Eco Worrier - Times Online - WBLG

String 'em up

A more positive garden drama. My chili plant is going nuts (here it is on the left). Bright red fruits all over it. They start off green, then slowly, like those weird T-shirts popular in the Eighties that changed colour with your body heat, they turn red. I’m waiting to harvest enough to make a string of them, as demonstrated on this website here. Has anyone tried this? With one of these hanging in my kitchen, I'll be that bit closer to my rustic French farmhouse fantasy.

Blasted water butt

I know, I know. It's hardly the season to be worrying about a water butt (see here for earlier post). Typically, all summer I've been waiting for parts to get it up and running and now, just when I thought it was doing its job, I notice a hitch. When it’s full, there is a leak at the point where the diverter enters into the butt, so on the side of the barrel. A drip drip drip that makes my patio soggy. Sorry to talk boring technicalities – I’m imagining I’ve already lost all non water butt owners - but I was hoping someone might have some advice. I bought my butt from Wiggly Wigglers, it’s the one in the picture here, and I don’t think I did anything wrong when I set it up (I says “I” but obviously I stood back and watched The Eco Sceptic Boyfriend do it).

Five Green Things To Do This Week

In the home
Resist turning the heating on. Why? Many reasons. Because it's not cold yet - we've had a warmer than average September. Because you'll appreciate the heating more if you hold off as long as possible. Because you'll save money. Because it gives you an excuse to wrap up in chunky knit cardigans and jumpers and feel snuggily and autumnal. Because it's nice to get reacquainted with a hot water bottle. Nothing beats a good film, a sofa, a mug of hot chocolate and a hot water bottle (known as a hottie in our family - am I alone there?). Roasting radiators would ruin the cosy vibe.

At work
Remind your boss how expensive sending company waste to landfill is going to become. Landfill tax is going to increase by a whopping £8 per tonne every year, from next April. Better prepare now, or pay the price later. 

In the garden
Do something useful with autumn leaves. Pile them into a black bin bag, add a sprinkling of water, tie up the bag and then a pierce a few holes in it. By next spring, you’ll have mulch, or more accurately, leaf mold. It’ll be rich in calcium and magnesium, nutrients that are essential for healthy vegetables

Out and about
Go and see A Crude Awakening, a documentary that explains why we should all be thinking about how we will adapt to an oil-free future. It looks at the phenomenom of "peak oil"; when and why it is running out and how we are going to adjust. Quite bleak, but grippingly so. At the premiere, the audience was made up as much of oil industry insiders as Green Party activists. Interesting in itself, this suggests the industry recognizes time is running out. I only wish I was part of the Transition Town movement - then I would be feeling quite smug.

Getting around
Londoners! Learn from the recent tube strike and look into alternatives ways of getting to work. Type your journey details into this Walk It website to find out how long it would take you by foot; how many calories you would burn, and the CO2 avoided. By bike, look for your nearest cycle path at Sustrans. It says 75 per cent of us live within two miles of a National Cycle Network route.

In the kitchen
Don’t stop at apple crumble, there’s a million things to do with this season’s glut. Apple cake,
baked apples, even plain old stewed apple, cooked with a cinammon stick, and served with Greek yoghurt. Or, for a main course, put a few slices of apple, a little vinegar and sugar and some flecks of butter on a pork chop and bake it in the oven. Yum. And don't forget Apple Day on 21st October - read about it here.

Should you feed the birds?

Last week, in the Body&Soul column, I innocently covered the subject of what to feed the birds after a question came in about whether it was possible to buy bird food from the UK, rather than abroad. You’ll find my answer here. Since then, shocked emails have thumped into my inbox, saying that I shouldn’t be advocating this sort of behaviour at all. Bird feeding, I’ve discovered, is shockingly bad form. I thought it was kind souls who liked David Attenborough did. Was I wrong to suggest that we help our feathered friends through the winter by providing goodies in our garden? Not according to the RSPB. So long as it is done responsibly. Click here to find its advice. Interestingly, it also recommends bird feeding as a way of bringing wildlife closer to people’s lives, allowing us to teach children about the natural world and generally get closer to small furry things that enhance our lives. I second that. Especially having chanced upon Simon Barnes’ book How to be a Bad Birdwatcher recently. Not counting myself as either a good or bad birdwatcher, I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. As he points out, even if you can only name a handful of birds – robin, pigeon, blackbird, mmm, struggling now - you can still be a birdwatcher. Hurrah. Having read the book, by heavens, I think I am one. So should I feed the new objects of my affections?

The sad tale of my apple tree

Imagine my excitement when I discovered that not only did our flat have a small garden in which I could grow things to eat but also towering above it (and taking all the sunlight from my tomato plants) was an apple tree. A beautiful great thing that blossomed triumphantly in May and then started to form small fruits. How lucky, I thought, because I love apples. I dreamed of nothing less for months. Come September, there would be crumbles, pies and chutneys galore. I would be baking apples stuffed with honey and raisins for pudding. I would be piling apple into cakes for tea, and freezing stewed apples for the future. I thought I’d never buy an apple again. But here we are, it's apple season, and I have scarcely a single fruit left.

Damson gin

A chance meeting with a kind lady who let us plunder her damson tree in Herefordshire at the weekend has led to a jar of purple booze in my kitchen. It's a good feeling, returning to London with some countryside bounty. Free, as well. Being someone who is almost as greedy as I am frugal, it makes me happy. Shame I've got to wait for three months before I can tuck in. Last year, I was pleased as punch with the two bottles of sloe gin I made. Sweet heady and not unlike cough mixture, it was a fun thing to whip out at the end of supper. Just when you think there are no more good things to come until breakfast. This year, I thought: why not branch out, try something different - to my knowledge I've never eaten a damson. It's too early for sloes - you're supposed to wait until the first frost, usually end of October or early November, so I busied myself last night, pricking damsons and poking them through the top of an old Amaretto bottle. Then you add gin and sugar and you're done. No need to buy special kit. Like making chutney, it's a satisfying way of using up old bottles and jam jars.  Having never made the stuff before, I had a quick scout around Google to look for a recipe. The one I followed is here. It is one of many delicious sounding creations on Woolfit, a food blog. I'm sure I'll be back for more. Now my gin is made, it's up on the kitchen shelf. I gaze at it longingly, wondering what a damson tastes like. 

Nightly patrol is not easy to live with

Bad news. My obsession with turning appliances off has reached new levels. If I lived with me, I’d find me annoying. It started with my mobile phone charger. Once I knew that one mobile phone charger in every household left permanently plugged in for 12 months would waste enough energy nationwide to meet the electricity needs of 66,000 homes a year, I became fanatical about turning mine off at the wall. I even put a little sticker on the one belonging to the eco-sceptic boyfriend (ESB) saying, “please turn me off” (I’ll post a photo of it later, if my blog skills are up to it). How annoying is that! Aren’t you glad that you don’t live with me? 
Anyway, my new ‘turning off’ hobby has progressed to include the television and DVD player and the ESB’s DJ decks. All of which must be off at the wall before bed. It’s become a night-time ritual, a house patrol before bed, like drinking hot chocolate or listening to Newsnight. I don’t want to make it seem like too much of a chore in case that turns you off putting your own home to bed, but it is a bit of a shock that these things don’t just turn themselves off when you press the off button. Often, they are designed to keep drawing on electricity, primed for action. Take my radio. Even when it’s off, the plug gets really hot which suggests that it must be using up electricity. Now I have to turn that off at the wall as well. It's exhausting. I’m waiting for someone to invent one button that controls all our house appliances. Now that would be a help to a lazy green like me.

The advent of trash fash

What, you might well ask, is this? Fashion gone loopy? Oxford Street taken over by badly dressed mannequins? No, in fact, what we have here is ‘trash fash’. Don’t worry, I hadn’t heard of it either. Apparently this is when you make outfits from the waste materials generated by shops. Good idea, but let’s hope the clothes get better than this. Until 23rd September, you can see mannequins dressed in ‘trash fash’ in London’s West End, positioned in House of Fraser, Wedgwood and Mexx (find out about it here). Be it coat hanger jewellery, plastic bag bodices, paper headdresses or skirts crocheted from wrapping tape, the designs are nothing if not imaginative.

Could this be the start of a movement to rival that of skip-diving for food. Instead of raiding Marks and Spencer’s bins for grub, we’ll be hanging out near the haberdashery department in John Lewis, hoping to scavenge a scrap of fabric or two.

Some towns have all the luck

Continuing my last post's theme...the story about the small English town of less than 5,000 attempting to ban plastic carrier bags is a happy one. I should be pleased. Five women – dubbed the ‘bag ladies’ – have been negotiating with supermarkets and traders to ban bags in the West Yorkshire town of Hebden Bridge. Co-op is handing out cloth alternatives.
So why is it making me grumpy? Something about the enterprise niggles. Until this morning, I couldn’t work out what. Then I realized… I’m jealous. I wish that I lived in Hebden Bridge. It looks delightful. I wish Hackney was a bit more like Hebden Bridge with its Fairtrade status and social conscience - did you know that HB has the highest proportion of lesbians in Britain, according to one survey? No offence to Hackney and don't think I’m after the lesbians but I do wish that when I walked around my local shops, they would give me free cotton bags and spark up chat about the welfare of my wormery.
To add insult to injury, I accidently stumbled upon an HB resident the other day. Celia Lyttelton has not only written a fantastic book about perfume and our sense of smell The Scent Trail but she also lives in the saintly plastic bag free town. Lucky thing. She says you rarely see plastic bags about town any more. “You’d get a dirty look if you went out with one,” she tells me. I suppose smugness might be one disadvantage to living in a town with an eco halo.

Click below for more green towns:

Public intervention: a good thing?

“You don’t need a bag for that.” When those words escaped my lips yesterday, I surprised myself, not to mention everyone else in the shop. In the past I have bitten my tongue in these situations. A lapse in concentration, this time, led to a successful plastic bag intervention in my local corner shop. The teenager in question, who had asked for a bag for his vile can of body-building chocolate milkshake, gawped at me, before walking out with it in his hand.

Whether or not this is an appropriate method of discouraging plastic bags, I’m not sure – I’d be interested to hear your opinion. Generally, I’m not in favour of shaming people in public - it's not part of my gently, gently, isn't-going-green-fun ethos - but this outburst been brewing for some time. Everyday I see someone buying a pint of milk in that shop or a bag of crisps and specifically asking for a bag. I wonder why. Is it because the bag is a sign that you have consumed, that you are wealthy and happy and can buy things when you want them? Is carrying one a visible and desirable display of consumption? If so, how funny that I behave in the opposite way, burying my purchases in the bottom of a rucksack to disguise the fact that I’ve done another lunchtime raid on Waitrose.

Anyway, the point is that I’m worried. What will I do next? Pull people from their cars and frog march them over to a bicycle. Who knows?

(By the way, the bag in the picture is from Green Eyed Frog. I wanted to find a picture of the lovely fold up tote bag that my friend Sophie gave me -it came from Superdrug (£2.49) - but it seems to have been left behind in all the excitement about Supedrug's latest "It Bag" designed by one of the Prince's Trust ambassadors.)

Let me know your natural recipes...

In this morning’s post, a leaflet from the Women’s Institute with advice on how to reduce your exposure to chemicals in the home. To you, mere mortals, Simple Solutions costs £1 (order if from the WI website). “The NFWI believes that the very products that we use everyday to enhance our health, keep us, our children and our homes clean, and to make ourselves even more beautiful, could be exposing us to a cocktail of hazardous man-made chemicals that have been linked to cancer, allergies and immune system deficiencies,” it begins.
Before you drift off, let me explain what lies ahead. Tips from WI members on how to keep your home and your body in tip-top condition. For firmer breasts, mix one tablespoon of yoghurt and a beaten egg with one teaspoon of Vitamin E oil, it recommends. Or, says Gail from Devon’s WI, you can removal wrinkles by spreading mashed banana on your face. Once your skin is young and bouncy, you can set about cleaning the taps with a handful of flour, followed by rubbing them with a soft cloth. Don't you love the Women’s Institute? Not sure I'd become a member, but their commonsense, traditional values are swinging back into fashion, while their choice of campaigns over the last few years – chemicals in the home, food packaging and farming – have been spot on. Not sure about their recipes for young skin, but let me know if you would argue otherwise, or if you have any equivalent recipes that work.

Anyone watching Dumped?

Rubbish isn’t it. Sorry to rant, but I can’t believe that the program ever intended to highlight recycling issues. It’s the same old reality TV gimmick dressed up in green clothing, with poor Rob Holdway trying to hold the eco fort. The contestants might as well be bickering in the Big Brother house, lounging on a remote island, or at any of the other random locations for this kind of thing. The focus is the relationship between them rather than ours with the planet.
When I first heard about it, I’ll admit, I was impressed. At last, a television series that would flag up the problem of landfill, I thought. It would make the important point that there is no ‘away’. When we dump bags of rubbish outside our houses to be picked up by the council, they do not magically disappear. They simply get taken somewhere else. Like a trip to a sewage works, I’ve always strongly believed in visit to landfill sites, something some schools (like this one) already do. I also liked the idea that while all the contestants imagined they would be going to some far-flung destination to help the environment, the location was actually right on their doorstep. A landfill site in Croyden. Then it leaked that the site, although next to a real one, had been staged. The rubbish was handpicked. Enough poles and tarpaulins are carefully strewn around to build a shelter. Now the show is underway, it’s even worse. Worryingly, the contestants I like the most - Darren, for example, who cracks into a spanking new triple pack of pants and socks every three days – are the least green. When he leaves, telling the others he’d rather take his wife on holiday and that he thinks the show is pointless, I feel quite pleased. An unlikely green hero.