Master Composters social

So tonight I had a trip out all by myself  :)  to a Master Composters social evening organised by our manager Ste to thank we volunteers for our time and efforts getting people to compost at home  :)

We gathered at The Cube in Malvern, a lovely place, for to eat an excellent veg/vegan supper of soup and sandwiches. I was pleased to be able to eat a Harcombe Diet friendly carb meal of beetroot, ginger and carrot soup and wholemeal bread sandwiches containing hummus and carrot :) Yummy.

Then we were entertained and informed by a talk on Cutting Edge Veg from the co-ordinator of Sowing New Seeds at Garden Organic, Anton Rosenfeld.  Anton is passionate about the growing, preparation and eating of food from a wide diversity of cultures. He has lived in South America, he has grown food crops for Caribbean and Indian communities, and on returning to the UK he was excited to see that people had managed to produce many of these crops successfully in our UK climate. The Sowing New Seeds project was the perfect opportunity to realise this interest.You may remember I blogged about attending CPD training with him at Ryton here.

Wonderful stuff and very inspiring :) After coffee and cake ( I had a just mouthful to taste :)  ) and a lot of chat with friends, I was given a lift back to Gt Malvern Station  (thank you Cyrus!) and waited on the platform, for 30 min listening to the rain fall (only because I had just  missed the early train ) reading stuff on my tablet and writing in my day journal.

Then the train arrived and I got on, sitting with a very lovely young lady who was returning to Hereford after a week away training in Liverpool. We had a lovely chat :)  Compostman collected me in my swish new to me car :)

I really enjoyed myself this evening :)

Food handling training - with a difference!

So yesterday I spent all day on a CIEH (Chartered Institute of Environmental Health) Food Safety Level 2 course - with a difference!

I spent it outside, cooking in the woods at Bishops Wood Environment Centre

We were an assorted group of ( mostly) Forest School leaders, but although I am a FS Leader, I was actually there with a couple of other Love Food Hate Waste Ambassadors, as we want to do some cooking demonstrations as part of our volunteer role.

We talked through the usual Food Safety stuff, different bacteria, danger zone/safe zone temperatures, how to keep clean, the use of different colour coded chopping boards, general food preparation,  the importance of proper storage and reheating,

and then we put it all into practice by making a delicious vegetable soup for lunch, cooked over the fire

We also toasted teacakes and made hot drinks and then mid afternoon packed up camp to do the CIEH (Chartered Institute of Environmental Health) Food Safety Level 2 exam

I have done a more conventional version of this course before and although it was helpful I did have a lot of questions about cooking outdoors which were not really addressed. This time they were :)

The course was taught by Sal Teasdale of Anubis Training - those of you who read my past posts will know I have done lots of training with Sal and Anubis and as usual the whole day was excellent.

Just hope I have passed!

I want a(nother) pond!

Regular readers of The Compost Bin will know that, after 16 years of living here and renovating the house and doing all sorts of work in the garden and wood, we are having a major rethink about all the aspects of the garden and grounds. How they are laid out; where to put a greenhouse, whether to have another polytunnel, where to put any new vegetable garden and soft fruit cage. Nothing is set in stone here, all manner of things are possible. Especially as we have a JCB!

When we first moved in to Compost Mansions one of the things which made us fall in love with the place was the pool in the meadow (the other was the wood!) One of the jobs we are part way through doing at the moment is clearing some trees to make a bigger meadow area around the pool and a few months ago I talked about how we were planning on rejuvenating the pool .  

Having a body of water in your garden creates so much scope for enjoyment; attracting wildlife, helping birds drink, bathe and collect mud for nests, the joy of watching the changing plant life as the year progresses, the sound of moving water if you have a fountain arrangement, actually the list is probably endless.

At the weekend I went on a Master Composter training course at the Shropshire Wildlife Trust Visitor Centre , which was to do with minimising water use, especially in the garden. The SWT building is amazing and has the most wonderful gardens -  you can read the visitor guide leaflet here.

The gardens there gave me so much inspiration and ideas for what I want to do here. I am in the process (slowly!) of redesigning the main garden so there is less lawn and more flower beds, but with flower beds which are a bit easier to manage (and less filled with bindweed!) than the existing arrangement. I have actually got a lot of herbaceous perennials ready to go in to one new bed, some I have dug up from elsewhere, some I have grown from seed or cuttings. This, like all the planting here will be "cottage garden" planting with lots of insect attracting flowers.

Shropshire Wildlife Trust Visitor Centre

I also really liked the solar powered water feature I saw at the weekend and it got me thinking. Water adds a whole new dimension to a garden and, though we are still planning on digging out the large pool and re instating it again, I now find myself really wanting to have a pond in the garden area, as well. After all, why can't we have more than one pond? I want the new pond to be more of a moving water feature though, than a full blown pool.

Shropshire Wildlife Trust Visitor Centre

Although I could make this new pond by just digging a shallow hole I would prefer to have a pond liner of some kind. So, I have been looking at flexible liners on line again but this time in a much smaller size than for the wildlife pool. One thing I don't want to have to do is spend too much money (we have lots of other things to do here and a very limited budget). I was therefore very interested to read about SealEco Greensea EPDM Pond Liner. This is apparently a new high quality alternative to butyl liner. It is the same thickness as butyl making it just as flexible and tough but it made from a different type of rubber meaning the price is much lower.

I went and had a look online at a few suppliers and was pleasantly surprised to find that I could get this sort of liner for a good price at Joe's Aquatic World. They also seem to be good value for all the other bits and pieces needed to go with a pond, so I am in the process of costing up how much a smallish pond would be if I ordered from them.

 I have also been getting inspiration from all sorts of online sources; photographs of what other people have done; ideas both large and small and have put some on my Pinterest "Dream gardens" board. One of the things I have found are water feature blades which create a moving sheet of water into a garden pond and give a reflection from the water. Another idea I really like and which fits in with the water saving theme is a pebble pond, where water moves over the surface of pebbles and is continuously pumped round by a solar pond pump. I must admit I did not find a lot of the statue water features I came across very attractive, though!

 

So it looks like I may be using the JCB to dig out a small pond in the near future - I had better get digging up and splitting some of the pond plants in the meadow pool to put in it :)

If you are thinking about making a pond you can get lots of advice about wildlife pond making and planting from the Wildlife Trust  here , from Pond Conservation here and The RSPB here.

And if you are anywhere near Shrewsbury I strongly recommend visiting the Shropshire Wildlife Trust Visitor Centre - its brilliant.