Category: self-sufficiency

Installing a high raised bed: Garden update

I’ve decided to put in a high raised bed on one side of the back garden. We are still working on the drainage problem and I will write a lengthy article about this once it’s all sorted. Part of my waterlogged clay drainage plan is to build a high raised bed (30cm tall by 2m wide by 1m deep) which can accommodate a whole load of the displaced soil from other areas of the garden (it should take about 0.6 metric tons of soil, if you put those measurements into a calculator).

This came about because we have about 3 tons of soil that’s been displaced from digging 50 metres of drainage trenches around the garden. The soil type we have is heavy clay soil, and although we have a south-facing garden, the fence at the bottom is 4 metres high so that part of the garden is in shade for most of the morning, and even in this heat (I measured a 45 degree ground temperature two days ago) the clay soil just can’t dry out because behind the 4 metre high fence is a huge garden whose ground level is 2m above our ground level.

This means all the water from their garden comes to ours. Their garden is the lowest on their street (the street goes uphill from there) so we’re getting water from about 20 houses percolating into our back lawn.

It’s squelchy.

Even with the drainage ditches (which have created a beautiful stream water feature in our garden), it’s too waterlogged to grow anything useful or interesting. And I can’t have a pond and a water garden because I have a toddler (and will soon have 2 under 2) who can drown in an inch of water.

So instead I’m building up. The positive about clay is, it’s fantastic for holding nutrients in the soil for plants. It’s just the drainage that’s an issue. So I’m making adjustments to the soil (more on that later) to make it drain better.

The plan is to grow onions over winter in this raised bed, or to plant green manure (to fertilise it naturally), and dig that in, ready for squash or pumpkin planting next year.

Being quite pregnant, a very raised bed is great because it means less bending over to work with my plants. I used offcuts of recycled wood and built each side separately (long sides are 2 metres by 30cm, short sides are 1m by 30cm). Once each side has been made, you can nail them together using square chunks of wood in each corner to give them stability and strength.

First of all, I prepared the site by laying down some thick (but not waterproof) weed control fabric (aka weed proof membrane) to kill the grass and weeds that were already here. The membrane stops the sunlight getting to the grass and it dies because it can’t photosynthesize.

There was a lot of moss in this area and weed control fabric isn’t much use for that. However, iron sulphate works well for moss. Usually, iron sulphate is used to acidify soil (to make so-called ericaceous soil, suitable for erica, heather, rhododendrons, hydrangeas, citrus plants and other acid-needing plants). Since moss thrives in waterlogged alkaline conditions (especially in shady areas), acidifying the soil can help with this.

My problem with this method was, when the soil is this waterlogged, all that will happen is the water will dilute the iron sulphate until it’s not very effective (any acid or alk. We would need to drain the area before using that remedy on the moss. Instead, I dug over the whole area after removing the weed control fabric so the moss was dug into the soil. It needs light (even a little bit) and oxygen to survive so this was another effective way of getting rid of it.

The wood needs to be thick enough to hold a ton of soil and remember, that soil will be wet, which will shorten the life of the wood if it’s untreated. However, untreated wood is better for your plants because the chemicals from treatments can leach into the soil. With a large bed this is less of an issue.

The structure was easy to make and here’s instructions, if you want to make one, too.

Instructions for making a high raised bed:

You will need:

6 pieces of wood (length 2m, width 2cm, height 10cm)

6 pieces of wood (length 1m, width 2cm, height 10cm)

4 square corner posts (length/width 5-ish cm, height 30cm)

12 screws or nails

Method:

Step 1: Attach 3 pieces of 2 metre wood to 2 of the square corner posts, using one corner post at each end of the wood. Repeat this step with the other 3 pieces of 2 metre wood and the other two corner posts. These are the two long sides of the bed.

Step 2: Attach 3 pieces of 1 metre wood to one square posts at the end of each long side. These will make the short sides of the bed. Repeat with the final 3 pieces of 1 metre wood. See diagram above (the green lines are the square posts and the grey dots are nails or screws).

Step 3: Put your bed where you want it. That’s it!

Once the whole structure was complete, I sited it in the ground. I left a 6-inch (15cm) gap between the end of the bed and the fence, to protect the fence and to ensure better drainage from the higher garden behind ours (I don’t want their garden draining into my onion bed haha).

Because I used recycled wood, one of the long sides has an extra piece of wood nailed on the inside that doesn’t appear on the plans.

Next, I filled it with soil. This soil was all extra stuff from digging drainage trenches all around the garden, so if we didn’t find a use for it, we would have to figure out how to dispose of it, which seemed weird, because it’s soil.

The soil needed to be adjusted to it useful for growing plants, which involved adding sand and manure. The sand will improve drainage and the manure will increase the nutrients available for plants. You can’t use just any old sand, however, and there are several ways of adjusting soil.

You also need to take care not to use the soil too soon after you’ve made adjustments to it, because the repaired soil needs time for its structure to change after you’ve worked on it. I’ll go into detail on how to adjust your soil in another article.

I removed the turf all around the bed, too, and replaced this with gravel for better drainage and access to the bed. Clay soil suffers badly from compaction when it’s waterlogged, and walking on it will literally damage the peds (the individual cells of soil) by making them platy, so they can’t absorb water, which makes the waterlogging worse.

Compacted soil also makes it hard to grow anything. You can see this out and about if you’ve ever walked past a farm gate where cows have stood around, compacting the soil with their hooves. In summer, when that soil dries out, there will usually be a bare patch around the gate where things don’t grow so well. Compacted soil can produce dangerous conditions around farm animals (especially cows) as their feet can get stuck in it and then they might get injured.

In a garden, the main issue with compaction around walkways (where you’re not growing your flowers or vegetable crops anyway) is that it looks really unsightly. It also usually produces a very sticky mud that attaches itself to your shoes and refuses to let go, resulting in lots of scrubbing to get them clean!

Overall, then, soil compaction is not great for a number of reasons, and it’s best to avoid it wherever possible.

Switching the turf for gravel around this bed should also reduce the chance of excessive grass/weed growth around the edge of the bed, which has been a problem with my much smaller (120cm by 120cm by 15cm high) bed which is currently housing most of my crop for this year.

Also, the gravel looks pretty and will mean I can work on the bed without having to wear wellies to keep my feet dry!

So there you have it, that’s how we changed this dark, squelchy corner of the garden into a large high raised vegetable bed.

5 ways to attract pollinators to your garden

Bees have been in decline for about the past 15 years. I believe it was 2006 when David Tennant uttered the immortal line on Doctor Who: “Why are the bees disappearing?”

It was a question they never answered. Because no sonic screwdriver, no TARDIS, no noisy battle with the Daleks could fix the problem. The bees ARE disappearing.

And here’s why: Human interference. For centuries, we have systematically gone on a campaign of building, and humanity’s collective footprint has become far greater than our ancestors could ever have imagined.

There are plenty of green spaces outdoors, but they’re the wrong kind of spaces for pollinators such as bees and butterflies. We have acres and acres of monotone green grass verges, green roundabouts, green front gardens which we mow weekly to keep it to a socially-acceptable height. We’re more worried about offending the neighbours than preserving the insects who literally keep us alive.

Without pollinators, the plants will stop growing. They will die out. Then we will die out. Even meat-eaters.

So making your garden a haven for pollinators is quite important. Here’s five tried-and-tested ways to do it (even in small gardens).

  1. Plant a buddleia (aka buddleja): This shrub is also known as the butterfly bush for a reason! In full bloom, the buddleia’s fluffy-looking flowers attract dozens of butterflies and bees.
  2. Mow your lawn less often: Switch to a two-week schedule instead of weekly in the fast-growing summer months. This encourages things like clover, daisies and buttercups to grow in your grass, all of which will attract bees (and look amazing).
  3. Put up a bee hotel: This is a specially designed place a bit like a birdhouse but especially for bees. In the circular holes in the wooden structure, solitary bees can hang out. You can buy a bee hotel online.
  4. Put up a butterfly hotel: Like a bee hotel, except this one has long, thin entrances designed for butterflies (and to keep out things that might harm them).
  5. Dedicate a section of your garden as a wildflower area. You can either do this by not mowing your lawn in certain areas or by scattering wildflower seeds in a dedicated flower bed or container. Packets of wildflower seeds are perfect for cultivated land like lawns and gardens. Do be careful of scattering wildflower seeds in woodlands or other public spaces, however, as they can force out native species of flowers.

So there you have it, five ways you can attract pollinators into your garden and make your lawn a friendly space for these vital species! Have you done any of these? Let me know in the comments!

Avoiding tomato blight organically in Ireland

Friday morning, my husband’s weather app came up with something that we both found confusing.

“There’s a blight warning for Ireland!” he told me, thinking it was bizarre.

I raised an eyebrow because I didn’t know this was still a thing. For me, potato blight is the stuff of history books and represents a very painful chapter in Irish history. Also, I’m not currently growing potatoes. And I didn’t know blight affected anything else. Surely, I thought, in this day and age, there’s a cure for it.

So I went to Met Eireann, the Irish Meterological Office, and checked what they said.

I thought this only affected potatoes so I wondered if I should plant mine out asap or leave them. See, in the past when I have a bag of shop-bought potatoes and they have started to sprout, I planted them in the ground and got a big crop of delicious new potatoes. Article here. I currently have a bag of sprouting potatoes in our veg drawer, and this week would be the perfect time to plant them, given that the end of June is really the last time you can plant anything in our climate if you want it to crop before winter.

I looked up how to avoid potato blight and found out it’s much worse than that. It also affects tomatoes. The two plants don’t just sound the same when Gene Kelly sings about them in Shall We Dance, they also are very closely related. So close, they get the same disease.

Even having to think about dealing with this feels like trying to deal with the plant equivalent of the Black Death, but I’ve done some research and here’s what I’ve found out.

There are two types of blight. Early blight, which affects North America earlier in the planting season, and late blight, which affects Ireland and southwest Britain. Remedies for early blight won’t work for late blight, because the diseases are two different species.

Once late blight takes hold, it cannot be cured. The first sign is the leaves are damaged, then your crops look… ill.

Farmers can spray their crops’ leaves aggressively with fungicides to keep the blight away. None of these seem to be available for homesteaders, smallholders or gardeners. I’m currently five months pregnant and so I don’t really want pesticides or other chemicals like that anywhere near me. I don’t even use weed killer.

Luckily, there are some steps you can take to prevent blight affecting your organic tomatoes without using any chemicals. It’s spread when wind carries spores during humid conditions followed immediately by rain. The goals are to keep the leaves off the soil and as dry as possible to protect the plants.

First, stake all your tomatoes up off the soil. I’m growing tumbling Tom variety, which tends towards the ground, but I’ve found it’s not too hard to anchor them to a bamboo pole and get them to grow upwards.

Second, remove any leaves that grow close to the soil. Tomatoes have more leaves than they need, especially the lower ones where the plants don’t flower or produce fruit, so this pruning will not damage the plant but could save it.

If you have a greenhouse or shed, move your containerized tomatoes into it while conditions are good for the spread of blight. Consider growing your tomatoes in your greenhouse instead of your garden as this is the best way to keep them safe. You can also grow them in a polytunnel but I’m assuming if you had one, they’d already be under it.

If you don’t have a greenhouse, or your plants can’t be easily moved, get some polythene sheeting and make a DIY polytunnel to place over your tomato crops. Make supports for it from bamboo poles laid diagonally, so they meet at the top where you can tie them together (like an old-fashioned tent). Use a pair of four-foot bamboo poles roughly every 2-3 feet and lay the polythene over it. You can anchor the polythene with big stones or with tent pegs, if you have any.

If you can’t get hold of polythene sheeting or don’t want to use it, get a parasol or large umbrella (or a gazebo if you have one) and cover your tomatoes with it. It won’t be as effective as the other protective measures because the spores will still be in the air and an open-sided raincover won’t keep them out, but it will be better than nothing. The rain carries the fungus. Keeping the rain off the leaves will help protect the plants. Be aware of wind conditions, however, because high winds could damage or blow away a parasol, umbrella or gazebo.

If you’re really stuck, cover your plants with bin bags for the duration of any rain during the weather warning and be sure to take them back off before too long so the plants get enough sunshine. White bags would be better as they will let more light through and not overheat the plants (black bags will conduct heat more whereas white reflects heat). Given that I don’t have any of the above, this is what I’m going to end up doing. Be careful not to tie the bags too tightly around the stems in case it snaps the stems. Tomatoes at this time of year shouldn’t be as delicate as, say, courgettes but they don’t exactly have tree trunks, either.

When watering, water the soil, not the leaves. Take the sprinkler attachment off your hose or watering can and use a gentle flow of water, trying not to splash the plant at all. Again, the goal is to keep the leaves as dry as possible.

Our warning says blight will be hitting Munster, Connaught and Leinster later today or tomorrow, but won’t reach Ulster until Sunday or Monday, so I have some time to try and prevent my plants getting blighted. Honestly, if I’d known this was a potential issue I would have bought a variety of tomatoes that was blight-resistant or I would have kept them indoors instead of planting them out.

Of course, this leaves the issue of what on Earth to do with this bag of sprouted potatoes. Will they grow healthy or will they get blighted if I try to grow them now? I haven’t really got a place to plant them which is the only thing that has been stopping me. I know it’s a bit late in the year to grow them, anyway, and lots of people’s potatoes are cropping already; maybe this particular batch will just have to go on the compost instead of in the ground.

Container gardening update

So my back garden is now baked solid with its clay soil, and all my vegetable crops are in containers or my 120cm-squared (four foot square) raised bed. Here’s an update on how it’s all going!

My goal is to be self-sufficient although that’s not likely this year since I struggled to buy many of the seeds I wanted to grow, couldn’t buy many containers to put it all in, and the soil here was too poor to plant most things straight into the ground (waterlogged clay that goes solid in summer).

So far this year I’ve managed to start the following plants from seed:

Spaghetti squash x2

Courgette x6 (2 surviving currently)

Purple sprouting broccoli (one square foot of broccoli)

Tomatoes (tumbling Tom variety) x4

Peas (one square foot of peas)

Onions (from bulbs) (four x 1 square foot in the raised bed, plus a container of bad clay soil).

Lavender (one propagator full)

Echinacea x8

Sunflower x2

Results so far are as follows:

The vegetables:

The spaghetti squashes are probably the hardest to grow and definitely the least resilient. They insist on growing really tall and curly, they refuse to stay attached to the poles I fixed them to. One of them has a stem which has split open in two places when I tried to re-attach it to the pole again. I don’t see it surviving to the end of the week. How these plants survive in the wild is anybody’s guess. Maybe they’re a very cultivated hybrid.

The first batch of courgettes died immediately when planted out in early May. I now know they have to stay indoors longer and be put out later. The second batch of two courgettes were planted out yesterday into the raised bed, 60cm apart (as per the instructions on the packet) and seem to be doing fine so far despite being smaller and younger when I planted them out than the first batch were.

The first batch of purple-sprouting broccoli was in mint condition when I put it out a month ago. Since then, it established itself with some difficulty. Then a bird ate it and now it has no leaves but it still seems to be alive. I don’t know if they will grow back. The second batch of broccoli went out yesterday. I need to get some netting or something to keep birds away.

The tomatoes have been easy to grow. No special treatment. They just sat on my kitchen windowsill forever until it was warm enough to plant them out. They are now happily sitting in containers and two of them have tiny green fruits developing while all of them have yellow flowers. The main issue with them was ensuring they were in big enough pots to grow as much as they liked.

The peas were also easy. This is my second year growing dwarf peas and I know this time that they need to be picked when the pods are small.

The onions are all doing great. The ones in the good soil in the raised bed are about 5 inches taller than the ones in the container full of bad clay soil. So that’s busted the myth that onions prefer bad soil. But it also proves that they can grow in waterlogged clay soil with no major issues they’re just a little smaller.

The fruit plants:

The blueberry bush is flowering in its container. I don’t think we’ll get fruit this year but I may be surprised. I bought the plant in December and kept it indoors until April. You can’t change the container or re-plant a blueberry bush in May and it was a bit of a mission to get it outside in time for the end of April, due to my hyperemesis gravidarum being in full swing in April and through May. I think we were saved a bit by the cold May this year.

The blackberry bush is also happy in a container. I’m thinking of keeping it in a container even if we can make the necessary soil adjustments, just because blackberry bushes can be quite invasive (the brambles at my old house in York produced incredible berries that made great jam but OMG they grew fast and suddenly were everywhere, which seemed to offend my mother-in-law who tried to rip them out).

The two dwarf cherry trees I bought last March are still happy in their pots. They are living at the front of the house for the time being until I can plant them somewhere permanent. They are self-fertile but I think they enjoy each other’s company.

The Flowering Herbs

In an amazing surprise, I went to weed the cherry tree containers yesterday and discovered some chamomile growing in there. I’ve tried to uproot it and re-plant it in its own pot, but I think a good amount of the root snapped off so time will tell whether the chamomile will re-root or not. I’m really pleased about finding it because it must have seeded from the chamomile I grew last year, which I was sad about leaving in a hedgerow to mark a rabbit grave.

In another surprise, my echinacea has sprouted, and a second seed sprouted in the same pot, so I carefully re-planted that in its own pot about three weeks ago and it’s established itself really well since then. Both echinacea plants are thriving and I can’t wait to see the flowers. Echinacea is THE hardest plant to grow from seed in the UK/Ireland. I have two more pots with seeds in on the windowsill in the downstairs bathroom but I am not expecting them to sprout since I planted them over a month ago. We’ll see.

And my lavender, also notoriously difficult (but not echinacea-hard) to grow from seed, was finally ready to move outside today. It’s actually looking like lavender, now (very tiny lavender) which is so exciting! I learned this week that lavender won’t flower until its second year, which may explain why it’s so expensive to buy flowering lavender plants in the shops.

Only one of my two sunflowers has sprouted but it’s thriving and I moved it into a bigger pot two days ago. I’m hoping we can harvest and store the seeds as they’re one of my favourite sources of protein.

So that’s my gardening update, how is yours coming along? Let me know in the comments!

Vegan white sauce recipe

White sauce is the foundation of most milk-based sauces, including cheese sauce, peppercorn sauce, bechamel sauce, parsley sauce and soups such as clam chowder (the white one).

I know this because, when I was 11 and learning Home Economics (now called the much edgier “food technology”) at school, I spent most of my time copying pages and pages out of textbooks while my classmates were busy cooking.

At my school, the teacher would buy the ingredients for us and we just had to bring in the money (usually about 80p-£1), or we could bring in the ingredients if we preferred. My mum refused to give me the money for the ingredients OR to buy the actual ingredients, which often left me not able to participate in home economics. The teacher, thinking I was just lazy, made me copy out of textbooks as a “punishment”.

I think I learned more from this than my classmates did. In my experience of attending 13 schools and 3 colleges, home economics teachers are singularly oblivious to the social issues that prevent children from learning. They all seem to be jolly-middle-class women who think everyone has “tagliatelle” at home.

I had been cooking for the whole family since the age of 9, but because I had never eaten a fairy cake, let alone made one, I was seen as “bad at cooking”, a label I internalized and carried with me into adulthood until I finally realized, at 27, I wasn’t bad at cooking, I just didn’t know how to cook the standard middle-class British dishes of the 1970s (which people still seem to judge us on today).

That’s fine, because people like that home economics teacher who think there’s one true way to cook “properly” are usually the first people to get upset about catering for dairy free guests, on the basis that they only know how to follow a bunch of recipes they learned at school or from Delia Smith (sorry, Delia, but you have some unimaginative readers).

So I took great pleasure in subverting white sauce for the vegan agenda and I hope you enjoy the fabulous results of using this sauce as a base for all your dairy-free milky sauce dishes that Western cuisine seems so obsessed with.

This dairy-free white sauce is very customizable, because it’s the base for so many other sauces. Leave it as-is for béchamel sauce (for lasagne/lasagna), or add things to make cheese, parsley, peppercorn sauces etc. It only requires three ingredients to make the basic sauce.

Ingredients:

25g Dairy-free butter

250ml Soy milk (other milks such as almond also work)

25g Flour

This will make enough sauce to cover two servings of cauliflower cheese. As you can see, the measurements are a ratio: For every gram of butter you need one gram of flour, and 10ml of dairy-free milk (add a bit more milk for a thinner sauce). This makes a very easy-to-scale recipe and I often measure my ingredients by eye, adding one part flour to one part butter, then I add the milk slowly from a big carton until I hit the right consistency.

Method:

Put the vegan butter in a saucepan and put it onto a medium heat. Melt the butter.

As the butter turns into a puddle but before it starts to bubble, add the flour gradually, stirring constantly. You are currently making something called a roux, which is the base of most thickened dishes.

Keep stirring (it might start to feel quite dry) until the roux turns crumbly and very slightly golden yellow (don’t let it burn). The quality of the roux will determine the quality of the finished sauce. If the roux turns brown, throw it away and start again.

The flour and butter should look like this.

Gradually add the non-dairy milk, a dash at a time (about a tablespoon’s worth, or a shot, if that’s easier to eyeball), stirring continuously. Only add more when the milk starts to thicken. I usually take the pan off the heat for this part because it’s easy to burn the milk. If you add the milk too quickly, you will get a LOT of lumps (some lumps are inevitable). Squash the lumps out with your fork.

Keep stirring the mixture until it’s a nice, thick, saucy consistency.

Now you’re done! It’s time to either serve it, if you’re making this as a béchamel sauce, or to add the other ingredients such as dairy-free cheese, if you’re making cheese sauce, or peppercorns, if you’re making pepper sauce.

Has your sauce gone lumpy? Fix it!

The main way this sauce can go wrong is if you end up with lots of lumps in a fairly watery sauce. There are two ways you can fix this:

Either use a fine-meshed sieve (if you have one; the sort with holes small enough to drain rice without any grains falling through) or a hand blender.

Lump Removal Method 1: With the sieve, get the bowl ready, put the sieve over it (bowl must be wider than sieve, unless you tilt the sieve so all the sauce falls from one place, or you will have cheese sauce everywhere), pour the cheese sauce into the sieve, and wait for the sauce to drain out, then throw away the lumps that are left.

Lump Removal Method 2: With a hand blender, leave the sauce in the pan and just blend out the lumps.  It usually thickens a LOT when you do this (because the lumps are the flour and butter that is also the thickener that gives the sauce its consistency).  If it’s too thick, stir in more milk, a little at a time, until it reaches the right consistency.

Container gardening: 12 mistakes I made

Last year, we were living in a cottage that had zero garden. It was in the middle of nowhere and literally all we had was a space the size of a standard apartment balcony around the back door. In that space, we had to be able to store our bins as well as hang out our washing.

I started container gardening in March 2020, having previously had a “regular” garden at our house in England. I started most of the plants from seed, with the exception of trees.

Gardening for me has always been a process of making mistakes and learning from them for next time. When something works first time, I am amazed. Here are the mistakes I made and what I learned from them:

Never plant out too soon

A lot of packets of seeds say “plant out when risk of frost has passed” but they don’t tell you that’s a proper gardening date that varies based on your region. You can find out your last frost date by searching for it. If you really can’t find out, don’t plant out until after 20th May in the UK.

If you plant out too soon, the night temperature will be too cold for your young plants to handle and they will freeze to death.

Move new plants into bigger pots when you get them

I bought some trees, including two lovely dwarf cherry trees and a raspberry bush. They were from different garden stores and arrived separately. The trees were very obviously in need of bigger pots when I got them, so I put them straight into the big containers they have lived in for the past year.

The raspberry bush came in a 5 litre pot and even though it was quite a big plant I didn’t think it needed planting up into anything bigger. So I left it.

This was not a good plan. More on the raspberry next.

Don’t put hardy outdoor plants beside a radiator that’s hotter than an active volcano

Worried about protecting my raspberry plant from frost, I’d read that raspberries won’t crop if they get too cold in their first two years, so I decided to keep it indoors until May. I popped it on the deepest windowsill in the kitchen. It honestly didn’t occur to me that being next to a radiator would cause any problems. Our heating was badly-controlled and was only on or off, it had no thermostat (this was a rented house). When the heating was on, the heat from the radiator rose into the air and killed half of the raspberry plant (you can see it in the picture for this article, it’s the plant with yellow and brown leaves sat on the white plate).

Don’t listen to well-meaning but badly-informed people about plants, especially if they are not container gardening

I put the raspberry bush outside, still in that 5l pot. Its leaves turned white and then brown, and my aunt told me that it wasn’t a bush at all and I needed to separate the “canes”. So I dug it out and, stupidly, pulled the plant apart trying to save it, until I found out it was all attached and had one main stem beneath the soil. If it hadn’t already been dead I would lose a lot of sleep over this.

Cress on kitchen towel needs watering 3x daily

I was really excited about growing cress as it can be done indoors with no special know-how (allegedly). It’s aimed at children so how hard can it be, right? Wrong!

Cress dries out (like, the paper towel shrivels up and goes hard) about 2-3 times per day. It needs so much nannying and constant attention that it really only works if cress is the only baby in your life.

Unfortunately, I have a human baby to look after, so time after time my cress dried out and died. I got it to crop a grand total of once without it immediately drying out and dying, and that was scattered over soil, not on kitchen roll. I ate most of that. I haven’t really mastered cress or other microgreens very well.

Pick your veg when they are ready

I bought pea seeds that were advertised as ideal for container gardens. I planted 4 in a big pot and put them outside. They grew perfectly. I hadn’t counted on needing to stake them and so they grew sort of curly near the soil until I sorted that. They never got very tall, and I’d expected them to reach 2-3 feet (bearing in mind regular pea plants can easily reach 6-ish feet or 2 metres-ish). Pea pods grew and went fat and green but they were tiny. Maybe 4cm across.

I thought they were still growing, not quite understanding that dwarf plants mean dwarf crops. So I left them. They turned yellow then brown and died. I picked them at that point and even tried one. It was bitter and inedible. I should have picked them when they were ready instead of waiting for them to look like full-sized pea pods.

Echinacea doesn’t grow easily in Ireland

Echinacea is a coneflower native to North America. I wanted to grow it because when the pandemic hit, the shelves were emptied of echinacea tea by all the sensible people who know about its immune-boosting properties.

It is really hard to get it to grow in Ireland especially if you follow the instructions on the packet. It has taken me 8 attempts to get one to sprout, then it immediately died, and two more attempts to get one to live a month (and counting).

Don’t assume seeds will be easy to get next year

I also successfully grew chamomile, another of my favourite tea-herbs. I got a bumper crop in a 60cm trough, enough to last for months if I’d cut and dried it. When our rabbit Timmy died, we buried him in a hedge, and we planted the chamomile on his grave.

It’s always been a readily-available plant in the shops and online, it never occurred to me that would be the last time I’d see a packet of chamomile seeds. But it was. I would have brought the perennial plant to our new house if I’d had any idea about how hard it is to get chamomile in Ireland these days.

It’s okay if the soil goes moldy

The first time my propagator got a layer of white mold over the surface of the soil, my seeds (broccoli microgreens) hadn’t sprouted yet and I threw the lot away. The third time it happened, I left it alone and the seeds grew through fine.

Now I understand that if I’m covering a plant pot or propagator to keep seeds warm, it’s a fact of life that the soil will go moldy before the seeds sprout. I haven’t done anything wrong.

You will need more containers than you think

I couldn’t grow all the things I wanted to last year because there wasn’t enough space in the kitchen to start them off (I had nowhere else to do it), and even if there had been, there were no containers to put it all in. In the UK, all the garden centres got emptied of their stock las year due to fear of food shortages, and I was lucky to get three containers and two troughs but it wasn’t enough for all the seeds I was waiting to plant.

Small plant pots blow away in high winds

We had several big storms last year and every time, my smaller pots blew away and ended up either on next door’s drive, in the hedge, or completely AWOL. I lost two mint plants, a sunflower and two broccoli because one rowdy wind storm began overnight. The storm was so bad it actually brought the wall down next to where my plants were standing.

In the morning I had to walk around searching for my plants, putting them back into pots and sitting them on my storage bench again. A thyme plant sadly died from all of this. I’m not sure what the best answer is, but now in bad weather I move all my pots up against the house, using the bigger containers to form a protective palisade around the little ones.

The baby plants were indoors for longer than I expected

This one doesn’t apply if you buy everything ready-grown from a garden centre or nursery, but if you grow from seed, it will take 15-60 days for them to germinate, then they have to grow big and strong enough to go outside and the risk of frost must pass and some plants have to slowly acclimatise to outside over a series of days or weeks!

On average, plants started from seed lived in my kitchen for 2 months. This made it impossible to do successive planting and I’ve had the same issue this year (but less stressful as our house is double the size of the old one but places to put plants are still limited due to having a curious toddler on the loose).

Bonus tip: Cut microgreens and cress with scissors if you don’t want to eat soil/other weird stuff.

So that’s the twelve (actually 13) things I learned from container gardening last year. The plants were in my house much longer than I’d expected due to living so far north. That alone helped me plan my gardening for this year a lot more effectively.

Overall, last year’s experience with container gardening has made me a more resilient problem-solver when it comes to growing food. When I discovered in February that our new, huge back garden was a waterlogged heavy clay soil which was terrible for gardening, I wasn’t phased, and have switched to a raised bed and a bunch of containers for this year’s plants, because it was too late (and lockdown has closed down everything) to adjust the soil in time for this year’s growing season.

I think every gardener could benefit from learning how to do container gardening.

How to homeschool your children during lockdown 2.0

Are you trying to homeschool again during the new lockdown? One thing many people new to homeschooling worry about is how to get their children to do the homeschooling, especially when they have several children. Now it’s half-term, you might be able to take a few minutes to up your homeschooling game.

Part of the problem for why homeschooling is so chaotic right now is that teachers are used to only having one age group in their classroom, so even though they might be using different work for different groups, those groups are still learning the same topic. There will always be times when the whole class do things together, regardless of their abilities.

At home, unless you have twins or triplets, they are unlikely to be doing the same lesson, so you need to organise your home learning differently to how it’s done in the classroom.

The following is adapted from my new book Homeschooling 101: How to Homeschool in the UK available here on Amazon and free with Kindle Unlimited, which I co-wrote with the amazing Dr. Jason Szulc from Scientifica Now, who really knows his academic stuff!

First of all, don’t try to do everything all at once. Let’s say you have three children you want to work with. A teacher in a classroom can’t teach three lessons at the same time and neither can you. It’s not possible. So give two of the children a task that doesn’t require any direct teaching, such as colouring or a home exercise YouTube video, and get the third child on task.

My personal preference is to start explaining the work to the child who will need the least help, and move through your children to the one who will need the most help, so you can spend as much time as you need sitting with them and getting them on-task with their learning.

Another option is to get the middle children on-task first, then get the one who needs the least help to help you with the child who needs the most help getting started. This approach works when all your children are close in age and when the child needing the least help is older and more academically able than the others. It won’t work so well if the child who needs the least help is five and the one who needs the most help is twelve.

Sometimes the hardest part can be getting the children to sit down and listen to you. Patterns of behavior based on years and years of the way parents and children live together will make it hard to use the sort of behavior management that works in a teaching environment.

It makes sense that the parent-child relationship is very different from the teacher-child relationship. You are there when your child wakes up in the night with a nightmare. You’ve sat through fevers with them. Taken them to the doctors and held their hand.

Your bond with your child is completely different to the way your child relates to their teachers. And that’s how it should be. But it means that what works in a classroom won’t necessarily work at home to get the children to sit down and do their work. Especially given that home is where all their toys and games are. So cut yourself some slack, you’re asking things of your children that aren’t part of your usual parent-child relationship, and this can cause conflict or outright refusal.

Another issue with the current situation is that most teachers have never actually homeschooled their own children and don’t know how it is different. Naively, some teachers (and head teachers) seem to expect children to do exactly what they would do at school… but at home. This is unrealistic.

Homeschooling lessons should be shorter and more productive, because the children don’t have to wait for all the classroom crowd-control. Many homeschooling parents have said that their child gets through very little content at school compared to at home.

What some teachers don’t understand is that the children should be spending less time learning at home to achieve the same outcomes. Mass video calls with a whole class of children are very unproductive, yet this is what many have fallen back on. This is because they don’t know what else to do.

Many normally-homeschooling parents (parents whose children aren’t registered at a school) only do 2-3 hours of table learning (learning at a desk) a day! These are parents of children who go on to take exams and then get into university. The rest of the day is often learning things like cooking, gardening, going on bug hunts or drawing/painting.

Here are some tips to help you get your children into a learning head space:

  • Make space: Have a dedicated part of the house such as the dining room where you can do homeschooling. This helps your children know that when they are here, they do learning. This area ideally needs a table and chairs, which is why a dining area or dining room will work well.
  • Zero distractions: Eliminate as many distractions as possible. Turn off the TV. Switch off the Wi-Fi if you’re doing a learning task that doesn’t require it. Ask everyone to put their phones in the middle of the table or in another special place and only allow them at designated breaks (once everyone is in the habit of doing their schoolwork, you can allow them to use their phones to do research).
  • Make a plan: Studies have shown that children who have a clear idea of what to expect from the day are more productive. Think about it. If you know what someone wants you to do, it’s easier to organise yourself. Using a piece of paper or a planner pad, write down times for each task (don’t forget breaks) and leave this sheet where your child can see it. If they can’t tell the time yet, just write down the order of the day, e.g. “Maths, break, English, break, P.E., lunch…”
  • Take a break: Research shows children’s brains can pay attention to a task for about forty minutes before they lose focus. Plan ten- to fifteen-minute breaks for the children every forty minutes. During breaks, children should have the option of snacking/drinking as this helps concentration.
  • Make noises: Some children work best with music. Others work best in silence. If your children are struggling to focus, try either putting music on or turning it off. Typically, what works for one child won’t work for another. In that case, earphones are the way forward. You can even put white noise on YouTube and play that through earphones if it helps!
  • Experiment: If your children are struggling with this kind of setup, change it up! You are free to do anything with your homeschooling, so you could sit outside to work (in coats and hats in winter), or even completely change the type of learning you’re doing with your kids, there are ideas in my book for ways you can homeschool with an outdoor classroom environment.

Some children will thrive working in the same room as their brothers and sisters. Others will struggle. Some schools during the current lockdown are saying that children need to be working alone, but this is unrealistic (and not what happens at school). Other schools are saying children need to be wearing school uniform (what absolute nonsense). Schools have clearly gotten notions this time around.

If you are really stuck for things to do with your children, do check out my free printables which you can find on the resources page and my article on ideas for things your children can do with Lego.

Don’t be afraid to hire a tutor, either. The advantages of a tutor are that someone is with the child, checking they are working for set times in the day, as well as being there to answer questions. A tutor is an investment, so don’t go for the cheapest, go for one who has good reviews, their qualifications are verified, and most importantly, who works well with your child. If the first one you try isn’t the best fit, let them know ASAP (so they can update their schedule for their other clients), and get a different tutor!

It is far better to get through this new lockdown with your mental health and family relationships in tact than to do every single thing sent home from school. If you follow these tips, you will soon be homeschooling like a boss!

Homeschooling 101 is available on Amazon or get a free sample packed full of tips when you sign up to my newsletter (unsubscribe at any time). Do also check out my free resources.

If you have any questions let me know in the comments and I’ll try to answer them.

10 Homeschooling ideas for Lego or Mega Bloks Construx

When you are homeschooling, sometimes you just want to give your child something to do, that doesn’t involve a screen, and to know they are learning something.

Lego/Mega Bloks Construx/other building products are perfect for this. Just buy a big bucket of blocks and use these ideas to keep your child busy and learning without any input (or minimum input) from you.

Younger children are very easily attracted to Lego, but even older children will find a challenge with some of the tasks you can set them using blocks that push together.

For older children, using Lego to express extremely complex ideas from the maths and science curriculum can help compound their learning, or you can use it as a starter to introduce a new topic.

I have also made a printable which you can print out, which is a deck of 21 things to build with Lego, for when you need a quick draw activity to instantly engage your child. You can download the free printable here.

You can also use the printable cards as a reward, e.g. if they have finished the work on another task, let them choose a card, as inspiration for something to build with Lego or Mega Bloks Construx.

Set them a challenge like building the tallest tower that doesn’t fall down using only yoghurt pots, then when you come back ask them how many yoghurt pots made the tallest tower and what might make the tower stand up better, then giving them time to try other ways to get the tower to stay up (glue, making the base out of three yoghurt pots and building up, etc).

Here are 10 activities your child can do with construction blocks such as Lego or Mega Bloks Construx that you could turn into an investigation or lesson (and which will give you time to teach your other children or make yourself a drink):

  1. What is the tallest tower you can build? You could use this to teach younger children about how buildings stay upright and, for older children, centre of mass and balance for GCSE physics.
  2. Put twelve blocks together. How many different ways can they split it evenly (two groups of 6, three groups of 4, four groups of 3, etc)? You could use this to introduce factors for a maths lesson.
  3. Put twenty blocks together. How many times can they split it in half? You could use this to introduce fractions for a maths lesson.
  4. Make one row that is one block, the next row is one, the next is two, three, five… each time get them to add together the last two numbers in the sequence to find the size of the next row. You could use this to introduce the Fibonacci sequence, an important number sequence that can be found in nature.
  5. Can you make a circle out of Lego, if you have enough bricks?
  6. Design a car. It has to be different to the last one your child made. Ask them to make it out of a different type of brick, or with different size wheels, or similar. You can then use the Lego car to test out physics questions (especially if they can make a ramp) such as friction (how much do they need to tilt the ramp before gravity allows it to roll down).
  7. Older children could make a 2-D Lego model of a plant or animal cell (or both) to compare the features of the two.
  8. Make a scene out of Lego, complete with minifigures, and use it as a creative writing prompt for your child.
  9. Make a balance beam with a long piece of Lego. The child can attach bricks at different distances and find out when the beam tilts. For example, one block, six studs away, should be able to be balanced with two blocks on the other side that is three studs away. You can use this to teach children from age 11 upwards (even through A-level if they need the reminder) about forces and distances from a pivot point (these are called moments).
  10. Using minifigures, look at their faces. They often have different expressions. Your child needs to write down what emotion each character is expressing, and describe their face (such as “eyebrows are close together and diagonal”, for frowning). This is especially good for children who are struggling to interpret emotions of the people around them. You could take this further by asking (for example) “why might this figure be angry?” Once the child has thought of something that makes them angry, you could move onto, “What could you do to make them feel better?”

There are thousands more things you can do with Lego, these are just a selection of things that I think would link closely to the national curriculum. Lego can be far more of a learning tool than the boxes imply. The best Lego to get for education is a bucket with a good mixture of lots of different shapes and sizes of Lego.

If you are using Mega Bloks Construx, these are compatible with Lego, but some other types of construction block don’t stick to Lego due to being very slightly too big or small. In my experience, Mega Bloks Construx don’t stick as tightly to Lego as other pieces of Lego do, but if you’re on a budget, they are definitely worth considering.

We have some of the bigger baby-size Mega Bloks and our little one loves them, although they are not compatible with Duplo (the next size up of Mega Bloks is, though). The plastic on the baby-sized ones is softer and I think he likes them because they are very chewable, perfect for teething babies. The baby-size Mega Bloks also have the advantage of being suitable from age 1 whereas Duplo is age 2+. When it comes to the smaller bricks, however, they are largely identical to Lego (the Construx range by Mega Bloks is for ages 5+) and there’s a thriving world of Mega Bloks Construx out there which you can discover.

Need some Lego? Get a big box here on UK Amazon or here on US Amazon (neither ships to Ireland but this smaller box does).

Lego, Duplo, Mega Bloks and Mega Bloks Construx are registered trademarks of their respective companies.

How to safely use essential oils in home-made soap (infographic)

Essential oils can cause harm if used incorrectly because they are potent substances. Putting the essential oil on the skin neat (undiluted, or straight from the bottle) causes irritation and can leave your skin burnt. The oil is diluted in soap to a rate of about 3% (average) which makes it less likely to cause irritation although some sensitive souls are still allergic to some essential oils even at this low concentration.

Check out the infographic and follow these tips to use essential oils safely in home made soap:

1. Buy from a reputable seller

This is the most fundamental first step. It’s not always easy to spot a fake, especially because they’re being sold online where you can’t inspect the product.

A clear bottle is a dead giveaway as genuine oils degrade in sunlight so have to be stored in dark bottles (amber is most common).

The label or online listing should tell you the Latin name. There are many oils with the same common name. If you can’t see the Latin name anywhere in the product listing, there’s a chance the oil isn’t the one you expect it to be, which will ruin your blend at best, and at worst, could cause skin irritation because you might use the wrong quantity.

The listing should always tell you the country of origin. For example, “French lavender” might say “Product of Hungary” at the bottom of the page. This would make it apparent that it wasn’t genuine French lavender from France.

Of course, real malicious fakers and counterfeiters would not honestly write “Made in Kevin’s backyard out of olive oil and artificial lavender fragrance” so the most important thing to weigh up is whether you believe the website you’re shopping on is genuine, or in the case of Amazon, whether the seller is genuine or not. Product reviews can very easily be manipulated so don’t rely on them alone. Soapmaking groups online can help warn you against scams and recommend genuine, reputable suppliers.

2. Always follow the recommended quantities

The FDA and EU both have guidelines about the amount of any fragrance (including natural essential oils) you can use in cosmetics. Usually this is somewhere between 1-5% depending on the oil and its potential toxicity. It’s very easy to want to use more essential oil when your soap hasn’t turned out very strong smelling, but there are other ways to solve this problem. Check out my article 10 ways to get the fragrance to show up in your soap.

3. Do not overheat (above 50 degrees) and ideally keep under 40 degrees (102F).

Overheating oil causes it to release free radicals as the oil’s fatty acid chains break up. Free radicals are carcinogenic as they contribute to cell oxidation. Overheating an oil is the fastest way to change it from safe to dangerous.

When an oil gets too hot, it also loses its fragrance, which is another great reason to take care over the temperature.

4. Do not eat!

This should be self-explanatory but some people do try and eat (or drink) essential oils. Unless they have been certified for food use and sold as such, it’s best not to risk it, especially when it comes to children. Just because something came from a plant, that doesn’t make it safe. All the traditional poisons of Greek tragedies were plant-based.

Conclusion:

Essential oils can be safe in soaps if you take care and follow some simple guidelines. If you need to check any information e.g. chemical compounds present in your essential oil or the maximum concentration for use in various cosmetics and soap making, contact the seller for the product safety documentation (or download it from their website if they’ve made this easy. The Soap Kitchen makes this very easy, as an example of best practice).

Sources:

Turek, C and Stintzing, F (2013) Stability of Essential Oils: A Review https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1541-4337.12006

Bejar, E. (2019) Adulteration of Oregano Herb and Essential Oil https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ezra_Bejar/publication/337113671_Adulteration_of_Oregano_Herb_and_Essential_Oil/links/5dc5cb74a6fdcc5750348535/Adulteration-of-Oregano-Herb-and-Essential-Oil.pdf

Check out my other articles about essential oils in soaps:

All about essential oils in melt and pour soap (and infographic)

How to get the essential oil scent to show up in soap

History of essential oils in soap

How to make soap: Everything you need to know to make soap even in a campervan.

Here’s a selection of my other articles about making home made cosmetics:

Vegan green tea shampoo bar recipe

Vegan hair conditioner bar recipe

One-ingredient avocado face mask recipe

Easy melt and pour breastmilk soap recipe

At-home DIY facial for new mamas!

DIY upcycled book caddy from a wine carrier

So I really wanted one of those gorgeous Ikea spice racks that Americans are transforming into book holders for children, but sadly, UK Ikea don’t sell the same spice racks. The ones in the US go for $6.99 and the nearest UK equivalent is £18.

That’s a pretty huge difference, when you consider that a British £1 is worth more than $1 USD. Like, they get the same thing for about £5 that we would have to pay £18 for.

Nope.

So I bought this wooden wine carrier from Hobbycraft. It was unfinished and I measured it. It’s the perfect size for the Gruffalo but about half a centimetre too small to fit any of the Charlie and Lola books in (boo). If Hobbycraft ever make these half a centimetre bigger, I’ll get another one and paint that instead.

IMG_2042b

I painted the ends green and the middle red, using cheap acrylic paint from The Works (£2.99 for 6 different tubes of coloured paint) and cheap brushes, also from The Works.

They deliver.

I copied the frog picture from Jellyfish’s favourite bath sponge, a frog we have dubbed Mr. Ribbit. If you’re wondering, the frog sponge is here in a 2 pack.

It took two days to do the whole thing and I feel really proud because I am not very good at painting.

IMG_2044b

IMG_2049b

I can see the frog could have been painted better (by someone other than me, with a steadier hand and better drawing ability) but overall I’m happy with how this turned out. The first thing Jellyfish did when he saw it was try to put it in his mouth so he definitely thinks it looks like his frog sponge.

I can’t wait to put books in it!

Have you made anything this week? Let me know in the comments.