Sunday 18th October 09

Up early as was expecting a visit from old friends Tim and Anita, whom we haven't seen for about 10 years. They were due to arrive at about 9.30 and spend about an hour with us, before going to meet their friend who had a big 50th birthday party yesterday, someone Tim went to University with.

At about 9am they rang and said they were running a bit late, could be here at 10. I went out the front and started building a new logpile to the left of the front door (looking out) and soon they arrived, in a taxi. How absolutely lovely to see them again. They had a fruit tea and a walk down the garden and all too soon it was 11 o clock and their taxi back to Bootham arrived. Hopefully next time we won't leave it 10 years! I am very fond of them both.

So then I got to work as it was a lovely day, and did 2 hours hedge removal and shredding. I finished the hedge roots processing... pulling them apart and taking off soil so they are bare-rooted, and don't have any ground elder with them. Put all these aside for the chap to collect later.

Lunch and Gardeners Question time, then cycled to Country Fresh to get some veg and came back with a trailer load of gunk to put in layers with the shredded twigs, the perfect mix.

As I arrived back the Freecycler from near Easingwold had arrived to collect the last of the privet roots, about 160 of them. He was delighted, and shared some Oscar Wilde anecdotes with me, which was interesting.

I spent the rest of the afternoon sorting out the material I'd cut off the extracted roots. Our neighbour got busy setting out where the foundations are going to go and I found him three builders 'dumpy bags' which are a cubic metre each to put the soil in. I used the rotasieve to separate roots from soil, and shredded the roots along with more of the twigs. I also collected together quite a lot of stones, which will help with the wall building apparently.

I stayed out in the rain and came in when it got dark, very achy and tired, but happy that so much has been achieved. Gill had made a good mushroom quiche, had this with potatoes and cabbage salad and some other bits and bobs.

Our youngest was very excited as he's going on a field trip tomorrow, I just kept my head down and let him bounce around and be his lovely excited self. He had a bath with water from the stove which I carried up. Played lots of facebook Scrabble and watched synthesizer stuff from my youth on BBC4.

Saturday 17th October 09

Not too early a start but as soon as I got up I went to do yet more work in the garden. This hedge removal and processing seems never-ending but it is gradually getting done.

Gill went into town with both boys on the bus to get assorted clothes. They are growing fast, and our youngest is going on a fieldtrip next week so he needs some more clothes.

I cycled round to the bread shop and bought £3 worth of 'yesterbake' bread, baked yesterday but not sold. So then it's all brought to the Tang Hall Lane Thomas the Baker and sold ridiculously cheaply, effectively at quarter of the full price. An excellent way of reducing waste. On the way back I cycled up to Harris Builders and gave them the 25% deposit cheques for the solar panels and chimney removal.

I contacted the Freecycle privet roots people and after lunch, one lady came round to pick up 25 of them, and a chap from near Easingwold is coming tomorrow to pick up all the rest.

I finished taking out the hedge, and put aside about 100 roots for the chap tomorrow. He'll be delighted. My sons also helped me start to chop up the sticks, of which there are a huge number, using loppers. This was lovely as they generally aren't interested in any garden activities. It made me very happy to work with them, although it was only half an hour maximum. Our neighbours are also very happy that I've removed the hedge so swiftly. The wall and fence will be put in soon.

Chatted on the phone to my friend Anita, who with her hubby Tim will visit early tomorrow morning. I found bus times for them as although they've got a car in Reading, they have decided to come up by train. They've a friend in York who's having a birthday. I haven't seen them for perhaps 10 years or so. Maybe more! I used to go and see them when I went to the WOMAD festival when it was held in Reading. It'll be lovely to see them again. I have lovely memories of WOMAD and it was there where I learned to do Devilsticks for the very first time.

During the evening Gill and I had a game of Scrabble. It was very close, score-wise, and whilst Gill took her goes, I did emails and wrote my blog. I won by 4 points.

Friday 16th October 09

A good day, with a bit of a late start but when I did get going I did another bout of hedge in the garden... I'm over halfway now. It's looking good, nice and open, more light. I think having a fence will be an improvement.

After lunch I did a little bit more (another 30 roots in a sack, destination unknown) but soon got ready to go and get two cheques out to pay the deposit for the solar panels, one from my Fiddlesticks money and the other from the Credit Union savings. Then I cycled round to a friend who wanted some help with a bike... simple things but this person is new to bikes and asked me to come and check it out. We walked into town and bought a pump and lights, walked back and I fixed the bike, and was rewarded with coffee and good conversation.

Home via Freshways and a quiet evening at home. Fruit drying tonight, washing up too... the usual!

Friday 9th October 09

Gill got me up quite early as a wasp which had come in with the logs last night had reappeared and she wanted me to 'deal with it'. However, when I got downstairs, bleary eyed after just 5 and a half hours sleep, it had gone to ground again.

This wasp phenomenon is the only disadvantage to bringing logs in from the piles outside the house. At this time of year the queens leave the nest and find somewhere to overwinter before setting up home in the spring. Often they choose my logpiles, and I find them on the underside of logs, torpid and still, and I flick them off into another logpile to sleep the winter away. But if I don't find them, they wake up in the warmth of the living room and fly drunkenly around. They are bigger than normal wasps, perhaps about half as big again, and could be classed as a bit scary!

Anyway, much though I would have liked to go back to bed, I didn't, and after breakfast went to a road near Country Fresh to collect four sacks of windfall apples that someone wanted to dispose of, but didn't want to put in landfill. I'd agreed to collect them, and I took them to St Nicks to sort out into compostable and juice-able. About half of them were OK. When I got back home, I stayed outside to get on with hedge removal. I was expecting a Freecycle visitor at 11 but he arrived at 10.20 and I only had about 10 roots for him, and he'd wanted 20. But he was nice and said that 10 was OK, and maybe once the other enquirers had had some, he could come back for some more.

After lunch I had invited another Freecycler to come and collect a large box of perhaps 30 or 40 roots, she showed up late and this meant my day was somewhat rushed after this. Chad came round to pick up the ratchet pin for the apple press, as tomorrow they are going to get started with the juicing a bit earlier than the 1pm start. Then I had to go and collect stuff from Country Fresh and Freshways, also popped in to the new Co-op which used to be Scummerfield just to check it out, and got fed lots of free cheese and biscuits...

Then I came home and had just half an hour to spare before setting off for the station so I could get the Northallerton train at 5.43. So I had a beard-trim and shower and hair wash. My shaver settings had been mysteriously changed and I've ended up with the shortest beard I've had for years. Gill made me some sandwiches.

I ate these on the train. Sally met me at Northallerton and we walked to the Town Hall. The Northallerton and Villages Community Forum had organised the showing of The Age of Stupid and had invited me to come and say something about low carbon living and Transition. I was pleased to meet Peter Hale of the Climate Speakers Network, and he was pleased to be able to see one of his speakers speak!

I did a very similar talk to the 10:10 Scarborough launch. About 15 minutes. Whilst the film was on, I sat at the back going through my inbox and deleting emails. I got rid of 95. After the film, a break with hot drinks and local tea-loaf, and then a question/answer session and discussion, including an offer from a farmer to do some type of Community Supported Agriculture project.

I got the 22.19 train back to York, cycled fast back home and was in soon after 11pm. A good evening.

Thursday 8th October 09

A busy day, much of it outside. Our next door neighbour has offered to put up a fence between his barbecue patio and our veg patch where there is now a big bushy Privet hedge. The hedge roots go right under our raised beds, making the hedge-side of them very poor at growing stuff, and he wants to grow things up the fence and cannot grow things up the hedge. So the deal is that I remove the hedge, and he builds a little wall with the fence on top, and we share the cost.

So today I continued to get the hedge ready for removal, and then started removing it, using my amazing digging bar. This is a very heavy metal bar, pointed on one end and has a chisel on the other, and can be jabbed into the soil and used as a lever to break up the ground. Then I move the earth away from the roots, take out any ground elder roots for composting and eventually am able to pull out the individual Privet plants. I cut off the tops and am saving the roots and in the evening put a message on Freecycle offering the first roots. I was gobsmacked to get 6 replies within an hour, all wanting them.

So I spent much of the first part of the day digging and shredding. But I also had some paperwork to deal with and some phone calls.

But at 1pm, I got my Vigo fruit press and apple grinder (my apple grinder is like this with teeth!)ready and one of the St Nicks recycling crew, David I think, came along on the big load-carrying trike and picked it up, along with my galvanised tub which is used for washing the apples. This is a central part of Apple Day at St Nicks, and I lend it to them every year. I bought it years ago when I was a winemaker/cider maker, but haven't used it myself for some while.

Then soon after 2, I got my bike out to go down to St Nicks as I was meeting Mark and his friend Tom to show them round. As I arrived I met a Taiwanese lady called YChing who also wanted a tour. So I took them all around the centre and the nature reserve. YChing is a PhD student, studying tropical mountains and climate change. She was interested to find I was involved in Transition, as she is attending the Transition North event on 6th November.

So we all had a good walk around and finished up back at the Environment Centre. I had got on so well with YChing that I invited her back to see the compost heaps etc at home, so we cycled back and had another half hour together.

After she cycled off, I did more hedge removal and came in for tea, knackered. Pasta, cauliflower, sauce, fancy bread... yummy, needed that!

Saturday 5th January 08

Saturday started with a bit of a lie-in, well, I got up, had a bowl of muesli and then went back to bed for an hour. Lovely! The boys were watching a brand new version of 'Swap Shop' with Basil Brush, who is possibly marginally better than Noel Edmonds was when I was a lad, but there again, possibly not as Noel didn't need a hand up his bum to make him do things (I'm assuming here!) Anyway, good to see a bit of practical re-use being promoted on the telly, made into entertainment (and a recycled show too!)

I spent an hour down the garden as the sun tried to poke through the clouds, and did yet more hedge, which is now getting a little bit tedious! There's so much of it, days worth of processing. I can begin to understand the mentality of people who have bonfires... it would only take an hour to reduce the massive pile of hedge into a pile of ash and loads of unwanted CO2 into the air... but what I'm doing will enable me to release some of the CO2 in a careful way, giving me much wanted heat (and replacing fossil fuel use) and some of the material will be incorporated into the soil as humus, trapping the carbon there for an unknown length of time. The twiggy bits which will be composted will also be the perfect composting companion material for the highly putrescible fruit and veg that I bring back in such copius quantities, so it will be worth the work to process the hedge not torch it. But quite a task and a half....

My eldest came down the garden at 11am to say that he was going round to a friend's house to do some homework (dissolving lumps of non-vegetarian jelly in water of different temperatures and timing them) and Gill and our youngest going into town to buy some shoes for his growing feet. I cycled into town to do some paper pushing (paid the phone bill, got a cheque out for a motorised compost riddler that I've had my eye on for a year, and now it's come down in price, I can afford it as a sort of post Xmas present to myself... also a business expense as it will speed up my composting ops, as it can sift 3 cubic metres an hour, apparently!)

Then called in on my friend Robin who I know from CRAG, and he proudly showed me his amazing retrofitted renewable energy systems. He has a brilliant smoke free woodburning stove with a boiler... I didn't know it was possible but it is, I've seen it in action and looked at the website too. It is a Dunsley Yorkshire Boiler Woodstove, built in Holmfirth in Yorkshire, and at up to 17Kw, it powers the central heating and hot water, and Robin runs it entirely on chopped-up pallets which are discarded in large numbers all over the place. It makes the house quite warm, infact too hot sometimes for his wife! For when the stove isn't providing heating, he has installed a 30 tube solar hot water panel on an outhouse in his garden, and some fancy electronics which feed the stove water and/or the solar-heated water to the hot water tank. I was very impressed! I'll be writing about the Dunsley Yorkshire in my paid blog which I resume tomorrow.

He also showed me his home made compost tumbler, constructed from a wheelie bin, used in conjunction with two small 'daleks'. He shared his future plans to install a downstairs toilet which uses either rainwater or greywater to flush, anothe excellent way of reducing one's eco-footprint. I went away inspired and very happy that I have met the second greenest man in York, probably! We'll have to have a competition to see who has the smallest Carbon footprint... he has a motor vehicle (although is a keen cyclist too) and I think enjoys meat, but we didn't discuss this.. I also enjoyed meeting his wife and kids, and hope we can get together when the weather is a bit better to let them have a go on the trampoline and show his wife the garden.

I came back for a late lunch via Martin's compostables emporium. Then I spent more time down the garden and finally took out the last bit of hedge, hoorah! However there is now an even bigger mountain of hedging to cut up, bag up, shred etc, which will take me weeks, I'm sure. Gill came down and spent a while cutting up sticks into kindling size.

I came in as it got dark and after de-grubbying my hands, threw together a nutloaf using yesterdays bulgar wheat and a reject pepper. It was lovely, and we had the two-day-old tomato soup on top of it as a sauce and reject parsnips cooked on the stove and reject sprouts ditto. a good nosh.

My son came back from his friend's after 8pm, and had had a really good time, homework done and lots of 10 year old play/interaction.

I watched Big Brother on E4 before doing my emails and blog. A good day.

Friday 4th January 08

A quiet day, foot has recovered completely and I spent much of the day removing hedge between our garden and our neighbours'. I did quite a lot but not much shredding, so I have a ginormous pile of hedge to process into compostable twiggy bits and sticks for next year's stove lighting kindling. It is going to take a couple of weeks to process all this... the pile of sticks is already over a metre high and it will make many sacks of material for drying... I'll use potato sacks I've brought back full of compostables and saved for re-use. If I put the sticks in plastic sacks they'd go mouldy but in paper sacks they'll dry nicely stacked up in the garage.

I enjoyed my lunch... some tomato soup made from thrown away tomatoes, a pepper, celery, spring onions and a potato to thicken it. Made yesterday, it always tastes lots better the following day, and was wonderful alongside a peanut butter and marmite sandwich.

After tea, which was rescued brussels sprouts and bulgar wheat, I went to the Minster to meet up with any Critical Mass people who chose to come out on a wet and cold night. Only 4 other people showed up, so we decided not to have a non-critical non-mass, but a drink at the 3 Legged Mare, a pub near the Minster that I've never been in before. My Green Festival buddy Baz was there, and we decided that a York Green Festival 2008 would be a good idea and would be easier the second time around. Baz offered to deal with the difficult and obnoxious Festivals Officer, whom I cannot deal with very easily without speaking my mind. I was happy with this, and will be happy to be on the team. We will have a public meeting on 6th Feb, 8pm at the Black Swan. I'm to do the publicity for this first planning meeting. I feel really happy about this and thank Baz for being willing to do some of the 'official' stuff.

Came back via Sainsbury's for Ribena, mayonaise and goats cheese for Gill, got one of their lovely seedy loaves too.

Wednesday 2nd January 08

A good start to the day as our friends Katarina and Ulrich dropped off their two boys early as they are going down to Leamington Spa to sign for their new house, so we're looking after their lads for the whole of the day and possibly for a sleepover, depending on when mum comes back and their behaviour!

Then got a booking for a Fiddlesticks gig in April, which was funny because last night Gill asked me when my next booking was, and I looked in my diary and said 'May', so I've brought it back a month! Still looks like a quiet spring though.... may give me time to do more writing and research.

As it was a lovely day, cold but sunny and dry, I did a load of outside stuff. My neighbour asked me again if I would like to cut the pine tree down which is on our boundary and about 1 metre from the house. It's as tall as the ridge of the roof and over a 30 cm in diameter at the base... and it's dropping lots of stuff in the gutters and is too close to the house really, so I agreed to prune it. Taking it out completely isn't a good idea as the loss of the transpiration might make the ground swell and make cracks in our properties... so a prune is a first thing, might remove it at a later date. So I got my 9 metre ladder and got 3/4 to the top, removed side branches with my small pruning saw but couldn't get through the trunk. Went round to 'fix it' shop round the corner but they didn't have a replacement pruning saw blade, just a 30 inch bowsaw blade so I got that to replace the one I've had for ages. I roped the top of the tree and my neighbour pulled on this as Gill footed the ladder... and took off about 3 metres of the top of the tree, to about eves height. A good job, ruins the look of the tree but my neighbour is happy... I hope!

Then continued making my other neighbour happy by removing more hedge and processing that. I use the wrecking bar... and when not in use; when pulling on the hedge to get it out, I put it in the ground, just plonking it into the wet lawn, sorry, mud patch. Then on one occasion the hedge I was yanking on knocked the bar over and it fell on my foot... it hurt but not much and I carried on. The boys came down the garden before their tea and the visitors were enthusiastic about helping me... so I let them poke twigs into the shredder, something my two have never offered to do.

At 4.45 I cycled down to the Heslington Road veg shop and Martin was just leaving as Richard is not well and not working, and as it was very quiet, Martin was shutting up early. However he had put a wheely-bin's worth of stuff which had spoiled over the New Year, perhaps 80 kg, and I spent some time scooping some of it up into sacks. Jamie the wholesaler (or is he a catering provider?) also gave me a load. My foot began to hurt, but I carried on and rode home with a good load for composting and drying.

I separated a load of grapes for making into raisins (or sultanas perhaps as they are big white ones) and pears and tomatoes for tea tomorrow... a good haul! However when I got home my foot really hurt a lot and I had to lie down and writhe in agony.. and be dosed with paracetamol and have iboprufen rub put on it. Excruciating for an hour, until the medicines kicked in. It took me a while to remember how I'd done it, as the original bump didn't seem that bad.

Did myself a hot bath to wash out sawdust from my hair and soothe the foot.

Then watched a film called A lot Like Love. Quite good.

Monday 31st December 07

A quiet day... didn't do that much except spend a couple of hours shredding hedge down the garden, and preparing huge 'lumps' of hedge for shredding by chopping the twiggy bits away from the sticks, and the sticks from the stumps, so the sticks can be cut down to size for the stove and the twiggy bits fed into the shredder...

Earlier I did spend a short time at the lottie, putting 3 20kg sacks of compostable veg and fruit on top of the last layer of brambles and weeds. I had a chat with an old fella who saw 10 bunches of unsaleable spring onions and said 'you can plant those and they'll sprout and be perfectly edible' so I planted 3 bunches in 3 rows just to see what happens!

Helped Gill get the house ready for a few visitors tonight, by clearing up some of my mess.