Sunday morning chores

Posted by louisa on Sunday 11 September 2011 in chickens | 5 comments

(Blogging the little things to help inspire meh-me to doing both the little and big things!)

I’ve felt the same start of autumn/winter’s a-coming feeling that many of my favourite bloggers have touched on recently.

After the great red mite infestation of 2011, our chickens spent most of the summer sleeping outside – they clearly slept in the coop occasionally when it was raining or whatever but they got a taste for outdoor (presumably cooler) snoozing and since they were safe in the run, I got over my initial panic about it. I’ve been keeping an eye on the coop (for red mites and to make sure nothing else was afoot) but not had to clean it out as much. Now it’s getting darker/chillier/wetter though, they’ve moved back inside which means a return to Sunday morning poop-scooping for me. (With a good layer of wood shavings on the floor, it only needs cleaning out once a week at the moment but will need a mid-week freshener in the winter, when the nights are longer and they’re in the coop more than out.)

The chickens do like seeing what I’m doing to their house:

Except for Blue and the ever cheeky Lime who knew they could escape through the open nest box door to play out in the garden. Blue has been on a bit of a mission of late – whenever I leave open the chicken chest, she jumps onto the rim to look around. I think she knows the motherlode – the open 20kg bag of treat seed – is in there but can’t work out how to get down into it.

(Btw, the chicken chest – an old metal chest, about 3ft high by 3ft wide and about 1.5ft deep, has been one of my best purchases for the garden. It was £10 secondhand on eBay, picked up from just the other side of Bradford and it holds our bale of wood shavings, our nest box straw, the treat seed and sometimes a spare bag of layers pellets – all water-tight and pest-free. It looks rusty – one day I’ll paint it – but is very solid. The metal also gets pleasantly warm (but not hot) in the sun so the cats like sunbathing on the top of it. Win for everyone.)

Last winter, after my poop-scooping, my next job was always to fill up the kindling baskets in the living room & office so I did that today as well – we’ve used the stoves in both rooms over the last few weeks and used up the last dregs of last year’s supplies.

I also started to replenish the dustbin of kindling-size bits in the woodstore (it’s now a third full) so we’ve got some surplus if needed – if it’s too cold to work out there or if future Louisa can’t be bothered. I would have cut some logs as well if there hadn’t been an old sauna bench on the sawhorse (a lame excuse I know but an original one, yes?).

As chore-like as poop-scooping and kindling cutting are, I do quite enjoy them – fresh air, fun chickens and axes, what’s not to like? ;)

Last of the potatoes

Posted by louisa on Saturday 10 September 2011 in growing | 6 comments

(Like Last of the Mohicans, except starchier.)

After expressing my meh-ness the other day, I actually had a productive few hours in the garden today. It’s John’s fault – after carrying down some chicken food for me, he stayed in the garden tidying some stuff at the bottom and I felt kinda guilted into staying out there too. I did a little weeding but then prioritised stuff that needed harvesting, namely the titular potatoes, some tomatoes & a gorgeous courgette. Some of said potatoes:

As I said a few weeks ago on Twitter, I don’t think I’ll grow potatoes next year. I’m restricted to growing them in containers at the moment and while it does have some advantages (diseases are contained and no digging!), it has plenty of disadvantages too. Most importantly, they use up a lot of soil and I don’t have access to a lot of soil at the moment, so to grow them means there is less soil/compost to go around everything else (or at least I have to buy it in – and it’s too expensive to buy in to use on potatoes). Growing them in containers also means they need more watering than they do in the ground, which isn’t terrible, just another job to do. Being in containers does, well, contain them a bit too: they don’t really get to stretch out to full capacity so the harvest isn’t as bountiful, either in number or size, as it would be in the ground. And of course, there is the diseased Satan gonad issue.

But the most important thing really is that we don’t eat a lot of potatoes – we cook with them no more than once a week, probably closer to once a fortnight. This last week we’ve not been eating wheat so our usual pasta/noodle/bread staples have been out but still, we’ve not actually eaten any potatoes (I was supposed to have jacket potato on Wednesday but had leftover risotto instead). If we were aiming to be completely self-sufficient then I suspect we’d eat more as it is easier to grow them than cereals but right now, we don’t need a whole lot of them and it seems a risk to grow a lot to use so gradually when we can buy the few we do want locally and/or organically ones for a frugal-friendly price. I’d rather use my limited soil and motivation/energy elsewhere.

Having said that, if we did have bed space for them, I’d probably be tempted to give them another go, or in a few years when I have more than enough homegrown compost to spare, I might try containers again. For future Louisa’s information, the Orla maincrop did well this year and have resulted in some good spuds, and the Charlotte-esque basic seed potatoes I got for next-to-nothing at Home Bargain also turned out well.

As for the other harvested stuff today: I collected just over a kilogram of tomatoes, mostly cherry tomatoes but a few big Romas too, for ripening inside since their home plant were looking worse for wear. Some are already orange-y but most are green; if they don’t seem to be getting with the ripening programme in a couple of days, I’ll turn them into Aurora’s chutney. There is probably about the same again out there and in dribs & drabs, we’ve (mostly John) has probably eaten about that so far. Three kilograms/six-and-a-half pounds isn’t a huge haul considering how much space they took up in my small greenhouse – some plants have been very productive but others not at all. John has *loved* the sweet cherry ones though, so I’ll definitely grow them again.

The courgette I picked was our first in our second wave of the squashes: we’ve had a few almost courgette-free weeks because I’ve been feeling meh so not picked the nutrient-hogging now-marrows from the plants, but there are lots of baby courgettes again now. The taste of summer still lingering on.

Have you been harvesting anything this weekend?

How do you stay motivated?

Posted by louisa on Thursday 8 September 2011 in meta | 10 comments

Apologies for the lack of posts this week and I guess the nature of many of the posts over the last few weeks/couple of months: I’m in a bit of a slump.

It’s a very precise slump though – I’m as generally happy as I’ve been in a long time/ever but feeling a bit meh about most of my work stuff and most practical things. I think it started in the garden in the early summer but has spread to just about everything else in the simple living milieu now and I’m finding it hard to get enthused about doing, or rather getting started doing just about anything. (It’s definitely not helped in areas like the garden, where the job to be tackled gets more difficult with each day I procrastinate, so makes me procrastinate about starting it even more.) Siiigh.

I’ve still been doing some stuff: looking after the chickens, cooking (which is why there have been a few new recipes recently) and bits of crafting, albeit pointless-just-pretty sewing projects (don’t get me wrong, they’re very enjoyable and I enjoy the outcome a lot but they’re not clothes or anything practical) but just about everything else … meh. I’m usually more about the journey than the destination but I can’t get motivated enough to even start the journey at the moment, and the reward of the destination doesn’t seem to be enough either.

I could go into a long, self-indulgent list of reasons what might be causing it but I think I’d prefer to focus on positive ways out of it instead…

So if you hit a motivation slump, what do you do to kick yourself out of it? Do you do things daily to keep motivated? Do you use lists to stop being overwhelmed by things? Do you focus on one area at a time, to hell with the rest – or do you do a bit of everything? Do you have any tricks for, well, tricking yourself into getting started?

Video games can keep my attention for a ridiculous amount of time: any other gamers thought of ways to “game-ify” simple living tasks to keep themselves at it?

Any suggestions would be very gratefully received!

Wheat-free week: our meal plan

Posted by louisa on Monday 5 September 2011 in weekly meal plans | 3 comments

I stopped publishing our meal plans a couple of months ago because I didn’t know how much value they had to other people – but I thought this one may be more useful. (I have been writing the meal plans most weeks and sharing them with John on Google Docs, and boy have we felt it in the weeks when we didn’t have a plan – we’re definitely plan converts.)

So this week we’re having a wheat-free week. As far as we know, neither of us has any health problems caused or exaggerated by wheat but we eat a lot of bread & pasta, just because they’re easy fallbacks. We’re hoping a wheat-free week will encourage us to find different things to eat for lunch and for quick dinners. I also eat wheat-based (shop-bought) cereal most days for breakfast and we eat a lot of wheaty biscuits/cakes so I’ll have to find an alternative for them too.

John’s not a big fan of potatoes really so there is a lot of rice (and our normal repetition due to leftovers). We’ll probably have another wheat-free week in a couple of months – if you’ve got any recipe suggestions, do let me know :)

Monday breakfast – eggs or porridge
Monday lunch – tomato & lentil soup
Monday dinner – chicken, courgette & pepper risotto, on a bed of spinach/with salad
Monday dessert – chocolate mousse

Tuesday breakfast – eggs or porridge
Tuesday lunch – tomato & lentil soup leftovers
Tuesday dinner – chickpea & paneer with rice
Tuesday dessert – kheer

Wednesday breakfast – eggs or porridge
Wednesday lunch – chickpea & paneer leftovers, with rice
Wednesday dinner – (John might be having a movie night with friends, which may include wheaty pizza but nevermind; if not/for me) Jacket potato with tuna & cheese
Wednesday dessert – kheer

Thursday breakfast – eggs or porridge
Thursday lunch – tomato & bean soup
Thursday dinner – keema curry with rice

Friday breakfast – eggs or porridge
Friday lunch – egg salad
Friday dinner – keema curry leftovers, with rice

Saturday brunch – bacon & eggs, with hash browns
Saturday dinner – steak with vegetables
Saturday dessert – flourless chocolate cake

Sunday brunch – bacon & eggs, with hash browns
Sunday dinner – Spanish omelette (with sweet potato & peppers)
Sunday dessert – flourless chocolate cake

August 2011 – end of month review

Posted by louisa on Thursday 1 September 2011 in goals, less than 12 clothes challenge | 8 comments

Cor, another month that seems to have taken its sweet time to come to a close – again, not dragged but the beginning of the month feels very long way ago now.

(Lemon curd, with cinnamon, which I made one day to accompany a fig-and-fennel soda bread test loaf.)

Goals in 2011 progress

We tried to go sea-fishing but failed. We haven’t had a lot of food from the garden – a few courgettes/marrows, tomatoes, potatoes but nothing major-major. I’ve been sewing quite a bit but for decorative rather than practical purposes. I haven’t made anything with wood. I have baked quite a bit – actually done quite a bit of experimental baking & cooking, trying out new ideas for recipes – but not made cheese. Basically, I’ve got a lot of goals still to accomplish and an increasingly short amount of time to do them in!

On the plus side though, I did slightly better with my month’s mini-goals: we sorted out the bills stuff (2), I researched the ISA options and decided it wasn’t worth switching until next year (1), cleared out the cupboards (4+5), nearly stuck to my budget (3 – see below), would have done 6 if there wasn’t a damp problem in need of investigation, and made a purse (8). Not great but better.

Buy less than 12 items of clothing in 2011

After buying two things in July, I bought another thing – a light “so very me” cardigan – at the beginning of August. My old cotton cardigan has seen better days so this is sort of a replacement and will be useful in the next few months over t-shirts/vest tops.

One of my favourite pairs of jeans has developed an unfortunate (and very difficult to fix) hole in the bum so I’m on the look out for a replacement pair but not seen any yet.

Anyway, no other temptations or anything else from the exempt list so I’m just up to three items so far in 2011.

Growing & Chickens

As I said above, the garden has not had a hugely productive month – which is a bit of a shame. I’ve run out of preening steam too so it looks a mess as well. Sigh. September should bring lots more tomatoes (we’ve got lots of green ones at the moment) and more courgettes, and hopefully our first achocha. Two out of four of our achocha plants have pretty well developed fruit on them and finally, the other two — which have grown up together against a wall and are MASSIVE (15ft tall, 8ft across) — have finally started fruiting too. That might result in a lot of fruit!

The chickens have had a good month – no broodiness and Ginger definitely started laying again (she went broody in the middle of June, came out of it finally about a month later but I couldn’t be sure that she was laying again until mid-August when we finally got six eggs in one day). With six eggs on some occasions, we had a grand total of 157 eggs, an average of just over 5 a day.

Spending

I had given myself a budget of £100 for my SAVE-as-much-as-you-SPEND (corrected!) categories this month and if I hadn’t gone completely craft supply crazy, I’d have made it. I spent a whopping £55.75 on craft stuff this month: mostly embroidery threads and cross-stitch fabric but also £17.20 on yarn from Bobbins in Whitby. The yarn was a complete impulse buy – I saw it, wanted it, had a vague project in mind but not great plans to use it ASAP (since I can’t knit/crochet in the summer) – and that blew my budget, pushing me over to spend £110.66 in total. *shakes fist* Yarn aside, I do know that all the embroidery stuff will keep me quiet for a long time so while it was a lot of money, I probably won’t need to buy anything more for ages.

Aside from crafts, restaurant/takeout food wasn’t too bad this month (£46.42) but I could easily have saved about a tenner of that by taking sandwiches, snacks & drinks with me when I was teaching during the day, rather than using the Coop. Naughty. It did also include expensive fish’n’chips, donuts and other seaside treats when we were in Whitby.

Transport costs were quite low for the month (£30.70), especially since £16.70 of that was last night alone (a return bus ticket then a taxi fare when the meeting overran and I missed the last bus, grr). I didn’t buy any books – used the library a few times instead. Entertainment was a newspaper one Saturday (and all the crafts, of course!). The silly thing was my cute vase. Household stuff included the wool blanket, some photo frames, a bathmat, and an oven thermometer – wild ;)

I spent £175.74 in total, after bills and food shopping – my lowest month since I started tracking spending (the previously lowest had been June, at £188.91). Bit disappointed that I “wasted” some of it on impulse yarn and actually wasted some of it on unnecessary lunches, but I’m not beating myself up about it too much.

How was your August?