Not content with last year’s Organic Fortnight, the Soil Association has gone one further and assigned the whole month of September to encouraging you to Discover your reason to love organic this September.

Reasons To Love Organic…

Each of us will have different reasons for choosing organic. Here are some things you could consider this September as you discover your reason …

Learn the Dirty Dozen

The Environmental Working Group produces a guide each year which lists the top dozen dirty fruit & veg (that most contaminated with pesticides and which you should commit to buying organic). There’s a also a list of clean fruit and veg, to let you adjust your basket most economically. However, do bear in mind that non organic produce will contaminate the soil and the farmworkers who come into contact with it – so try and buy as much organic as you possibly can!

Print off  this handy Dirty Dozen (PDF download) guide to take on your next shopping trip.

Choose Organic Textiles

According to the Soil Association, “the market for organic textiles is growing. Certified organic textile businesses saw their sales grow in total by  35% in 2010.”

Go Organic With Your Wool (PDF Download) “Animal welfare is at the heart of organic systems. Organic sheep are reared, fed, sheltered and transported with consideration for their well being. Cruel practices are prohibited and animal stress is minimised.”

Go Organic With Your Cotton (PDF Download) “As well as being a natural, renewable and biodegradable fibre, when cotton textiles are organic there are additional benefits… Organic textile products don’t contain allergenic, carcinogenic or toxic chemical residues.”

Join in with more news, events and event competitions and special offers this Organic September by using the Twitter hashtag #organicseptember

The once proud polytunnel collapsed and crushed after the autumn storms. The poor wee seedlings exposed to the frost. Ouch!

Organic Fortnight 3-17 September 2010

An Organic Fortnight blog - Choosing Organic Everyday

Your organic home and garden. Sounds too much like The Good Life for you?

For us, Barbara and Tom are a complete inspiration! But that’s us – everytime we launch into the Rocky-we’ll-climb-those-steps family theme tune, it descends into the one from The Archers

However, in a rather big commitment to the Organikal Garden this summer, we’ve only gone and bought ourselves a polytunnel!

The start of Organic Fortnight saw the launch, with the weekend spent preparing our soil and creating the first beds:

We used some of the seeds we bought as part of the One Pot Pledge, via Seed Pantry. What a delightful set of seeds these were. All wrapped in tissue paper like sexy underwear – gardening 2.0

So we’re hoping the sun keeps up appearances and warms our tunnel. We’ve used our home grown compost but have a special plan for some forthcoming trial beds. Really hoping to report on that soon.

Not ready to embark on a polytunnel yet? Never fear, Part 2 of the Organikal Challenge is here with some small changes you can make today for your organic home and garden ( do check it out, if only to see the cool photo of the peace loving cockroach).

p.s. You can catch up with The Soil Association’s goings on in Scotland at their blog.

home grown organic compost

Home Grown Organic Fruit & Veg

Are you tempted by the trend to grow your own food and turn your garden into an organic paradise producing healthy fruit and veg for you and your family?

The very first thing you need to do is start with some good soil. The best way to ensure the compost you use is organic is to make it yourself.

We’ve been composting for a couple of years, turning our food scraps (of which there are a mighty lot, what with the household being veggie and all), our coffee grinds, our teabags and such into some lovely rich soil.

You can see our latest batch of compost in the photo. Way too many eggshells… I read recently that I should be crushing my eggshells if I want them to breakdown at all. I can see the evidence right before my eyes, so crushing will definitely take place forthwith.

Does Your Council Compost?

free compost from west lothian council

West Lothian Council have been collecting garden waste for composting via a local wheelie bin collection scheme for a few years now. They use the compost for their own gardening needs and this year started a new scheme whereby they issued vouchers to local householders for some free compost.

We redeemed our voucher today and got three bags full of some decent quality soil. It isn’t organic, of course – so we’ll use it for the non-edible plants & flowers.

Action you can take: Does your council have a similar scheme? If not, why don’t you submit a request for them to start?

Pssst: Waste Aware Scotland offers compost bins for households from only £8.

Find out more: For more hints and tips on producing lovely organic compost visit Garden Organic.

Or watch this video for a quick start guide:

Hands up who hates cleaning? Yes, that’s all of us, no doubts there, then …

How many different cleaning products do you use? One for the toilet, perhaps and one for your bathroom? Maybe one more for general purpose? If that’s all, then you’re doing good. I’m amazed at how many different products there are out there.

I used to buy expensive eco cleaning products. For years, I’ve been using Ecover and similar brands around the home, but more recently I’ve been considering that despite them being labelled ‘green’, I probably don’t need to use all of them and to be honest, I wasn’t quite seeing the results I really wanted.

Part of the prep for going on house exchange involves a wee bit of scrubbing. I like to leave the house – particularly the bathrooms and kitchen – quite shiny. I say “quite shiny”: each of us has our own standards, eh?

A couple of weeks ago I set out to start a pre house exchange eco cleaning challenge.  Could I replace my usual cleaner of choice (Ecover washing up liquid – I really don’t like having different solutions for different purposes) and obtain great results at a low cost? Up top is a picture of my arsenal – most of which was bought from the supermarket, which means you can buy it too;

• Organic cotton cloths – I only bought these as they were marked down in price to about 80p for a pack of 3, if I recall correctly. We first saw these cloths at the Organic Food Fair a few years back. I guess the fact that they were marked down means the supermarket isn’t finding them a good seller. They’re quite meaty cloths, but not long-lasting. I did enjoy using them, though and would buy them again if I needed to use new cloths as opposed to rags.
• Lemon juice and bicarb – for the most famous eco oven cleaner. It’s not organic lemon juice (but I couldn’t bring myself to buy organic juice to waste on the oven) and I picked up the bicarb on the supermarket shelf next to the baking goods. Just over £1 for both.
• Soda Crystals – fantastic ingredient without any phosphates, enzymes or bleach. So many different uses, these magic crystals can be dissolved in water and will tackle mostly any difficult dirty surface. From the supermarket again and way less than £1.
• I’ve heard that ‘real cleaners’ don’t wear rubber gloves, but that’s not me. The supermarket offers loads of varieties, but these fair trade FSC certified gloves are my weapon of choice, and can be bought from the Ethical Superstore (alongside loads of other eco products).
• The “mild and gentle” household soap cost 39p and I thought I could use it as a stain remover for my clothes, as I’m always spilling something over myself. It was an impulse buy. Completely unnecessary – and just goes to show what happens when you go to a supermarket and start to fill a trolley. It’s a hazard!

How did I get on? The soda crystals cut through everything when I used them to clean the cupboards. Way more effective than the Ecover liquid I had been using. The oven shelves came out sparkling, and it even worked for the cooker hood, which was a little furry given we’ve never had it connected to the mains.

The lemon juice/bicarb oven cleaner really does work. I read up on different techniques beforehand and ended up making a paste of juice and bicarb to spread thickly in the oven for about half an hour. This worked to great effect on the top oven, but our main oven was bit trickier. It gets used way more and had some very stubborn stains (this time I promise to clean it more regularly – no, really). There I was scrubbing away and Martin offered to come to the rescue. Less than five minutes and he was asking for some “real cleaner” to finish the job. After a mouthful from me and a few vague threats he returned to the job in hand and made a really good job of it. It’s not sparkly new, but I’m really happy.

Should you ditch your toxic cleaning chemicals? Yes. Of course you should.

Can you replace them with cheap, eco cleaning products? Yes, you really can. And you can buy them anywhere. If you want to check out more eco products, check out your preferred supplier or have a look at the (aff link).

Bag for Recycling

We were eating yoghurt yesterday, and Ruaridh asked if he needed to wash the yoghurt pot before putting it in the Bag for Recycling. I asked him to look see what type of plastic it was as our local Council collects Type 1 (PET) and 2 (HDPE) plastic and takes it away to the Great Recycler in the Sky. It was Type 5 (PP). It went in the rubbish bin. He was aghast. And so am I.

I’m our household recycling vigilante. Forever to be seen hauling bits of recyclable rubbish out of our standard bin and waving it in the boys’ faces – spaghetti cling ons intact – to shouts of derision and promises to shove the offending item up their behind the next time they stray from our very civilised, very low-effort recycling policy.

But I’ve noticed that I’m emptying our Bag for Recycling an awful lot these days.

Despite deciding on a frugal existence for Team Fundergibbons, it seems that of late I’ve been a bit mail-order happy. The worst offender has been when I’ve opted to have some groceries delivered from Ethical Superstore. Every single item comes wrapped – in bubble wrap, or corrugated cardboard. This has me worrying. Am I creating lots of needless, extra cardboard and plastic miles just to have my eco friendly, organically grown, fairly traded household items delivered to my door (not to mention road miles)?

But surely, if I wasn’t dealing with packaging at this end, then someone, somewhere else would be dealing with it? How much packaging does your average supermarket deal with on a day? Under EU law, all retailers have to recycle at least 19 per cent of the paper and cardboard they use. Thankfully most go much further – with the Co-op (our local supermarket) using recycled cardboard and plastic from its stores for the packaging of its own brand products.

I’ve worked out a nice wee project for Ruaridh to take care of – and that’s to figure out what happens to the content of the blue bin which West Lothian Council so kindly collect every couple of weeks. Where does it go? And when we will we be able to recycle Type 5 (PP) plastic? I’m pretty sure it’s way more complicated than a Big Recycler in the Sky.

And all this brings me back to a story I heard on the radio a few months ago about one UK family that had managed to reduce their yearly non-recyclable waste to one wheelie bin! We do the Blue Bin (plastic, paper, card, tins) and compost all of our food waste (and lots of cardboard and hair and other unmentionables) but I can’t imagine that even with that reduction I could ever get close to one wheelie bin a year. And then I remember what the Dad of the family said. “When you’re talking about rubbish, there is no away.”

p.s. there is hope out there ref food packaging – Vegware is the UK’s only food packaging company with a compostable range & UK-wide waste composting service. You can say hello to them on Twitter/vegware.

p.p.s remember Socks for Happy People? they send out their socks in a compostable envelope.  You can join their party at Twitter/Socks4HappyPPL too.

Not being a practised crafter, my home-made Christmas presents are almost always of an edible nature. It’s a little later than I’d planned, but I finally got started today …

My preparations didn’t actually start in the kitchen, however. First, I need to get some supplies in. Ideally, I should have done this last month, but isn’t time flying?

Yes, I know in an ideal world I’d be crafting family recipes passed down by buxom great-grannies, but we’ve already agreed it isn’t an ideal world, right? – and I have that Nigella one to draw upon. Whatever you make of her, (personally, I find her TV persona dreadfully uncomfortable, but her writing style quite lively and amusing) she pulls together a great selection of edible gift ideas in her Nigella Christmas book.

Last year’s Chilli Jam was such a huge success, I’ll be recreating that this Yule, and adding to it Spiced Christmas Salt; Cranberry and Apple Chutney; Christmas Ketchup, Winter Spiced Vodka and my own Beetroot Chutney.

Closer to the time, I’ll get baking some sparkly cupcakes and the like, but with around only 40 days to go, I must concentrate on the preserves…

So the first thing I did today was spend my money online. Without fail, a pleasurable experience, some of goods have already been dispatched. Don’tcha love the interwebs?

Here’s where I went. Do let me know if you’ve any alternative recommended stockists.

Ribbon Oasis : for beautiful ribbons to tie around my presentation jars
Jane Asher : for special baking toppings and presentation boxes and wrap
Lakeland : for preserving jars and bottles
Seasoned Pioneers :  for organic spices

This is a very lazy blog post in respect of Blog Action Day.  Interesting idea:

Earn Earthpoints by visiting Earthpoints partners , spend money with them and spend your Earthpoints on projects that actively help climate change.

Organic gardening is so simple, you really want to give it a shot.

Nature really does give you a head start, so if you think you have no time, take it from me – I’m working about 12 hours on the computer every day, with general house and family duties outside that. But, I am still managing to grow organic veg for the summer.

You can see our pitifully small sweetcorn here just after planting.

All I did was to prepare my bed with good organic compost and fertiliser and buy some organic plants to stick in the ground. I also grew lots from seed, and most of them have actually appeared to hopefully blossom into strong and healthy plants – and what with the price hikes in food this year, we hope that our house-swappers will find the extra larder beneficial! (we won’t be here – instead, we’re spending the summer in France, with our house-swappers spending their time here).

If I can do it, with so little space, and so little time – and in the unreliable Scottish climate – there really is no excuse for you. At the very least, you can grow some salad leaves in pots on your kitchen windowsill.

Looking for more tips on gardening? Visit this great Squidoo Lens on Starting  a Garden.

Here’s a shout to some interesting resources for you – and they’re not all about food:

Complementary Therapies
Do you live in Scotland? Give Dave McGhee, Reflexologist and Auricular Acupuncturist a call. He has magic fingers )

Harmonic Living
Products and Resources for Living in Harmony! (hint: I heart the 100% organic chocolate). Free ebooks, downloads and teleseminars.

MoodFood
The online food store for healthy body and mind. Choose food to make you feel passionate, energised, happy, focussed, healthy or relaxed. Fair trade, organic, free delivery.

Envirowonk
I love a bit of politics. You can find US politics from an environmental perspective here. It’s out of  the ecogeek stables, so comes with high pedigree.