2010 – A Really Good Year

Posted by louisa on Friday 31 December 2010 in meta | 2 comments

Everyone else is doing end-of-year round-ups and it’s inspired me to do one too. Feel free to skip if you don’t like introspection ;)

While my life as a whole has been up and down (mostly up but some deep downs), 2010 has been a fantastic year from a simple/DIY living point of view.

Growing

Our first growing season in our new house, this year was one of experimentation. We had fresh produce from the garden from March through to October – and have a cupboard full of preserved goodies as well as potatoes in store. I’ve written about our growing successes and failures before – our overall output was disappointing but my, my, I learned so much. I’m pretty jazzed by the potential of what we can achieve now we know more about the conditions etc.

Chickens

Our first four chickens arrived in June and we got another four (which soon depleted to three) in November. They’ve been ace!

They’re a lot of fun – such personalities! – and the egg output has been awesome. From the day they arrived in June until the middle of December, the first four provided about 3.6 eggs a day (ie, most days one each but sometimes just three between the four of them) – they’re still laying now just less than that (especially as one has entered an early moult). The new girls have yet to start laying but hopefully they’ll start soon – and that’ll provide cover for when the rest of the originals going into moult.

Aside from the extra winter workload, I’ve been stunned by how little work they are – food & water are topped up once a day (they always have more than enough), quick visual inspection of the coop every day-ish (remove any giant piles of poo/top up straw & shavings as appropriate) and a full clean out once a week. It’s an hour a week in total, max. I do typically spend more time with them though – because as I said, they’re so much fun. Their arrival has been one of the highlights of 2010 for me.

Cooking

Why I don’t celebrate Christmas

Posted by louisa on Friday 24 December 2010 in meta | 12 comments

I don’t celebrate Christmas. I don’t buy presents, give cards, eat turkey or see family. For the last few years, I’ve treated it like a normal work day, this year will be a normal Saturday. I think we’ll have pizza for tea and watch a film.

Not a special day for me

I was talking to some (teenage) kids at class about it a few weeks ago and they exclaimed “but it’s Christmas!”, as if it had some natural inherent specialness. I explained that I’m not a Christian and so I feel about Christmas how they might feel about, say, Eid or Hanukkah. It’s something that other people, with other beliefs, celebrate but I don’t.

Christmas was never been a really big deal in my (small) family – apart from a few times when I was very little, it was just the four of us and presents aside, it wasn’t that different from a normal Sunday (we didn’t even have turkey because one third of the family’s meat eaters – my brother – didn’t like it). As I grew into my teens, its specialness ebbed away even further – my dad had to drag us out of bed for lunch – and so when I left home for uni and beyond, I didn’t feel the need to create a big production of my own. For a couple of years, we (me, the ex and a friend) had an unusual-for-us roast dinner but did little else to celebrate (and it was lamb not turkey, and involved a whole lot of chilli). But pretty much since then … nothing.

Such pressure – and such waste

Probably because it’s never really meant that much to me, it was easy for me to leave it behind and now that I’m completely out of it, I find it hard to comprehend how much pressure some people put themselves under in the name of the season – not everyone, not by any means, but a lot of people. The pressure of finding the perfect present or affording an ever growing pile of more expensive presents, the pressure of cooking the perfect meal, the pressure of finding the perfect tree, the pressure of everyone getting along, the overall ongoing pressure to make this year better than it was last year and to make sure everyone has a good time… I’ve had a good number of people (adults rather than kids) tell me that they don’t enjoy Christmas at all, but it’s just something they feel they “have” to do, especially if they have kids. It riles me when people do things because they feel they “should” rather than actively want to do it.

And it’s not just that – the greenie/anti-consumerist in me is obviously outraged at the excess and waste too – the presents-for-presents-sake, the packaging, the food… Basically, it pushes a lot of my buttons.

Every day is special

I think some people think I’m just a Scrooge-ish, contrary bah-humbug type but I’m really not. I just don’t see why 25th Dec is any more worthy of celebration than 19th February or a random Thursday. I see friends & family when I want, we have nice meals when we want and I give presents to people when I see something I think that person would really like or need, rather than keeping it until the end of the year. I would rather enjoy the whole year than saving up all my festive juices for just a couple of days.

I’m not saying that people shouldn’t celebrate Christmas, not in the slightest. I’ll admit that I can see why the old celebration was revived in the 19th century as it gave people something special to look forward to in the middle of winter and I could probably do with more events to look forward to in my calendar – but for me, right now, it’s not worth all the stress and waste.

Rhonda on Down to Earth recently talked about how her Christmases have evolved over the years with the coming and growing of children, and soon grandchildren. Perhaps we’ll be more interested when we start a (non-animal) family in a few years – but coming from a place of rejecting it all, I suspect we’ll pick and choose what bits we do more than most.

If you don’t also celebrate Christmas, I’d love to hear why.

Christmas, according to Agnes Jekyll

Posted by louisa on Thursday 23 December 2010 in meta | 0 comments

(1922! Imagine what she’d think of Christmas in the 21st century!)

Why are you frugal? A quick poll

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 1 December 2010 in frugal, meta | 7 comments

I follow a lot of frugal, green, simple living and growing blogs – some of my favourites are listed in the sidebar but I read many, many more. Amongst all the great advice and ideas, I’ve noticed that just about everyone has their own reason for being frugal or growing their own – and that’s made me wonder what drives me/us too. What drives you?

I’ve listed what I think are a dozen reasonably common reasons for frugality here – but I’m sure there are many, many more reasons for it — and for many people, it won’t be just one thing, it’ll be a combination of a few – so feel free to tick as many as applicable.

For me, it’s a certainly a combination of more than a few! I’ve always looked after the pennies and I think I’d still look for offers/bargains even if I had a million pounds, I think it’s an unchangeable trait now.

Living cheaply allowed us the freedom to quit the shackles of our full time jobs and start working for ourselves – and it still allows us to do what interests us rather than needing earn a fortune to pay the bills.

I am a greeny and I abhor easily avoidable waste, and related to that, I also strongly dislike excessive consumerism – so I guess that’s part of my drive too. There are elements of frugality I find fun – cooking, growing, making etc – and I like having hobbies that help me save money and live well. I’m also definitely be ticking the “thrill of a good deal” box! Frugality isn’t all doom and gloom as far as I’m concerned.

So what about you? What drives you to be frugal? Is there something I’ve missed off the poll list?

Frugal, cooking, growing and making link love

Posted by louisa on Friday 19 November 2010 in chickens, cooking, frugal, growing, meta, wood stuff | 2 comments

It’s super foggy here this morning so I need some ace inspiration to get going – and I thought you might need some too. Here are some of my favourite reads from the last few weeks…

• Ana White makes things that always excite me – demystifying woodwork and creating fab bits of furniture cheaply and easily. I think her old Knock Off Wood blog was the site that most inspired me to pick up a saw and screwdriver – and I just love her most recent side-table – and her “paint it bright” philosophy!
• One thing I was missing when I made my meal from just things I’d grown/caught/foraged was salt – now thanks to ManUpATree, I’m inspired to try making some myself – just got to find some clean enough sea water…
• Gillian of My Tiny Plot neatly summarised Which? Gardening’s heritage versus hybrid veg article – very useful info, thanks Gillian!
• Damn the Broccoli gave us some useful tips on staying warm but keeping the heating bills low…
• Compostwoman of The Compost Bin has been writing about… composting. Specifically, how she does it – and a very seasonal post on how to make leaf mould.
• And finally, Little House in the Suburbs recently ran a seven part series asking their community about lots of aspects of chicken keeping. I’ve contributed a number of times and loved reading what other people had to say – lots of very good advice and suggestions.

(For anyone who cares, the first is from the top of our garden, looking into the woods next door/at the bottom of the garden – and our chicken coop is in the bottom right; the second is the bandy trees at the bottom of our garden, just behind the chicken run; and the third is over our wood pile to the north, we can’t see our neighbour in that direction in the summer – or when it’s foggy!)

Why I’m trying to stop making comparisons

Posted by louisa on Thursday 11 November 2010 in anti-consumerism, frugal, meta | 12 comments

Last week, I wrote about how I cut our gas bill in half with just one phone call. Immediately after my phone call, I told a friend about the experience and he expressed surprise about how little gas we use – compared to him (he keeps records like I do) and compared to the national average, a figure he knew off the top of his head. Intrigued, I started looking up more and more information about average consumption figures – the boards at MoneySavingExpert are full of people talking about how much they pay, for what size of a house, and I also found a website which lets you compare your consumption with others locally and nationally, IN GRAPH FORM. (I like graphs.)

But then I stopped. I realised what I was doing. If I’d been doing it a year earlier when we first moved into our new house, I could have pretended I was looking up the info to get an idea how much I’d be paying over the year. But I knew exactly how much I should be paying. I was just doing it to gloat. To feel good about how frugal we are, how green we are, compared to the rest of Mr & Ms UK resident.

I’m terrible at making comparisons to make myself feel better about things. I think it’s partly (mostly?) to do with being insecure and generally having low-self esteem, but another part of it is wanting to proof my deliberately lifestyle decisions are making a difference.

I want to know that someone else spends three, four, five times as much as me on their weekly shop because I grow my own and spend time cooking from scratch to justify my time and energy. I want to hear the person who bought the 42″ plasma tv or the new BMW complain about not having any money at the end of the month, because it justifies my sensible attitude in not buying those things. I want to hear that the person who lives in t-shirt and shorts in the middle of winter is paying multiple-multiple times the amount for heating than woolly-clad me, because it means I can look down on them, on their wastefulness and how they’re SINGLE-HANDEDLY DESTROYING THE PLANET.

I’m not that bad really. But it’s there and it’s destructive.