Emergency kit

Local flooding

What do you need in an emergency kit? A quick bit of googling opens you up to a whole world of disaster planning for the apocalypse! I think that I might be too scared to leave the house for a while...

More flooding

River Stour

It is still raining and according to the forecast there is yet more to come. I am slightly concerned for J who will be returning to work this week. Fingers crossed that the floods don't get any higher.

I must confess to finding the floods fascinating. I realise that they have cause a lot of damage and some people are in a bad way thanks to the high water levels. My thoughts are with those who are having to deal with the double whammy of the tidal bore yesterday. But despite that there is still a bit of me that enjoys the sight of nature reminding us, yet again, that we cannot control her.

Each day I have walked to view our local river that has spilled out over the fields for the last few weeks. Despite the calm look of it all there is a strong current rapidly moving great volumes of water down stream. This is not a massive still puddle but a active, dangerous force.

Drying out wellies with newspaper

What to do with wood ash?

Having a wood burning boiler for our hot water and a wood burning stove in our living room does mean that we have a regular supply of wood ash to deal with. Thankfully both burners are highly efficient and leave significantly less waste than an open fire would. But waste there is and it has to go somewhere.

When we first moved in there was a large pyramid of 'stuff' by the patio at the back, we initially believed this to be a nest of some kind but thankfully it was just a huge pile of dumped ash. It was really not very nice! The positive side of having to deal with this mess was that it made me consider just what we should do with our own that we generate.

Looking at ash from a permaculture point of view, it is a resource not waste. The nutrients are useful for the soil. For the first year all of our ash went onto the compost heap but I learnt a lesson here too... ash needs to be mixed in but through out winter when we are generating most ash very little of anything else gets added to the compost heap. We could store the ash and mix it in throughout the season but this just brings to mind the ash pyramid once again.

My solution? We scatter it, lightly, across the garden. One of the benefits of such a large garden is that it will easily absorb all of the ash without any of it becoming more concentrated.

Another use for wood ash is to use it to make soap and I would love to try this one day. But lye is a pretty dangerous substance so I'm happy to put this idea on the back burner for now.

Christmas: what does it mean to me?

What does Christmas mean to me?

I don't celebrate it as a Christian festival. Christianity comes into some of our traditions but it is more of a background thing. When you look at the holiday celebrations most of the traditions are blatantly pagan anyway! But even though I don't see it as very Christian I also don't see it as a time for worshipping at the alter to the great god of commercialisation. It could be for some but not for me.

I see it as a festival for celebrating family. For spending time together playing games, singing, having fun. A time for visiting family and friends. Midwinter can be such a miserable time but planning for Christmas some how helps to alleviate this, by focusing on the good it helps drag me through those short days and long, dark nights.

I also enjoy the opportunity to craft, decorate and curl up in front of the fire with a good movie. Sometimes I'll panic before Christmas but when we're settled in on Christmas Eve I relax and just go with the flow. If I've forgotten something it's too late.

And following Christmas day is that short period before the first of January where, despite yourself, you start planning what you want to get on with, what you would like to start and what you would like to change in the coming year. It's a great time to reflect on where you have been and where you want to go forwards.

I do love Christmas.

Christmas: presents

Warning: this is a bit of a ranting, moaning post. Please do skip past it! But I think that it does us all good to have a moan to get things off of our chest sometimes.

December review, January planning

Last months plan:

Christmas, Christmas, Christmas!!!
Christmas definitely happened and there is little about it that I would bother changing. Well, maybe not add a second set of lights to the Christmas tree after it had been decorated! I do still have a couple of posts to share but I am now Christmassed out and ready to move on.