Then pop over here and claim a free one!

While we do manage to reuse packaging most of the time there is only so much that we receive here that can be reused. And your order has to be secure, safe and manageable by the post office, and it has to reach you safely and without getting soaked or damaged. Soap nuts in particular shouldn’t get wet, until you want them to.

It’s a bit of a balancing act.

Imagine my surprise when I went to order more mailing bags and found some that are made from 95% recycled materials and are 100% biodegradeable – for THE SAME PRICE as I usually pay….

So we’ll be trying those out as soon as they arrive and would welcome your feedback if your order arrives in one.  Do please let us know what you think. The idea is sound but will they meet our needs in regards to secure and safe packaging?

Me too.

So I thought I’d make the politics work…..

Look, Gordon Brown and Paul Holmes doing some good for a change...

I’ve cut the tabloid sized papers and made paper pots so the politics are helping me grow things this year.

Sweet corn, chard, sweet peas...

I figured it was about time the politicians did some good…

The Lib Dems have stiffer paper and that makes more stable pots but I wonder at its composition. It should compost well though. Labour have more flimsy paper, which makes floppy pots. The Conservatives haven’t sent me a paper to use, just a postcard sized leaflet.

Make of all that what you will, I will be watching germination rates over the next couple of weeks.

I will vote and I would urge all of you to go out and vote. I vote not use sends no message at all, a vote for someone silly, or a ruined ballot paper still has to be counted. Make the effort, go and make your mark.

Let’s start with Earth Hour.

Did you? WWF Earth Hour is a token gesture where you pledge to turn off your house lights for one hour at a particular time on a particular day. It was yesterday at 8.30 and I sat here in darkness, but with the TV and computer on. Seems wrong somehow.

It’s like recycling a few things and ignoring the rest. It’s a step in the right direction but really, what good is one hour, once a year really going to do? It’s a token, it’s awareness raising and in that it’s brilliant! People are talking about it but it’s a novelty. What we need to do is turn things off every day, reduce our consumption over all, and not just in terms of the energy we use. We need to be thinking about where things we consume come from and how they are made.

Earth Hour is a great idea, it should get us thinking about whether we really need that light on, that TV on stand by all day just in case we might want to watch. But how many of you took part and then went straight back to those old habits this morning?

We’ve found a fun way to take our hard plastic for recycling at Tesco and that takes plastic bags, glass jars, tins, cans and plastic bags as well.  We already compost as much as we can here and we feed food waste to either the guinea pig or the chickens.

So the way to reduce even further is to follow the My Zero Waste example and stop the waste before it reaches us and therefore isn’t our problem to deal with it!

Mrs Green, did you know you’re famous in Chesterfield? DD and I were shopping today and I decided to be brave in the cheese shop.

“Can I ask you a silly question?” I started, feeling a little bit silly.

“Go on.”

“If I brought a tub in could you pop the cheese in that instead of having the plastic round it?”

“Oh like that family down south who only put their bin out once a year?”

“YES!!”

“Of course you can. We can use the same plastic sheet for all your cheese bits so we only have one to deal with once you’ve gone. No problem.”

Result! So, next week I have to remember a plastic pot when I go into town. Oh and I have to remember my old glasses which are to be recycled and sent off to the third world for reuse.

Just by taking the hard plastic out and passing cooked food waste to my chickens we’ve halved our rubbish. This week we’re trying to work out which soft plastic bags and packets can go in with the recycled carriers and that will help even more.

Residents of a Belgian town are to be offered chickens as part of a campaign to reduce household waste.

The town of Mouscron has 50 pairs of chickens that it will distribute to families with sufficient space to keep the birds in their gardens.

What a splendid idea! But how does that fit with EU regulations that you shouldn’t feed kitchen or household waste to chickens?

These are three of my chickens, well, two are mine and one belongs to a friend and is on holiday here – but we do love our hens. They are very efficient consumers of weeds, grass clippings, dried sunflower heads, plant prunings and pretty much anything remotely edible you care to pop into the pen – including slugs and snails and you should see them catching flies!

Mine don’t have the run of the garden, I’m not allowed due to local council guidelines so do check your house deeds or rent agreement before you get any chickens of your own, and do check with your neighbours as well.

But EU regs. According to the EU those lovely chickens shouldn’t really be eating my veg peelings, left over pasta, half spoon of mashed potato and bits of pizza crust. But what else should I do with it? The peelings can go in the compost and we do try to not waste food but now and then there is some waste. At the moment my daughter has a flu like cold and her appetite is up and down like a yoyo and she’ll think she’s hungry and then get part way through her dinner and start feeling ill again and leave some. So, landfill or chickens?

The EU regs were put in place to stop the big farms from feeding their chickens on inappropriate things and thus preventing the possibility of a disaster like mad cow disease.  But it’s worded in such a way that it *could* apply to those of us who have a few hens for a few eggs each week and for fun. I’m not selling my eggs or eating my chickens, I don’t see why they shouldn’t peck over the kitchen waste as long as I’m balancing that with a complete food that provides a balanced diet for them. It certainly means less waste in our bin and more good quality fertiliser for my garden.

We also had a long chat with one of the staff in Tesco when DD asked loudly, “Will they recycle that?” when she spotted one of those large cage trolley things filled to the top with squashed plastic and cardboard. The woman filling up the carrots then had a long chat about how they separate it all in the warehouse and recycle everything.

It’s the alternative week so it’s cardboard and garden waste but we’ve been careful with our shopping and I’ve not been gardening.

So, is there enough to warrant dragging the bin through the snow, or will we skip another week?

“No, don’t bother, there’s not a lot in it.”

I’m quite impressed.

Following the My Zero Waste example we’ve been recycling more after discovering the Tesco recycling machine a few weeks ago. It was out of order today so we brought out plastics home and will take them next week, or another day we’re going in that direction. We’re also being so much more careful about the waste attached to things we buy – which to be honest we’ve been naughty about until recently. I hadn’t realised quite how much volume the plastics take up in our bin. We get through a lot of milk and tend to buy the 2l plastic bottles and now they get rinsed, the labels peeled off and then flattened and stored and recycled. The bin is less than 1/4 full – really not worth putting out even knowing the next collection is 2 weeks away. I’m actually quite astounded at the huge difference it’s made – just the sheer volume and extrapolating that to every house on the street, in our town and onwards…… How much plastic that could be recycled isn’t? How much is in landfill? It’s scary.

So, having tackled the solid plastics – bottles, food trays etc – next is the soft plastics – bags and the like. I plan to investigate each fruit bag, each cheese wrapper and post those into the tesco recycling place as well, wherever possible. That should cut it down further.

Oh and more hens coming at the end of the week – that’s pretty much ALL our food waste being processed on site to enrich the garden, whether it’s directly into the compost or via an animal (we have a guinea pig as well and she likes the crunchy bits!) Hen pics will be posted when they’re here.