Foraging fortnight

Autumn is a great time for foraging.  I’ve been picking apples, blackberries, pears and plums from my garden and hedgerows.  I’m planning to go blackberrying again and I’m hoping to add in some elderberries too.

We are also lucky to have a vegetable patch which is producing carrots, spring onions, beetroot, courgettes, celery, beans, and spinach at the moment. But it isn’t just the outdoor foraging that I want to invite you to think about. Now is a really great time to go foraging in your fridge and freezer. What better time to cut down on spending than after your summer holiday and before you start thinking about Christmas. Read more...

10 top tips for reducing food waste

I’m often asked for my top 10 tips on reducing food waste, so here you have them.

1. The big number one tip has to be…  Buy less food! Try to think of each shopping expedition as one where you will buy the minimum amount of food to get by rather than one where you are going to fill your trolley and pack your fridge full to bursting.  It is a small change in mindset that makes a huge difference. 

Read more...

Day Three of Zero Waste Week

Sum total of waste on day three:

458g of manky cheese from the fridge clear out
94g of tea bags.

Once a cheese.

Yesterday's meal of Onion (and cheese soup) with pesto croutons went down well.  Not a scrap left (probably for fear of having it served up for breakfast).  But I did have to confess to the addition of the bits of ageing cheese, mainly because I didn't cut it up small enough!

So, lesson learnt.  Add the ageing cheese cut up into small bits at the earlier stage before you whizz it.  Then maybe they'll never know.

The family were dubious about the cheese, but they all went back for second helpings of soup.  I got a bit of unmelted cheese rind donated to my bowl though.  The pesto croutons will have to be repeated.  They were excellent.

Onto day three...

My bananas have long been in solitary confinement away from the rest of the fruit.  And I can't remember the last time I threw away a black banana.  Mine go into Banana Bread - I usually use the recipe from Nigella Lawson's 'How to be a Domestic Goddess' but I'm never particularly careful about the actual ingredients (the fruit and nuts part).  I just throw in what needs using up usually and it is always delicious.

So onto the rest of the day three challenge...

1. Food Hygiene

I cleaned out the bits of the fridge that I didn't do yesterday as I extracted the lurkers, and I continued the use it up, by making pasta and turning a jar of tomato salsa into the sauce.  I added some blue cheese into mine too.  I think blue cheese in pasta sauce is excellent but Senior Daughter pointed out that really you'd have to like blue cheese!


This evening we are going out for dinner, but I have plans bubbling away to use up another jar of salsa and the tomato puree tomorrow in a butternut squash and Philadelphia cheese lasagne.

What to do with the rest... any ideas?

The remaining lurkers have until the end of the week!

2. The White Board

I have a black board I used to use to plan meals on, but I stopped using it when Junior Daughter and/or Friends decided to plan the week's meals for me.

It read something like this

Monday - nothing

Tuesday - leftovers

Wednesday - nothing

Thursday - crisp sandwiches

Friday - out

Saturday - nothing

Sunday - roast

There it remained as the years passed by until one day it was mysteriously wiped clean.

Maybe it's time to start using it again, but it's main purpose would have to be to write down who's in and who's out each evening as that's what causes us the biggest headache for meal planning.

However, what today's email really inspired me to do was to use the magnetic 'Shopping List' that's stuck on the front of the fridge to write down each time I use up the last of a jar of sauce.  If it's not on the list it doesn't get bought.  That way I might not end up with two jars of open salsa, two jars of mustard, two jars of mint sauce etc.

Will it work, I wonder?

3. Turn it on its head.

Well, I have now made sure most of my jars are stowed in the place designed for them in the door.  That frees up the top shelf, which has become my 'Use it Up' shelf.  The next shelf down is for things that need to be used up this month, and then further down are the long life things such as chorizo and the jars that are too big for the door, e.g pickle and mayo.

The veg, fruit and salad are still at the bottom, but only while they have lots of life in them.  I'll move them to the top shelf as they need using up.

I feel cleansed and organised, and I haven't bought a single food item this week!

Bon appétit, my fellow zero heroes! 

Zero Waste Week

Did you know that this week is national Zero Waste Week.  The zero waste week campaign is now in its sixth year and each year tackles a different theme .  This year's campaign tackles the problem of food waste and it starts today.

You can sign up to get a daily email about how to reduce your food waste.  There are some good tips in there (I know because I edited the emails!).  You sign up on this website: http://www.zerowasteweek.co.uk.  Every day, you'll get an email with some tips on how to reduce food waste and there's a challenge you can take part in too.

I've signed up even though I already know what's in the emails.  As an editor you have to keep your backside firmly glued to the chair and concentrate on how the words work together, and whether they get the message across as efficiently as they can. Every time I sat down to edit one of the daily emails I was tempted to go running to my fridge to see what I had that needed using up.  That's why I've signed up.

Given that food prices have rocketed in recent years, it seems a great thing to focus on when you want to reduce your waste.  Because let's face it, if you are throwing away food that could have been eaten, that's pretty much like throwing away money.  And, that's pretty much always in short supply!

The savings from looking at how you deal with food waste are two-fold.

Most people end up throwing away a quarter of the food they buy. So, firstly, there's the simple fact that if you make the most of the food you buy and don't throw it away, you can cut your food budget by a quarter.  If you spend £60 a week on food then you could be saving £15 of that every week by making sure you use all the food you buy.

Secondly, the more food you waste, the more it costs your local council to deal with it.  And that cost is part of what YOU have to pay for in your council tax!

Many local councils now provide households with a kitchen caddy and a food waste bin. If you have one and don't use it read on...

When I met with the head of waste management at my local council he explained the huge financial advantage of householders using their food caddies rather than their landfill bins.  For every tonne of food waste diverted from landfill to be taken to our local anaerobic digestion plant gives a saving of around £50.  This is because sending waste to landfill incurs a tax, called Landfill Tax.  This is currently set at £72 a tonne and is set to rise to £80 a tonne in April 2104.  In addition to the landfill tax, the council has to pay a gate fee of around £21.  So, the average cost of sending a tonne of waste to landfill in the UK is currently £93*.  The cost of sending food waste to anaerobic digestion is on average £41.  Did you know that on average one household generates around a third of a tonne of food waste every year.  So that's only three households that share that cost and YES, of course, it goes straight onto your council tax bill!

It would be nice, wouldn't it, if those who still send food waste to landfill had to pay more in council tax than those of us who avoid food waste and compost the unavoidable bits, or dispose of them in their food waste bin.  That doesn't happen anywhere in the UK yet, as far as I'm aware, but maybe it will come!

 We can all do our bit to reduce our council tax bill:

• by reducing the amount of food we waste,
• by disposing of the unavoidable food waste in a compost bin or the local council's food waste bin,
• by encouraging friends, family and neighbours to do the same!

So, if you haven't already signed up to Zero Waste Week, why not give it a go.  And don't forget to talk about what you learn, the things you try out and the money you save!

I plan to photograph and weigh my food waste caddy every day.  I hope it won't look too grim so I can post it on here!

Monday lunchtime, the food waste caddy contains
 two banana skins and three tea bags.

My fridge is rammed full of food, so it will be a challenge this week.  But we'll see.  Bring on the Zero Waste Week challenge!

*Source: http://www.wrap.org.uk/content/wrap-annual-gate-fees-report

Swishing

New Year's Eve 2012 - As I sipped my champagne cocktail, awaiting the midnight fireworks, wearing my new favourite dress bought for me, as a birthday present, by my two lovely daughters,  I wondered what my New Year's Resolution would be.

All the usual things came to mind - you know the ones... eat less, exercise more, reduce the alcohol intake!

But I had another idea, inspired by two tips sent in for my book which I thought would be fitting with my mission to get the waste reduction message across.

I decided that I would buy no new clothes (nor shoes, nor any other accessories) for a whole year. I outlined my plan in a blog post in February - in brief, I would buy only second-hand, repurposed or up-cycled items in an attempt to reduce my carbon footprint and save money too.

Fast forward to May 2013: I decided that I would try to wear only second-hand, repurposed or up-cycled items when I piloted my Dustbin Diet workshops and gave talks in schools, and so I took a look at my wardrobe, had a good mooch around my local charity shops and put together a few outfits to fulfil that goal.

Photo: My Eco Activities Day at the wonderful Octavia's Bookshop in Cirencester,
 wearing purchases from my local Oxfam shop accessorised with upcycled necklace by Laura Hounam.

I also came across this fantastic website called swishing.co.uk which will be a great help when I get my workshops in full swing later this year.  With Swishing.co.uk you get to trade in clothes and accessories you don't wear for virtual money credits which you can use to buy clothes from the website that you will wear.

Here's how it works:

Click on the picture to open it fully 

I spoke to the team at Swishing.co.uk and they have set up a special offer code of rosie306 which will get you £1 of virtual swishing money to start you off. They will also give £1 of virtual money to my Dustbin Diet project for each person who registers with the rosie306 code by 30th June this year.  This will be a great help towards being able to encourage some of the young people to think about a more environmentally friendly approach to fashion, so I will be very grateful for your support if you sign up.

I'm now in my 5th swishing month and I've probably bought more clothes than I do normally, but I have certainly reduced my overall spend. In these tough economic times, I'm sure lots of us are trying to do just that.  There couldn't be a better time to take up some new green living money-saving resolutions, don't you think?  

The Post Christmas Clean-up

Happy New Year!

Here's my post Christmas tidy-up schedule.

Eat any leftover Christmas pudding for breakfast.
(That's my favourite bit of tidying up)

Collect up all the empty gift bags to use next year. This year I didn't have to buy a single gift bag but I have got pretty good at rounding up any abandoned bags left by my Christmas guests. Given that gift bags can be anything from about 80p to £2.50 and that I'm no good at wrapping up I think I must have saved about £20 by re-using gift bags and most of them seem to have found their way back to me ready for next year.

Extract all the ribbons and bows from the Christmas present unwrapping. So you don't need to buy any for next Christmas. More money saving.

Cut up Christmas cards to make labels for next year.
 But don't do what I did and lose them. This year I've made sure to keep them next to my stock of gift bags so I'll know where to find them.

Recycle your Christmas Tree.
For a few years I had a pot-grown Christmas Tree which was great but it didn't survive more than about five years of neglect. Since then I've not been organised enough to find a pot-grown tree at a reasonable price. But most local councils offer a shredding service for Christmas Trees now. We used to have to take our tree to one of several local car parks for shredding. That was always a messy business that I felt a lot of people wouldn't bother with so it is great that many local councils now pick up Christmas Trees along with the normal waste and recycling collections this week or next week. Check out your local council's website for details.

Just in Time!

Year six!

I confess to a smug smile on my face yesterday morning when I looked out of the window and saw we had our first real frost. Why? Because, yes... my Dad and I dug up (Dad) and potted (me!) all our Geraniums and put them in the conservatory for the winter.  I think this is now about year 6 from the same half dozen Geraniums I was bought as a present - and now they total twenty seven plants and 14 cuttings (well the bits that fall off as we transplant them).

Every year we bring them in in the Autumn - usually by October half term rather than nearing the end of November, but they looked  lovely in full bloom still and so we just kept our eye on the frost forecasts. But last weekend we decided we could hold out no longer and yesterday morning it looked as though it was a wise choice.

We use old plant pots and a bit of soil dug up from the garden combined with the fabulously rich compost made in my wormery (another Christmas present!) so it costs us nothing.  Better than that though, Geraniums thrive whether the weather is wet or dry through the summer - in fact, they seem to thrive on neglect which can only be a good thing in my garden. And, last but not least of their characteristics is that they seem to be totally rabbit-proof.

My wormery

See also: http://rosiesecoblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/use-for-broken-crockery.html

Gardening - It is all so much effort!

Or is it?

Well it does require some effort, most definitely, but I can't help thinking that sometimes we don't do ourselves any favours by the way we garden.

I have long associated the growing of tomatoes with the 'Growbag' technique.  Stick a couple of grow bags on your patio and plant them up with a couple of tomato plants in each and low and behold you will have tomatoes in abundant supply all through the summer. BUT probably only if you remember to water them every evening. Ughhh! Can you be bothered with that?

The thing we all know about Growbags is they dry out very quickly. So why do we insist on planting our tomatoes in them?

This year we decided to do things a bit differently.  Instead of using grow bags we planted our tomato plants straight into the ground along a post and rail fence.  If I remember rightly they got a couple of cans of water over them when they were first planted and I pulled up the weeds from round them early on but since then they've been entirely left to fend for themselves.  If they want water then they have to send out their roots to look for water. If they want to survive among the weeds then they have to be strong and be the fittest.

It seems to be working!

You want water? Find your own!

So despite the money saving (no grow bags to buy or water to pay for) and the huge saving on time and effort we are still being rewarded with lots of tomatoes and they taste wonderful.

Free Fuel

Last Christmas I was given a briquette maker - one of those metal contraptions you use to turn waste paper into 'logs' to burn on the fire.

I was mad keen to give it a go but a quick read of the instructions and a bit of common sense told me it was not a job for January. The main thing about making waste paper briquettes is that the paper needs to be soaked before you make them and then they need to be able to dry out. So... a job for the summer, it seemed.

But having sensibly put my briquette maker away until the weather was right, you may have guessed it, I never once thought about making myself some winter fuel this summer. However, on a gloriously sunny day in mid September I remembered my plan and went to survey the pile of newspapers that I'd been donated by my grandmother. It was a big pile. Better late than never, I thought, and set to work making my briquettes. By this time I had of course lost the instructions so a quick search on Google led me to this video from http://www.downthelane.net.  What was bothering me slightly was that the newspapers I was shredding up could easily have been recycled so other than the benefit of hopefully gaining a little bit of free heat was I really being environmentally friendly turning newspapers into fuel?  As we have two wood-burners and a Rayburn we get through a lot of wood in a year, most of which we manage ourselves from a small woodland.  Chopping wood, where ever it comes from always generates wood chippings and there is lots of waste from the smaller brushwood, and other than a useful mulch for flower beds and around our new trees it pretty much seems like a waste product, so I decided to add a bit to my paper mix to see what happened.

Having set my mixture to soak for a few days I went to inspect and it seemed to be a suitably gooey mess. So I spent a pleasant afternoon in the sunshine making 36 paper and wood-chip briquettes. Are they going to dry I wondered?

I left the soggy creations on a palette in an open barn hoping that if the sunshine didn't last at least the wind might dry them out. Little did I know our Indian Summer would continue.  This morning I went to inspect my briquettes and they were nicely dried out. Here they are stocked in my shed ready for use.  I'll let you know how they burn!

TIP: I think one of these briquette makers makes a great present, but really, why buy one? - just borrow. Anyone who has one will only be using it for a few days a year!

Wind Power for Free?

I've been looking into ways of generating my own energy.  The depressing thing about this is that it costs such a lot of money.

Every now and then I research the latest on micro-generation, and love the idea of wind power.  I live in a windy spot on top of a hill - the only hill for several miles around.  So wind power would seem to make sense.  But, I know it is going to take me a long time to find the necessary information, save up the necessary money and work out whether the new 'feed-in tariff' will make this a worthwhile investment.

However, we can all be using wind power at no cost to all. How?

Just by hanging out our washing.  Yes, it is October, yes it is freezing cold but I hung out some sheets and pillow cases and tea towels and dishcloths about an hour ago and they are nearly dry now.

It is not going to save mega-bucks,  and by the way, you can find out how much it does save here but to me the best saving of all is that line dried clothes need far less ironing and that makes it even better.

One Man's Junk....

.... is another man's treasure.

Well my local community shop certainly proves that to be true. Each year they are able to give away in excess of £10,ooo to local charities and organisations.

When I decorated my children's bedrooms several years ago, one wanted a sea theme and the other wanted a jungle theme. The community shop was just the place to make these themes come alive. I found cushions, soft toys, stick-on insects, a fish mobile, and all sorts.

My children have grown up, and the rooms have been decorated, and now look tastefully teenage. So, today, I'm taking all these things back there to the community shop, in the hope that another child will be able to have their dream jungle theme, or seascape all for the sake of a few pounds which might end up funding their Guide Camp or the next bit of park that needs a revamp.

Making money from green living

I came across this great post today on saving and even making money from green living.

There are many ways that you can save money, just by spending a little, but this blog is all about the small things that cost nothing but collectively could make a big difference. On BBC Radio 5 in the UK today, this very thing was being discussed and it was suggested that governments are likely to put more effort into the bigger picture when they can see how people are making an effort with the small stuff.

Eco Valentines

The Energy Saving Trust have some great ideas for going green this Valentine's Day. And once again, these ideas show that going green is often a way to beat the Credit Crunch.

Recession Buster

In an attempt to reduce the number of miles we travel taxiing our children to and from their afterschool activities we decided to eat out in the hour and a half we had between dropping off one child and picking up another. So we picked a nearby hotel / restaurant which we knew did good, reasonably priced food.

When we checked with the landlord if he was serving food the reply was 'sort of'. He went on to explain that he really wasn't busy enough on a Monday and Tuesday evening to employ a chef so there was just him on his own to do everything. So he had set up a new initiative. On Monday and Tuesday nights he was serving what he called a "builders' supper" for the overnight guests. His guests would 'get fed' but they would 'get what they were given' so on the Monday night he had served cold beef, cold pork, bubble and squeak and salad to use up the meat and veg left over from Sunday's carvery. Last night's offering was spaghetti bolognaise served with garlic bread and it was going to be ready in fifteen minutes. Perfect! The upside for his guests was that it was just £5 a head. "And that," he said. "... is my recession buster."

Out came two large bowls – one of spaghetti, one of bolognaise - a smaller bowl with freshly grated parmesan and a bread basket piled high with garlic bread. The plates were in a pile by the side and everyone helped themselves to what they wanted and went back for more when they wanted. Delicious!

With the price of fuel these days and the hike in food prices I thought we probably couldn't have driven home and back and cooked spaghetti bolognaise for much less than £10. With the spotlight we've had earlier in the year on the 4 million tonnes of food wasted in the UK every year initiatives like these should be praised. Next week I will probably be eating pasta salad served out of an old ice-cream tub in the car reading my book, but I think before long I'll be back for a builder's supper.

Read more about food waste.

Bag that news spot

From today Sainsbury's are removing their free plastic bags from the checkouts in the hope of encouraging bag re-use. Read more

Back in February this year Marks and Spencer introduced a 5p charge for plastic bags for their food shoppers.

Most supermarkets offer the 'Bag for Life' plastic bags which generally cost 10p the first time you buy one but can then be replaced for free when they wear-out.

I guess the problem is the spur of the moment purchases when you are out and about and just think of something. I always carry a couple of the old style carrier bags (because they fold up so small) and a 'bag for life' in my handbag. Each time I unpack the bag it goes straight back in my handbag. It has probably taken me about six months to get properly in the habit of doing this but I feel all these little changes in habit add up.

Supermarkets are now also giving customers loyalty card points for bag re-use. It pays to remember your bags.

101 ways to reduce your carbon footprint for free

As I was being 'dissed' yet again for my recycling habits, I came up with the idea of putting together a list of 101 ways to reduce your carbon footprint for free. Free? Yes, absolutely free.

I thought I'd have no trouble coming up with hundreds of little things that we could all do that would be more environmentally friendly but didn't cost a penny. Surely it would be a doddle!

Well, it wasn't.

The ridiculous thing about « going green » is that it so often costs more than not being green. It costs more in terms of time and effort, and all too often, it costs more in terms of hard cash.

There may well be lots of things with long-term savings, but realistically, for many of us on this planet cash-flow comes first. It is the initial spend that we think about, rather than the long-term cost saving.

This, to me, is an important issue governments face that they could do something about but don't. Would it really be that hard to structure all taxation, vat and so on, to always favour the green option?

 

That said, the list is growing …..