Automatic chicken coop door

Posted by louisa on Monday 4 October 2010 in chickens | 1 comment

Most of our chicken-related to-do list had to be put on hold yesterday because we don’t have gills any more. It was raining a little. (The beck at the bottom of the garden was flowing insanely fast – felt like a proper river rather than a little stream. It wasn’t a good day to have disturbed myself reading a book about a weather-caused apocalypse.)

Anyway, one chicken thing we did get to do this weekend was fit the automatic door for the pop hole. We decided to go for it – to “justify” the cost, I’ve instigated Alice’s suggestion of (retroactively) saving up for it by giving up fleeting wants and as for the chore element, John pointed out that it’s silly not to automate something that can easily be automated just because I feel guilty or lazy. Cleaning out the coop can’t be automated, dusting them for mites can’t be either, but the pop hole can be.

The gadget arrived on Saturday morning and John was delighted that he could tell exactly how it worked by looking at the simple circuit – gives me hope for us fixing it if things went wrong. The mechanism can lift & lower a door weighing up to 3kg, or up to 6kg if used with pulleys – meaning our little wooden door would be no problem and we didn’t have to make/buy/fit a new door (hurrah!).

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? ;)

I’m not self-sufficient so what am I?

Posted by louisa on Thursday 30 September 2010 in meta | 0 comments

When I was trying to come up with a name for this blog, I spent a lot of time thinking about the different words and definitions for someone in my situation. The phrase I repeatedly kept coming back to was “self-sufficient” but that’s just wrong.

Now I know there are a few people who are truly self-sufficient and others striving for it, but that’s never going to be me. Lazy me, the me who likes the internet and chocolate, the me who lives in suburbia, the me who sees a huge value in community and the division of labour. To label myself as “aiming for self-sufficiency” seems hopelessly naive but also inaccurate – that’s not my goal.

I grow, I cook, I make and I try to live a sustainable & green life – and I’d like a way to summarise that neatly but don’t know how. Perhaps I’m over-focusing but words and labels are powerful – created and used by others if we don’t do it ourselves.

A lot of people use “simple living” but to me, it has almost negative ascetic connotations of personal deprivation/doing without and also seems a bit wrong for people who document their simple living adventures on blogs, via laptops and their internet connections. (I know the vast majority of people who live simple lives don’t do that, it’s just easier for me to find out about the ones who do.)

“The Good Life” related terms seem more positive on the face of it – but in the UK at least, there is a mocking element to it too — bad jumpers, experimental homemade wine and poo-powered cars. (An aside: I’ve noticed when talking to people about how veg crop or chickens, there has a shift in people saying “oh, just like the Good Life!” to “oh, you’re just like River Cottage”. So there’s maybe a term: we can say we’re cottagers … maybe not.)

My boyfriend John suggested something along the lines of “self-sustaining” but I worry it has many of the drawbacks of “self-sufficient”. I thought about “DIY living” since it suggests the practical element that is core to the lifestyle – but I suspect it might conjure up images of us being obsessed with wallpaper and coving.

What term do you use/prefer? Do you put the emphasis on one part of your outlook than another, for example, calling yourself a “microfarmer” or focusing on “green living” even though green=frugal, sustainable, growing your own etc.?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

(Photo by Patrick Hajzler

Quick crocheted flask/water bottle holder pattern

Posted by louisa on Thursday 30 September 2010 in crochet & knitting, making | 0 comments

My building plans for last weekend (the mezzanine level thing and a mini ark for quarantine/broody hens) fell through because I felt ill so aside from a walk/forage at Bramley Falls park on Saturday and the sheep & goats in Calverley graveyard on Sunday, I spent most of the weekend sitting. I like sitting but it was frustrating to think of all the to-do tasks building up while I was lazing around.

In an effort to achieve at least one thing, I decided to make a flask holder/carrier – because I like taking a water flask out with me when we’re walking the dog but quickly get bored of carrying it.

It’s an adaptation of my never-fails crochet shopping bag pattern (which I should write up over here sometime) and is pretty quick and easy to make – an hour or so, maybe a little longer including the long strap.

Crocheted flask/water bottle holder pattern

Note: this pattern uses British crochet terminology. North America readers (etc) should revise accordingly: our DCs are your SCs, our TCs are your DCs etc.

To make this item, you need to know how to chain, DC, TC, join stitches to finish rounds and tie off. It’s not complicated at all but I fear parts of the pattern are a little confusing – let me know if you hit any problems.

Yarn & hook
This is a great project for using up the ends of yarn balls – it only uses about 20g. Choose a strong yarn, 4ply or DK, and a suitable sized hook – I think mine was a 5mm.

My top 5 clothes line drying tips

Posted by louisa on Monday 27 September 2010 in frugal, green | 12 comments

Environmental blogger The Crunchy Chicken is having a line drying challenge for readers of her blog next month – getting people to give up their default use of clothes dryers and make them think about greener alternatives instead.

From both the green and frugal perspectives, I fully support the idea but think it’s a strange time of year to have the challenge – if the purpose is to convert new people to line drying, then now, when it’s getting colder and damper, is not the time to do it. It’s a hard time to line dry. But I guess that is part of Crunchy’s challenge – anyone can line dry in summer, it’s easy to convert people to line drying in summer but if you can show people how line drying is possible all year around, it’ll be more sustainable – not just fair-weather converts.

Here are my top five clothes line drying tips:

1. Find the clothes drying rack/airer that’s right for your home & garden
This feels like a bit of an obvious point but there is a lot of variety. Think about what you’ll use it for most and how you’ll use it rather than buying the first one you see.

Our last house was very short on floor space so we had a ceiling-mounted rack that could be raised or lowered. Here, we’ve got more space but only heat the rooms we’re in so an easily portable airer is better (those vertical concertina style ones fold up and can be carried even when stack with clothes). Radiator ones can be a useful, neat overflow but be careful not to use them for bulky items – it reduces the air flow too much for the middle rows to dry.

Outside, rotary ones give a lot of hanging space and can be folded away easily and quickly. However, they’re awkward to use for bedsheets and other big items – a basic line is better for those (you can get retractable lines too, so they can be folded away easily as well).

And if you live in an area which is frequently showery, you’d be best thinking of an outdoor line you can cover so you can make the most of the warm sunny bits in between the rain — rotary driers can be covered or you can buy ones that are essentially an airer in a tent.

Spicy plum chutney recipe: plum & chilli jam

Posted by louisa on Friday 24 September 2010 in preserving, recipes, wild food | 5 comments

With the last of the plums from the wild tree next to our house, I made a delicious spicy plum and chilli chutney.

The plums are slightly smaller than cultivated ones but highly flavoured – both sweet & tart at the same time. Yum!

My Spicy Marrow Chutney recipe uses flavours inspired by the Indian sub-continent but this spicy plum chutney uses flavours from further east than that.

It’s not a thick jelly-ish jam but is delicious spread thinly on a cracker and topped with a piece of tasty cheese. Mmm, cheese.

Adding a second level to the chicken run?

Posted by louisa on Thursday 23 September 2010 in chickens | 0 comments

In advance of possibly expanding the tribe, I’ve been thinking of installing a mezzanine level in part of the chicken run. A metre-square or so, depending on the dimensions of the building materials.

I’ve had two ideas for it:

1) A table-like design – but with a rim around the outside so that it could hold wood chippings like on the floor of their run, and essentially be just a raised extension of the ground, or

2) Something slatted/including perches, since they do rather like perching.

The first option (which I’d likely make with a solid-topped pallet I was given recently, or with old formica desks that John’s dad salvaged from the skip at the school near him) would provide extra shelter in the run but might have drainage problems. The latter (made with other wooden pallets) wouldn’t provide any shelter but wouldn’t clog up with mud either, and as I said, they do rather like perching.

Any suggestions/thoughts?