Eating at the Table.

As the busy mother of three, I find that one of my biggest issues with food is eating on the run; scoffing toast at the computer whilst checking emails at breakfast, or munching on a basic sandwich with one hand at lunch while I multi-task with the other is not unusual.

Most of the big chain takeaways encourage this practice with their drive-thrus and whatnot, encouraging us to munch "super-sized" buckets of chips absent-mindedly whilst negotiating traffic and refereeing back seat arguments.

Busy Woman posted last year about the importance to her of eating dinner at the table and the myriad of benefits that come with it. She wrote that:

* It is an opportunity for them to gather together as a family and to talk with each other about their day;
* It's a time without television;
* It allows their meals to be more structured; and
* It's a simpler way of living.

I have to agree, these are all great benefits. I have been doing a lot of reading over the past couple of years about the Slow Food movement, and I think there are also a number of other, food- and health-related benefits to eating at the table. The main aims of the Slow Food movement is - essentially - that our food should taste good, should be good for us and be produced in such a way that it is good for the farmers and their animals and good for our planet.

Primarily, sitting down for a meal together (and by myself when I make the effort to sit at a table) means that the emphasis of meal time is placed on the food and conversation, not the TV or computer screen. As a result:

* We tend to chew food more slowly. This achieves two results:

a) We feel full more quickly, and therefore tend not to overeat. I think this is a really big issue with many families; it's easy to overeat when we are distracted by whatever is on the TV - I know I've sat down to watch a movie with a packet of chips and suddenly I'm scraping the bottom of the packet, thinking "Where did they all go?!". As well as:

b) We tend to savour the flavour and texture of our food. Too often processed foods are loaded with fat and are heavily salted and/or sweetened to cover up the fact that they are bland. I think the maxim "Quality over quantity" really comes into play here for me - a simple sandwich made from hard, supermarket tomatoes and bagged white bread does nothing to inspire me to sit and savour the moment. However, substitute a rich, red, fresh heirloom tomato, sliced onto a slab of toasted fresh bread, with real butter and a sprinkle of salt and pepper... well, there's a little bit of heaven :-)


* We tend to go to more of an effort to prepare our meals. Grabbing something quickly as I pass through the kitchen between tasks, is really the equivalent of the drive-thru in the car I suspect - all convenience and no substance! If I take the time to sit at the table to eat however, I might as well take the extra couple of minutes to make a nice garden salad, or heat up some leftovers - and then the first point I mentioned above kicks in, and I'm not wandering back into the kitchen 20 minutes later, circling around for something else to eat, filling up on empty calories and extra fat and/or sugar.

* We tend to put more thought into what it is we are eating. By that I mean, if I know I am going to be putting a platter of food onto a table in front of my family, I want it to not only be healthy and filling, I also want it to look appealing and fresh (particularly if I am trying to get the girls to eat something new).

* It gives us the opportunity to create a nurturing environment. This could be through the ritual of setting the table - my kids are involved and each has a task to do - and/or the decoration of the dining room, if you have one, and also through the effort made to prepare and present the meal on the table. I think many of us have really pleasant memories of particular instances in our childhood that revolved around food and special occasions, such as a grandmother baking for hours to prepare a Christmas feast for example. I'm sure that whilst the actual food was amazing, part of the fondness of the event was the fact that someone you love went to the trouble to do it for you and/or your family. What better way to create a contrast with our consumerist, fast-food society than to ensure our families feel healthy and loved at home?

* We can model appropriate behaviour for our children, such as table manners and how to eat slowly and deliberately (as opposed to scoffing our food and then diving in for seconds).

* I can expose our children to a larger variety of foods, both through seeing new foods placed on the table and through seeing what the adults are eating. I hated avocado for years when I was younger, but I clearly remember the relish with which my parents used to smear it thickly on toast with some lemon juice and salt and pepper. It was that memory which tempted me to try it again years later when my taste buds had clearly developed more (yum).

* I can give our kids the opportunity to serve themselves from platters and bowls placed on the table. I have found that this is a great way to get our kids to try new foods - and it also gets around the issues of each child liking particular salad vegies that the others don't as they can just serve themselves more of what they like. I am often surprised at what my kids will dish themselves out, and in what quantity. I guess most parents know that littlies can tend to eat like sparrows for a few days and then like a horse to make up for it LOL. It also lets them regulate how much they feel like eating without the pressure of not having finished what is on their plate.

I'm sure there are many other reasons that sitting down to a meal is a great idea but just from these reasons alone, it seems like a win-win situation to me; it's all good! Certainly something we will be persisting with for a long time to come.

One person's trash...

Doing: ...Admiring our new-for-us gazebo-cum-kiwifruit trellis. It started as this pile of bits and bolts rescued from the neighbour's trash:

And ended up as this:


When our neighbours bought it a couple of years ago it had a canvas roof, but that was shredded in a storm a few months later. Now that they are building a permanent awning they were throwing away the gazebo frame, so I pounced on it! With the addition of a few strands of wire running around between the roof supports, I hope that this will make a terrific trellis for my two new kiwifruit vines (you need both male and female vines to produce fruit). The female is a "H4" variety, similar to the commercial "Hayward" variety but slightly more suited to subtropical conditions.

After putting it together, my DH then kindly constructed a small raised bed from sleepers left over from the new vegie garden beds, to improve the drainage for the vines.

I'm hoping that by this time next year they may have grown enough to cast some shade from the summer sun and make this a nice little spot for lazy lunches :-)

Making: ...Homemade Rosewater and Witch Hazel facial toner, and Rosemary hair "conditioner".

I wash my hair with bicarb soda which is quite alkaline, and needs to be finished with an acid rinse to neutralise the hair again; most people use a dilute solution of apple cider vinegar (1 part vinegar to 4 parts water). After recently reading Melinda's tip to use diluted organic white vinegar infused with spices instead of apple cider vinegar for a hair rinse, today I've switched to using the white vinegar. Melinda likes to add a cinnamon stick and some vanilla essence (yum) but since I have oily hair - and rosemary is reportedly good for dark-coloured and oily hair - I have added a couple of sprigs of fresh rosemary to mine today. I'll let you know how it goes, although it certainly looks pretty doesn't it? I'd definitely rather look at that in the morning than some lurid-coloured chemical concoction!


Baking: French bread for tonight's garlic bread.

Harvesting: Purple King beans, Richmond Green cucumbers, tomatoes (Tommy Toe & Rouge de Marmonde), lettuce, carrots, kale (which should have gone to seed by now but hasn't yet, yay!).

Dinner: Creamy zucchini and leek pasta sauce with wholemeal penne and garlic bread.

Reading: Re-reading Heidi Swanson's chapter on building a wholefoods pantry in Super Natural Cooking.

Homemade Facial Toner

I have really enjoyed eliminating every day toiletries from my shopping list over the last couple of years, and as part of that process I have been making my own facial toner for over a year now.

Rosewater is a wonderful natural toner for anyone with normal to dry skin, but I have quite oily skin so I use a combination of rosewater and witch hazel extract. Witch hazel extract is made by distilling the bark from the Witch Hazel tree in alcohol. The extract I buy has an alcohol content of 14% so it can be a little drying on the skin if you are sensitive, but pure witch hazel is terrific as a make up remover, and is often used around the home as natural home remedy to treat minor cuts and bruises and insect bites; I also use it in other homemade products such as my tea tree oil deodorant. You can purchase witch hazel from health food shops, many supermarkets (check the section where the Bandaids are kept) or you can order it online (often in bulk) from shops such as Aussie Soap Supplies.

Making your own rosewater is very easy - simply collect around 2 cups of (tightly packed) rose petals and place in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Cover with distilled water (around 2 1/2 cups) and simmer until the liquid has reduced in volume by about half. Cool, pour into sterilised jars and store in the refrigerator.

Alternately you can buy rosewater from natural foods stores, or online from stores such as Aussie Soap Supplies.

Rosewater & Witch Hazel Facial Toner

1 1/4 cups rosewater
3/4 cup witch hazel
6-8 drops glycerine (more for normal skin and less for oilier skin)

Combine ingredients gently in a very clean air tight jar. Apply using a clean facial wipe (I use reusable cotton flannel wipes I made myself) after cleansing.

If you are using homemade rosewater containing no preservatives, you will need to store this solution in the refrigerator.

For other toiletry recipes, check my side bar under "Popular Posts and Recipes".

Saving Our Seeds.

I mentioned on Sunday that I had picked most of the drying bush beans I planted as an experiment. I bought a packet of mixed beans from Diggers (I think it was called the 'Magic Bean Mix'), and it included a few each of Borlotti, Red Kidney beans, Yin Yang, Cherokee and Flageolet beans. I think I ended up with about five plants of each, and I note that even though they were supposed to be bush beans, the Yin Yang beans were definitely climbing beans. With normal beans, picking them constantly promotes flowering and therefore more beans, but since these beans are designed to be dried for cooking later on, I left them on the bushes. I don't know if picking a few might have increased they yield, but I got perhaps 5-6 pods per plant? The Yin Yang beans (which ended up being climbers) wound their way up a nearby garden arch and produced by far the most pods of the five types of beans (you can see them below).

The plants themselves grew as quickly as other beans, didn't take up too much space in the garden and weren't subject to any pests (other than the usual snails and slugs) which is a plus.

The girls and I had much fun with them all anyway, bursting the dried pods open and then sorting all the very differently coloured beans into ramekins. Aren't they all pretty? As you can see we would have harvested barely enough for one meal of them if they were all combined LOL (although what a pretty meal it would be!). Therefore, these will all be carefully stored in labelled envelopes for sowing again next season.

Hopefully next year I might get enough out of those plants to store away for eating! I suspect that with my limited space however, growing enough drying beans to supply anything more than a couple of weeks' meals will be out of the question. Still, I'll be interested to see what we do end up harvesting next year.


I also mentioned on Sunday that I picked some of the celery I had left to go to seed. I needed the space to plant out a couple of tomato seedlings, so I had to pull the celery out before the seeds were really ready. The Seed Savers Handbook suggests to either clip individual seed heads from the flower stalk as they brown, or wait until the entire seed stalk is brown. Since I didn't have that long I just clipped the browned heads from the stalk onto some newspaper. The Handbook recommends leaving them to dry for a further two weeks in the shade before storing, so this is what I will do.

I also took the opportunity to separate the coriander (cilantro) seeds from the bushes I have had drying in my garage. I pulled up the coriander bushes when the seeds were all fully formed and lightly browned a couple of weeks ago. I used the roots freshly chopped in a curry (yum!) and hung the rest of bushes upside down in an airy out-of-the-way spot to finish drying. Dried seeds will drop of at the slightest touch LOL, and I've seen it suggested that you hang them over a paper bag or some sheets of paper to catch the fallen seeds, but my bunches were too big for any of my paper bags so I just crossed my fingers that not too many fell off.

I shook the bunches over a paper bag to catch most of the seeds, then snipped off the remaining heads and gently squashed and rustled the bag to separate the seeds from the stalks, then threw the stalks into the compost bin.

Coriander doesn't seem to self-seed around here for some reason - although many of my herbs do - so I've stored away some of the seeds in the paper bag for sowing when the weather cools. The rest, I will use - ground in my mortar and pestle - in the kitchen (we do love our curries around here LOL).

Growing Challenge Update #15

My first update for 2009! I haven't been doing much in the garden lately though - except picking vegies - so there isn't much to update.

In the Greenhouse: Nothing at the moment, as it's the height of summer here and I think it's way too hot in there to be sowing seeds. Having said that, I would like to start sowing some more salad greens (especially lettuce) when I get the chance, although I will probably direct sow them into the garden and hope for the best.

In the Vegie Garden: I've had a bit of a clean out over the past few days. I've removed the celery which I had let go to seed. I was hoping to collect enough to use in the kitchen as well, but I needed the space. I have more than enough seeds to sow again next season though.

I've harvested most of the drying beans, which were a bit of an experiment this year. I bought a mixed packet of bush beans from Diggers, which included around 5-10 seeds each of Borlotti, Red Kidney beans, Cherokee, Yin Yang and Flageolet. The last still has green beans on them so they will stay for a bit longer yet, but the rest had nice dried pods on them. They will be opened and sorted later today, no doubt with my kids help :-) It will be interesting to see how many I get from the few seeds I planted.

I also picked what was left of the leeks in the garden, apart from two which have nice big flower heads, left so that I can save the seeds. Now I need to decide what to do with all these leeks, oh the dilemma ;-)

Elsewhere in the garden, I've noticed that the Dragon Fruit has another flower bud on it. It has had around 4-5 buds on it previously but they've either been knocked off by boisterous children or pets, or they haven't been pollinated which is a pity! This one is sticking out perilously close to the pathway so I suspect it might get knocked off as well, otherwise I will be watching it closely for signs of flowering - I believe that the flower only opens once, and only after sunset. I can't find any information on what sort of insect/bird pollinates it though, so if anyone knows I'd be grateful :-)


In the front garden, the vine I first thought was a cucumber developed fruit... which got to cucumber size and kept going LOL. The first ones looked like the one below, so I immediately thought "watermelon!". However, I've was out there yesterday and checked on them again, only to discover that the skin is developing webbing.


Mmmmmmmmm, despite the snails making short work of almost every melon seedling I planted this season, it looks like we might get some rockmelons (cantaloupes) after all!





Speaking of melons, only one of the three surviving Golden Midget watermelons seedlings I planted actually did any good and flowered, although I haven't been keeping a close eye on it. (Incidentally, it was the melon seedling that was supposed to be a Luffa when I planted it LOL). Well, yesterday I noticed that there is finally one teeny tiny watermelon developing on the vine! Isn't it cute? They are supposed to get to the size of the palm of your hand, and - as the name suggests - have gold flesh. The vines are only supposed spread around 1 metre wide so they are good for small spaces. This vine would be nowhere near that size, although it could grow that big over the rest of the summer I suppose.





I also noticed yesterday that my Starfruit is starting to flower, yay! The fruit normally ripens in May/ June so it's a little earlier in flowering this year, but then this season has been much warmer than last summer. It really is a very attractive tree, I'm looking forward to it getting to a reasonable height so that it will become more of a feature in our garden.

Well, it's a gorgeous day outside - not too hot for a change - so I'm off to plant my kiwifruit vines now that DH has put together the gazebo frame we were given by our next door neighbours AND built me a little planter bed to plant them in! Photos to come soon.

Have a great week in your garden :-)

Riot for Austerity update

I haven't talked about my participation in the Riot For Austerity for a while, although I have been taking my meter readings on the first day of each month for the past year, tracking our use of water, electricity, natural gas, and fuel for the car, plus we weigh all of our garbage and total it up each month, so that we can get a feeling for whether we are reducing it or not over the course of the year.

For those of you not familiar with the challenge, the Riot was started by Peak Oil writer, Sharon Astyk and her friend Miranda, with the intent to reduce their family's resource use to 90% of that of the average American - deemed by Peak Oil expert George Monbiot as the amount that those in affluent countries would need to reduce their emissions to in order to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

For me, the challenge also has a social context, in that those of us in affluent western nations are using much, much more than our fair share of the earth's finite natural resources. I believe this inequity (and waste) is not only resulting in global warming, but is also responsible for some of the dysfunction we experience in our society these days: the obsession with buying Stuff instead of building Community is one aspect.

So, I participate not only in order to try and get my family's resource use as low as possible and play our part in hopefully reducing the effects of global warming, but also because it will save us money (thus allowing me to stay at home instead of going back to work), and - more importantly - to me it is the morally right thing to do. Just because I was blessed to be born in Australia doesn't give me the right to squander clean water or refined oil, and pollute our environment without care.

The Riot covers seven categories, although in 2008 I recorded results for only five of them: Petrol (gasoline), water, electricity, heating and cooking energy (natural gas) and garbage. This year I hope to record the final two categories as well : Consumer goods and food. (Click on the seven categories link to read more about how each of the categories are calculated).

Results for 2008

Gasoline/petrol: The average Australian car travels 14600km per year, using roughly 1665L of petrol per year. We started the year with two cars, so we set a goal of a total of 1128L for the year for the two cars combined. Our final result however - despite selling our second car in July - worked out at 2356L, or (taking into account 7 months use of the second car) only an 11% reduction on the average. Argh! Pretty woeful results, which I am really disappointed with. Still, a reduction of 11% is better than nothing, and I am now resolved to try and do even better this year.

Our biggest issue is the lack of accessible public transport where we live, plus my in-laws live a 35-minute drive away (and have no public transport at all), which accounts for over half our travel each year. This year I will begin keeping a log of each individual trip for a month or two, which might give me a better insight into where, when and how long each trip lasts? I'm fortunate that our car has one of those digital trip meters, which gives me a readout of the kilometres travelled, time taken and petrol used. If nothing else, having arecord of exactly how many litres of fuel are used (and therefore the cost) for each typical trip will make for interesting reading. I imagine that having a list on the fridge with something like "Trip to Bunnings = $4" might cut help persuade my other half to write a list before he goes!


Water: The average Australian household uses 625L/day. We set our goal as 120L/day, and although we managed to get it as low as 320L/day at one stage, our average for the year ended up at 412L/day - not helped by the very hot and very dry weather recently, requiring lots of water on the vegie garden. That works out at a 34% reduction on the average.

This past week we've purchased a new front-loading washing machine (due to arrive next week), since our 12-year-old, repaired-several-times top-loader was starting to play up. The new machine uses around 76L per wash, in comparison to the roughly 130L my old machine used, and it's also bigger so theoretically I also will be doing less washes per week. We've also replaced our old poor-quality bathroom tapware with new, 5-star water-efficiency rated (Australian-made!) tapware, which has a flow-rate half that of our old basin set (when it wasn't leaking). In addition, we've also installed a Every Drop Water Saver switch on our main bathroom shower. We've had one of these switches - which allows you to turn the water flow off while you soap up without losing your water pressure or temperature settings - on our ensuite shower for over a year now and it's fabulous. Now that my girls are getting older they are starting to prefer showers over baths; now they can spend as much time as they like soaping up and mucking about without wasting heaps of water.

So, between the washing machine, the tapware and the Water Saver on the shower, I am hoping to see some improvements in our water use this year! We are also saving for a second, small water tank, which we hope to install close to our laundry later this year. We have calculated we can probably fit a tall, skinny 1000 to 1500L tank in the back corner of our block if we remove a tree. Not much, but it all helps, and we just don't physically have the room for anything larger.


Electricity: The average Australian household uses 6900kWh per year of electricity (though this varies vastly from state to state), which works out at 18.9kWh per day. Our best result was 10.7kWh/day over one month, but overall we ended up using 12.6kWh/day, or 4601kWh. That's a 33% reduction on the average, but nowhere near what we were counting on. Our ducted air conditioner uses a lot of power so the recent hot weather has bumped up our average, despite limiting it's use to only a couple of hours a day on the real stinkers, but I suspect a goodly proportion of the rest of our use is my recalcitrant family who love nothing more than to turn on every light and appliance in the house at once! I seem to spend half my day walking around the house turning things off. Sigh.

An electrician friend of ours is on holidays at the moment (who works for mate's rates ;-), so yesterday we bought ceiling fans for our combined lounge and dining room and the study, the only three rooms left in the house with no fans. That should make a difference to our comfort levels anyway, although I tend to move to a room that has a fan rather than turn the air conditioner on at the moment, so they probably won't have a huge impact on our electricity use. We are also hoping to replace our desktop computer with a more energy-efficient laptop sometime over the next year or so, so perhaps that will also make a small difference (although I try to limit the time the PC is on during the day). I guess I am going to have to just stay ever-vigilant with keeping all unnecessary lights and appliances turned off when not in use!


Natural Gas: The average Australian uses 100MJ/day. Our best month was 28MJ/day, but our yearly average was 36.7MJ/day, or 63% less than the average. Ideally, I'd like to get this down even more by utilising my solar oven more often in this coming year. I have been a little wary of using it with the girls around this past year, as it does get very hot on the outside on a hot day and Miss Three definitely has enquiring little fingers, so I've worried about her hurting herself. It's also a little awkward to carry inside and out, so I am looking to find somewhere to store it permanently outside, perhaps one of those benches with a storage section under the seat (where I could also store the kids' gumboots away from spiders [eeek!] and the gardening gear I use every day)?


Garbage (landfill): The average Aussie living in NSW each sends a whopping 19.2kg of waste to landfill every week! Our final result was an average of just 2.0kg/week for our household or a 90% reduction on one average person. I'm pretty pleased with that obviously, although I still feel that there is room for improvement when I look at how many plastic wrappers we still throw away (from our dried beans for example) although I try to reuse them for something else at least once before disposal.

Recycling: The average Aussie recycles 3.1kg of waste per week. Our final result was 1.17kg/ week, or a 62% reduction on the average. Clearly, there's still some room for improvement there too. Again, I try to reuse anything that would normally go into the recycling bin (such as using toilet rolls for seedling pots), but I think I need to look at putting pressure on my local bulk food suppliers to provide the facility for "bring-your-own" containers, something that is available in the big cities, but not around here unfortunately.

So! Lots of work still to do unfortunately (no rest for the wicked and all that), but I'm going to be positive about it and view it as an opportunity to do better! At least if nothing else, I now know where we are doing well, and where we are falling down, and now I have a plan of attack to address those issues.

Low Fat, Low Sugar Muesli Bars

My kids and I love this recipe, although it is not as crunchy as commercially-bought muesli bars. If you prefer a more crunchy bar, you could try either lightly toasting the rolled oats before mixing with the other ingredients, or returning the cooled, cut-up bars to a low oven, but watch carefully that the bars don't burn. Alternately, you could dry the cooled, cut bars further in a dehydrator.


Ingredients

2 cups rolled oats
6 crushed Weet Bix
1/2 cup sultanas
60g dried apricots, chopped
1 cup 100% orange juice
1/3 cup honey
2 egg whites

Method

1. Combine orange juice and honey in a small saucepan, and simmer over medium heat for around 10 minutes, until it thickens and forms a thin syrup.

2. Combine oats, Weet Bix, sultanas and apricots in a bowl. Add syrup and stir to combine. Add egg whites and mix.

3. Preheat oven to 180'C (350'F). Press mixture into a lined 18 x 28cm tin, and bake 20-25 minutes until golden.

4. Cool in tin, turn out and cut into bars. They will last for up to a week in an air-tight container.

Happy New Year! Reflections on 2008 and Goals for 2009.

Happy New Year!

Wow, a new year already! I can still remember being young enough to feel each year drag by until the summer holidays and rolling my eyes at the "old folk" marvelling at how fast the year had flown... I guess I must be one of those "old folk" now LOL, because I can't believe how quickly the days seem to pass!

As always though, the beginning of a new calendar year seems a good opportunity to reflect on the past year and set goals for the new one. The past two and half years since we started down the path to simplicity and sustainability have been such an interesting experience for us; exciting, educational, satisfying, and also at times confusing, bewildering and even sometimes stressful, but - I have to say - mostly joyful.

Looking back it seems that that time has been divided roughly into two parts. Our first year or so was spent "greening" our lives: replacing incandescent light bulbs, reducing our household waste output and our water, electricity, natural gas and fuel use dramatically, and so on.

This second year or so seems to have been spent "simplifying" our lives: vastly expanding the items I can cook from scratch, vastly reducing our need to buy pre-processed foods, learning how to sew and mend, teaching myself to knit and crochet (badly!), getting rid of the second car, gradually purging the plastic from our lives and replacing it - where really necessary - with natural materials such as glass, timber and stone, paring down our wardrobes to the minimum and only buying the best quality (and preferably pre-loved) we can afford at the time.

Which brings me to this coming year! I see 2009 as the year where I will concentrate on learning how to really "nourish" my family, and by that I mean nourish them not only health-wise, but spirit-wise as well.

I feel as though I am at quite a cross roads in my cooking - having learnt the basics, now I am finding it hard to find recipes which aren't based on highly refined, highly processed white flours, white sugars and so forth. I see enticing packages of spelt flour or soba noodles for example, at my local organic grocer but don't really know what to do with them! So this year I plan to research and experiment with more wholesome alternatives in my cooking.

As well, I plan to address other areas in our life. I want to begin some new family traditions that - I hope - my children will look back fondly on when they grow up and leave home. I also want to further enrich our home, for example by getting rid of even more plastic and mass-produced products. In the same way that (I feel) a lovely meal not only involves taste, but also a pleasing combination of colours and textures, a lovely home environment - to me - is also a combination of pleasing colours, textures and smells. More and more these days I find I am repulsed by artificial fragrances (such as in dishwashing liquid or hand soap) which I wouldn't have even noticed a couple of years ago. The same goes for bright mass-produced plastic toys; I find them ugly and brash, unlike toys made from more natural fibres and materials, which have been sturdily crafted by a loving hand (not a machine).

And I can't forget my garden of course. Last year I joined Melinda's Growing Challenge and broke through a mental barrier regarding planting with seeds (instead of punnets of seedlings). This year I plan to learn how to save seeds from my own garden, which will involve not only learning how to do that for each type of plant, but also setting up some sort of logical (and accessible) storage and filing system for them.

Blog-wise, when I first started my journey it seemed logical to me to set up separate blogs for my favourite recipes, my garden diary and my slow food blog, because I wanted to keep my "green/ ethical living" research posts separated for easy reference. However, now all of those issues are part and parcel of my daily life and I see no need to have them separated. As such I am going to be incorporating the two lonely posts from my slow food blog, and then post a recipe from my cooking blog each week until they have all been swapped over, and close the two other blogs. I'll probably keep my garden diary blog, but just for (boring) planting records.

So, to add a little more fun to my blog layout and, more importantly, to help me organise myself a little more this year, I've made up some little picture headers for various post subjects and I'll be posting along a very rough schedule I've made up for myself, although I'll be still be blathering on randomly when I feel like it ;-)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading along, it's going to be an exciting learning curve for me!