Expanding the tribe: four new chickens!

Posted by louisa on Saturday 13 November 2010 in chickens | 0 comments

After thinking about it then not getting around to it for a good while, we finally got around to expanding our chicken tribe yesterday.

We knew we wanted some more variety but didn’t know what – we went to see the wonderful Edward Boothman up near Silsden again, and he showed us all the options — it was very hard to choose!

In the end, we went for two Black Rocks – Edward Boothman is renowned for his Black Rocks so we thought we should get some. They’re photographed here getting up close and personal with Blue, one of our existing ISA Browns:

And we also got two pure breeds, who will give less eggs but are fun – a Buff Leghorn (who shall be imaginative known as Buffy):

And Minnie, the Black Minorca:

Minnie is hiding until the shelter I built them from pallets the other day – glad to see someone using it! Minnie looks unremarkable at this point – about 16 weeks old – but as she grows, her comb will get a lot bigger and redder, and her white lobes will grow huge — she’ll be a very interesting looking bird!

An expensive week at the vets

Posted by louisa on Friday 12 November 2010 in frugal | 1 comment

We’ve had an expensive week at the vets this week.

Our old cat Boron has always been more prone to dental problems than the others: he had to have his top fangs (amongst others) out a few years ago, giving him a wonderful gurning grin, then on Monday, he had to have pretty much the rest of his teeth out. He’s now just got one left, a molar or premolar I forget which.

At £240, it was an expensive day out for the little chap but he should be happier now – I suspect his gums were hurting a lot before.

But there’s more. As part of the pre-op blood tests, they found he had slightly higher than normal T4, which means he’s got hyperthyroidism. Hyperthyroidism is apparently an increasingly common condition in older cats – although according to some sources, it’s probably not actually increasing in frequency, it probably just increasing in diagnosis. Just about every very old (14+) cat I’ve ever known has been a bit too skinny and not as rigorous about keeping their fur as immaculate as they used to be – I always assumed that was an old cat thing but it seems like it’s probably hyperthyroidism.

There are apparently three ways to treat hyperthyroidism – an operation, radiotherapy (which gives them radioactive poo for 3-5 weeks!) or ongoing medication every day for the rest of their lives. The radiotherapy thing isn’t an option – it costs over £1500 and the cat has to live in a special cattery for it’s glowing poop period – and our vet kinda glossed over the operation option (telling me about how they’re reluctant to operate on hyperthyroid cats because the common hyperthyroidism symptoms – such as increased heart rate, high blood pressure or damage to other organs – make it a danger to operate — but Boron had an operation on Monday…). So it’s pills every day for the rest of his life.

If we buy them monthly from the vet, it’ll cost £28 a month (93p a day). If we buy a full tub from the vet – 100 tablets – it’ll be £71 (71p a day). I can get them cheaper online – £41 for the 100 tablets, although I’ll need a prescription from the vets for £10 – but still 51p a day in total. There will also be ongoing monitoring blood tests (one after a month, then hopefully just every six months) which are about £40 a pop.

Boron’s a marvellous, loving cat and in the ten years we’ve been together, he’s never been an expensive high maintenance cat so he’s worth it. Knowing about it now, there is no way we can not treat it but it’s another thing to add into the budget…

Why I’m trying to stop making comparisons

Posted by louisa on Thursday 11 November 2010 in anti-consumerism, frugal, meta | 12 comments

Last week, I wrote about how I cut our gas bill in half with just one phone call. Immediately after my phone call, I told a friend about the experience and he expressed surprise about how little gas we use – compared to him (he keeps records like I do) and compared to the national average, a figure he knew off the top of his head. Intrigued, I started looking up more and more information about average consumption figures – the boards at MoneySavingExpert are full of people talking about how much they pay, for what size of a house, and I also found a website which lets you compare your consumption with others locally and nationally, IN GRAPH FORM. (I like graphs.)

But then I stopped. I realised what I was doing. If I’d been doing it a year earlier when we first moved into our new house, I could have pretended I was looking up the info to get an idea how much I’d be paying over the year. But I knew exactly how much I should be paying. I was just doing it to gloat. To feel good about how frugal we are, how green we are, compared to the rest of Mr & Ms UK resident.

I’m terrible at making comparisons to make myself feel better about things. I think it’s partly (mostly?) to do with being insecure and generally having low-self esteem, but another part of it is wanting to proof my deliberately lifestyle decisions are making a difference.

I want to know that someone else spends three, four, five times as much as me on their weekly shop because I grow my own and spend time cooking from scratch to justify my time and energy. I want to hear the person who bought the 42″ plasma tv or the new BMW complain about not having any money at the end of the month, because it justifies my sensible attitude in not buying those things. I want to hear that the person who lives in t-shirt and shorts in the middle of winter is paying multiple-multiple times the amount for heating than woolly-clad me, because it means I can look down on them, on their wastefulness and how they’re SINGLE-HANDEDLY DESTROYING THE PLANET.

I’m not that bad really. But it’s there and it’s destructive.

Quick Spicy Tomato & Lentil Soup recipe

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 9 November 2010 in cooking, recipes | 1 comment

Spicy tomato and lentil soup is a great, hearty soup, which can be made quickly & simply – and from cheap, store cupboard items. As a result, it’s one of my favourite emergency soups when we need something quick and warming – it only takes about 30mins from start to finish.

The observant may notice a pattern with the things I cook. What can I say, we love spice-inspired endorphins. ;) Again though, like with the spicy butternut squash soup from a few weeks ago, for us, this is more flavourful than highly spiced – easy to add more for head-exploding spiciness though.

Chicken shelter from two old pallets

Posted by louisa on Monday 8 November 2010 in chickens, DIY, making | 6 comments

I finally built my long-awaited shelter for the chicken run on Saturday – hurrah! It will provide more stomping space (since they can stomp around underneath and on top), more shelter for the rain and somewhere sheltered to hang another drinker.

My original plan had been very fancy – involving a sloped solid platform (to be a shelter, with the water draining into a mini-gutter) topped with perches. The actual version is simpler – two small pallets (about half the size of normal pallet), one cut in half to be the legs, one left intact to be the platform, then finished off with scrap wood.

Since I was using already pretty solid pallets, it came together really quickly – three little bits of sawing (through the support struts of the pallet to be the legs) and a few screws, and I had a strong platform, which I could use as a work bench for cutting the scrap planks to size.

The raised bit in the middle has three purposes:

1) I couldn’t find any wood to fit the gap between the two middle slats – everything was either just too big or way too small – so I fitted a too-big piece across the top (it’s supported underneath by some little pieces on the support joists);

2) The raised sides are a bit narrow for the purpose really but could be perched on if a chicken felt that way inclined; and,

3) It gives a neat bribery trough for corn and similar treats.

It’s a little low really — they can get under there and stand up, but not stretch properly.

But I’m really glad I made this one – it showed me how easy it was and because it was smaller, it was easier for me to manage on my own without having resort to Long-Armed John’s assistance. It’s a useful prototype really – and aside from the cost of a few screws, completely free!

I’m going to make another version with two full sizes pallets next weekend – that should be more than tall enough for them. Once I’ve made that, I’m going to secure more perches going to and from the platforms and their existing perches so they can play “floor is hot lava” around the run :)

Learning patience from wild food (and veg growing)

Posted by louisa on Friday 5 November 2010 in growing, meta, wild food | 0 comments

As I said in my post about our fungi forage last weekend, that walk taught me to confidently identify about half a dozen wild mushroom species, and the wild food walk we did in the early summer taught me how to identify another half dozen things, mostly green leaves. These built on things I’d learnt how to identify myself and the obvious things that we all know (nettles, dandelions, blackberries etc). So after a couple of years of being interested in wild food, I can identify maybe 25 things with enough confidence to eat them. That’s not exactly that many when you consider the variety of stuff out there.

When I want to learn a new craft or a new way to cook or bake something, I tend to grind it – a video game term for doing some repetitive task/quest over and over again in order to “level up” as quickly as possible so you can go onto more exciting things. When I was figuring out my (lazy) way to make slow rise no knead bread, I made it every other day for a fortnight. By the end of it, I was knocking out perfect, uniform loaves without much effort at all. By grinding it, I can quickly learn from my mistakes and don’t ever get stuck in a “it didn’t work last time, I don’t want to try again” slump.

But I can’t grind wild food. Nature won’t let me grind. It won’t let me focus on finding just one type of thing at any given time. I have to learn by its schedule and its randomness, an enforced slow learning curve.

Growing things in our garden is possible even worse. I’ve usually got a couple of months to collect and experiment with different wild plants before they go out of season, but I have, by and large, got one shot at growing things each year. If I miss the narrow sowing window or my seedlings die a few days after transplanting, that’s pretty much it – I have to wait a year to try again.

I always feel a bit sad when each wild food window closes – but I suspect it’s good for me to have these limitations in part of my life. It’ll teach me patience and there is nearly always something new to move onto finding or planting. I can continue reading about boletes & russulas and tomato seed varieties & manual pollination techniques over the winter – grinding the theory – but I have to wait until next year to continue the practical work.

After three decades of flitting from one thing to another fractionally more exciting thing, I think developing the skills of patience and sustained year-on-year learning is as important for me and my sustainable living as being able to tell the difference between a death cap and field mushroom. I just wish I’d started earlier ;)

How I cut our gas bill in half with one phone call

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 3 November 2010 in frugal | 3 comments

Recently, we got a letter from our utility company.

As a result of your latest annual review, it said, your monthly payments will increase to by £5 to £70 a month. I gasped – £70 a month!?

I realise an increase by a fiver isn’t much in this day and age – but the original £65 was higher than it should have been (we’d underpaid when we first moved in so overpaid over the summer to make up for it). I’d been hoping for it to drop when everything levelled out, not raise further.

John and I were in disbelief about it. We didn’t think we used that much gas. Sure, it powers our heating, our hot water and our cooker hob, but the oven is electric and so is the shower. We mostly shower rather than have baths so don’t use much gas-heated hot water at all. Even though we work from home and have a high-ceilinged draughty house, we hardly over-use the central heating – we prefer to use our woodburning stoves for heat when we’re in the living room or office, and only used the central heating last year when we were in other parts of the house – with the thermostat at 15C/60F and only programmed to come on at certain times of day (and certainly never at night). We wear layers and use animals as hot water bottles.

We weren’t sure how much we could cut back – maybe rely on the stoves more (although we’d obviously need more wood than we’d planned for to do that), wear more layers, get more animals… John accepted that his nasty habit of turning on the hot tap to rinse things (but turning it off again before the hot water started) needed to stop and I worried how much energy we’d used cooking jams and long-time-on-the-hob stews, curries and pasta sauces. Even with my recent drop in income, we weren’t particularly concerned about the extra fiver – we wouldn’t have to be selling any kidneys to cover it – but we were worried about how much it was costing compared to how little we were using. What if we did need to start using the heating more? How much would it cost us then? And what’s the going rate for a one-careful-owner kidney these days?

Then I decided to do some maths. I collected together all the year’s bills and counted up how many units of gas we’d actually used. I also made sure that our bills were being worked out on actual meter readings and not estimates – they were. Then I made the phone call I mention in the title.

I explained the situation to the woman on the end of the phone. I explained that I was happy to accept that I’d done something wrong in my calculations but according to my figures, we should be paying substantially less than the £70 they’d proposed. With a bit of rounding up, I thought it should be closer to £40 a month.

She put me on hold and did the maths herself. Then she put me on hold again and got her manager to do the maths. They both worked out it should have been £32 a month. We settled on £35 a month to give us a bit of leeway in case it’s a cold winter and the dog doesn’t perform her feet heating task as well as desired.

She said she couldn’t understand where the £70 a month had come from – it just didn’t make any sense when you looked at the figures.

I suspect the power company don’t actually do any counting during the automated “annual review” process and just put everyone’s bill up a little bit – an amount not many people will notice – because every extra pound that our accounts are in credit will be money in their bank account making interest for them. Sure, that money is still technically mine and I’d be able to use it against future power purchasing, but I’d much rather it was earning interest for me, not them!

The episode has made me more keen than ever to get our paperwork in better order and to keep taking monthly meter readings for my own interest – if we suddenly start using more of something, it will be nicer to be able to spot it earlier rather than waiting for the quarter-and-then-some bills. I’m also definitely going to be checking all future bills incredibly carefully.