First DIY tools

It's never to early to get into DIY, so I sewed up a couple of toy hammers. Presents for new-ish babies I'm off to visit soon. I wanted to add rattles to them, but was struggling to come up with an eco-friendly way of making one. I didn't want to buy anything either, especially more plastic crap. Eventually I found a very small bottle lid, filled it with lentils and taped it shut with electrical tape. It just fits in the hammerhead, padded with lots of wadding.

Spong!

Awhile back I scored a Spong mincer from the charity shop for 99p. We tried it out for the first time turning lamb chunks into mince to make lamb burgers for dinner.

Felt Flower

I made a flower brooch out of a felted recycled sweater from this tutorial. It's attached to the front of a birthday card for my sister, and is now flying airmail to California. I'm not a big fan of birthday cards as they're such a huge waste of paper, so really liked the idea of a birthday card plus. It's kind of like a mini-birthday present, which can be reused rather than a card which would just get ditched after a couple of weeks. Excuse the awful photo, which was taken late at night. It makes it look crappy, but believe me the brooch looks much better in reality. I couldn't wait till the next day to take a better photo cause as usual I was finishing this last minute and wanted to get it into the postbox down the street to be there for the first pickup in the morning. Luckily I also discovered that you can now pay for and print stamps online which is awesome. So instead of having to rush up to the post office first thing I was able to print off my stamp, post the parcel, and go relax for the rest of the evening.

Fruity

Finished knitting a teacosy. This one's for Rebecca as I'm going to visit her and her not so new baby in a couple of weeks, just before her birthday. Luckily they use a teapot, and are lacking in knitted goods to keep their tea warm with. I just love this cute pattern but it's a bit too wide especially for my teapot. I think I'll have to adapt a pattern to fit my teapot, but I might wait till I get a bit more knitting practise before I attempt that.

Thieves soil allotment paradise

Last night our shed at the allotment was broken into and our mower and strimmer stolen. We were alerted by an early morning phonecall from our friend James who walks his dog past our allotment every morning before work and noticed our shed door swinging open in the breeze. The police arrived to take a look, and found that 5 other sheds on neighbouring allotments and 15 on another allotment site nearby had also been raided. Luckily it turned out that the culprits were far from criminal masterminds and were arrested just a few streets away later in the day, and all the loot was found stashed in an empty house next to our allotment. After they'd been dusted for prints we brought the mower and strimmer home for the moment, while we consider how to make our shed even more secure. We'd already relocated the door hinges so they couldn't be unscrewed from outside and covered the window with mesh and wooden battens, so I'm not really sure what else we can do to deter thieves. Perhaps some extra reinforcement where the hasp attaches to the shed would be a good idea, we're also mulling over what would best sort of booby trap to install.

Bike trailer at work

A trip to the local diy warehouse by bike. This time just the bobyak and panniers, but even though it was only a small load it cost a scary amount of money as we were buying new powertools.

More allium love

Planted 4 bulbs of garlic today, 2 rows of early purple wight and 2 rows of mediterranean wight. Another 6 bulbs are ordered and should be here soon, but best to get these 2 autumn planting varieties in now. The leeks have been weeded and earthed up. Hopefully that'll help them withstand the fierce winds that whip across our plot all winter. Picked a few for tonight's dinner, along with parsnips, carrots and celeriac from the plot. This will be combined with our own rosemary, garlic and mint jelly and a organic leg of lamb from Mansergh Hall who have a stall on Wednesdays in Lancaster. Perfect Sunday roast dinner.

Glorious autumn sunshine

The autumn planted onion sets are on their way. Onions were a major sucess on the allotment for us this summer, so we're hoping the good luck with alliums will continue. These were planted in on 1st October and weeded today.

We also harvested the rest of our potatoes. This bed had bigger potatoes and higher yield than the others, a fact we attributed to our unscienfitic mini experiment of lining the trenches of this last bed with comfrey before planting the seed potatoes in April. We'll have to expand the already massive comfrey patch if we want enough to line ALL the potatoes trenches next year.