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Manual lawn mowers are actually better for your grass as well, the clean cut enables grass to recover quickly, making it healthier and improving the general appearance.  And yes the Brill Razorcut Premium  is definitely on the eco-friendly list, not only will you save on fuel bills but you won’t be contributing to the UK’s hydrocarbon emissions, for which powered lawn mowers contribute  a surprising 2.1%.   Find out more about the Brill Razorcut Premium 38 or visit Nigel’s Eco Store for their complete range of hand mowers.

Now I come to think of it, it’s not even our grass The Man cuts.  I wonder if we could persuade British Waterways to start using hand mowers?  I’ll still take their clippings for my compost though!

I am visiting Granny Goo.  In order to earn my keep here I have to put some hours in at her allotment – this week she is particularly keen to get all her potatoes in.  Quite excitingly, she has a new toy.  Well actually it is very, very old.  In fact had she bought it brand new it would have cost her the grand sum of five pounds, twelve shillings and sixpence.  As it is she paid rather more for it on Ebay.  Oh yes,  Granny Goo has a jalo – pronounced à la Lopez apparently.  

The Jalo is a wheeled soil cultivator, with various attachments – such as plough, rake, hoes and ridgers – which, you guessed it, is powered by human effort.  Brought into production shortly after the second world war, its manufacturers claimed it was ’12 times faster than by hand’ and ‘costs nothing for fuel or repairs and can be safely used by the youngest member of the family… in conditions where a powered machine would be unusable.’  Right up our allotment then.   

One thing that Granny Goo regrets doing when she first got her allotment was using a rotavator to turn the soil.  It chopped all the weeds up back into the soil and led to lots of vigorous regrowth in the beds.  Rotovators (and indeed most petrol powered garden tools) are heavy to use and difficult to manipulate and you can bet you’ll waste frustrating time, better spent digging, trying to get the things started.  

I couldn’t wait to try the Jalo out on the intended potato patch which was unbroken and infested with couch grass.  We used the plough attachment to turn the soil.  I guess if we were sowing seeds we would have also used the rake attachments to create a fine tilth, but for tatties the plough is fine.  I loved that the attachments can be easily added and removed, it really is just like playing with Meccano.  That’s the sort of simple engineering that makes tools like this easy enough for anyone (yep even simpletons like me!) to use.  In order to get the engine going all Granny Goo had to do was give me a decent breakfast! 

There is we discovered, as with all these things I suppose, a bit of a knack to using a Jalo.  You have to start off just teasing the surface of the soil to start with and then work your way deeper with each successive ploughing.  Starting too deep will just lead to the plough getting stuck.  On about the third plough, the job became easy and it really was pleasurable to watch the soil turning over the blade.  The added bonus was that the plough, instead of chopping up roots, actually dragged them to the surface and made removal much easier.  The Jalo is only about a foot wide, so once the potatoes start coming up it should be possible to use the hoe attachment and work between the rows.   This simple, well-thought out, lightweight but low-maintenance technology is perfect for the sustainable gardener.  Big thumbs up for the Jalo from me and Granny Goo!  (See also Hand Mower)

'Mind your garlic, did you say Granny Goo?'

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!