Urban gardening, the upcycled way

Ever since Christmas when I bought W an Allotinabox, I’ve wanted to start planting our seeds and growing our own veggies. Unfortunately gardening doesn’t work like that. There are seasons and temperatures to consider and chucking all the seeds into pots on 26th December just wasn’t a sensible option. Apparently.

But finally the day rolled around that we could start our vegetable patch. And it just so happened that the day before I discovered how to make these.

Newspaper plant pots. Folded from a single sheet of newspaper and perfectly sturdy when filled with compost. When your seeds have sprouted into seedlings, these upcycled pots can be planted straight into bigger tubs and will break down naturally. It’s utterly genius. Not to mention heart-breakingly cute.

We have several pots with chives, peppers, courgettes and leeks in. When the Allotinabox planters ran out, I grabbed some wooden clothes pegs and wrote on those. So simple and they look great.

As I feverishly set about ripping newspaper in half to make more pots, W took the more adult approach and read the seed packet instructions. Our spring onions and salad leaves needed wider spaces. The newspaper pots might be the answer to growing peppers but not for lettuce.

Old milk bottles cut in half length ways made the perfect salad-friendly seed tray. We stabbed some drainage holes in the bottom, filled them with compost, poked a few tiny seeds in and it was job done.

A week or so later we’ve got sprouting seeds all over the place. Even the pepper, which was refusing to show it’s face, has finally popped up.

We have plenty more seeds to plant in the coming weeks including carrots, beetroot and spinach. Oh and of course, plenty more cress.

When the seedlings get big enough to go out on their own, we have a few big tubs to decant them into. Including one lovely wooden one from Plantabox that I bought for W last year.

Oh, and our watering can? Another milk bottle of course. With a few holes poked into the lid.

So far, so good. It seems that gardening is a doddle! Our upcycled, urban vegetable patch is well under way and I can’t wait till harvest time.

A trip to Paris to steal a sustainable idea

After being together for almost 2 and a half years, W and I finally took our first proper holiday together last month. For four wonderful days we went to Paris. We got the Eurostar over (or should that be under) and stayed in a great little hostel within walking distance of just about everything.

The Eurostar is fantastic – instead of the hours and hours waiting at an airport before departure, the boarding time for the Eurostar was 30 minutes before it left the station. I had a normal sized bottle of shampoo in my bag and my Aquatina full of water. Nobody batted an eyelid.

While W dozed I stared gleefully out the window like a child. I still love train journeys. Especially when they leave a city. You get to watch the buildings get lower and further apart, the greyness gently fading out into green, grassy fields. We entered a few dark tunnels and then popped out of them minutes later, each time I prodded W and squealed “Bonjour France!”. This happened so many times that I have to admit, I was never exactly sure when we left England and arrived in France. The channel tunnel bit of the journey is only around 20 minutes long, the other two hours is overland. The tell-tale owl-like electricity pylons finally gave it away that we no longer en Angleterre. Well that and seeing a sign for ‘Paris Nord’.

I really can’t fault the Eurostar. It’s so fast, so easy and so much better than flying. We arrived in Paris feeling great. No dry skin from pressurised cabins, no long, slow moving queues for baggage and no fear of falling through the air to my death. Big smiles all round then.

We stepped off the train and about 5 minutes later were on a Metro heading for our hostel. It all seemed too easy to be true.

We had lists and lists of things to do in Paris from various friends that have visited or lived there over the years. But top of my list was a visit to la Ressourcerie, one of the many new shops popping up in France that takes in anything you don’t want and either sells it, fixes it, makes it into something new or recycles it.

You can take clothes, CD’s, kitchen ware, furniture, toys, electrical goods – broken or not. All those bits and bobs that you might not give to a charity shop because they aren’t really worth anything but are still perfectly usable. All the things that you just end up chucking in the rubbish because you don’t know where to recycle them. Basically, anything.

When you walk in it feels like a big junk shop mixed with a charity shop. Anything you can think of you will find in there, including a homemade lampshade fashioned from a pink baby bath.

A key difference between this and a junk shop is all the fixing and upcycling that goes on. In a junk shop, if it’s broken then it stays broken. If its useless then it stays useless. In a Ressourcerie, if it can be fixed or made into something else then it will be. I wished my french was better so I could chat to the owner but instead I made do with having a good old wander around. And resisting the urge to buy all those little things I love but don’t need.

The reason I was so keen to visit a Ressourcerie was because I would love to have something similar in London. A place where people can bring anything and everything, broken, old, new or worn out. I could spend my days fixing and making, hiring people to help me bring things back to life. We could put on simple electrical courses, sewing lessons and DIY days to teach people how to mend and make do. Seeing the french version was really inspiring and I returned home bubbling with enthusiasm.

Could I be the girl to bring la Ressourcerie to London? Watch this space.

Worms. Round II

So my foray into the world of wormeries didn’t go quite to plan. In my over-excitment I grossly overfed them in the first few weeks. Bewildered by the vast amount of food being heaped on them they panicked and buried themselves into the soil, refusing to eat a thing while the growing pile of my vegetable odds and ends were being mercilessly heaped on above them.

I realised something wasn’t right when I noticed a molding bit of bread spreading it’s white furry tentacles across the rest of the food.

“I’ll just cover that in more food…” I thought to myself whilst trying to ignore the sensible part of my brain that was saying “fish it out, don’t leave it in there!” But never one to get my hands dirty until absolutely necessary, I thought I would see if ‘out of sight, out of mind’ also equaled problem solved.

The smell a few days later confirmed that no, out of sight might mean out of mind but it doesn’t mean out of nose. Gingerly opening the wormery also confirmed that no, it does not equal problem solved either.

My wormery was full of furry mold. And it stank.

Unfortunately it seemed that now was the time to get my hands dirty. Luckily for everyone, I was too disgusted by the sight and smell to remember to take a photo. But I can assure you, it was gross. Using a garden trowel I shoveled up the moldy food and threw it into a plastic bag. I hoped that most of the worms had stayed hidden in the clean soil beneath rather than ventured up into the festering mess that I had created above it. After poking around I discovered a few worms still in the bottom of the wormery but I had definitely lost a few along the way.

I added some shredded up newspaper and a handful of lime mix and left it outside for a while to let the smell dissipate. We were off on holiday the next day and I hoped that we wouldn’t return to a newly molded wormery. The freezing February weather meant I was reluctant to leave it outside in case I accidentally froze the remaining worms to death so back inside it came. I placed a few bowls of bicarbonate of soda around to soak up the smell, muttered “Au revoir” and left for Paris for four days.

On our return the wormery was happier! No mold but sadly barely any worms either. This was a job for Amazon. Two days later a packaged marked ‘URGENT LIVE WORMS’ plopped through the letterbox. It was heavy and a bit wriggly. Well OK, maybe that was my imagination.

Inside were tons of fat happy looking worms. I had a brief panic that they didn’t look exactly like my original worms but then I reminded myself that I am no expert on the finer differences between these little creatures and tipped them in. I added a SMALL handful of teabags and vegetable offcuts and left them to it, wondering about worm fights and the possibility of accidentally creating a new breed of worms that can somehow eat through plastic and invade my living room.

Three days later I buckled to my meddling addiction and added another TINY amount of food. I just couldn’t help myself! But that is it, no more food for the next week and I’ll see how they settle in. Fingers crossed I won’t kill them all this time!

Any wormery advice is gratefully received – please leave a comment, the health and welfare of my worms depend on you!

Thank God for cress

For Christmas, W and I amassed quite a haul of stuff to make our balcony more exciting. From a wormery, to a bird feeder to a beautiful box of seeds and tips from Allotinabox. I even got a can with a sunflower seed in it. Eating locally just got a whole lot more local.

Last weekend I piled the seeds up on our coffee table, grabbed the little trowel and got excited about planting. I turned over the packets to read when to plant them. It turns out January is not a planting month. For anything. Step one and my woeful lack of gardening skill is highlighted. I sulk for a few minutes then we mark out on the calendar when we can starting planting what. Everything is at least a month away.

As I pack the seeds back into the box, sighing mournfully as my Sunday afternoon planting plans drift out the window, I turn over the last pack. Cress.

The favourite plant of primary school kids everywhere. The easiest vegetable you can grow. If it even IS a vegetable? It grows whenever and where ever you like. My green fingered Sunday is not lost!

I grabbed a tupperware, added some damp cotton wool balls and sprinkled on some seeds. It took all of 3 minutes (including finding the cotton wool balls).

“This is my kind of gardening.” I muttered to my newly planted cress as I covered them with a wet tissue.

The next morning most of the seeds have sprouted…something. It looks exciting. By the evening they are all sprouted and taking hold in the cotton wool. The following day green bits are growing up all over the place.

It’s been less than a week and my first foray into urban gardening looks like this.

The satisfaction vs time involved in growing cress appeals highly to my low attention span. That and the fact that is almost impossible to do wrong. Although I fear it may have lowered my expectations for simplicity when it comes to growing my ‘real vegetables’ from Allotinabox in the next few months.

But for now, my journey into the urban gardening world has started, and I’m loving it! Bring on the egg and cress sandwiches.

Fishing for plastic

(Image: Groves, Murakami and Jones)

The clever students at RCA have come up with another brilliant design idea. The Sea Chair Project. Alexander Groves, Azusa Murakami and Kieren Jones renovated an old fishing trawler into a boat that collects up plastic floating in the sea. The plastic gets sorted into sizes through a flotation tank and then it’s ready to be recycled and rescued. The boat even has an onboard chair making machine that produces chairs from the plastic it scoops up!

With our oceans becoming more and more like a giant plastic soup, it is ingenious ideas like this that might go some way to getting our seas back to their normal, non-plastic-y selves.

P.S. If you like this idea, check out Method’s bottles made from recycled sea plastic.

(Spotted on GreenMuze, written for Do The Green Thing)

It’s big big news in the world of apple stickers

(Image: Scott Amron)

Good news apple fans! No more having to pick off a label before washing and eating your favourite fruity snack, this new sticker dissolves in water to become the soap to wash your apple.

Ok, so it probably isn’t an issue for most people, and I have never washed an apple in my life, but this waste-less sticker is a pretty clever design. And if you’re sick of filling up your bin with apple stickers then you’ll be rejoicing over this news too!

(Spotted on Treehugger, Post for Do The Green Thing)

Thirty new pets through the post

Yesterday I received about 3o new pets through the post (but shhh, don’t tell my landlord). 30 pets might sound excessive to you but they don’t take up that much space. I keep them in a plastic tub on my balcony and I’ll feed them on scraps once a day in about two weeks. This isn’t animal cruelty, this is the life of a womery owner.

That’s right, I finally got the wormery I’ve been dreaming about since I was…well a few months younger than now. But still, the excitement was huge. As was the parcel.

I carefully opened it up (not sure why I was being so careful, it’s not like the worms were just going to  be free-crawling around the box!) As I unpacked it all I got a slight stomach flip of ‘ugh, worms’ but brushed past it and told myself to stop being silly.

I don’t mind worms. The big pale ones you find in the garden. One big pale worm is fine. I used to play with them as a kid. They were the garnish on my not-so-delicious Mud Pies. But suddenly the prospect of dipping my hands into a big tub of plenty of wiggling worms wasn’t so appealing. Luckily they were packaged up nicely and looked quite friendly. I think. I mainly had them between thumb and forefinger at arms length.

I hastily read the manual then set to putting it together. Tap at the bottom, layer to hold the compost up over the liquid compost (also known as liquid gold thanks to its wormy, pooey, nutrients) , bit of newspaper, pile of earth and some damp shredded newspaper. Then the worms. I gently, but fairly quickly, emptied them into their new home. In my hurry to cover them with tasty vegetable peelings (which I had to dig out of the bin!) I forgot to take a photo of them in their new home. But trust me, they are somewhere under this lot.

When the lid was on tight (and double checked) I placed them and their new home outside on our balcony. It’s a bit nippy out there at the moment, not to mention windy, so I tucked them into a corner and then hastily retreated back inside to watch through the window (for about 2 minutes until I realised I was just watching a plastic tub).

“Maybe I should knit them a warm wormery-cosy….” I mused as the wind howled past the windows. Glancing at my knitting bag stuffed with the ‘third time lucky’ hat I’m making for W (don’t ask, why he can’t just grow a wider head to fit the big hats I’m making I just don’t know), I realised it would be mid-summer by the time I managed to finish it.

“If it gets too cold out there, I’ll bring them in” I promised myself, trying to forget what I read about one wormery owner who woke up one morning to find her worms had escaped and were partying all over her kitchen.

Unfortunately I have to wait for about 2 weeks for them to settle in before I can start adding more food to the tub. I have the date circled and starred in my diary. It also means that in about 2 weeks we should have almost zero waste going into our bin. What with our vegetables being delivered packaging-free by the wonderful Abel and Cole, our pretty good borough recycling and my refusal to buy things that are over packaged, our bin has mainly been filled with vegetables peelings. Well, not for much longer! This was one of the main reasons for wanting a wormery. At my parents home we compost all our food scraps but in London it hasn’t been possible. Chucking bin bags of rotting potato peelings into the rubbish truck has made me feel slightly guilty as food doesn’t break down in the same way in a landfill site as it does on a compost heap. And what is so great about the worms is that they will eat almost anything. Aside from the easy to compost vegetables and teabags, worms also eat cooked food and meat (not that meat is an issue in our flat). I love these gross little things already. Plus, just think what all this liquid gold is going to do for the veggies we’re going to grow this year!

Roll on January 20th, mama wants to feed her new pets!

****

Thanks to Original Organics, the wonderful, wormy people I bought my wormery from. And who are very friendly on Twitter. They may become less so when I send regular panic-stricken tweets about the health of my worms…

Our little wooden Christmas tree

This year is our first year together in a flat by ourselves and so, in true girly style,  I was excited about our Christmas decorations. Due to space restraints, anything big was definitely out the question. Anything shop bought was also off the table. (Flats are expensive without hundreds of flatmates and with most of our home decor being homemade, why should Christmas, the most crafty holiday of them all, be the one to break the DIY mold?)

During a peaceful weekend back at my parents house in the countryside I visited one of my favourite vintage and craft shops, Chesapeake Mill. There I spotted a beautiful little tree made from sticks. I left immediately (….via the till to buy the vintage clay pot to add to my other vintage clay pots. In my defense it had been reduced to £1. I’d have been a fool not to buy it) to gather up some sticks. Pulling on my walking boots and grabbing a bag I headed out to the fields where I spent my youth picnicking, kissing boys and avoiding homework. I scrambled into ditches, fought off dogs and scratched myself on brambles. I returned home, triumphant with a bag of sticks and muddy shoes.

I left the sticks in the airing cupboard overnight to dry them off and the following morning I woke early, excited to start making. Dad found me Granddads old handheld drill.

Unfortunately some of the sticks were pretty tough so, after fruitlessly sweating into the drill for 10 minutes, I had to resort to Dad’s electric drill, much to the annoyance of my neighbours at 8.30am on Sunday morning.

Using a thin wooden pole to thread them onto, I drilled holes through the middle of each stick. Only stopping to pretend I was robot with a drill three times.

Dad helped me saw up a little triangle for the top and he then emerged from the depths of the garage waving a circular slab of MDF with a neat little hole drilled in the middle.

“Do you need a base? I just found this.”

Would you believe it, the hole was the perfect size! I drilled a hole through a wine cork to make a trunk and then popped it onto the base. 9.30am and I had already made a Christmas tree. Our first Christmas tree. And I hadn’t bought a single thing!

I added some green felt, left over from my art school days, to the base to make it a bit more colourful and W and I put it up this weekend. What with it being so small, this event took all of 2 minutes. That includes hanging the 5 small felt hearts that I had sewed as decorations. But hey, it’s quality, not quantity. And I’m damn proud of that little tree.

Scrub your way to some awesome graffiti

(Image: Moose Benjamin Curtis)

Street artist Moose Benjamin Curtis is decorating London with a new kind of graffiti. Rather than painting anything onto the walls of the city, he’s scrubbed stuff off. His beautiful and surprisingly delicate patterns are cleaned off some of the cities dirtiest surfaces, leaving a sort of anti-graffiti. The police weren’t too happy but were fairly flummoxed when asked to define what he’d done wrong. He was eventually let off after promising to clean the whole wall and therefore removing his careful artwork. But his floral images can be found scattered across cities worldwide, making the world a bit cleaner and a lot prettier.

(Image: Moose Benjamin Curtis)

Criminal or beautiful, what do you think?

P.S. If you’re a fan of this then you’ll love this moss graffiti.

(Spotted on Grist, written for Do The Green Thing)

In just one Swish, all your dreams will come true

Apologies for the fact that this post is about 3 weeks late but I thought what happened was a nice enough story to tell so long after the event.

In the middle of November I organised a Swish at work for all my lovely, creative colleagues, a handful of fashionable friends and a couple of other green-minded charities and companies in London. We had some organic wine leftover from a previous event, some delicious treats from Marks and Spencers (I forgot to make my own!) and several rails of lovely clothes.

Ladies arrived armed with suitcases of unwanted clothes and canvas bags stuffed with items they never wear. Wine was poured, biscuits were gobbled down and new friends were made. Then when all the clothes were hung up, we dug in. In much the same fashion as our previous Do The Green Thing swish, comments were flying through the air, recommendations could be heard from rail to rail and squeals of delight erupted when a particular beauty was uncovered.

One such squeal came from me.

A few years ago I needed a dress for my boyfriends end of uni Summer Ball. Dressing up smart doesn’t come naturally to me and so I dragged my feet around the posh frock shops for several weeks, muttering curses and continually being sidetracked by pretty, floaty, floral dresses. I dutifully took photographs of myself in each dress I tried on to send to my boyfriend for his approval (I’d already been told that most of the dresses I’d picked were not ball-suitable and would look more at place in a field of daisies with a cow chewing thoughtfully at the cud by a small, tinkling stream, NOT at a Summer Ball where everyone else would be looking smart and grown up). One of the dresses that was deemed unsuitable, albeit he did agree it was very pretty, was a very floral, very floaty, very cute dress that I was sad to put back on the rails. But back on the rails it went and, eventually, I found a posh dress and, in true fairy tale fashion, I did go to the ball. A few months ago my boyfriend revealed he had kept the photo of me in the much loved floral dress because I looked so pretty in it.

So when I discovered the very same, very floral, very floaty, very cute dress at the Swish in my size and with no other hands grabbing at it, I couldn’t help it, I squealed. Yanking it off the hanger and pulling it on over my t shirt, I pranced around in joy that the dress had come back into my life. I was obviously meant to own this dress. I think it might be a bit of green karma for all the organic, locally produced food I’ve been eating recently!

And if that isn’t enough to make you think ‘wow, I need to get me to one of these Swishes’ then maybe the second trimuph of the night will convince you.

My friend Holly came along with a few items of clothes she no longer wanted. She was Swish virgin and came with equal parts of ‘helping my friend out with the event she organised’  and ‘free clothes? yes please!’.  She arrived, a bit frazzled with the recent news that the Hen party she was attending the following week had suddenly been announced to be attended in 1920′s style. Where on earth was she going to get a 1920′s dress in such short notice? (Can you see where this is going?)

The ever wonderful and always fashionable Liv, of The End of the New fame, had only gone and bought a vintage 1920′s style dress with her to the Swish that night! In ture Swish magic, it fit Holly perfectly and there was even a pair of shoes to match the dress. An unbelievable end to a fantastic Swishing story.

So come on, you must be convinced of the amazingness that is the Swish now? If you want some info about how to set one up or find one in your area, take a peek at the official Swishing website.

Trust me, you want to get this in your life.