Selfsufficientish.com

You are right starchild, it takes time to develop the habit of not collecting rubbish. It's going to take a little time to clear the backlog of badly thought out buying in the food cupboard. But this gives me time to consider the best way of reducing it without having to spend an arm and a leg and m...

I'm going to go away and think about this one. At the moment the dry stores cupboard is overflowing so I'm just buying fresh oddments such as bread and vegetables to supplement what I have so it's a new angle on shopping so it's a matter to consider. It would certainly tie in well with the rubbish r...

I've turned one compost heap with the new shovel, moved part of one to this one and turned the rest of the now seriously smaller one. I've composted an area that seems to never drain properly and will probably have to do it again to make it really effective but turning the clay soil at the moment is...

Yes it can be a bit hard sometimes not to buy anything new. I rely on the allotment for a good 60% or more of my food (I'm virtually vegan) and although you can do a certain amount of seed saving, if a crop fails you can't save seeds from it. Also second hand compost doesn't really meet the criteria...

I've discovered an enormous stash of tea lights - cheap white ones with no scent - at the back of a cupboard this morning. :roll: Hundreds of them literally. :roll: Now I quite like using the tea light container (takes 7 at a time) in the darker winter days. It looks as if it will take about 50 bout...

Would be good to formulate some kind of action to reduce packaging. Not sure what it would entail, lobbying governmental bodies - yes of course. Lobbying individual companies, well we can at least ask them why they use so much - perhaps we could have a name and shame system somewhere on the site. I...

You can buy second hand clothes from the charity shop Julie without breaking any vows on the nothing new front (oh and will help the budget if you have to sort out the house). Buying seeds, fruit and such like for the allotment counts as food provision. See if you can get the wood free from local sk...

1. Shop less 2. Put less waste in the landfill bin 3. Keep going to the local ground force team I have joined and get back into the habit of going to three local forums 4. Be seen on the allotment at least 5 days a week from February to November 1 should help 2 I suppose with a bit of care on the pa...

There was only one set of fireworks last night locally which is unusual and a lot of houses looked dark so they were either in bed or down the pub which is the local tradition. I go to bed at the usual time and get up at the usual time as usual - it was the growing up on a farm and knowing that ther...

I had the same attitude when I took on a double sized allotment plot (admittedly it was clear of weeds as it had been used) - I was told that as a single older person I should take a smaller plot but I seized the big one with both hands and have kept it in good order as well as supplying two househo...

I've been involved in a consultation group of older people and the environment recently. Waste disposal was the hottest topic and we had the packaging buyer from M&S come to visit us to answer questions. It seems that plastic packaging adds to the shelf life of a lot of fresh food and so stops w...

I've managed to go round two major shopping centres recently and bought nothing. I looked at the prices of items that would be nice to have and thought I'm not paying that for that so I didn't. On a third trip, I did pick up a couple of good enough woolly shirt items to wear down the allotment from ...

Also instead of buying salad bags buy a load of salad seed packets and grow in a window box. That doesn't work very well in winter in a foot of frost as salad type plants are not frost resistant. But it's certainly a good one for the growing months. Trouble is that people buy the bags of salad in t...

(Having worked in our local charity shop you'd be amazed at the cr4p some people donate, expecting it to be sold!) MW Oh no I wouldn't from the same experience. However, all the suggestions made so far for the reuse of clothes when necessary at some distant point in the future are filed. Where I th...

Well I've done a house audit to see where the rubbish comes from just to see if there are quick fixes to start the ball rolling (well it's cold out there). I run a compost heap on the allotment (large one - double the normal size) so that takes care of vegetable peelings, tea bags, shredded receipts...