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Friday, 21 December 2012

Children's Activities - Upcycling

On the run up to Christmas our house feels full of decorations, excited children counting down the days, and Christmas music.

In the expectations of new presents the children have been doing a clear out of their rooms and creating a box to go to charity.
This clear out turned up a last year's Beano album full of fun colourful cartoons and it seemed a shame to just discard this; a look over towards a very tatty desk gave me an idea.
Decoupage!  Soon one tatty desk had a really personal touch, full of distraction from tedious hours doing homework!!  


This then led to a literature inspired desk for his brother and a fashion inspired jewellery box for their sister.


Decoupage is a great fun activity suitable for all school age (and above) children.  It is very addictive, once started you may find yourself casting your eyes around looking for more items to personalise.




You'll need
Suitable paper.  Not too thin or too thick.  It could be magazine cut outs, broken books full of great verses, cartoons or even old maps...
Box or table to decorate
PVA glue
Paintbrush
Scissors
Varnish

  1. Look over what you want to cover.  Decoupage needs a clean surface, if it is very smooth it may need sanding to create a key.  Also if any background is likely to show at the end you may wish to paint.  
  2. Select the images you want to use and cut out.  We used square images to cover the desks and individual fashion items to cover the jewellery box and decide the layout.
  3. Once everything is ready add about 20% water to the glue, then mix and spread thoroughly (but not too thickly) over a small section and carefully lay out your images ensuring they lie smooth and all the corners are glued.
  4. Once finished leave to dry thoroughly.
  5. Cover in several layers of varnish, allowing to dry in-between coats. 

Wednesday, 19 December 2012

We love a bit of Scrumpy


Having been born and bred in the West Country I have to admit to being a little partial to a drop of cider. Sadly, a number of the smaller producers I grew up loving no longer exist. I have particularly fond memories of Inch's Scrumpy from Winkleigh in North Devon – a wonderful still, cloudy cider that was deceptively strong!!
I was therefore delighted when we recently took on a new addition to Muddy carrot - the multi-award winning Thirsty Farmer Cider. It is a traditional, long fermented, slightly cloudy, still farmhouse cider, similar to the one from my memories. 
Local Farmer Fear Cider
The Fear family started making cider further back in time than anyone can remember from their then farm in the South West; but it was in 1880 that the first commercial batch was sold by Mr Metford Fear to a public house in Weston Super Mare and the love of making cider has been part of the Fear family ever since.
In 2005, Andrew Fear settled in Leicestershire near to possibly the only cider apple orchard in the county, and decided to produce his own brand of cider  which he called the “Thirsty Farmer”.
Since then “Thirsty Farmer Cider” has won many local and national awards including 2 Gold Stars by the Guild of Fine Food in the 2011 Great Taste Awards.
The Thirsty Farmer Cider is very popular in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, but I think the West Country has had a definite influence on this lovely Leicestershire cider.

How to make Mulled Cider
1L Cider
3 allspice berries
5 Cloves
2 Cinnamon stick
2 oranges
sugar to taste

Put the cider and juice and zest of 1 orange  into a saucepan with the spices and simmer gently for 30 minutes. Taste and add sugar if you want. 
Transfer into a large heatproof bowl with slices of orange to garnish.
A perfect warm party drink to cosy up by the fire.  Enjoy...

Monday, 17 December 2012

Drilling into history



Over the past 40 years, ice cores have revealed more about the earth’s climate than any other scientific technique. It was by chance that Danish climatologist Willi Dansgaard realised the benefit of analysing the ice caps and went on to develop modern ice core science in the 1950s. 

According to Dansgaard "a minor - but to me fateful - miracle" whilst watching the rain fall, he wondered whether its isotopic composition changed from one shower to the next.  He tested his hypothesis, collecting samples during a rainstorm which turned out to be an unusually well-developed front system. When the rain began in western Jutland, it had not stopped raining in Wales, 1,000 km to the west. The miracle was his decision to start the sample collection under these unusually favourable conditions.

Dansgaard discovered that the ratio between two isotopes of oxygen depended on the temperature at which the rain was formed within the clouds and he then reasoned  that the relationship between temperature and delta value might also hold going back in time: "Old water might reflect the climate at the time of formation of the water," he recalls.

His theory was further developed in conjunction with Norwegian zoologist Per Scholander who noticed that gas bubbles tended to develop under ice, and also that a chunk of ice chopped from a glacier gave off bubbles of gas when put into a drink to cool it. Scholander determined that ice is virtually impermeable to gases; this made him wonder whether the air trapped deep in the glaciers contained a permanent record of the composition of the atmosphere in earlier periods. Scholander developed ingenious methods to mine the tiny bubbles of ancient air.



In 2004 a 3,270 metre-long ice core taken from Antarctica - the oldest taken - has proved one of the most useful, stretching back 800,000 years. Dating an ice core is a bit like counting tree rings; near the surface of an ice core, annual layers are usually visible.

Ice cores have confirmed that a great chill reached its climax in the 1600s when London festivals were held on the frozen River Thames, and that when the Viking adventurer Eric the Red named "Greenland'' in 985AD the weather there was warmer.  These ice cores have also been valuable in finding details of volcanic activity.  Ash blasted into the atmosphere during a volcanic eruption is often dispersed over a wide area within a few days or weeks. With very few records of volcanic eruptions from before 10,000 years ago on land these ice cores add considerably to our knowledge of volcanic history much further back in time.

With so much still to be learned from ice cores about our weather, scientists hope to go back up to 1.4 million years. Antarctica has been covered in ice for around the past 30 million years.

So if the climate is constantly changing why do scientists believe our present climate changes are anything different?

With records reaching 800,000 years back in time scientists can see that the gas bubbles show that the concentration of CO2 was stable over the last millennium until the industrial revolution. It then started to rise exponentially, and its concentration is now a massive 40% higher. Other measurements have revealed that the increasing CO2 is from fossil fuel usage and deforestation.

The fastest large natural increase, measured in older ice cores, is around 20ppmv (parts per million by volume) over 1000 years, as the earth came out of the last ice age 12,000 years ago. However CO2 concentration has increased by the same amount - 20ppmv - in just the last 11 years.

The evidence is very compelling and even more worrying for the next generation.

“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything”
Albert Einstein

Thursday, 13 December 2012

Bathing with goats milk soap...


This has been a busy month for Muddy Carrot with lots of new sellers coming on line.   
One  such seller is Cyril's Soap Shed selling their wonderful fragrant soaps, made using goats milk fresh from  their own goats. 

Goats milk has been valued for its exceptional moisturising and healing properties for hundreds of years.  The key reasons why it is so good is it has a similar pH level to human skin, and is naturally high in vitamins, minerals and Alpha Hydroxy acids, that nourish and rejuvenate. 

These soaps are completely handmade by the ancient method of cold process. Using quality, ethically sourced, natural oils with the lye from the goats milk, once all the ingredients are mixed, they are poured into handmade wooden moulds to set for 48 hours. The soap is then hand cut into individual bars and left to 'cure' for several weeks.  the finished soap is gentle and caring, delicate enough for even the most sensitive of skin
  
We at Muddy Carrot love local and Cyril's soaps tick all the boxes; they even use home grown herbs from their own garden to add gentle swirls of colour and texture to their soaps. There are no harsh chemicals, just 100% pure, natural ingredients.  The fragrances are from pure essential oils. 

A big thumbs up to Cyril's Soap Shed!

If you'd like to get your hands on a bar visit their shop or you could try your luck at entering our Muddy photo competition  where they have kindly donated a soap as a prize to help clean up the winning entry!!

Tuesday, 11 December 2012

What is the Greenest Christmas Tree Option?


This is a dilemma faced by so many of us coming up to Christmas. Is it best to have an artificial tree that can be pulled out year after year, or a real tree? In the UK 8 million Christmas trees are sold during the Christmas season and the number of real trees is growing year on year. Can this be good?
Christmas trees are grown in the UK as a sustainable crop. Approximately 40 million trees are grown in the UK absorbing 50,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Provided you are able to buy from a local grower this has to be good news.
Another alternative is a pot grown tree. We have one of these at Muddy Carrot HQ. We bought it 10 years ago and had it in the house over Christmas, it was small but perfectly formed. After Christmas time we all took turns in digging a hole and planted it within view of our window so we still enjoy it now.
It is now large and gorgeous. It has withstood the harsh storms that so many trees have struggled to establish themselves against, and we still love it and light it up every year. It somehow connects our Christmases. OK this is not practical solution for all, and we could not bring it in year on year. We do often have an indoor tree as well, but we love our live Christmas tree.
How green the solution you choose depends not just on the care with which you source but equally on the care with which you dispose of the tree after Christmas. 
Official figures show that most trees go into landfill at the end of the festive season and yet they can so easily be recycled. They are ideally suited to composting and wood chipping that could provide nutrients for depleted soil.
Most councils offer a tree recycling service and have the capability of turning your lovely tree into valuable compost. So this Christmas when you are thinking what tree to get think also about how you intend to dispose of it. It would be a great way to start 2013 on a green note…

Monday, 10 December 2012

Well Done Rosewood Farm on #SBS win!


Theo Paphitis of Dragon's Den has recently selected 
Rosewood Farm  as a winner of his 'Small Business Sunday', a weekly initiative on Twitter to support small businesses.  We feel this is very well deserved.  They produce an excellent range of meaand strive to do this in as environmentally friendly a way as possible for which they were awarded the Think Green Business of the Year award in 2011.

Friday, 7 December 2012

Green Roofs and Heavy Rain

Did you notice the green roof on the shipping container garden office on George Clarke's Amazing Spaces? (great up-cycling, by the way...)

sedum roof Muddy Carrot HQSome of you may have noticed the sedum roof on our house here at Muddy Carrot HQ. Looks good, I think you'll agree, but is there any more to it than that? A lot of effort to go to perhaps, so there must be more logic to it than mere aesthetics?

It's made up of an absorbent substrate which we planted with 4,000 assorted sedum and alpine plug plants that we grew in the polytunnels here. Now, four years on, the plugs are getting knitted together to create a living carpet which changes colour with the seasons and will ultimately help the building blend in with its surroundings.

But the recent heavy rainfall has brought home another benefit of green roofs - recognised in Germany where something like one in ten new builds in built-up areas includes a green roof. That benefit is rainwater runoff attenuation. Underneath the planting substrate is an egg-box like structure that provides thousands of little rainwater reservoirs to sustain the plants through dry periods. Above that is a membrane followed by the planting material which itself is absorbent (it's made of little pellets of aerated brick material) plus of course the plants' roots also absorb a certain amount of moisture. So from a dry state there are three ways in which rainwater is held before it finds its way to the gutters and downpipes.

Although this house is surrounded by fields so flooding isn't a problem, where green roofs really come into their own is in heavily built up areas. The abundance of non-absorbent surfaces such as concrete, tiles and tarmac exacerbate the effects of heavy rain, but this can be slowed down by absorbing the water of an initial downpour so it can trickle away slowly over time. Where better to do this than above our heads on rooftops, making good use of otherwise inaccessible areas?