With it being holiday season Little Miss C and I are really doing the days out thing at the moment and our adventures this week took us to Luton and more specifically Stockwood Discovery Centre. If you're local and have not been before then it is a lovely free day out. The museum is vast, covering a wide range of exhibits from farming machinery to horse-drawn carriages, and there's also a lovely cafe, playground, grounds and the wider Country Park to explore. The reason that took me to Stockwood this time was having heard about the Treasures from ... read more
Watching the units…
A couple of months ago I had a bit of a winning streak and was lucky enough to win three different blog competitions within the space of about two weeks. It was probably all my good luck for the year used up in that fortnight, but still, at least I got some good luck! One of the prizes that I was most excited about came from the My Zero Waste blog and was an Owl Wireless Electricity Monitor. I've been after an electricity monitor for years (in fact since first starting on Green forums and blogs back in 2006/07) but the cost of one always put me off. When you look at how much ... read more
Wipe out Waste: Recycling baby wipe packets
I was thrilled to see a mention on Being a Mummy's blog about the Johnson's Wipe out Waste campaign to recycle the plastic packs that baby wipes come in. They've even put together a lovely little video showing how the scheme works. I admit that it would be even better for the environment if you used reusable baby wipes, but sadly that just doesn't work for us and at least this provides a way to recycle something that I would otherwise be putting in landfill. The only problem I see with the scheme is that the T&Cs state that the scheme only runs ... read more
London Green Fair
It was a complete fluke that Mr C and I stumbled across the London Green Fair on Saturday, but I'm so glad that we did. We were both in London for a rare day on our own to take part in the Bing Your Britain bloggers day (which I will expand on in a separate post as it was fantastic) and as part of the day our challenge was to take photographs around the city. After the initial briefing and workshop we instantly headed to the nearest bit of green space; Regent's Park. We thought we might find some interesting nature or wildlife there, but instead we ... read more
First home brew success
It all started about 18 months ago when I was lucky enough to "win" some bits of home brew kit on Freecycle. What I didn't realise at the times was that I was two weeks pregnant at the time, so it's taken us a while to get round to our first proper batch of home brew. I admit that it did start as a kit, but I'm not feeling too guilty about that. I'll leave it to Mr C to provide words on his blog at some point (and I will let you know when he does) but I can provide picture evidence and I'm also pleased to report back that it tastes delicious and no sign of ... read more
How warm is your house?
I've been meaning to blog about this for a few days now, but the warm weather outside has distracted me somewhat. It's hard to stay inside thinking about thermostat temperatures when you can be outside in the garden in the sunshine digging the veg plot over. I'm a bit of an obsessive as to what temperature our central heating is set to ever since we upgraded the heating in our (normally cold) 1928 semi to a system that has such a posh user control unit that it even has a "party mode" (I"m not sure what it does, but it has a picture of a martini glass next to the ... read more
It costs how much?
Sorry - I don't usually have a rant on here, but I'm afraid today I'm so stunned by something that I'm going to do just that. I'm quite a recent convert to Ecover products, but so far I have been pretty impressed with them all. The laundry detergent gets things clean and leaves a lovely fresh smell on our clothes, the delicates washing liquid isn't harsh on the hands when hand-washing wool, the washing up liquid is equally hand-friendly and the stain remover has been brilliant at removing even some of Little Miss C's worst stains. It therefore seemed ... read more
Harvest
Finally an opportunity to spend some time in the garden today actually doing some gardening. I'm delighted to say that we were also able to harvest all the carrots that I grew from seed. The courgette plants are still producing a few and some of the beetroots are also ready.For anyone interested the courgettes are Black Beauty and the carrots are Royal Chantenay Red. Both of these seeds came from the BBC Dig In campaign. Also in the picture is one of the first beetroots that we've harvested - a Boltardy one.Interestingly there is quite a bit of variety in the sizes of the carrots ... read more
Potatoes and Tomatoes
It seems that not all our growing efforts are in vain this year after all. Our first attempt at growing potatoes was via a free kit that you could send off for from the BBC Gardeners' World Magazine. The kit contained Vales Emerald seed potatoes and also a patio bag to grow them in. It really was as simple as filling the bag with compost, putting the seed potatoes in and ensuring that they got plenty of water. This afternoon we decided to see what the bag contained and we were pretty content with our results. Hopefully we'll get to eat them some time this ... read more
Not exactly a bountiful harvest…
... but better than nothing! I'm also hopeful that there are more courgettes still to come. ... read more