Sunday 25 May 2014

Naked bike rides, no shampoo and radishes

Yesterday the naked bike ride passed through Porsmouth and it was the catalyst to have another discussion in our family about our relience on fossil fuels and cycle safety issues.  And it's also spurred me to spend some more time finding out about fracking...always suspicious when politicians offer financial incentives for something (especially when they slip it in the day after you have a chance to vote (or not) for them).  
Some reading if you're interested: 
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/23/fracking-compensation-increase-quell-opposition
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/climate/fracking
https://secure.greenpeace.org.uk/page/s/frack-free-uk

But closer to home, I had an amazing response to my previous post (especially on Facebook) and as a result I've been trying the 'no poo' approach to hair washing for the past month.  It's quite astounding that just washing your hair with water isn't as awful as I imagined.  It is strange at first as the natural oil in your hair takes some time to sort itself out, and having read around it is a bit more tricky with hard water....but I'm certainly going to stick with it for the time being and see how it goes (the kids too)....and we're literally just using water (some people use additional oil and other things).  And of course it saves water too....showers are shorter as I don't spend ages getting soap out of my hair.  Win win!

My husband has also given shaving with shaving oil a go.  For the first try we bought some from the shop (not in plastic packaging), but having looked at the ingredients, I think we'll be making it from now on (sunflower oil and lavender etc).  Apparently works brilliantly and is again cheaper.


And finally to radishes.  The kids and I love trying to grow things, and last year we started a 'help yourself herb' garden in our front yard.  It's led to great conversations and introductions to neighbours, and some others in neighbouring streets are wanting to do it too now.  But we have very little other space to grow stuff in, so since our neighbours don't use their front yard we asked if we could use their space this year.  They were really up for that, and we are now growing blueberries, strawberries, carrots, potatoes, radishes, tomatoes and flowers.  We harvested our first radishes this week and boy do they pack a punch!  Never tasted radishes quite like it.  Kids not quite so impressed, but hopefully the rest of our yield will be more favourable.  The main beauty is that it's like having a garden that's big enough to grow veg.  There is an amazing amount of land on our doorstep that is unused, so my plan is to expand a little further each year and see where it takes us.  (Must more realistic than getting an allotment that we need to make a trip to regularly...at this stage of life.)

The challenge for the next few weeks is cleaning...I've bought some vinegar and bicarbonate of soda...so will report back on my experiments soon.  (Oh and we have a zero waste Big Lunch to do as well :-)


No comments:

Post a Comment