We have Worms!!

After Wiggly Wormers finally sent us a bedding block 2 days after sending the initial order (it seems "Ann" didn't pack our order correctly!), we were finally able to get our wormery started.
First of all the bedding block was soaked in water to make it swell and break up. This was put in the bottom layer on top of a layer of cardboard.
The worms were then emptied onto the bedding block and spread over the layer.
They were then left with the lid off for a while, as worms are light sensitive and this encourages them to burrow down.
The instruction booklet said to leave the lid off for a couple of hours (we did put a mesh over the top just in case the birds were feeling peckish!) but within 1/2 an hour they had all burrowed down!

From reading on the message forums it seems it will be 6 months or so before we get any results - worm wee etc, so it's just a case of feeding them, keeping them happy and waiting now. They even have a shower cap on so the rain doesn't get in and drown them!

Allotment and Gardening Forum Photo Competition - "Amazing Constructions"

Because my garden isn't exactly big enough to have a large construction like a shed or greenhouse in, i decided to enter a picture of my homemade slug trap. last year i found that the rain got in etc and the beer/dead slug mix got rather disgusting so i devised a lid/roof for it this year.

A little bit of artist detailing and my photo was complete! Not expecting to win, but its all good fun!

Freecycled Wormery - A Mega Saving!

I spotted this on freecycle a couple of weeks back. The excitment i felt was possibly a bit on the sad side but then when you see how much the brand new ones cost i think it's justified! Admittedly they come with the worms and bedding etc. But even in a specific wormery online store the rescue pack/value pack which contains everything i don't have and need costs £30, whereas when you buy a full kit with the plastic wormery case its self retails for at least £90.

i mean a spare leg costs a fiver for goodness sakes - and there are 5 of those!!

i was looking for ways to bring the costs of the remaining items i need down, but i think i need to realise i can afford £30 and i've saved double that already really. So here it is all cleaned up and assembled, waiting for me to buy some worms.

Recycle your Bathtub - as a pond!

i spotted this on Geekware, who often features super ways to recycle objects, mainly computer or technology related.

Geekware: Bathtub pond

Eco Transport - The Magic Wheel

I get the Weekly Newsletter from Life Goggles and as part of it they do reviews in eco friendly products.

One review that caught my eye this morning was that of The Magic Wheel.  The Video on the web site for the actually product of course makes it look so easy to use but that you to Life Goggles who's product tester proved that not to be so.

You can find a link to the product web site on the review.

Great Green Giveaway

I have various "Green" Feeds in my RSS Feed and new updates come up in my Windows Live Mail. I can't actually remember which specific feed it was but one of the had a great link to this Great Green Giveaway.

Not only is it a fab competition but a great way to find and link to many other Green Sites and Shops. The competition is being hosted on Life Goggles. In fact there are 56 (but this may change it seems) competitions however some are only available to the USA and some only to the UK but there are international ones too. Prizes include a variety of green items, including clothing, homewares and cosmetic type stuff.

Also on Life Goggles there are interviews, fun stuff, articles, product reviews and a Green wall of shame for those places and products who aren't so green!!

They also have a free ebook on 100 ways to save the planet - so stop by have have a look! just think of the paper you're saving by reading an ebook!

Am i an Upcycler?

Sure i recycle the bottlecaps.... or maybe you would say i reuse them......Or maybe my products are upcycled!

 

Upcycle - Wiki

Recycled bags to use at the farmers market

I was thinking about bags for when i go to the farmers market. now i know i never accept a new bag but little items like my magnets and brooches could easily get lost and i don't think people would really want to put them with food from the market in their bags either.

so i did a quick websearch and thought about all the envelopes mum brings home from work for the food waste bin. i found a template for gift bags made from envelopes!! perfect!!

This has really made my day, because they have worked perfectly. the brown bag in from an A4 envelope and the white from an A5.

however the clear window gets in the way with the smaller one, and also the paper is thicker with the brown one.

so with a bit of double sided tape, i have my bags!!!

If Money were no object....

When i was in town Thursday i spotted this in a shop window:

(click on the photo for more info)

I knew instantly it was a recycled object, so decided to pop into the shop and have a look, with the thought of my bottlecaps in mind too. I had a nice chat with the lady, who said she was just getting back up and running after a family bereveavement over Christmas. She said this shop was a bit of a test to see if the town was ready to become more green in their purchases. She said it wasn't - basically people want to think they are but don't want to pay the prices for handcrafted objects. Well i have to say i certainly couldn't afford the prices but the with the comission she charges to sell things on your behalf no wonder the prices are so high! she takes 30% comission! really not worth it for me if i want to sell my items at a reasonable price.

Mum still think things like my magnets are over priced but then these days you will be pushed to find one for under a pound i expect so i don't think for a hand crafted item that £1.50 is too much, especially as i have to cover my costs and fees, so i probably only get £1 at the end of the day anyway! but 30% certainly wouldn't leave me with anything!

anyway here's a few other favourites from the online shop:

All i want for christmas........is not a cold virus and sore throat!!!!

just went things were hard enough, i woke up this morning feeling like i'd swallowed a fish bone or a razor blade! but i haven't been near either of those items in ages - the first, a few weeks, the latter over a year!! added to that a headache, sneezing (which has just started) and feeling even more drained than i already do and i have a very unwelcome christmas gift to myself!
doesn't help when i'm feeling low anyway. but can't be helped so will just mean extra effort in being "ok" - or the perfect excuse to not be "ok".

i've got a huge supply of bottle top to keep me occupied, however i've just realised i've run out of 3D varnish. but i still have to take the plastic seals out of the latest lot i picked up from the pub today. my magnetic strip arrived from ebay, i was at least able to make shane's into a magnet and get that wrapped and delivered before christmas.

i cut up some magazines and gave some images a trial go. i was quite pleased with the way they worked out really.

i took some more photos of my lanterns the other night as well, once i'd cleaned them up, put new candles in and then managed to get them all lit! one of those things i think is it worth the effort - but then i think, well, it's handmade, personal and saving electricity.

my non electric christmas lights

well i finally got them finished and eventually found that the best way to hold the candles in place was simply blue tac. putting coloured stones, like you find in vases with fake flowers made the lanterns very heavy. sticking a drawing pin to the bottom of the jars didn't work - i simply couldn't stick metal to glass. so in the end i opted for blue tac.

the candles seem to burn for about 5 hours, but with 10 lanterns, my 40 candles aren't going to last long! i've used 2 nights worth already, so i might have to find some more cheap candles somewhere..... i wonder if tescos' do value ones?

anyway i sent david out into the cold to take some photos once they were all lit. so here they are:

A very busy week

no, i haven't fallen down a rabbit hole and gone missing. it's just been a very busy week, and i don't think it's going to end there! i'll go through it day by day starting last thursday:

Thursday 6th - babysitting got home about midnight but at least managed to get peter's christmas card order sorted - 25 cards, not bad in one evening!

Friday 7th - did food shopping all on my own this week, nan and grandpa arrived 3pm, sat showing off my laptop to them, watched my starring peformance together when having dinner.

Saturday 8th - weather crap so stuck indoors, peter picked up his cards, offered us a trip to london to see Handel's Messiah @ St Martin's in the Field (going just before xmas), went out to Van Haage's garden centre in the afternoon just to get out the house, not soon enough in my books but by that time i'd had enough so when we got home at 5pm i escaped the house and went down to the pub with my diary.

Sunday 9th - left home 10am to go to Tryst on the Green for a family lunch with Alison, Joan and others from that side of the family. got there just after 12pm, not bad as the weather was horrible so the spray on the motorways was bad, i'd stopped for petrol and stopped for a 5 min break at Clacket Lane services, and i managed to take a "detour" as i got close to my destination but again that was only about 10 minutes of the 2 hours.

lunch lasted 4 hours and by the time we'd finished sadly it was a bit late for me to go back to their house especially if i wanted to get home for dinner. and its quite a good job i did as driving conditions were still bad with spray and after i passed through the tunnel i hit the tail of a queue from an accident which then delayed me by about 45 mins. so it was near on a 3 hour drive home.

whilst i was out nan and grandpa had gone home.

monday 10th - needless to say after the weekend i was shattered and spent monday half asleep!

tuesday 11th - i don't actually remember what i did, still half asleep i think. mum had her work christmas event so a quiet night in.

wednesday 12th - emotional rollercoaster of a day, ended up driving to meet mum for lunch as i needed to see her, then took my time getting home, got back about 4pm. had the evening to myself as mum and david went to the local panto. settled down to a dinner of mussels, something to keep my fingers and mind occupied!

thursday 13th (last night) - popped into town in the morning still on my hunt for coloured sand, and still no luck. i was it for my "green" christmas lights - homemade candle lanterns not electric lights outside this year! i'll try and take some photos later when its dark tonight.
babysat again - screaming tantrum lasted about 15 minutes this time. she's starting to learn that screaming the house down isn't going to stop mummy going out and i'm not going to give in and let her go downstairs or call her mumy back - i feel so mean and nasty but a 3 year old needs to learn she's not ging to get her own way. she got 20 mins of TV on her parents' bed and then a story anyway. the TV was mummy's compromise, not cartoons tho as only analogue TV upstairs due to renovation works, so it was nice and boring for her! and the quick story was just to make sure on my part and to be fair she hadn't had one earlier, but then to be honest she didn't really deserve one. so i read through the book quickly and put little emotion into it cos i was tired and pissed off by this time! but i was home by 10.30pm as the father had been away on business and got home before the mother.



but i could be going through all that again tonight! the mother phoned to check all was ok, and asked me if i was free tonight, as she had been invited out again during the course of the evening. My mum is right though, i need to work outwhether i need the stress though, as nice as £7 an hour is - is it worth the stress?

well at least i don't have to worry about getting up early or anything like that. todays plans include the post office, which will mean a huge queue at this time of year. but i have ebay items to send out and a postcard to send out for a swap-bot partner. her mother had cleared out her postcard collection when she moved out of home, so she's trying to rebuild it.
and then when mum gets home about 4pm today, as she's been on earlies this week, its off to do the food shopping at tescos.

why does this time of year have to be so stressful and tiring??!!

The beeb are coming!

i didn't post about if before now because things kept changing and it seemed like it was going to be impossible to arrange a mutually convenient time.

Of an evening we've started watching The One Show on BBC1 at 7pm. A few weeks back they did a series on the brain and whether you had a male of female brain (regardless of your gender) and which brain was better at which type of things such as spacial awareness and map reading etc. As part of that they had a quiz to do online, so one morning i decided to check my brain out (according them i have a female brain) but while i was looking round their website i noticed a bit that asked for your views on certain topics and one of them was junkmail. this was very soon after my "bad day" so that was fresh in my mind and i emailed them telling them about that.

i didn't think anything more of if but the a couple of weeks later got a call from a researcher at the BBC. he originally wanted to come with the presenter Justin on the 29th, but obviously i knew i was in Kent that day. i did say i might beable to get back for early Wednesday morning, but after more thought i decided that wasn't sensible. after telling them that i was expecting them to say never mind, we've got other people we can interview/film. but no, he then suggested the tuesday the next week, the 6th and passed my details onto another collegue who was coming this way.

it then seemed like it was all going to fall through again when she called to say she couldn't make that day, but she did have yet nother collegue who was in Essex the week after. so thats where we are. however i was almost thinking that it wasn't going to happen again as i hadn't heard from this latest researcher. but she called at 7.30pm last night to see if it would be ok to come at 2pm not 1pm. which to be honest works better for me regarding lunch anyway!

so all i have to do in the next 6 hours is tidy the dining room tables, decide what to wear and make myself look presentable, which will take 6 hours alone! had better get started then.....

The Maths on my plastic, metal and glass recycling....

ok, so in the last post I worked out from my clubcard points (about 160 green points) that in the last quarter i've taken 640 items to the recycling centre!!

because its 4 items per point....

that means 640 items on 3 months.....

thats 213 per month....

thats 53 items a week....

thats a rough estimation of 7.6 items per day!

A further thought on plastic bags and shopping

well, it's friday which mean the weekly grocery shopping at Tescos.

i was trying to work out the cheapest way of buying the citrus fruit i like (large clementine/mandarins). they have the offer of 2 nets for £2 which usually give 8 - 10 fruit. but then there's the value citrus fruit net for £1.29. but then i thought about buying them loose and am going to look into the cost of that.

however one of the things that put me off buying loose is those stupid little clear plastic bags, great for lining the bathroom bin but we really don't need any more at the moment. then i thought about how many of those i use each week for the shopping. Pears, brocolli are two other we buy loose and also sometimes tomatoes. they provide paper bags for the mushrooms so that the mushrooms don't sweat - so why not use them for other veg - although the paper bags do have a plastic insert. i mean is it purely so the checkout people can see whats in them? if so what is the difficulty in peeking into the top of a paper bag.

however many young checkout teenagers don't even know what the fruit and veg are! i read on the BBC Food message board about one teenager asking a customer to confirm that what was in the bag was a leek! i can understand with the new exotic fruit and veg they may not know what they are (although surely if you work in a shop you should know the products they stock). for example plantains, moolis, eddoes, pomelos are some that i have had to explain to the person on the checkout.

anyway i'm getting side tracked, the point of my post was that today when i go to tescos i am NOT going to use any of those silly plastic bags for the loose fruit. but then i was thinking "how am i going to put the fruit loose in the trolley without it getting bruised and rolling around. so i think my plan is to put a basket on top on my trolley, or i may find a box home here to put in the trolley so they are separate. i think that makes more sense them i can simply take them home in that too.

maybe one day i'll have to guts to leave ALL the packaging at the checkout when i do the shopping......not in the near future i fear though. and anyway if they stop all the packaging how am i going to get my green clubcard points at the recycling centre? which of course then turn into vouchers which i am saving for a big treat i think rather than spend them on little things. In this last quarters statement i got about 160 green points which is all from the recycling centre at tescos. now its 4 items per point so thats 640 items!!!