I’m keen to try as many edible perennials as possible – I like the idea of not having to re-plant things every year, with all the work that involves. I’ve been having a great time watching “A year in a Forest Garden” from Martin Crawford at Agroforestry, and it’s been giving me lots of ideas [...]
Archive for February, 2010
26 Feb
Eat Seasonably – save money and the earth
Eating seasonable fruit and veg can be a great way to save yourself money, and reduce your impact on the environment. It can be hard though to work out what really is in season now that you can get pretty much anything at any time of year. Luckily there’s a great new website – EatSeasonably.co.uk [...]
24 Feb
How much does it cost to bake your own bread?
Now we’re making our own bread I thought it’d be worth working out how much cheaper / more expensive it is than just buying standard wholemeal bread. So here’s the standard pricing of all the ingredients – I haven’t started looking for cheap bulk supplies yet so these are just from Sainsbury’s. 310 ml semi-skimmed [...]
22 Feb
Planting our tomato seeds
We’ve been taking (false) hope from all these false springs and started our January plantings with tomatoes. Planted them in little seed trays in an unheated propagator on January 24th on a beautiful south-facing windowsill and here’s the result two weeks later: They are Beefsteak tomatoes “Big Boy” and Sweet Olive cherry tomatoes, and have [...]
20 Feb
Baking our own bread – even better recipe!
Never happy to settle for good-enough, I’ve been tweaking our easy, reliable bread recipe to respond to a little family criticism that it could be lighter. So here’s the new result: It’s about an inch taller than the previous recipe but it is not as reliably pretty: But I’ve used the new recipe three times [...]
19 Feb
Our Seed Potatoes ready for chitting
Another great step here at the Eco-House, chitting our first potatoes! We’ve been collecting eggboxes for a little while now so we’d be ready, and today I took the kids out to the Hulme Garden Centre in advance of this Sunday’s Potato Day. Here’s our haul, all ready to “chit”: I got a whole range [...]
18 Feb
Baking our own Bread
After a lot of experimentation we’ve finally got a recipe that reliably produces delicious bread! It even looks like the real stuff, rises properly, slices nicely and tastes great. Don’t believe me? Here’s one I prepared earlier: Now I know the recipe it takes me less than 10 minutes to prepare it, and it’s then [...]
