Weed killer found in human urine across Europe

Well done FoE for exposing this outrageous situation.70% of the UK samples contained glyphosate weed killer!

My view? It is absolutely appalling.

Weed killer found in human urine across Europe

People in 18 countries across Europe have been found to have traces of the weed killer glyphosate in their urine, show the results of tests commissioned by Friends of the Earth Europe and released today [1].
The findings raise concerns about increasing levels of exposure to glyphosate-based weed killers, commonly used by farmers, public authorities and gardeners across Europe. The use of glyphosate is predicted to rise further if more genetically modified (GM) crops are grown in Europe [2].
Despite its widespread use, there is currently little monitoring of glyphosate in food, water or the wider environment. This is the first time monitoring has been carried out across Europe for the presence of the weed killer in human bodies.

http://www.foeeurope.org/weed-killer-glyphosate-found-human-urine-across-Europe-130613

Of blight and seed saving

Blight has finally hit the potatoes :-( Given the humidity and totally wet time we have had here since April I am frankly amazed that we have managed to get this far into the summer without signs of blight, but now it is there.

So Compostman has chopped off all the haulms for all three of the raised beds with spuds in them and we will wait for several weeks before lifting the potatoes. If we do this we will hopefully have usable potatoes which we can store over winter.

I have also started this season seed saving. This is HSL Asparagus Lettuce, a soft, buttery tasting cut and come again variety which I love. As this seeded inside the polytunnel before any other lettuce set flowers, I know it will be true to type, so I am saving some of the seed for my own use. I have put the stems in a paper bag, seed heads down and when it has finally dried I will gently rub the flowers to get at the seeds.







I have also got the dehydrator down from the attic :-) yep folks, it is THAT time of year ( finally!) when the harvest starts :-)

Rainy Sunday

Have been gardening and composting all morning in the pouring rain Only just had lunch and a sit down!

I like warm rain....

Also have washed out the rabbit hutch and now have to refill it and replace it in the run. Compostgirl has cleaned out the two Guinea pig runs and refilled them with paper and hay etc. She did a really good job of it!

Am having a bit of a sit down before I start on that, and potting up some okra plants and more tom plants , for outside growing. Will then plant some pea plants outside...

Later...

I have just planted some sprouting earlies in old growing medium bags.. I had some left over from the 400 seed spuds... so why not? If you don't plant them, they will certainly NOT grow...but if you do, they might give you a few nice spuds....

I have just eaten some gourmet baby broad beans, new potatoes ..yummy, mmmmm along with a casserole of home grown leeks, dried tomatoes and courgettes and local chicken,.......yummy yummy....and home made cider and later on, a glass of home made wine...mmmm

Today I have .....pricked out many, many tomato plants - they are about 6 inches high and I have now got 6 plants of each variety in a multi cell cell and another 4 in individual pots.

I have grown;

Pink Cherry, Red Cherry, Aunty Madge, Gardeners Delight (Cherry)

Costoluto Fiorentino, Costoluto Genovese, Big Boy, Beefsteak, Black Russian, Amiee stuffing, Carlton (Beef)

Shirley, Moneymaker, Latah, Roma, Golden Sunrise, Yellow Perfection,

plus a few others I can't remember now...

I have about 170 plants all growing well, some in the cold frame in side the polytunnel ( those are mine!) and some in the porch conservatory ( which I will sell or give away.)

Have similar quantities of peppers, have grown Californian Wonder, Nardullo, Marconi Rosso, Romano and Hot Cayenne chilli.

We use a lot of tomatoes and now I dehydrate most of them we don't have the space storage issues in the freezers which we used to have to deal with.

These photos were taken 2 weeks ago when the seedlings were just over 2 weeks old.

Abundance

Guess what I have been doing recently?

A quiet weekend in the garden

This weekend has been a peaceful, if busy time. Time spent tending my garden, weeding , harvesting and talking to visitors about my work in the Wood and the various renewable energy systems we use to reduce our carbon footprint.

Yesterday afternoon and this morning I have; cleaned out the eglu, cleaned the two large wooden hen houses, the walk in run and all the feeders and drinkers, filled 8 compost bins with assorted stuff, moved 8 wheel barrowloads of an old bonfire pile to somewhere else ( lots of digging involved), hand mowed around the potato patch ( the raised bed ones), tidied the barn and swept the paved areas, watered and fed the polytunnel and picked lots of produce from the garden. I did lots of other stuff as well, but I can't remember the details!

I also did lots of inside, housework...and washed, hung out , dried and put away 3 loads of washing. I love the smell of freshly line dried washing!

Compostgirl went to play at her best friend's house today, and I gave a talk to a group of crop sharers from a local CSA scheme just up the road. They walked across the fields to us, and we had a pleasant hour or so in the wood, where I gave my talk, they asked questions, drank tea and generally had a look around at how we keep chickens, grow veg, make compost and generate our own electricity and hot water and wood products. They were a lovely group of people and it was a pleasure to talk to them.

Then it was time to collect a tired but happy Compostgirl and have our evening meal, which was entirely home grown or home reared.

A good weekend.

The Polytunnel in early July.

This is what the polytunnel looks like, now. Lots of cucumbers and salad being eaten, also sugar snap peas, although the outside plants are bearing pods now as well.

I expect the first tomato any day now...

I am very busy at the moment, with courses in the wood, chicken and composting courses coming up, a talk to give on Forest Schools and lots of meetings and work to do with the next phase of my business plans....


So it is good to get outside and weed and pick and smell the soil.

Making yogurt

Given the very snowy weather we are all having in the UK, I have had a few friends saying to me how hard it is to get certain foodstuffs and one of the most common items which are in short supply are bread, butter and yogurt.

Now we make our own bread and I have a stock of home made butter in the freezer, and yes I do also make my own yogurt, so I shared with my friends how I do it.

And I thought maybe you all might like to know , as well?

I keep a stock of UHT organic milk in out store cupboard, for drinking/cooking but also for yogurt making.

If you use UHT milk you don't need to scald it first...and UHT milk will keep for ages in a store cupboard so it is always on hand.

Yogurt can be made very easily on a small scale with very simple kitchen equipment. It is important to be very clean though!

You will need:
One pint of Sterilised or UHT Milk.
a saucepan or a glass jug if using a microwave.
a thermometer (optional).
2 Tablespoons of live Yogurt.
a thermos flask.
a jug and maybe a basin


Method:
Heat the milk until it reaches blood temperature ( 37° C /98.4° F )either on a stove or in the microwave.
In a jug blend in the 2 tablespoons of yogurt with a little of the warm milk, when a
smooth mixture is obtained, pour into the rest of the warm milk and stir.
If using a microwave I just add the yogurt a little at a time into the jug of warm milk.
Pour the milk/yogurt mixture into a pre warmed wide necked thermos flask, seal and leave for 7 hours ( I have left it overnight before now)

Pour the Yogurt into the basin or into smaller containers with lids cover and refrigerate for at least 4 hours to allow the
yogurt to thicken further.

Yogurt made this way can be kept in a refrigerator for 4 or 5 days.

If wished add pureed fruit or other flavourings to portions before serving.

Eco Club plant stall at Blossomtime event

Sunday I got up early ish and did the hens, watered the polytunnel plants etc before starting to load up the car with plants.



Lovely trees waiting to be bought!



Mmmm salads, tomatos, beans, peas, aubergines, peppers, herbs...all waiting to go to new homes.

I did 3 trips to the village hall and then set up my table, along with a trestle table kindly provided for me, outside the hall and laid out the stall.





Sue joined me at 1.30 and we made ready for the flood of people coming for the start of the cider tasting in the hall. We had the plants to sell and had designed and written a Family Nature trail as well to sell. This was a sheet with a map of a walk across the fields from the village hall to Aylton Church and the wonderful, newly refurbished Court Barn, with 20 things to spot along the way. We had all had fun the previous Sunday doing this walk and getting the clues sorted out!







Business was very brisk on the plant stall, we sold lots of plants and I was very busy giving advice on how to grow the various veg plants to people who hadn't grown much stuff before but wanted to start growing, which I found very encouraging! We had grown a lot of heritage varieties and these went very quickly, especially the tomato plants and salads.

We also had a lot of general interest shown about Eco Club and Gardening Club, and of course lots of children from the school live locally so came up to look at "their " plants! A good number of families bought a nature trail sheet and had fun.

Much cider was also drunk ;-)Well the event in the hall was the tasting of the winners (and all entrants) for the Big Apple Cider and Perry awards.

Compostman and Compostgirl came over later, Compostgirl spent most of the time playing with her friends, although she did walk the trail and pronounced it "fun"
Compostman took a turn on the plant stall while I went and got much needed tea and cake from the Tarrington Brownies.



Plant stall after an hour, not much left!

We sold everything in the 3 hours we were there, apart from a few big trees...which have now also found a home.


And we raised nearly £100 for Eco Club, which I think is a good total :-)

Homegrown food - taking stock of what we still have and looking forward to new stuff

If you look on the right hand side of my blog you will see a list of the homegrown food we still have in stock and are eating now. I have been asked by a few people what we have left, so I thought I would make a list. Its getting less each day, but I was quite pleasantly surprised when I did a quick stock take! I am not sure we could live on it but it makes a welcome contribution to the diet.

The first of the new season salad, herbs and such like are coming through fast now, and when I see new bean and pea plants growing fast I know we are not far away from eating them, fresh, again! I have carrots growing in tubs inside the polytunnel and spuds in bags with haulms up the top of the bags! ( so new spuds will be on the menu in another month...) and the broad beans are doing well in the garden. I have turnips to succesionally sow, asn the usual salads, spring onions and radishes will go in as and when a bit of land becomes available throughout the summer, and in pots in the Polytunnel.




The plum trees are smothered with blossom and as long as we have no frosts in the next few days, should have a bumper crop of fruit this year. The soft fruit has lots of flower buds forming as well.





I have all my seed potatoes in the ground, now, and am actually ahead of myself thanks to the good weather! (shhh, don't tempt fate!) the parsnips are all in as well.

I just need to get the onion sets in the main garden, I have overwintered shallots and onions in some raised beds, but need to plant more, oh and carrots, in between the alliums. The garlic, planted in December, is going well.

I have peas and beans of all sorts shooting up, all the tomatoes, peppers, aubergines etc are now good sized plants and are out in the cold frames inside the polytunnel, where they keep nice and warm at night with a lid over them and get fresh warm air in the daytime without the lid.

I still need to put some melon and cucumber seeds in the heated propagator ( now I have some room!) then when they come up (in a day or two!) next will be the courgettes and then squashes of various sorts, which will go in during the next week or so.... I find these grow so fast that I tend to leave them until about this time in April, otherwise they grow into huge leggy plants when it is still too cold to pot them out in the Polytunnel.

This year I am going to try, yet again, to grow some Kale and Purple Sprouting, plus a few other brassicas...we will construct a METAL cage which, hopefully, will stop the squirrels from eating every last shred of them. So I have been planting various brassicas and they, too, are in the Polytunnel.

Looking at my "fresh food" list, I DO need some brassicas to fill that "hungry gap", about now....!

Phew! I hadn't realised quite how many plants I have growing, I am not surprised the house and porch and polytunnel all look like mini forests at the moment :-)

I do feel worryingly ahead of it all at the moment...but I probably shouldn't have said that ( she whispers) as we will now have non stop hail storms for the next month, or a plague of locusts......or something....I keep expecting to find a whole clutch of seeds I should have sown in January , but didn't ;-)


So...what do the rest of you have left over from last year? and will you be growing more, or less of anything in particular this year?

Samhain

Today is Samhain, the start of the Celtic New Year, a day or two when the curtain between the sprit world and us is thinner and our ancestors are closer.

It is also, of course Halloween...All Hallows Eve...a more modern, originally Christian version of the pagan festival.

We don't go in for Halloween parties and suchlike at Compost Mansions, normally we have a bonfire, a clear out of the sheds and polytunnel and a tidy up to mark the end of the year. We eat some favourite, special foods and I mark the day in a number of small, private ways.

One of my regular things is I tend to do "kitchen witchery" today, with the cooking usually being pumpkin related! However I am still feeling very unwell so a lot of the things I had planned have been shelved for a few days but I DID want to make something for us to eat!

SO, some Pumpkin and Apple soup was in order...

The Pumpkin ( A Turk's Turban) was VERY resistant to being cut in slices! I tried ( and failed miserably) and then Compostman tried, he got a bigger knife out and finally his chopper (a scary thing...I don't use it as I have cut my self on it before now!) and the Pumpkin was defeated!

.


I removed the rind from the slices and roughly chopped the flesh along with a couple of onions ( chopped) 2 BIG cloves of garlic, a few peeled, cored ,chopped Bramleys, salt, pepper, thyme and sweet marjoram and my magic ingredient in Pumpkin soup, a small amount of some dark brown sugar





Pumpkin, apples, herbs, onions and garlic were all from our own garden, stock made from a local chicken ( NOT one of ours I hasten to add!) all put in a pot

brought to the boil....

and left simmering on a low heat for an hour, then I turned off the heat and left it simmering for a further half hour with the residual warmth from the ring. I aways like to simmer soups for a long time, I find it improves the flavour!




I blitzed it up with my stick blender and we ate it with a slice of cheese on ( home made bread) toast. The pumpkin flesh was even more sweet than usual, I think the fact it ripened fully on the vine makes them taste the best. I have noticed the ones which I have to finish ripening on a sunny window never taste quite so good?

And as I chopped, sliced, stirred and tasted this morning I couldn't help thinking "Hubble, bubble..." but I guess thats a bit of a stereotype! ;-)))

I certainly WAS thinking of my family, my friends, my loved ones and hoping we all have a good year ahead. I also thought of all my loved ones, still with us or not and wished them all well.

Happy Samhain to you all as well, may your coming year be fruitful, peaceful and blessed.

Flavours of Herefordshire Festival

This afternoon I was at the Flavours of Herefordshire Festival, being "Compostwoman" on the composting and recycling stand run by the County Council.

We had a lot of interest, the "Love Food, Hate Waste" stand was with our compost stands and we were inside a hall with Beekeepers, Marcher Apple Network displays and Slow Food Herefordshire amongst others.

Here are just a few of the displays of apples put out by The Marcher Apple Network.





I spent a lot of time talking about rats in compost bins and then turned around to find a different sort of resident in one of mine!





















































The Hairy Bikers were there and were VERY friendly, stopping so people could talk to them, take their photos etc! ( No I didn't get one!)

It was sunny but cold on Hereford Racecourse and I was glad to go home and have a hot drink at the end. We WERE very well supplied during the day with wonderful cakes and copious cups of tea or coffee , so thank you to the group doing that (an ecumenical group in Hereford I think?) It was most appreciated!

And I was able to pick up an organic veg box which had been on display over the weekend for a bargain price, and eat braised steak which had been cooking in the slow cooker all afternoon then sit in front of the woodburner and get nice and warm!

I think that is my last Compost related event now for 2008, unless I get asked to do a talk or demo or something!

More Slow food.

Slow Cooker did its stuff again tonight, we had spare rib chops with onion, apple, leek, carrot, celery, mushrooms and peppers, cooked in home made cider and some sage...

It used 0.75 Kwh and took just under 4 hours, 2 hours on high and the rest on low heat. Food miles either feet (from our garden) OR 5 miles away for the Pork!

YUM!

Slow Cooker

Last week I went into Hereford for an appointment and popped in to Sainsbury. I spotted that they were selling off their own brand Stainless Steel Slow Cooker for £ 9.98, less than half price.

I had been thinking about getting one recently, in previous years we have had the Aga on all winter so cooking slow food was never a problem, but we only use the Aga now in the very depth of winter or if there is a prolonged power outage as it uses far too much oil and our wallet AND our conscience tell us not to use it.


So a 4.2 litre Crock Pot for less than a tenner seemed like a bargain, so I bought one.

Mid afternoon on Saturday we put in a couple of small lamb shanks from our local butcher Wallers in Ledbury, half a glass of our homemade Damson wine, some stock, shallots and carrots from the garden, and some local celery and button mushrooms.

5 hours and 1 KWh later and it had turned into this....

And when we added some of our beans and spuds, this is what we had for dinner on Saturday night. I can honestly say it was delicious, and we normally eat very well! We thoroughly enjoyed it, along with some more of our home made wine.

I can see us eating a lot of food cooked in the Slow Cooker this winter..........good job we like Casseroles and Stews!

Pink Chutney

I posted last sunday that I will be making an experimental Purple French Bean, Red Onion and Tomato Chutney and that I was going to make up the recipe. well today, I did!

Purple Beans, Red Onions (but no tomatos) as I decided on a more vegetable based chutney, more a bean relish to go on the side of a plate of meat or cheese and salad, rather than a chutney to put in a sandwich! So, Purple French Beans, Red Onions, Bramley Apples, Sugar, Red Wine vinegar and salt and spices ( coriander, cumin and ginger).

I finely chopped the ingredients

and tipped them in a preserving pan
After bringing it all to the boil, see! it IS pink!


Doing the channel test ( If you don't know what that is, go back and read my blog!)

Finished product, 5 jars of Compostbins Purple Bean, Apple and Onion Relish.

It is very different to the chutney I made the other day, more pickle-y and less sweet, even though the proportions of sugar and vinegar are the same AND it has more apple in it than the chutney. I guess that is because the beans absorb and cook at a different rate?

ANYway, it is very nice and I can see a good dollop of that going on a plate of cold roast meats at Yule!

A chilly night

We had a temperature of 1 C last night at about 1 am, but then a lot of cloud came over and warmed things up! So no frost...but its only a matter of time...

As a result I have harvested today lots of stuff which will spoil if it gets below freezing outside, just in case...and I couldn't resist posting some pictures!


In the middle are Turk Turban squashes, behind are some shallots which were drying in the polytunnel, also the last of the peppers and tomatos. The few apples were picked when I went out to the hens and what is left of the Sweetcorn harvest.


The colours on this Turks Turban! I love these and grow them every year. They are good to eat and keep very well also!

Nearly all the sweetcorn is like this to a greater or lesser extent, it tastes delicious BUT the kernels have only ripened part way up...lask of sun because of the weather I suspect.

Such fabulous colours! an autumnal palette....