August Friday

Hello, hello, and happy Friday to you!  I do hope that everything is well with your world – the news this last week has been so sad with reports of people’s houses burning with the wildfires and trains derailing as the tracks buckled in the heat and my heart goes out to everyone who is counting the cost of our recent heatwaves.  I never thought I would be so excited to see the rain but it’s arrived in Winwick at last and we’ve had a reasonable amount of it.  Not bouncing rain, thankfully, but steady rain that is landing on the ground and staying there to be soaked in instead of running off to fill gutters and drains and cause flooding – that’ll be the next worry!

I noticed whilst I was out and about this week that a lot of the leaves are starting to turn their autumn colours already – the trees will be under a lot of stress and are doing what they need to do to conserve the water their roots can get access to, but it does feel strange to see it in August.  The sycamore trees are getting ready to drop their keys already, and I’ve been finding hazelnut shells on the path so it looks like the squirrels have been getting their winter supplies together early too.

I finally got round to sorting out the books that I moved out of my yarn room the other week, and all the books that I brought from my parents’ house that I’ve kept are now safely stored in one bookcase not so small daughter’s old bedroom.  I’d initially thought that it was going to be a Saturday morning chore that I needed to get through before I could go and do something more interesting (see why decluttering takes me so long? 🤣) but it turned out to be just the opposite.

My parents were ahead of their time in terms of their interests and knowledge, and their bookcases were full of books on every subject from anatomy to engineering, complementary therapies to organic gardening, spiritual to metaphysical and pretty much everything in between. There are poetry books, cook books, short story books, books on writing books, nature books, books on steam trains, encyclopaedias, novels … it took my brother and me quite some time to go through them all when we cleared the house out after my Dad died, and the books that I kept are ones that I remember being fascinated by as I grew up, or ones that I decided that I would be ready to read now that I’m older.

I had such a lovely time looking at all the books again, deciding which would fit best on each shelf and remembering why I kept them – it wasn’t a quick job at all, as I sat surrounded by books and memories and chatted to my parents about their books, and I didn’t feel the need to rush.  I’ve added some Post-it notes to some of the books so that in the future, when the girls come to look at the collection and ask “Why on earth did Mum keep so many books?!”, there’s a reason behind some of them that will make sense to them, but others are probably old and outdated now and I’ve just kept them because I can.  I don’t forget how lucky I am to have the space!

What I did find that I had forgotten about was, amongst my Dad’s gardening books, a collection of books about worm composting.  He was an organic gardener who wrote a few books on the subject himself and worm composting was something that I grew up with – the bins were at the bottom of the garden, the worms ate the scraps, the compost went into the soil.  It wasn’t anything unusual for us!  Warrington Council started a food waste collection service in March; we’ve been given an outside waste bin and a kitchen waste bin to fill up and empty into the outside bin and the waste is being collected every week.  At the time it started, it reminded me that my Dad always had worm compost bins to dispose of food waste.  I’ve had them going on and off over the years; I was never quite as committed as he was and my worms never did quite as well – but thanks to the number of fruit flies that are now zooming round my kitchen and the maggots in the outside bin (how do they get in there?  I’m so careful with the lid!), I’ve decided to start my worm bin up again.

I’ve nothing against the council’s waste collection although I know there are issues with biogas plants around the country in terms of smell and noise (there’s currently a planning application for one to be built in Winwick which has had residents up in arms over the location and the fact that it won’t even be for local food waste, and the application has been halted for investigation), but it makes more sense for me to use the waste myself over the summer to feed worms so that I can have the compost for my garden.  The worms won’t eat as much over the winter so I can go back to using the council bin when it’s cooler and hopefully there will be less flies.

I’ve got a dustbin wormery that my Dad built for me years ago that’s the same as the ones he used, but I’ve also found my Can-o-Worms wormery in the garden so I’ve washed that down and I’m going to set that one up first and see how it goes.  The dustbin is great, but because you load the waste into the top of the bin and the worms move upwards to eat the food, there comes a point where the bin is full of compost but you have to tip everything out, worms included, to get at it.  It’s a big job and it’s heavy, so I thought I’d go for the layered system first and see how that went before starting up the dustbin again.

The idea with the Can-o-Worms is that you put the worms and food waste into the bottom layer and the worms work their way upwards as the tray gets full of worm casts so that as they move out of the tray to the one above, you can take the worm casts out without having to empty the entire bin.  In theory, it’s much easier, although I’ve not had as much success with this system as with the dustbin.  Anyway, no harm in giving it another go!

My worms arrived on Tuesday morning …

Hattie was very interested …

Yep – Royal Mail delivered my bag of 500g of composting worms, a coir brick and some worm food!  I’ve actually seen quite a lot of the postie this week just because we’ve had a few tracked deliveries, but it’s not uncommon now for us to only get post once a week.  It’s such a shame, isn’t it?  I grew up with the postie delivering letters every day; there would be cards, letters sent between friends and relatives and household bills, of course, but now lots of that sort of stuff is sent by email and the only way to guarantee something actually arriving is to send it as a tracked delivery.  I do feel sorry for Royal Mail workers these days, constantly on a deadline to deliver the tracked items that Royal Mail have made a requirement for anything to actually arrive.

Anyway, my worms arrived safely and I started by soaking the coir brick in water to rehydrate it.  This is the bedding that the worms live in to start with, before they create their own bedding of worm casts from the food waste that they eat.

Next, I layered cardboard at the bottom of the tray to stop the bedding falling through into the sump tray at the bottom which is designed to catch the liquid that comes out of the food as it rots down and gets eaten (this makes good liquid fertiliser) and then put the coir on top …

Finally, it was time to add the worms.  They were still mostly hidden in the compost they arrived in and I didn’t poke around at them to see how many there were.  They just started untangling themselves and within a short space of time, had disappeared beneath the surface.  I loaded the tray up with worm food, a small handful of kitchen waste and lots of packing paper to soak up excess moisture from the coir, and I’ve left them to it.

I’ve had worm bins before so I know there’s a good chance the worms will be trying to escape at every opportunity!  I’ve got a brick on the lid to hold it down and I’ll go and check everything looks OK but on whole, you need to leave the worms to get on with what they’re doing without poking about at them.  It’s a good metaphor for life 🤣

 

Also this week, I’ve had a go at pickling beetroot for the first time.  I love pickled beetroot and more recently, I’ve discovered that I love it cooked as well.  However, when some arrived in the veg box, I thought I’d try pickling it for myself as it will last a bit longer than cooking it as there’s only me that eats it.  I could eat an entire pound of beetroot if I tried, I think, but I’m not sure that would end well!

It turned out to be easier and less messy than I expected – I used this recipe: BBC Food: How to Cook Beetroot and in a pretty short space of time, I had beetroot in pickling vinegar all ready to sit for two weeks until I can eat it.

I will give you an update on how it turns out!

We got a purple cauliflower in the veg box as well.  Isn’t it beautiful?  I’ve never seen a purple cauliflower before, much less eaten one!

It turns out that it tastes just like white cauliflower but it does keep its lovely colour when you cook it.  I often get different coloured veg in the veg box – purple carrot or yellow tomatoes – and little fussy eater me would not have touched them with a barge pole, but big grown up me loves them!

 

Still on the fruit and veg theme (ha!), I’m nearly at the end of today’s post and just want to mention an email I got from Shiv at The Kiwi Fruit is Cute craft shop and community space in Cheltenham.  They have had to move out of their premises into accommodation that is more expensive and they need help with restocking their products and getting themselves set up in their new place.  Their physical address is 1st Floor, Normandy House, 305 – 309 High Street, Cheltenham, GL50 3WH if you’re able to go and visit – they sell yarn, fabric, haberdashery and run events including learn to knit and crochet classes and “Make and Mingle” craft and chat sessions.  I don’t think you can underestimate the value in a chat session where you can just sit with likeminded people with your knitting or other craft in your hands and feel like you’re exactly where you’re meant to be, so if this sounds like something you’d like, do go along!

You can find the website here: The Kiwi Fruit is Cute and their crowdfunder link is here: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-us-keep-the-kiwi-fruit-is-cute-alive#

I’ve seen a few posts on social media recently where yarn shops are struggling so if you’ve got one close by or you spot one on holiday, please do pop in and see if there’s anything you might need – every visit and every purchase counts!

 

And here we are at the end of the post!  It’s 10 days to the end of August and that means it’s getting closer to the start of September … ooh, I’ve been hard at work behind the scenes putting things together for a month-long sock celebration which includes the new pattern to be released on 1 September (my testers have also been hard at work and I am forever grateful that they have knitted on through the recent heat to help me), Sock of the Day posts and making sure that my Sockalong tutorials are properly signposted to help people follow on to the next tutorial.  There’s still plenty to do but I’ve got 10 days …

I’ve been taking photos of the September Socks and I’ve had help – or maybe not.  I just don’t think she got the idea of what I was trying to do …

It’s a good job she’s cute!

 

Have a lovely weekend, I’ll be back next week with more info on September’s sock fun! xx