Waark!com – A self sufficientish blog

We English love our strawberries and cream…

Strawberries are incredibly easy to grow and are technically not berries.

The summer is coming and now is the time to plant them! (Yes now!)

Strawberry planters are great for several reasons – fruit is easier to see and pick – a big boon for the aged whom can’t bend down and can be placed in easily accessible level surfaces like patios.  They’re great space savers as you’re growing up not down.  Once established, they’re quite pretty too with a tumble down effect of fruit pouring down the sides.  You can also move them about easily, so if a hard frost is due, you can move them into the greenhouse over the winter season.

In the UK you can buy strawberry planters but most people have a hard time with them because they don’t set them up right to begin with and they’re a real pain to water.

This instructable shows you one of the best ways to setup a strawberry planter to make feeding and watering a doddle!

Click HERE to see the instructable

It’s getting hotter every day and your electricity bills are not environmentally friendly.

This credit crunching fridge is a sure way to be sure your beverages will stay chilled in the hottest of heats.  It’s much greener than your average electrical fridge and will work anywhere where there isn’t a lot of humidity.

The pot in pot refrigerator or Zeer was made by Professor Mohammed Bah Abba, though there’s evidence it was in use in early Egypt.  It works on the principle of evaporative cooling.

Click HERE to see the instructable

Fertiliser isn’t cheap – neither is organic fertiliser.  I’m also a cheap skate and seeing as during the growing season you need heaps of fertiliser for fabulous veg, here’s a guide to making your own.

Click HERE to see the instructable

One of my most enjoyable hobbies is creating instructables (and following a few too!).  An instructable is a “how to” broken into steps.

I’m going to feature my three newest instructables here, then I’m going to feature a new allotment or gardening type instructable each week (as long as I remember)

Nettles are fabulous.  Last year I went round in the late autumn picking as many as  I could find and dumping them in the new nettle ‘fermenter’ (See here)

That has rotted down nicely and it really pongs.  It’s been watered down and dumped everywhere it can concieveably be needed.

Now of course we’ve had to top it up, so yesterday I popped round to the most nettle infested parts of the allotment and pulled up more than my fair share.  I then stuffed it in the fermenter, filled up with water and set about it with a big stick to ensure it was broken up a bit – the more you break it down, the more surface area the bacteria has to rot it down with.

In a few weeks it’ll be even more stinky and more delicious for the plants.  Hurrah!

Recently things have been a bit stressful .  We’re looking to move so the home is on the market.  That in itself required a lot of DIY, on top of a hernia operation and preparing for quite an intensive course and subsequent exam.  I couldn’t possibly take the time out to go down the allotment.

But my wife came to the rescue.  For over a week now she’s been strimming, weeding, planting and watering.  On Sunday I finally went down to see the lay of the land.  It’s back to its old self – almost as if I’ve never left which is fabulous.

We spent the day turning over and moving the compost bed.  A few of the areas now have a healthy new layer of compost and the heap was moved through fear of rats (which seem to be under the shed, not in the compost heap). 

The heap which has served us well for three years was dismantled and cleaned up so we can plant on it.  Not sure what we’re putting in there yet but I’m sure the soil is very good after all that compost being brought down by the worms.

I’ve not gone, though I figure we’re likely to get a letter from the committee saying start sorting out your plot or get out!

My wife is currently weeding and sowing whilst I work on exams, jobs and house buying.

If all goes well, I may get a house and chickens!

No, I’m not here, but I’m forward thinking which means whilst you read this, I’m probably either drinking at a party, out and about (it’s two years today since I proposed to my now wife) or asleep at home.  Either which way, I’m not on my mac.

So what’s your new years resolution?  Mine is one of blogging and sustainability.  I’m going to make a lot of effort to make my life more green, especially with the forthcoming purchase of a new house (unless something changes over the next month) and the DIY renovations I’ll be making.   I’m going to make more effort to evolve the blog too.  Just you wait…

This is neither a self-sufficiency post or a green post.

I don’t tend to play a lot of computer games any more.  My main gaming age was between the years of 8-16.  After that I started going out, meeting girls etc though I still did a bit of gaming at university, but it was social gaming, it was the years of the LAN (local area network) and now these days with high speed broadband access we’ve moved into the WAN gaming years – that’s Xbox live and the playstation equivilant.

As an ex-computer scientist (got the degree as proof) I loathe computers.  It’s a bit like if your mother catches you smoking and makes you smoke a whole packet (I’ve never smoked, but this is a metaphor).  I like computers, so where should my education take me but into computing, or more specific computer science.  It killed my love of computer games really, but recently Modern Warefare 2 came out, and my wife now claims to be a MW2 widow.

It’s a short lived fad I know, because I’ll loose interest like I usually do in games like this, but what has really got my goat and what this post is all about is problems.  I bought a console because I didn’t want problems.  I wanted to switch on a dedicated device, it would run, open the game, let me kill a few friends and then I can switch it off and watch some TV.  Which it has done rather sucessfully for a number of weeks.

Until now.

Now when I’m playing Mw2 at my first startup the game crashes outright when searching for a random game against random people.  I then reset (this is a repeatable error) and this time round I can connect to other random people.  Except my friends I want to play.  The ones I don’t want to play still work fine…

Xbox live support have so far had me testing my network connection (yes I’ve done that), check my ports (yes I do know what a network port is, I have a computer science degree dontcha know) then it _must_ be my network connection (no, it works the same on other peoples connection).  So last but not least I’m removing my online profile and reinstating it.   The problem persists and I ran out of time.  Aparently now it’s not my problem but all my friends problems! So they’ve got to delete their profile and reinstate it if they want to play me!  So I’ve asked nicely if they’ll do that and a couple will.  Hurrah.  But I bet it doesn’t change the problem.

My next issue is to completely delete my profile and reinstating it back where I started over a month ago.  That would annoy me beyond compare and quite frankly I’d never buy another xbox product ever again, so here’s hoping they can transfer my progress if it comes to that.  I’ll update this post just in case someone else is experiencing problems.

 Yet again it seems the temperance movement are back biting at drinkers heals.  Ignore the fact we are massively over taxed on alcohol and currently we’ve got people whinging about how cheap a unit of alcohol is.

Alcohol problems are a big issue we shouldn’t ignore, but increasing prices don’t ever seem to have achieved anything apart from line the pockets of the government.

Apparently the old argument of giving children alcohol is bad.  This is not as clear cut as it sounds.  Give two situations 1.) little Johnny sitting down for a sunday lunch with a small glass of wine 2.) little Johnnys parents giving him a pack of alcopops and letting him go down the local park.

Ignoring the issue of responsible drinking, which is responsible parenting?  The root cause is not the drink, but the parenting and not the price of cheap alcohol.  Granted the issues in the south are not the same as those up north and it’ll be impossible to make one law for all, but the point is normalising kids to alcohol removes the mystery and stops them from overdoing it later in life.  It worked for my friends and I, but when the kids at university who’d never had the opportunity to have a drink at home were let off the leash, they were the first comotose on the floor and their friends (not far off it) were the ones who’d never seen a paraletic student and were the first on the phone to the ambulances that were needlessly called out.

Pricing alcohol has historically never had the required effect, it takes a social attitude change which is long term – not a quick fix to line the governments pockets.

Meanwhile my homebrew gets cheaper…