I often hear vegetable growing enthusiasts bemoaning the small size of their carrots or cabbages. Later they will be disappointed at the short season of their cauliflowers – failing to eat them before the curds start to open out and flower truly. This is why it pays to be greedy in your veggie garden. Start to eat things as soon as they are edible. One, small, perfectly formed cauliflower a week for a few months, can bring much more enjoyment and sustainability to your life than two weeks getting bored of continual cauli consumption. Particularly when the produce is past […]
Food Waste Reduction Bandwagon!
One of my beliefs with trying to attain a more self sufficient life is that we cannot waste ANY food. With that in mind, plus my naturally thrifty, greedy nature I’ve been making more of an effort of late to reduce our food wastage. We are pretty good. All our food waste except cooked bones gets either fed to hens, dogs, cat or the compost heap. However I think I should be making more of an effort for there to be less available for the animals. With this in mind I’m jumping on the Food Waste Reduction Challenge Bandwagon. Crunchy […]
Preserves (Canning) – Basics Part 3 – Ingredients
Right then, continuing the ‘Preserves – Basics’ theme. This is some information that you need to know about the ingredients you’ll be using. Fruit and Vegetables These must be in good condition before you preserve them. So disgard anything spoilt, over-ripe or rotten. You don’t want to introduce any moulds or fungus into the product before you even start the preserving process. Beware of coatings to commercially produced fruit. Wax coatings on citrus and other fruit should be scrubbed off or peeled. Pickling is a good way to use up any under-ripe overly firm items. Green tomatoes are a traditional […]
Solar Radios Reviews Wind Up Radios Reviews Crank Radios
I really can’t express what great little Eco Gadgets Solar/Wind Up Radios are. Next to the Laptop it is probably one of the most used items in the house. We purchased a Solar and Wind Up Radio over ten years ago now and it is still going strong! A minutes worth of winding and it runs for well over an hour! Click for Discount Crank Radios or read on to find out why we love our original Freeplay wind up/solar radio. When the sun is shining it quickly stores up energy and runs the whole day. We really have found […]
Preserves – Basics Part 2 – Methods of Preserving (Canning)
A continuation on our introduction to home-preserving. Here we’re talking about canning / bottling fruit & vegetables. Luckily the first few preserves I made were from Mrs Beaton’s All About Cookery. These Victorian recipes assume the cook knows the basics of preserving and general hygiene in the kitchen. They didn’t scare me into not trying, which many books I’ve read since might well have done. Here I want to share some of the basics about methods of preserving foodstuffs that should help you in your kitchen. What Is It? There are a myriad of ways to preserve fruit and vegetables […]
Make Compost From Your Kitchen
Part of any drive towards living a more self sufficient life involves trying to grow as much produce as possible. To this end we should all be composting as much as we possibly can. Compost works wonders for your soil, and the richer it is the more we can grow. But are you forgetting something? Every day many people who have a compost heap neglect a very important part of the composting bible – the Kitchen. The kitchen produces a vast amount of compostable material every day but it is all too easy to just throw scraps in the bin, […]
Compost – How to Compost
How to Have a Useful Compost Heap Lots of people wonder why their compost heap doesn’t do much or worse still turns to a pile of evil smelling slime. Usually this is due to a lack of stuff , or a lack of variety of stuff ending up on the compost heap. We need to add as much to our compost heaps as possible. It means we get more benefit from a bigger heap of finished compost. We also save time and money as we’re not sending so much stuff to landfill. It’s our own waste so why not sort […]