ways they recycle their bath and shower water. Carol Hague keeps a bucket in the bathroom and uses bathwater to flush the loo. Linz uses a bucket to take it to the garden, and Wulf also uses it in the garden via a droughtplug. Yellow washes her whole family of four in a single bath (I think they take turns rather than all go in at the same time) and Amy likes to get in and out quickly. Rob isn't satisfied with taking just one green challenge, but he has done a whole bunch of them and wrote a roundup of the challenges he has taken in the last few months.

There will be a new challenge for August coming soon.

Bats

Bats are among my favourite regular garden visitors. Other people may listen for the first cuckoo of spring, or look out for the returning swallows, but for me the first bat flying past my bedroom window marks the beginning of the warm season, and their disappearance tells me winter is on the way.

I sleep with my bedroom curtains open. My bedroom backs on to open fields and is not overlooked at all so I don't worry about privacy. I love to look at the stars or simply the clouds, although the moon is never visible from my bedroom window which is a bit sad. I like to be woken by the sunrise and in particular I like to watch the bats. I wish I could show you a photograph but they're incredibly fast and almost impossible to photograph on the wing, and I don't know where they roost so I can't show you a photograph of them resting. The (rather fuzzy) photo I have included is of some bats we saw roosting in a souterrain in Craggaunowen in Ireland last year.

I don't know what species they are. There are 17 species of bat in Britain, which is about a quarter of all our mammal species. The most common is the common pipistrelle, which is also the smallest at less than 2 inches long. The rarest is the greater mouse-eared bat which was thought to be extinct in this country but was recently discovered living in the south of England. The largest British bat is the noctule, but even this is only about 3 inches long and weighs less than 1 1/2 oz (40g). British bats are diddy, although their wingspans make them look bigger than that.

Sadly, like much of our native wildlife, British bats are in trouble. A combination of loss of habitat and insecticides wiping out their prey has caused their numbers to decline sharply. Now all British bats are protected by law. It is illegal to harm them or disturb them, or muck about with their roosting sites.

I've recently discovered you can get bat detectors - electronic devices which can hear the bats' sonar sounds and can identify the bat from the frequency of its squeak. They're not cheap, but maybe my local bat conservation group or wildlife trust can lend me one to identify my bats. I'll be looking into that and I'll tell you how I get on.

If you want to find out more about British bats, visit the Bat Conservation Trust.

My Sister Visited

My sister Stephanie went back home to Sunderland on Friday. She had been with us for two weeks. Whilst she was here we went to three farmer's markets, a National Trust property, we had a picnic in Calderstones park Liverpool, we went to the Liverpool Tate art gallery with our five kids (that was fun), we restored and painted some beehives, we made recycled mirrors, we met up with our other sister Lindsey three times, we bottled some honey, we made waffles, cookies, cheese scones, we went to a barbecue at my neighbour's house, we went to an agricultural show, we played Scrabble and Risk and we watched the first season of The Sopranos on DVD, we did some sewing, some drawing, some painting, some pyrography, some decoupage. We had a great time.

I went to the farmer's market again today and all the stallholders asked me "Where is your sister? Where is her baby?" It's still fun going to the farmer's market without her, but it's not as much fun.

I'll be seeing her again in only ten days' time when all the family are gathering at my dad's house in the west of Ireland. I'm looking forward to that, but in the mean time the house seems unnaturally quiet.

Cartoon by the talented and uncannily sexy Marc Roberts of Throbgoblins. He's recently published a great cartoon about allotments, but it has too many panels to fit neatly on a Bean Sprouts blog entry.

Recycled Mirror

My very talented and arty sister Stephanie made me a beautiful mirror decorated with recycled drinks cans. She cut the cans into small squares then folded the corners of the squares to form smaller squares with safe edges. Each small square was nailed onto an old wooden picture frame with a tack in each corner.

The picture frame used to be white and contained a picture of Elmer the Patchwork Elephant. All our children are too old for Elmer now, so she removed the print and painted the frame with some blue and purple emulsion paint we found in the shed, before nailing the pieces of drinks can onto it.

Then Steph cut an old piece of mirror glass to fit the frame (we saved the mirror from an old wardrobe, it's been in the shed for years). And that was it, a beautiful new recycled mirror.

I was utterly delighted with it - until I found that she had cut up several drinks cans with my best dressmaking scissors.