Oregon Scientific Weather Station review

Before Christmas I was sent one of these weather stations  to try out and review.

Weather at home 



The Wireless Weather Station with Weather Alert allows you to monitor local weather conditions on your smart phone as well at the station itself, using Bluetooth. This wireless weather station brings you all the vital weather information you need to plan your day. The Weather Alert feature also shows you at a glance what to expect; heat, fog, frost, rain and wind /storm, displaying both indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity, and a 12-24 hour Weather Forecast.

I am very impressed with this device. We have a display with a sensor inside and a sensor outside under the garage eves.

This means I can be in the sitting room in the warm but see if it has gone cold outside and go and shut the Seramas in their house, or cover up Juniper the Guinea Pig or cover up tender plants.

I have also had endless fun using the app on my mobile phone and tablet to look at weather statistics and trends for here. (yes I know, I am a geek :) )


The one I was sent retails at £59.99 and at the moment there is an offer on the website of a free sensor if you buy a Weather Station from Oregon Scientific.




Disclaimer. I was sent a Weather Station to review. All opinions are my own and I was not paid to write this post.

A blogging birthday and a giveaway

I have been doing a bit of spring cleaning of this blog today; updating lists; making sure the review page is up to date and generally having a tidy up. One of the things I also did was to re read some of my past posts for the month of February and it was interesting to see what I was up to and thinking about several years ago.

I also realised that it is 7 years ago today that I started this blog :) Predictably my first few posts were about nest boxes, organic gardening and my local farmers market, along with photos of Compost Mansions under snow :)

There was also a post about why I am called Compostwoman, which featured Master Composting, Garden Organic and a lot of stuff about making compost :) Oh what a surprise!

And here I am, 7 years, 1290 posts and a lot of pageviews and visitors later. I am still writing about local food, organic growing, hens, compost, gardening, wildlife, teaching, crafts, food, compost, animals, renovating Compost Mansions, growing veg, daily life - not much has changed over the years (except I have got older and have more gray hairs and Compostgirl is now a teenager!)

Since I started blogging we have started keeping chickens again, we have gained and lost beloved pets and done a lot of work on the house and grounds. In the last 7 years amongst other things I have also trained as a Forest School Leader, an Adult Education Teacher, a Master Gardener, been nominated for a number of awards, become a Love Food Hate Waste cookery demonstrator and a hens@home mentor (phew, after all that training no wonder I feel so tired all the time!) All of this has allowed me to widen what I do in my volunteering roles and Environmental Education business and I hope I have helped lots of adults and children to have fun and be more sustainable in their daily lives.

I also hope I have helped some of you, readers of this blog, in some small way, with gardening, hen keeping or cooking advice or just by sharing my small triumphs and tragedies.  At the very least I hope I have sometimes amused you with my antics :)



So in honour of my blogging birthday and to thank all of you, my lovely readers, I am going to have a giveaway!

Leave me a comment below and next week I will draw out a name and send who ever is drawn a little surprise present - possibly something home made, possibly something I have been sent to review but it will be nice, I promise.

Good luck!

Crafting with Scotch.

No, not with alcohol! I was sent some Scotch Super Glues to try out recently.

I love these bug eyes - I take them out on my composting stall. I have viewing pots with compost samples inside, so people can see the insects which do the composting and live in a compost heap. Then the people can put on the bug eyes  and "see" in the same way as an insect does. When the bug eyes got broken a few months back I was really sad.

But..a bit of the new Super Glue gel from Scotch along the line of the break and they were fixed!

I am so pleased :)

The bottle draws the liquid back in when you stop squeezing. Perfect for stopping your designs getting ruined by excess glue! It also eliminates the frustration of dried glue around the tip of the bottle. The Scotch Super Glue Precision Applicator apparently uses a ‘stay-fresh’ bottle that prevents the glue from drying out on the inside.

I am sure the Scotch Super Glue gel ( and the other bottle of Super Glue liquid I was sent) will be really useful for fixing lots of other stuff I have stored away, waiting for a rainy day to make me get fixing. I am so impressed after using it to fix my bug eyes as it didn't make a mess, it went where I wanted it to, and unlike other experiences I have had of super glue  - it didn't stick anything apart from what I wanted it to stick.

Not sure I would let Compostgirl use it yet (at 12 she is maybe still a bit young for super glue?), but for adult use it was very good stuff indeed.

Thumbs (unstuck) up for 3M Scotch Super Glue.


 Disclaimer -I was sent a free sample of Scotch Super glue gel and liquid to review. This post originally appeared ( in an expanded form) on The Compost Bin but I thought it might be useful over here as well. As always, the words I write are my own and are my honest opinions.

Spicy tea and a blocked view

At mid morning break time today I decided I would take my drink outside and sit in the sunshine at the edge of the wood. Normally I take coffee mid morning but as I still feel  full of cold and a bit rough I took a herb tea -  as I thought it might help me feel a bit better and warm me up a bit.

As is usual I  sat surrounded by a bevy of hens and cats. I wanted to take a photo of the wood, but hens kept on getting in the way!

 This is Babs - she always jumps up on the bench and tries to drink out of my mug!

But I fended her off and drank my tea before it got cool. Today I was trying a new to me tea - Sweet Chilli from Higher Living Herbs  Wow! It was so nice! I like herb teas but usually drink single herb versions and have never tried a blend like this sweet chilli blend before. It was really warming and tasty, but not too chilli hot, more warming and comforting than anything else.

















This is Yarrow hen, still alive and looking quite perky, she begged a few crumbs from my mid morning cookie. Apart from her permanent limp she looks pretty good now. She wanted some of my tea, as well.


After I finished off my drink I also hung out some more washing - I got five loads done and dried yesterday. Then I came inside and because I liked the Sweet Chilli tea so much,  I made another one!

Higher Living Herbs are based not far away from us in Gloucestershire and their teas are 100% natural and organic. They specialise in herbal teas ( there are loads of other flavours to try!)  and have over 45 years blending experience.

As you can see from my oh so artistically arranged shot set in my kitchen, the teas come very attractively packaged  in paper and card so all fully recyclable materials ( or in my case, fully compostable!)

I was also impressed that there was no little metal staple holding the tea bag string on to the paper tab - as I hate having to fish the staples out before I compost it - so full marks for that Higher Living,  as well as the yummy tasting tea.


 Oh - and Higher Living don't just do herbal teas, they make a range of "ordinary" teas as well - you can find the full range here. I like Breakfast tea, if anyone is interested...(!)




I was sent a couple of boxes to review (thank you Higher Living) but you can buy the teas online,  in some health food shops and I think Waitrose stock them as well.

Exotic seeds and a Homegrown Revolution

I have been sorting my seeds, thinking about seeds and pondering what else I want to grow in this new gardening year. With our changing climate one thing I am interested in growing more of, are "unusual" and "exotic" vegetable crops (although, after last year's wet weather maybe I should think about just growing rice?)

At the end of January I was supposed to be volunteering at Garden Organic’s 20th National Potato Day  I was very excited because Garden Organic Ambassador and Ethnobotanist James Wong was due to give a talk about the many exotic edible tubers that can be grown in British gardens.  You may remember he presented a very interesting BBC TV series " Grow your own Drugs" plus  he appears on BBC 1 "Countryfile".

Sadly, because of the snow on the roads around us  I could not get to Ryton for this event, but I wondered if James was going to be speaking anywhere else about growing more "exotic" seeds in the UK. So I was delighted to discover, after an wander around the Internet yesterday afternoon (Google is a wonderful invention)  that  James Wong is doing a tour of the UK speaking at various events. The next event is 16th Feb, in Bristol  followed by an event at Kew Gardens on 26th Feb. Further events are listed during the next few months.

I also discovered that Sutton Seeds   produce  James'  "Homegrown Revolution" seed range. I did not know there was a "tie- in" seed range, and was interested to see the seeds on offer. I already grow, or have grown in the past, some of them (Purslane, Borage, Asparagus pea, Chinese Chives, Quinoa, Mooli) but there are many other interesting seeds which I quite fancy trying to grow this year.

There is a special offer on the Suttons website on  his book and a selection of  6 seed packets for free, for a very good price. Yes, you could get the book and seeds from various different suppliers but it IS convenient to find them all in one place, ready to order.

Having followed the link to the Suttons Seeds website, I had a look around and was pleased to see an ever more extensive selection of organic vegetable seeds -  as you know I try to use only organically certified seeds, growing media etc here at Compost Mansions!  I buy a lot of my seeds from The Organic Gardening Catalogue but  I do buy seeds from other places including the Real Seed Co, Suttons, Franchii, Victoriana Nurseries and MoreVeg.

The website is very well laid out as well, far too tempting for a seed -a-holic like me! As well as seeds there are lot of useful pages on what to be doing at different times of year and how to grow various plants.

I have a future post in mind about my seed order and plans  for 2013 and it looks like I might be adding still yet more seeds  to my list. And maybe a hint to Compostman about an early birthday present :-)

Anyone growing any "exotic" seeds? Or going to see/have seen James Wong speak?





Disclosure  - I was paid to link to Suttons Seeds  - but as always on The Compost Bin all the words and views are entirely my own :-) 

Looking back over this blog, after nearly 1000 posts

I have been feeling rather under the weather the last few days and have spent a fair bit of time sitting at the computer keyboard ( as it is in a room next to the bathroom...enough detail there I think!)

So of the things I have been doing is reading back over this blog and all the things I have posted about on here. As I am nearly at 1000 posts ( a bit of a landmark, there I feel)it felt like a good idea to see what I have been saying.

What a lot of words and photos! I am amazed at how much I have written, to be honest:-) I am also amazed at so many comments and especially followers, who have stayed with me over the last nearly 6 years I have been writing here.

I am aware that I used to post more about what we did in the garden and what the hens got up to etc, but I feel there comes a point in a long running blog, which follows the cycle of the seasons and which carries on year on year, that I start to repeat myself - so lots of stuff now just does not get mentioned.

One thing I did do for a while was the idea of Five good things - every day finding five good things about the day and posting about it. But I stopped, largely because last year to be honest I just didn't want to do that sort of post - indeed I had to try very hard to post at all, for many reasons, on many occasions. But looking back on my posts from 2010 and earlier, I can see finding five good things had a helpful purpose of making me see that life is not as gloomy as it sometimes feels. I actually have lots of blessing ( family, animals, love, food, a roof, etc) even when life is a bit of a struggle.

Something else I used to do, but seem to have dropped, is a monthly round up of what has happened. Again, I think that was helpful.

Also missing as stand alone posts are the Chickenailia posts - I do still post ( a lot!) about the hens, but often now the stuff about them is mixed in with the other stuff. So I think a monthly Chickenailia post would be a good idea, also.

Apart from those points, I really enjoyed reading back over my blog - looking at all the stuff we have done and remembering fun things. Some things I had forgotten we did and some things need doing again. I am so glad I started blogging!

And I think the trying to find good things in each day is something I will re instate - anything which makes life seem brighter has to help! Ditto the monthly review and Chickenailia posts even if I don't, this time,  list the eggs laid and the weight of each item harvested from the garden :-)

Thank you for reading, as always and if you have any observations or things you would like me to write about in future, please do comment!