Spring, Veggies and Bunny Bouquets

Spring is fickle. One minute wooing you with bouquets of daisies, the next blowing a gale and laughing manically as it catches you in a shower of rain. Luckily our vegetable garden seems to thrive on this callous treatment.

The cabbages are pictures of bursting health, we have an enviable broccoli crop this year, and while for some bizarre reason our last carrot planting failed, there are new rows beginning to show promising signs.

An evening walk - Youngest still immersed in book

Most mornings we walk around the farm road to try and get at least a bit of exercise before freezing in front of our computer screens for the rest of the day.

We walk purposefully along, stride up the hill until we reach the veggie patch, where I veer off the road and start gathering a bouquet of greens. Bunny bouquets for the two rabbits and two guinea-pigs, who must have the healthiest diet of any caged pets: beet leaves, nasturtium leaves, cabbage leaves, broccoli leaves, rocket gone to flower, spinach, lettuce, radishes.

Picking all this fresh food for them delights my frugal-disguised-as-green-living soul. All they need is the outer cabbage leaves, the lower broccoli leaves, the thinned beets from overcrowded rows, the radishes that have got too huge for us to eat.

It’s free for the gathering, unlike the extortionate bag of designer guinea-pig food sold to my husband in the pet shop, where the girls chose their new guinea-pigs. State of the art flakes of dried fresh food, guaranteed to have a residue of vitamin C and originate from real apples and carrots... like eating your salads in the form of breakfast cereal.

The bouquet looks so pretty that it’s a shame to let it drop to the floor of the cage... the guinea pigs stand up on their back legs and squeak desperately until I hand it over. It’s polished off in twenty minutes flat. Thereafter any time we go past the back door heart-rending squeaks ask for more, more, more.

Inspired by all this free goodness I made a Thai green vegetable curry for supper last night, hoping to convince the kids that this is an edible option. I put in plenty of potatoes as a base (they will all eat potatoes at least!) then added in the just-picked broccoli and spinach. All I can say is that three out of five of us ate it quite happily and at least our son will eat plain rice till the cows come home... what was that vitamin deficiency linked to rice-eating, I wonder?

And spring on our farm continues to look gorgeous, every time the sun shines and brings the daisies out in a blaze of dazzling brightness.

Shiny, Happy Hair

Heading for the shower on Saturday morning, I armed myself with a box of baking soda/ bicarb and a bottle of apple cider vinegar. Diluting them as per the recommended dose of one tablespoon to a cup of warm water, I shook them up in old shampoo bottles and stepped in to the rush of hot water to try out this crazy idea of replacing shampoo and conditioner altogether with these more mundane ingredients.

After I read about shampoo-free hair care on Simple Mom last week and got all enthusiastic about it, there was a little resistance to the idea from my husband, who can’t stand the smell of vinegar and isn’t over the moon at my brilliant discovery of vinegar as a surface cleaner. He was worried he would no longer be able to hug his wife without feeling nauseous. Middle Daughter was fascinated by the idea and attended the hair-washing experiment in person, a useful audience as I was able to get her to sniff for any vinegar residue after rinsing!

I’m pleased to announce that the experiment was a resounding success! The bicarb felt a bit strange as I massaged it in instead of shampoo, like water in consistency but just slightly squeaky. Then the vinegar rinse went on and I could immediately feel my hair getting smoother and shinier. The best thing was that it rinsed off completely, leaving not a trace of vinegar smell, even while still wet, and my husband’s fear s were groundless. He was able to hug me as much as he wanted!

Overall, once dry, my hair was softer and shinier than after shampooing even with conditioner. My scalp hasn’t had any dry flaky skin at all for the two days since, whereas usually it does immediately after shampooing. My hair is a bit floppier than usual, but that is a good thing, as it tends to bush out rather after shampooing now it’s layered and only gets shiny and smooth after several days, when it is about time to wash again.

The girls were so impressed by the results that all three kids tried it themselves at hairwash time yesterday and they also have nice soft shiny hair today, which is easier to comb.

So apart from the fact that it seems to work better than shampoo and conditioner for us, why give up conventional shampoo in favour of some basic kitchen ingredients?

1. It’s natural. Shampoos are full of goodness knows what chemicals and fragrances, all of which we are rubbing into our scalps and possibly absorbing through our skin. We use shampoo to strip away our natural oils and then conditioner to try and replicate the effect of the oils. Baking soda just cleans without stripping and vinegar balances out the ph of your hair and scalp.

2. It’s very cheap. Shampoo and conditioner for the whole family can get quite expensive, whereas this way we are just using a small amount of cheap ingredients that we already have in the house.

3. Better for the environment and sustainable. The fewer complex chemical products that we need to use in our homes and flush away down the drains, the better for our local environment and for the whole planet.

You can read much more about it here if you want more details of shampoo-free hair-care. As for us, we’ll be carrying on the experiment and I’m going to try out some herb rinses to alternate with the vinegar; rosemary first for me and maybe chamomile for the girls.

Green Muffin Cases

My inner Scrooge really loves the whole green movement – Reduce Reuse Recycle is a great excuse to save the pennies and polish your halo at the same time. No longer are you stigmatized as being stingy when you re-use your shopping bags, you are now a green heroine, nobly saving the planet as you shop.

Paper muffin cases are a case in point. We bake muffins every week, often double batches for school bake sales. I used to use muffin cases all the time. It’s easier and more convenient. But if you think about it, that piece of paper just becomes litter within minutes, if the kids pounce on the muffins straight away, and it’s just one more non-essential to add to the weekly shop. So I stopped using paper muffin cases most of the time for home-baking, and it wasn’t a big deal at all. I just had to soak the tins a bit before washing them.

And yet there are times when a paper case really does make a difference, like when you are trying out a chocolate chip muffin recipe and envisage gooey melted chocolate going to waste all over the tins. Of course I now had no paper muffin cases in the house after my frugal/green spree of conscientiousness. I’d also nearly run out of baking paper for the same reason, just a few odds and ends left over from a series of cakes, which left me with the stash of butter papers in the fridge.

When I was growing up, butter papers were always saved in the fridge. They knew about frugality in those days, having grown up with rationing and wartime shortages and lived through Seventies coal miners' strikes and all. Saving butter papers was a habit that transferred itself to me, despite our generation's prodigality. A fridge full of butter papers generally isn’t all that much use, not very zen either, cluttering up the place. Quite handy for greasing baking trays, but that’s about it. Except when you need muffin cases at the last minute.

I think they worked perfectly – perhaps not very elegant, but they have a certain green chic about them, don’t you think?!

But perhaps the scraps of baking paper made the more elegant version. They make me think of The Sound of Music, a drift of nuns in sparkling white wimples…

And Marisa's chocolate muffin recipe? The kids loved them, in fact Middle Daughter made them all by herself. Me, I'm holding out for dark chocolate chips for the next batch, with the good dark Nomu cocoa, but then that would be my inner chocoholic, who vanquishes the inner Scrooge every time.

Vinegar for Cleaning – A Mild Obsession

The smell of vinegar wafts in my nostrils. This time it is not balsamic, not destined to adorn crinkly salad leaves or rich marinades. It is plain old spirit vinegar, not going anywhere near my food if I can help it, but my latest discovery on the cleaning front.

I’ve never been a neat freak. My Virgo star sign has never yet extended its renowned attention to detail to the housework. I have a high tolerance threshold for dust and clutter and, as long as the kitchen is wiped down regularly, I usually manage to turn a blind eye to the rest. So my latest obsession with environmentally sound (and cheap) cleaning alternatives has to be put down to a hormonal obsessive compulsive episode. Tomorrow it will probably be over and the house will settle back into its shabby chic dustiness with a sigh of relief.

But for now I have discovered the joys of surface cleaner in a squirty bottle. Half and half vinegar and water is all you need for instant, non-polluting, spray-on, wipe-off shiny brightness. It works on the counters, on the sink, on the fridge, on the cooker. I’ve wiped the light switches (I swear that never in my life before have I cleaned a light switch or even noticed their grubbiness… it must be the hormones). I even started wiping the plug sockets. I took apart the free-standing fan which has gathered a warm cloak of woolly dust over the last couple of years but now is pristine and sparkling. My husband was getting worried that if he sat still long enough he’d be on the receiving end of a squirt of vinegar water and a wipe with a damp cloth.

I Googled vinegar and found about a hundred uses for vinegar in cleaning, some alone and others combined with bicarbonate of soda. It’s a revelation! No more need for a cluster of specialist chemical cleaning fluids cluttering up the place. Just one big bottle of vinegar and a tub of bicarb…. but I might tire of the smell.

I can feel the obsession dwindling to liveable proportions as the hormones recede. I haven’t yet made it around the whole house and my computer still bears a gentle layer of dust. Probably a true neat freak visiting would still be horrified at the state of our house, in fact I know they would. Straw bales with clay plaster, a posse of sandy farm dogs, a clutch of cats with a liking for sleeping on the ironing board and three kids of a creative disposition, don’t make for labour saving neatness But I know those light switches are sparkling, so I can hold my head up high with the rest of the Virgo brigade.

Anyone got any frugal and environmentally brilliant cleaning tips, just in case this uncharacteristic obsession keeps on for a little while longer?!