Plants plants planh plah blah blah blah

Well we're back, we're married, and it' been a hectic (and very sunny & rainy apparently) couple of weeks culminating in a lot of work to be done in the garden.

Our wedding was wonderful - very very hot and sunny, lots of friends, and lot of homemade vegan food, and our honeymoon was double wonderful - a week in a cottage in Llandeilo.

Unfortunately when we got home our first discovery was that a couple of our cacti have been struck down by mealy bug, very upsetting as our plants have never had any diseases before, and this meant that after a quick bout of the Queasies we had to quarantine and spray the plants, and are now just waiting to see if that's enough. Luckily the new garden table is perfect as a temporary plant treatment zone.

Our second discovery was that in all this beautiful weather our garden had gone MAD. The beans are creeping off the end of their poles, weeds have taken over, the peas have disappeared off somewhere, and unfortunately my lack of foresight in firstly not thinning the cabbages before the honeymoon, and secondly not putting netting up, meant that we had to face a major invasion of caterpillars. After a second quick Quease I finally thinned out the, now fairly large, holey, and caterpillary, cabbages and Will and I put up some netting, so now we'll just have to see what happens.
Does anyone have a pesticide-free butterfly deterrent they can recommend? And has anyone found companion planting completely successful? We now have gypsophila and marigolds (talk about locking the stable door) and with future crops that's certainly something I think we'll make sure we do as a priority.

We harvested our first crop, or some of our first crop, which was our radishes and found them very  hot! I'm planning to plant another load in a pot this week as they were such a quick + easy to grow veg.

I've finally put some flowers in the garden to encourage bees and also just to make it a bit nicer thanks to very generous friends and family giving us gifts of money for the wedding, and already our garden is filled with buzzing. I also planted a bird bath that was from my Mum's garden as it's quite a catty area and I'm a little worried about putting water in it and encouraging birds into the garden (I know we have a bird house, but the only thing using that is a big spider).

 I also planted out a few leeks, kale and beetroot so with any luck we'll have a few more vegetables this winter. We're not even approaching producing enough to be self-sufficient in vegetables, and won't be able to in this space, but any step closer is pretty exciting at the moment. We were also able this week to go blackberrying after Will got home from work, and collected a Kilo and a half of berries with a lot more to pick  next week. We also found a couple of plum tress to go back to in a month or so, so we're planning to freeze a lot and have jam and pies for the rest of the year!

Finally, a surprise gift for the house from the husband arrived today - very exciting if you are me, which I am.

Now, I'd better go and find a job. Morrissey Sympathises.

Chamomile, construction, car boots & coffee concerns

A very picture-heavy post today, as what I’ve mainly been doing this weekend is taking photos!

After a fairly uneventful week of Will working and me frantically writing lists and trying to control every little thing for the wedding (11 days!), we finally got to spend our first weekend together in our new house. The weather’s only been so-so, so unfortunately the line-up of boot sales we’d planned to visit had to be postponed until a better weekend so on Friday we worked in the garden, finally getting a washing line up. Will also built a couple of storage units with wood leftover from other projects, while I mostly squatted by the seedlings whispering encouraging words.  I also made something of an effort to organise the study (ha!) in the hope that I might be able to start working again one day, as after all something is better than nothing.

Sunday was the really busy day, and we managed to make it to one car boot (in the rain) where we dug up several things we needed for the house, and several thing we didn’t (Whimsies, cherries, jewellery, ahem.) Afterwards we went for a walk through a nature reserve we passed on the way, which was not at all unfruitful either as we managed to collect some chamomile that was growing wild, and brought it back home for the garden.  I also caught Will chewing on some cow parsley (or at least it was evident by the flowery crumbs in his beard) so we have plans to go back with Food For Free and see what we can see.

For the rest of the weekend, Will mostly worked on fixing up old scissors he's collected over time, making them smart enough for gifts, and I repaired my almost favourite pair of shoes after over a year of staring at them in dismay. Will also made me a little table for the garden with a nice bit of wood we found in the loft.

 Now, if Will and I are going to look at our daily lives and find the cracks in our routine compared to our ideals, then my hot drink habit has got to be high up on the list of things to examine. I don’t drink a LOT of tea or coffee, and certainly less than I once did, but it is a daily – 2 or 3 times daily, I can’t speak before my morning coffee – event, and that’s got to add up. What I really need to know, is what is the cost of drinking a cup of tea or coffee?

Well, for a start it’s definitely bad to have milk in your cup, although that’s something I was pretty sure of anyway without reading about the ill-effects this has on our environment. But anyone who knows me will know that I’m thrilled at any opportunity to boast the benefits of not consuming animal products, so this is good news as far as I can see!  However, smug as I am, I couldn’t have predicted the shocking fact that having a drop of milk in your tea or coffee is more harmful to the environment than both boiling the water needed for that, cup, and indeed cultivating the tea or coffee itself and shipping it over here, combined. But, as the milk issue doesn’t really apply to me, I still want to know where my tea or coffee comes from, what it does along the way, and how I can make this better.

I stopped drinking coffee for quite a while last year because it had gotten a little out of hand, and I certainly know that caffeine is bad for you – you just have to see how you feel an hour after a coffee to know that. Instead I replaced my coffee with a barley & chicory drink, produced in Italy; bingo – caffeine free and much closer than coffee certainly, however I have since slid back to drinking just one cup of coffee a day, and that's starting to weigh on my conscience a little.

So what are your options when it comes to hot drinks?

Well, the easiest thing you can do to make your tea or coffee ‘greener’ before we even look at the product is to simply boil the amount of water you need. If by chance you do boil too much (although a good way of making sure you don't is to use your cup to fill the kettle), use it anyway. Put it in the washing up, cook with it, fill your hot water bottle, or just make a pot instead of a cup, but do not let it go to waste. I’ve also read a couple of articles which indicate that it is greener to use a gas stove-top kettle rather than an electric kettle because of the amount of waste that goes into transforming fuels into electricity, however I would wonder about the benefit of this if you are sourcing your electricity from sustainable companies/sources, so that’s one to look into before rushing out to buy a stove-top  kettle.

A simple and not unpleasing way to cut down on processing before your coffee reaches the cup is to buy beans over instant. Although the product is heavier to ship, there is less processing involved, and therefore fewer steps between growing the coffee and drinking it.

A fairly major issue with drinking coffee in England, is that coffee definitely does not grow in England. So what can you do about that? If you do a Google search for that all you get is a long, long list of your local Costas. So resigning yourself to the fact that England is cold, can you at least, and if not why not, get a coffee that is fair-trade, organic, shade grown, bird friendly, and grown not too far away (relatively speaking)? There’s the earth friendly coffee company but as they’re based in the U.S. ordering from them might be counter-productive. The Ethical superstore boasts a wide range of ‘eco-friendly’ coffees, but none of these say that they are shade grown/bird friendly, and having emailed them they  have confirmed for me that while the companies' products they stock are equal exchange and organic, they are apparently aware of bird friendly coffee but are not currently producing it, and I'm starting to wonder if bird friendly is only a myth. So at the moment I'm buying CaféDirect Machu Picchu which is organic and equal exchange.

I don't really have any answers at the moment (apart from quit the habit) and there's a lot of research still to be done.  This is obviously something that’s going to take more than a few Google searches. Expect updates soon (though not too soon). 

There is a BEE building a HOUSE made of LEAVES under my AGAVE it's the most exciting day of my life so far. Sadly, however, shunning the insect box I put up.