Plants & pots & seeds

Posted by louisa on Monday 4 July 2011 in growing | 5 comments

Thanks for all your batch cooking and what-to-grow-in-my-empty-spots suggestions! I’ll reply to the comments as soon as I can but I’m feeling very inspired by both! :)

I mentioned on the empty-spots-in-the-garden post that I was visiting my mum & dad on Saturday and my dad might have some spare plants for me – well, he certainly did. He gave me:

Six lavender plants – he was offering more (he’s gone a little lavender crazy this year) but I don’t have room for them. As it is, a couple of these will go to our neighbour who loves lavender.

Three (admittedly slightly pot-bound) chillis and eight (capsicums) pepper plants. These will need potting on immediately and I’m not convinced we’ll have quite a long enough season to really benefit from them – but I’ve got others of both so these will just be bonuses (and I’m going to try overwintering all my chillis this year too). They will, of course, have to stay in the greenhouse rather than filling up my currently empty containers/bed – and last week that would have worried me because I’m running low on decent sized pots … which I mentioned to my dad and lo & behold:

40+ decent sized pots. (Leaves in the photo for scale and not just because we’ve not swept the porch recently ;) ) He has hundreds stashed near his old greenhouses (from when he knew a landscape gardener and saved them from landfill) — I only took 40 this time but could have taken ten times that. I feel confident I might never need to buy a medium size plant pot again ;)

My mum also had a box of goodies for me – old jars, egg boxes and whatnot – and included in that were some seeds that they’d got free but wouldn’t use: packets of peas, coriander, tomatoes, land cress, rocket and all year round lettuce. I’m going to use a couple of my foot-square scrap wood planters for the rocket & land cress, and the rest can join my seed stash for use next year. (At last count, I’ve got about 18 packets of seeds free this year from one source or another – about half flowers, the rest veg – so hopefully next year will be a cheap year!)

So not only did we get to introduce Lily-dog to the sea (funny!), have pink-and-white ice creams and a visit to Broadhursts – oh, and see my mum & dad, my garden is a little fuller now too :)

What did you get up to this weekend? Did you get to enjoy the sun?

From pelmet to planter

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 3 May 2011 in frugal, making, wood stuff | 6 comments

Yesterday, we went to see John’s mum & dad, and spotted that one of their neighbours had put a fancy (curtain) pelmet out on the street in front of their house to be taken away – either by John’s dad (who they know is a salvager of random things or by a scrap person). I thought it looked pretty sturdy so bagsied it instead.

A surplus plank of wood and four screws later, and I had a pretty new herb trough :)

The original plan had been to wall mount it (I had some old brackets that would work & look nice, and it would save having to add a back piece to it) but it turned out that because of a supporting fence post, it didn’t fit where I’d hoped to put it. It does though fit perfectly on the little ledge behind the greenhouse.

I’ve drilled some drainage holes in the bottom and will add more rocks-as-crocks to stop it getting waterlogged (if it ever rains). As I’ve mentioned before about that ledge, it’s not *that* accessible in the summer so I can’t use it for things I need to pick regularly – but it will be good for companion plants & not-picked-often herbs. It’s not massive — 5ft long, about 8inch deep and about 6inch wide — but it’ll make a bit of use of some otherwise dead space. Plus, I think it looks pretty cool :)

And weee, another freebie :)

Portable chicken run from scrap wood & wire

Posted by louisa on Friday 18 February 2011 in chickens, making, wood stuff | 6 comments

I was in a bit of a sulk this morning. My weekends – now that the weather is getting better – usually involve playing out in the garden, or at least cooking up treats in the kitchen but this weekend, I’m out all day, both days, at a youth theatre event with the group I help teach. The event should be fun but, you know, not playing in the garden or making sugar-packed goodies. So I was sulking about losing my play time – until I realised there was nothing stopping me playing out this afternoon instead. Even after five years of self-employment, I still feel naughty playing out during a workday – but as soon as I realised I could, I was up and running for the box of screws and our scrap wood supplies.

I find it funny that I get so excited about making things from wood these days because a couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have thought I was capable of doing it. I’m quite a practical girl – I worked as a labourer one summer during uni and I’m happy to get my hands/clothes/face dirty with paint or mud or what-have-you – but I always thought that making things from wood was a Big Serious Skill that wasn’t for my sort. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was because we didn’t really do any big woodwork stuff at school – we did stuff on “resistant materials” (which included bits of woodwork as well as electronics and stuff with plastic/metal) and I remember making little bits of jewellery out of wood and plastic – but it was little things, nothing practical.

I think I started to get converted after we moved into this house just over a year ago – I wanted some airing shelves inside the boiler cupboard so I went over to the DIY shop across the road, bought some 38mm by 19mm lengths, and made them. I think I did a pretty good job – I made them easily removable in case we needed better access to the boiler and they’ve not fallen down yet. Then I decided I wanted a wellie stand for outside and after getting some advice from a friend who is handy with a saw & screws and a scramble around our scrap wood store, we had a shiny new wellie station in a couple of hours. And that’s when the addiction started. I’m not great at it by any means but every time I make something, I learn something new and have tons o’fun :)

Anyway, this afternoon’s project was a portable chicken run so I could let the chickens out of their main run more. I was inspired by Kate from Living the Frugal Life‘s poultry schooner – it would let me use the chickens to weed and de-slug the veg beds but wouldn’t need me watching over them the whole time (or chasing them around the woods when they got the taste of freedom). I wanted to do a hoophouse thing like Kate’s but didn’t have any material to make the hoops – so I ended up making a boring wood frame instead. At least it was all the boring wood was scrap so free though :)

I made the ends first and was a little surprised by how sturdy they were ;)

The sturdiness was beneficial as the only long lengths I could find were lighter than desirable – but with the sturdy end frames and some supporting struts in the middle, it still felt strong enough. So far, so good.

Free ebooks for Kindles & iPads/iPhones with Project Gutenberg

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 29 December 2010 in frugal | 0 comments

I was talking to a friend about Project Gutenberg the other day and realised that perhaps it isn’t as widely known as it should be, so here is a quick PSA.

If you, like my friend’s mum, got a Kindle or iPad/iPhone for Christmas, you can get lots of free books from places like Project Gutenberg. (There are other sites that do a similar thing, like Manybooks.net, but Project Gutenberg is apparently the biggest and the one I’m most familiar with.)

Project Gutenberg is an archive of 33,000 books which you can download to your new fancy device for free – including many, many classics – for example, the rather seasonal A Christmas Carol, the rather excellent Walden and the rather long War and Peace. (The observant will notice that the Kama Sutra is the most download book of the moment, between The Art of War into 6th place – so clearly ebook readers are more interesting in making love not war at the moment.)

I think if I liked classics more, I’d find the Kindle a lot more tempting than I already do – for the price of 20 classics bought new, I could buy a Kindle and access thousands. I’ll still keep resisting – I don’t need it – but it would definitely be more tempting.

If you already have a Kindle/iPad, it’s definitely something to check out.

Free resources for simple living & frugal bloggers

Posted by louisa on Friday 1 October 2010 in meta | 0 comments

I read a lot of frugal living blogs and blogs by growers & cooks – people who aren’t necessarily as geeky as me because they’re too busy doing what they love to be glued to their computers like I am – and recently I’ve noticed a number of people using copyrighted/watermarked images, or not being able to crop/edit pictures they’re using (especially screenshots). I thought it might be useful to them (and others) to pass on a few (free!) resources that I use regularly in my blogging.

(If you already know about all these things and/or get bored by computer stuff, perhaps you’ll be more interested in making a water bottle holder/flask holder, or making a blackberry jam from the last of the blackberries?)

• Stock images #1: it’s always better to use your own unique images wherever possible but between our growing, making and cooking, there’s not always time for that and I’m not the best photographer anyway so I use Stock.XCHNG sometimes too – when the picture isn’t an important part of the story, just a nice illustration. Stock.XCHNG is now part of Getty Images (which charges for use & watermarks images so it’s obvious if you steal them) and the “premium” pay-for photos are advertised heavily on the site but there is still a LOT of free stuff available. Some images require you to message & credit the creator if you want to use them but most don’t. It’s free to register and you can add to the community too by uploading your own pictures.
  >> Stock.XCHNG
   
• Stock pictures #2: Similarly, Flickr’s Creative Commons section allows you to search for pictures released for use under the Creative Commons licenses. Creative Commons images (and other media) are available for anyone to use, for free as long as you agree to meet the requirements of the licence – some pictures just need to credit the photograph, others say you can’t use them for commercial work etc. At the moment, there are 22million pictures that just need an attribution/credit – plenty to choose from.
  >> Flickr’s Creative Commons photo collection
   
• Photo editing/screen shots: The GIMP is fantastic, free “image manipulation” software, typically referred to as a free version of Photoshop. It does have a lot of very advanced functions but you can use it for simple cropping, resizing or colour tweaking. It’s easy to take screenshots with The GIMP too – File > Acquire > Screenshot > Snap – and the resulting image can easily be edited/resized or saved as a jpg or png file.
  >> The GIMP
   
• Creating banners/buttons: Another piece of fantastic, free graphics software is Inkscape. It’s a different kettle of fish from the GIMP – creating “scalable vector graphics” like Illustrator – and it took me a little while to get my head around it but once I did, I was completely converted. I also use it for desktop publishing style jobs like creating leaflets.
  >> Inkscape
   
• Fonts: I’m very picky about fonts and I always try to find the perfect font for use on banners/buttons. Fontspace is probably my favourite font site – because unlike many font download sites, it lets you instantly see what your word/words will look like in that font – rather than just seeing ABCs or the fonts name as a preview. Thousands of well-categorised fonts to choose from too.
  >> Fontspace
   
• Blogging software: I’ve tried a lot of different blogging platforms including Blogger & Livejournal, but WordPress is by far my favourite – it’s HIGHLY customisable & extendable, but at its most basic level, you don’t have to be a computer whiz to use it. You can either download it and run it on your own server (and some hosts provide it as a “one click install”) or you can leave all that to WordPress.com. To make your blog special, there are thousands and thousands of free themes available for it – the easiest to install are the ones in the WordPress theme directory but there are even more at WordPressthemesbase and some very sleek ones at BlogOhBlog.
  >> WordPress.org
   

I hope this has been useful to someone! If not, did I mention flask holder patterns and blackberry jam recipes? ;)