The comedian Michael McIntyre does a great sketch about people preparing to go on their hols. He points out that every electrical item in the house is turned off, except the fridge, because we TRUST our fridges! They are not going to spontaneously combust in our absence or suck energy with a thirst that would embarrass a vampire. Where would we be without our fridges?
I’ve introduced a new category called Power Down. It’s not strictly about renewable energy, although elbow grease, which I imagine is going to feature quite a bit in this category is pretty much that. It is about being less reliant on mod-cons, for which most of us rely upon people cleverer than ourselves to invent and design. It usually means we also need experts to fix them when they go wrong, or worse we chuck them out and buy a new one. This is about simple technologies that all of us can employ. So where would we be without fridges?
Before we got our inverter it was impossible to run a fridge all the time at our house. Even now, with the inverter, we can only run a small fridge and certainly not a freezer. (And we empty and turn that off when we go away!) We did have fridge-freezer that ran on gas in the generator room which we used from time to time, but mostly it was inefficient, expensive and getting gas up here was a pain. It has now conked out and is just a cupboard!
We managed quite well without a fridge to be honest. Most of the year it is cold enough just to leave food outside or in even in the coldest part of the house. (Which was originally a pantry and was what most people managed with prior to the advent of the fridge!) We only bought fresh food as we needed it – doing a large shop and stuffing your fridge full can be a recipe for waste – and remember that fridges don’t work efficiently when they are over full. We also came to the conclusion that a lot of what people keep in fridges is to some degree already a preserved version of a foodstuff; cheese, bacon, any other cured meats, smoked or salted fish and there even seems to be a trend towards keeping jams, pickles and ketchups in the fridge. Is that really necessary?
I think preserving is a very worthy way of ensuring we can enjoy our harvests during the winter months, jams and chutneys are fun to make and good to eat. You might lose vitamin C but many other anti-oxidants, especially from berries, are concentrated in this way and will still be doing you lots of good. Building vegetable clamps is another way of increasing the life of your harvest, they are suitable for most root crops aswell harder fruits such as apples and pears. The basic idea is you choose a dry, free-draining spot and dig a trench around it for further drainage. The excavated soil will be used to cover your clamp over. Make a layer of straw, dried bracken, reeds - whatever is local to you – then lay on your first layer of crops. Build it up in layers in this way. Finish with a final layer of your insulating material and then cover over with the earth. For more detailed instructions on clamp building visit here at Self-Sufficientish, always one of my favourite places!
This is all fine if you happen to live in a cool climate but what about when things hot up? How about making your own earthen-ware cool storage system? I came across this idea at Practical Action, a charity that seeks to enable people to use local resources and simple technologies throughout the developing world. Go and visit, it’s a site full of brilliant ideas. This particular idea is called a Zeer Pot and was developed using local clay in the Sudan. The basic principle is that you take a large pot and a smaller pot that will fit inside that, this is the food storage area. You fill the gap inbetween the pots with wet sand. The water in the sand evaporates outwards towards the outer surface of the larger pot causing a cooling effect of several degrees in the centre. The pots should be covered with a damp cloth and placed in a shady place where air can circulate around them, I’m going to rest mine on wooden pallets because we have those, but the original article suggests making iron stands. The cloth and sand needs re-wetting every couple of days. This method of storage can increase the life of tomatoes from two days to twenty days, or salad from one day to five days. That’s about as good as a fridge I’d say!
Hello, sorry for not posting – seemed to have got lost somewhere in between my birthday and the snow appearing – occasionally in a slightly alcoholic haze! Happy New Year anyway and I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas. In an inspired bit of junk swapping The Man from Salford managed to get me a manger for Christmas. How seasonal was that? Of course I don’t have any live stock to feed and I’ll almost certainly get the sack if I try to stick any babies in it, but it is just perfect for soaking my willow in without worrying about it getting washed away down the canal or warped in the butts. Another great freebie for Christmas was a large family sized canoe, somebody’s storage problem has become our entertainment – slight hitch though – it’s completely useless to us until the canal unfreezes! 
I’ve been trying ever so hard to be conscientious about buying (or more accurately not buying) clothes. This also means I’ve been thinking about what to do with clothes once they are no longer serviceable as such. Goldilocks generally manages to out grow clothes before they wear out too badly and so can be passed on to her younger cousins and friends. I tend to wear things to the point of falling apart and then they become part of my cleaning arsenal. I don’t darn, patch or stitch things back together though and I think perhaps I should. 
We had our first proper frost this weekend. I like frost. According to allotment lore it will make my parsnips really sweet and tasty. Actually I dug one up about two weeks ago because I couldn’t wait any longer for the frost. I was dying to find out what was underneath the soil and leafy top growth. Unsurprisingly, what was underneath was a parsnip. I served it up for lunch that day. The Man from Salford, who is quite partial to roasted parsnips, complained that there wasn’t much. I explained that I was just digging one up to see what it was like. ‘It’s like a parsnip,’ he helpfully told me.