Propagating Bolted Cabbages (If that's even the right word) - An Experiment

Today I thought I'd do something about the state of my indoor cabbages.

These are all taken from previously used cabbages, the ends of which I'd kept in water for some time before planting in soil, similar to how I have retained my leeks and on which I may blog in more detail later.

They've done better than I expected on the shelf space I'm planning to use for a much more substantial and productive vertical growing space in the future.  Here they're receiving some direct sunlight (this picture was taken quite early this morning, on an overcast day, hence the shadiness) but I fear they've reached the limit of what they can do under such conditions.

Leafy enough in parts, and they've added a little extra green to a few meals the past week or so, but they're starting to behave quite eccentrically.  Some of them didn't look very well at all:

Another Walk in Another Park

Tonight I'm off to my best friend's to drink wine and have great conversation.  Nothing else is on the agenda before then, so I decided to spend as much time as I possibly could around plants.  To this end, I took myself off to Fletcher Moss, Didsbury.

Didsbury isn't really in Manchester.  Well, it is, but it doesn't feel like it is.  If you know Manchester at all, you know what I'm talking about.  Let's just leave it at that.

Contemporary Worm Management Solutions

Back in January I posted about my home wormery, so if you read that post, perhaps you'd be interested in an update on how things are going with the little wrigglers.  There's no way to make posts about vermiculture sexy, so I'm not going to try.  You have to plunge your hands into the smelly, sticky earth to reap the benefits of worm composting, and that's just all there is to it.  Either you're into that, or not.  But plenty of people are.  So anyway, here's a quick video I just made:

Oh, and for the purposes of this post, I made some tweaks to my YouTube channel, such as it is, and linked it back to this blog.  Might start posting more actually useful videos there in the future, if anyone's interested?

How to Re-Grow Leeks

Leeks are a dense and tasty vegetable that are well suited to European climates, and have been used in Britain probably since Roman times.  (Google "history of leeks".  Go on.  Aren't you even curious?)  I feel they're a very underused vegetable.  Leek and potato soup?  That's about it.  In fact they're something you can add to any soup, stew, casserole or other concoction, with or without potatoes.  I've even tried them grilled a few times, sliced vertically and with a bit of olive oil and salt, and never regretted it.

Leeks come from the onion family (along with garlic, chives and - believe it or not - onions) which means they grow roots enthusiastically, even recklessly, wherever they can.  And what this all means for the frugally inclined is that they're a perfect candidate for re-growing.  In my experiments so far, they're the vegetable I've had the most success with turning back into edible indoor plants from the ends that would otherwise normally go to waste.  Here's how to do it.

1.  Slice off the root end at the point where it turns from green to white (about 3-4 inches from the bottom).

2.  Leave in a jar or bowl of water, half submerged in a spot that's getting some direct sunlight.  I've had best results just leaving them on a kitchen worktop, rather than on a windowsill, where they tend to go a bit too soggy.

3.  Change the water a couple of times a week.  Some websites recommend changing the water daily, but I haven't found this necessary.

4.  The leeks will start to 'sprout' from the middle, growing back to their original green colour almost immediately.  You might be surprised by how fast they grow, even in the winter.

5.  After about 2 or 3 weeks, you will start to notice roots growing back.  When you have a healthy-looking amount of root growth, plant the leek ends back into soil.  I've packed them fairly close together in containers and they're thriving.  Very little space seems to be required between leeks, another reason why they're ideal for indoor or container gardening.

6.  Cover to the point when you first sliced the vegetable, so that only new growth is above the surface.

7.  Whenever you want, slice off new growth, leaving the end rooted in the soil, and allow to re-grow.

8.  Report back to me with your findings.

The planted leeks pictured above have already started to grow back after I used them in my green stir fry breakfast just the other day.  I see no reason why they can't just keep on regrowing indefinitely.  Except possibly entropy, or something.

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Consider the Toilet

No Buy April is drawing to a close, and one thing I can be certain I will have saved on is laundry expenses. I can't think of any way round having to wear clean clothes at least some of the time, and so a big box of washing powder was one of my 'essential purchases' at the start of the month. Five days left, and there's still plenty of washes to be had out of the 2.6kg box of Daz I helped myself to for a respectable £5.00. One trip to the launderette every 10-14 days was previously costing me £4.00 a pop (more if I used the dryers) so there's an obvious saving of at least £3.00 for the month. Little things, my friends. Little things.

One lesson that stuck in my mind after my trip to Brighton Earthship last summer was how much water is wasted in modern housing, to the benefit of nobody.  While water is of course an essential element of life, the use of totally clean water is essential only for certain purposes, and yet in modern architecture, all incoming water comes from a single source, whether it's used for drinking, washing, cooking or sewage.  Earthships incorporate the recycling of water into their design, so that rainwater is collected, used for drinking and cooking when it's fresh, recycled and filtered to be used as 'grey water' for plants and in plumbing, and finally recycled again as 'black water' for sewage.  It then returns to the earth, and re-enters the water cycle naturally, causing little if any pollution or waste.  Obvious when you think about it, but hardly anyone ever does.

Take a look at your toilet.  Fresh water is pumped straight into it, which you then piss and shit in, and flush away.  This accounts for 31% of overall household water consumption, apparently.  This is normal.  That is the kind of world we live in.

You beauty.

What if our sinks were plumbed in to our bathrooms, so that water drained away from washing dishes, showering, etc, were stored in the cistern (or probably also a 'backup' tank) and then used to flush?  Clearly this would save water, which benefits everyone.  Are houses designed that way?  I'm no architect, but I see no reason why they shouldn't be.  So anyway, I've come up with my own contribution to the situation, that requires no plumbing or architecture or design skills at all.  I hand wash my clothes, and use the left over water to flush my toilet.  Radical.

Of course this means transporting the water from the kitchen sink to the toilet manually, and for this I use a jerry can (pictured).  Full, it has the capacity of approximately one flush.  So each time I flush, I just empty the jerry can into the cistern, and it refills from there.  Incredibly simple, and since I'm on a water meter in this flat, it's going to reduce my water bill too.

Some comments on hand washing clothes: this is a little labour intensive, but very satisfying.  I find that in a kitchen sink's worth of water and a handful of washing powder, I can get 3 or 4 shirts and/2 pairs of trousers/5 or 6 pairs of underwear and shirts clean, given the requisite elbow grease.  This means washing clothes every 3 days or so, rather than in bulk as I was previously at the laundrette.  It might be worth calculating if this is actually using less water overall, but when you factor in the fact that all water I'm using is being used twice, I'm not exactly sure how to do that.

Related Posts

Paying Not to Die
Individually packaged sugar portions are stupid, and so are you, and so am I, and so is everything else in the world


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The Game of Evil

What I want and what I aspire to become are two different things.  Obviously, since one is the present and the other concerns the future: peace of mind, perhaps, belongs to those for whom the present and the future are the same.

Probably not the next Prime Minister

I was chatting to my friend Nicola the other day about this blog, the upcoming General Election, and the overall shittiness of the political landscape, among other things, and she suggested the idea of me becoming a "lifestyle blogger", living off the ad revenue generated by clicks from my millions of loyal subscribers.  Now there are a lot of words that make me cringe - and that's probably something I need to work on (too much cringing is not good for the soul) - and "lifestyle" is most certainly one of them.  I've had a kind of motto rattling around in my head for I don't know how long that goes, you can have a lifestyle, or you can have a life, but you can't have both.  It's just a thought, one that can lead you down various psychic rabbit holes, and not one I'd say I actually believe (or don't believe) but one that bubbled up in the course of our conversation anyway.  The commodification and fetishisation of the mundane is something I utterly detest.  Nobody talks about it much (Guy Debord killed himself - nobody talks about that much, either) and one reason for that, I think, is its ubiquity.  You can't see your own eyes.  

Probably the next Prime Minister.
Same as the old Prime Minister.

What could be more symptomatic of late stage capitalism than to mine the drudgery of the everyday in search the last, untouched corners of reality to turn into money?  Here's a video of someone giving you a "tour" of her kitchen and, specifically, of her fridge.  It was 5.7 million views.  She has 8.2 million subscribers.  She has published a cookbook, which was a New York Times bestseller in the 'Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous' category in November 2015.  There is of course nothing wrong with this.  I'm just pointing out that it is something that it is actually happening in real life.  Online "content creators" (here comes the cringe again) seem to be doing very well for themselves.  YouTube's recent tweaks to its advertising policy led to a decline in revenue for other many creators and, of course, helped to generate thousands of hours of exciting new content.  Sometimes at night I lie awake and wonder if the government counts YouTubers when it's calculating unemployment figures.  No really.  I do that.

Anyway I'm getting on a bit now, so all of this probably appears stranger to me than it actually is.  (I still don't really understand what 'Gamergate' is (or was?)  Also apparently there's a fourth wave of feminism, and I'm only vaguely aware of just how much Oxford's conflation of with students not making eye contact with racism, is going to generate lots and lots more angry content.  Apparently this targets autistic people, too, which I can imagine the internet is not going to like at all).  Here's me.  I started a blog in 2016.  That's what you kids do nowadays isn't it?

And it takes me five paragraphs before I can even get to the point.  My knees hurt.  My thumbs hurt.  What time is it?  I don't know, and I don't know how to think about the fact that I thought I'd give advertising on my blog a shot.  It feels a bit like pissing in the face of the spirit in which I started this blog in the first place.  Maybe it is.  So for now I'm just telling myself it's an "experiment".  Or a game.  To see if I actually generate any money from hosting advertising on my blog, now that I'm gaining a moderately respectable amount of "traffic" (cringe no. 3)  I've been tweaking my adsense settings so that (hopefully) I don't host anything unconscionable: ads in the "property", "finance" and "beauty and personal care categories" (cringes no. 4, 5 and 6) have all been blocked.  How effective this is remains to be seen.  Nicola very kindly clicked on some ads right as we were chatting, generating me approximately 35 pence, which isn't exactly enough to live on, but it's a start.  I don't think asking you to click on ads is allowed, so I'm not asking you do that.  Please don't click on any ads.  Or do, if you want me to help my generate lots of exciting new content.

All ads are evil, but some are more evil than others.

Don't forget to like, share, subscribe and scream desperately into the void.

The Open Air

Sunday was a good day.  Maybe it was the spontaneous, unorthodox breakfast I russelled myself up.  Admittedly, it wasn't all that filling, but I'm a firm believer in having vegetables for breakfast.  Why don't we do that?  For whatever reason, some foods are 'breakfast foods', and some are not.  Bollocks to that.  Try having vegetables for breakfast tomorrow.  See how it feels.

Anyway, with all that green goodness inside of me, I decided to spend the morning on the move.  The plan was to go over to my friends' Sarah and Jon, who recently moved to Farnworth, about 6 miles away from me, in the afternoon and spend some time in the garden, seeing what we could do with it.  It's hit me recently just how much I enjoy being around plants - a thought so simple I'm having trouble processing it - so just the idea of being given the chance to be part of shaping someone else's garden (lacking any outdoor space of my own) is one that brings me real joy.  But I'm getting ahead of myself...

A Walk in the Park

Never overlook the joy that might be found right on your front doorstep.  I popped out just now to old school spam some local letter boxes with OLIO leaflets (sorry?) and found myself wandering down a street adjacent to the side of Clarence Park, only to discover said park is quite considerably larger than I realised.  Hey, it's only been seven months since I moved here.

So I had myself a wander.

I had no idea these spots even existed.  And yet they do.

I like parks.  Parks are nice.

Some parts of the park are nicer than others, of course, but then, that's true of all parks.  There are no perfect parks.  Parks are reality.  In the part of the park nearer to my flat is one of the less impressive parts, which perhaps had something to do with why I'd neglected to explore it much before today - an apparently abandoned 'sensory garden'.




It's not what probably once was, but amid concrete and clay and general decay, as they say, nature must still find a way.  And it's found a way to make the most of these impressive sage bushes:

There's mint, as well, defying the will to weed, as mint is wont to do:

So I helped myself to a few cuttings...

...which I trimmed and re-potted, making them mine:

I'm feeling good about all this.  Who knows what you might be living right next door to?  Maybe stop gawping at your phone for half and hour and go and find out.  I don't mean that as a criticism of you.  I'm talking to myself.


Some related posts

A Bit More Foraging
Sunday in the Park, And Then Soup
Another Walk in Another Park


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Home Grown Green Breakfast Stir Fry

This morning I woke up hungry, as I sometimes do, and decided to try a little experiment: to construct a breakfast using only ingredients I have grown at home.  This limited my options somewhat, but here's what I russelled up:

As part of a balanced diet

 Behold, a nutritious green breakfast stir fry!  Ingredients: leeks, cabbage, spring onions, sage and chives.  Here it is a few moments later, in a bowl:

It's all in the presentation

It was, in all honesty, delicious.  OK, I 'cheated' a little - I didn't grow my own olives to produce the oil in which I fried and stirred, and the salt I added was not exactly extracted personally from the ocean, but these are only minor concerns.  I'm much more interested in the fact that not only were these homegrown ingredients, but that the substance of the meal - the leeks, cabbage and spring onions, were homegrown from scraps.  I've mentioned the power of spring onions regrown in water before, and it turns out the same power can be harnessed from leeks and cabbages too.  These I've let sit in water for a good few weeks, until roots start to grow, before planting them back in soil and letting them do their thing.  I'm curious to learn, now I've 'harvested' the leeks and some of the cabbage, how many times they'll regrow, and/or if yield will slowly decrease over time.

It was an enormously satisfying breakfast: free, healthy, fresh and as 'of the earth' as the food from an indoor container garden could ever hope to be.

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First Pea Pod!

I'm happy this morning because I spotted the first pea pod growing. It's the simple things.

Imagining No Possessions (Part Two)

Now what?

Last week the story that Lord Simon Wolfson, the chief exec of 'Next', had been moaning about "millennial shoppers" and their diminishing enthusiasm for spending money on material things (Next clothing in particular, we can safely assume) in favour of spending instead on "experiences", fell across my radar.  As you would expect from such a person, he expressed the "problem" entirely in terms of numbers.  According to "the latest figures from Barclaycard" (standard bedtime reading for a chief executive, probably) "expenditure in restaurants shot up in the last three months of 2016 compared with the previous year" with similar rises in spending on "entertainment, such as going to the cinema".  All this apparently leaves our multimillionaire hero "'extremely cautious' about the outlook for the rest of 2017".  Not "extremely cautious" in a parents-of-the-3-million-plus-children-in-the-UK-who-live-in-poverty kind of a way, I assume, but extremely cautious nonetheless.  More a perhaps-he'll-decide-not-to-use-his-bonus-to-plug-the-pay-gap-between-him-and-his-employees-this-year kind of a way.  Which, of course, he has every right to do, doesn't he?  Or not to do.

Now there's no need for me to go down that road to make the point I want to make here.  Some people are multimillionaire chief executives of successful businesses.  Personally I don't begrudge them that (much) and I've never much cared for the neo-socialist vitriol spewed at "The 1%" (TM) as if the inequality that exists between them and the rest of us were always, by definition, their fault.  I'm more interested in the assumptions underneath this type of thinking - assumptions expressed in Lord Wolfson's comments, on the right (he's a Tory peer, believe it or not) as well as in the standard criticisms of "wealth inequality" that we hear repeated ad nauseum, and without much reflection, on the left.  Crudely put, those assumptions boil down to this: some people have too much money, while the rest of us have too little, and if the have-too-muches would only share with the have-too-littles (voluntarily or otherwise), everything would be much better for everyone.  There'd be no more multimillionaires (boo hoo) but no more children in poverty either.  Utopia achieved.  Hooray.

Whether or not this is true does not concern me in the least.  I have lost all taste for the bitter back-and-forth between left and right on such matters as 'entitlement', 'equality', and 'wealth'. As if all that politics was really about was who gets how much money, when, and why.  As if all that really mattered was not whether or not we are spending money at all, but only what we spend it on.  (Note the fetishisation of capital-E 'Experience' is just as prominent in consumer culture as the fetishisation of stuff, and that we are all just as susceptible to it).  I'm trying to imagine a world beyond money, a world where value - real value - is contained in something much more, well, real than the means of exchange. More real, even, than the things themselves being exchanged.

And it's a terrible irony that in our slouching towards Utopia we came to value anything else. But that's what happened, and here we are, in the empty pursuit of objects, and of the means by which to acquire more objects. Even our experiences become objects, memories to accumulate and 'share' with 'friends' - people with whom the only thing we really share is envy.  We can do better than this. We haven't quite worked out how yet, but we will. We have to.

Today I reached a kind of milestone. I got rid of the last of my excess stuff.

Stuff, bags thereof.

There's a very handy little app called 'Gone for Good' here in the UK, that allows you to quickly find local charities that will collect your clutter for free. Posting the picture above alerted the local British Heart Foundation man + van, who arrived this morning to take about ten bags of clothes, books, kitchen items and other miscellaneous junk off my hands and into the hands of people who can hopefully do some good with it. It was a great feeling - not just the unavoidable, self-congratulatory warmth that comes with giving to charity - but the feeling of going back inside to a flat that no contains virtually nothing useless. No doubt there's more pairing down to be done (it becomes an obsession) but I feel like I crossed another bridge to wherever I'm going next.

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Imagining No Possessions (Part One)
"I have everything I need"
Thoughts from an empty room
No Buy April
A Brief Rant on the Nature of Things
Thoughts from a non empty room
Taking the Zero Waste Plunge
Paying Not to Die


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No Buy April

It's been just over a year now since I began my journey, my "new life" (the inverted commas mean something). A good time to take stock, and reflect on what I have learned so far.  To sum up:

1. I am a fundamentally lazy person. I don't think this is ever going to change. While I've made a conscious and deliberate effort to switch my perspective away from the acquisition of money and of things, and even to say yes to things to which I would always previously have said no, at heart I'm still a recluse. I'm not motivated, in the normal, noisy happy-go-lucky sense, to "live life to the full" by backpacking across Tajikistan or bungee-jumping off the backs of elephants or starting up a bespoke toenail polishing mobile app or whatever it is we "Millennials" are apparently more interested in now than filling our bank accounts. I've no interest in capital-E Experience as such.

2.  I have a painfully short attention span. This is problematic, especially when it comes to sitting down to write my book, which nominally I've set aside two days a week for, but for the last few weeks has been closer to two hours. (Counting the time I spend researching the subject the matter, to be fair, this is considerably longer, but the double-edged sword that is the instant availability of an incomprehensibly vast amount of information being what it is, how much of my research is *relevant* to what I actually want to write about is another issue entirely). It's also just problematic in general: the decision to eschew money and material possessions as much as I possibly can requires a certain vigilance, an awareness of your own behaviour that is frustratingly easy to allow to lapse.  Which brings me to my third realisation...

3.  It is easy to fall back into old habits. A year ago my head was full of dreams and ideas about how I could be totally money-free, living of my wits and the land alone, perhaps sooner than I dared imagine. So I quit my job and just thought fuck it, we'll see what happens. Well, what happens, as it turns out, is if you don't have a clear and comprehensive plan (which I don't, see 1 and 2 above) you fall back into the same old trap of work, earn, exhaust your time on trivialities, sleep, dream and repeat. I'm working now on average 15 hours a week, which is negligible compared to how things used to be, and even though the work is as dull as I can allow it to be, it still occupies far too much of my headspace. And so I find myself thinking in the same old circles: if I just earn this, I can do this... And all the while the silly spends creep out of control again: the takeaway coffees, the taxis, the conveniences. Time for another jolt.

I have declared April to be my "no buy month". Yesterday I topped up my electricity meter, bought a month's supply of cat food, a few other bits and pieces I've been meaning to sort out (like fitting a new toilet seat) and resolved not to set foot in a shop or cafe or anywhere else I might spend money again for the rest of April unless I need to. "Need" in the true sense of that term. No cinema trips, no bottles of wine, nothing but the food I need to eat to live and the cost of my bus tickets. Any bills that happen to come I suppose I'll have to pay, and that is very much that. Another small step in the right direction. Get my sending down to an absolute minimum.  See how it goes.

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Related posts

No Buy April: The Results
"I have everything I need"
Preparations
A Soup Made of Scraps

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