The Prepping Thread - A Newer Beginning ;)

DigForVictory

mingVase  needles - sucks breath in between teeth - we hunt charity shops for UK needles as Himself swears something shameful when the Chinese made things snap on him.

Si clist - our hurdygurdy does indeed core & peel the apple but leaves us with a blighted coil of apple which is no use for apple rings at all. Anything I can do to persuade it different? <reaches hopefully for mallet>

boazu - many thanks for apple ginger recipe - sis complaining can't pitch tent as raining apples. Shall email her this & suggest revenge with ginger. Then veg leathers... Hm!

elaine - very glad to read you back up & kicking - my vacuum sealer I learned to operate from YouTube!

jamanda - come the festive season there is always massive demand for inexpensive wine for the punch (dad bought 4 demijohns for his engineers [terrible thirsty lot], started them on a case of the good stuff & then switched to mine mulled with nearly every spice in the cupboard & a slosh of brandy & yet they were all safely operational within 24 hours. Dad still can't figure how.)

C J - "melt knicker elastic"?! Mind, there was a lass I knew at Uni who cheerfully admitted her principles were soluble in ethanol. (Shrewdly, she never said How Much.)

markin - how sad is it that I covet the shelving? As for the cans, well, I have rather a lot of Kilners. currently full of unappreciated jam, so I may swap them locally. Getting a US pressure canning bath is being the toughie.
I'm beginning to loose legroom as my under work desk store is filling up. My WAH office may need to be rearranged hard...

GreyQueen

The thing about steel is that it is 100% recyclable. If you google, you’ll see that post consumer steel packaging recycling rates at just under or just over 80% and that recycling is being done in Wales. Post industrial steel recycling rates, including demolition and old appliances, is circa 92%. I’ve been inside our recycling centre and they’ve steel and aluminium can crazy. Can’t get enough of them, gagging for them. These are valuable materials and they are being recycled here in the UK; the turnaround from you putting your can out in your recycling bin and someone buying another canned product in that metal is usually under a month.

Most steel used in packaging, manufacturing and building isn’t a virgin material, it’s very much on a merry go round in the material stream. Keep your cans on the move and there’ll be enough steel and aluminium to go around.

Heck, get a litter picker and go walking to retrieve stray alu drinks cans that the idle are littering the countryside with.

Si_Clist

DigForVictory said:

Si clist - our hurdygurdy does indeed core & peel the apple but leaves us with a blighted coil of apple which is no use for apple rings at all. Anything I can do to persuade it different?

There's a bit of a knack to it, but we reassemble the coil to make an apple, so to speak, then just cut one side parallel to the core hole.  That gives us apple rings for bottling, but not for drying, 'cos we dry them by threading them on a bamboo sprung across the fireplace rveal above the kitchen woodburner and if they've been cut, they tend to fall off ,  Having said that, though, we've not actually dried any since we've discovered how well apple rings (and for that matter whole apples) bottle ...

elaine241

I have been buried in beans literally! The french beans have gone mad, I have put at least 10kg in the freezer and there is loads left to pick. The runners maybe coming to the end but I have plenty again in the freezer again at least 10kg! The potatoes are still nestled in the ground and I am digging them up as needed. The tomatoes seem to have survived the blight after I showered them in diluted copper sulphate. I don't use chemicals but I couldn't face losing the whole harvest and all that work. Copper sulphate is not a serious anti fungal but it seems to have held back the blight so that the toms can ripen. I have several layers of the smaller toms cut in half and drying in the dehydrator. I am going to put them in oil flavoured with herbs and garlic. I have several kilos of those with a mark or blemish that I am going to use up in tomato sauce . Hopefully I will bottle this and use for bolognese, pasta etc. My onions and shallots are drying on shelves in the poly tunnel, luckily I got them in before all this wet weather. My peppers and chillis are also looking good and I will have plenty to dry and use. I have even managed to grow an aubergine!! Never before, they always just seem to fail. I have at least three or four fruits on a plant, not quite the size and shape of shop bought ones but I am one proud mum!  
My sister went to Costco and bought me a big pack of loo roll  about 40 for £12, apparently its good quality as she used this make last year. She has also bought me catering size spices paprika, garlic powder, salt and pepper corns. I only grew a few garlic last year as I didn't know I was going to have the huge plot until later in the year. This year I will be getting the cloves in the ground soon!
I have made mental notes of trees that I can scrump apples from. My sister has just moved to a house with plenty of apple trees so I am off to collect as many as I can now.

betony

GreyQueen said:

The thing about steel is that it is 100% recyclable. If you google, you’ll see that post consumer steel packaging recycling rates at just under or just over 80% and that recycling is being done in Wales. Post industrial steel recycling rates, including demolition and old appliances, is circa 92%. I’ve been inside our recycling centre and they’ve steel and aluminium can crazy. Can’t get enough of them, gagging for them. These are valuable materials and they are being recycled here in the UK; the turnaround from you putting your can out in your recycling bin and someone buying another canned product in that metal is usually under a month.

Most steel used in packaging, manufacturing and building isn’t a virgin material, it’s very much on a merry go round in the material stream. Keep your cans on the move and there’ll be enough steel and aluminium to go around.

Heck, get a litter picker and go walking to retrieve stray alu drinks cans that the idle are littering the countryside with.

This is genuinely impressive! It's shame more can't be done with plastics recycling, but I know it has a limited lifespan. Manufacturers should be dissuaded from using it really, but that would most likely put up costs which are passed on to consumers and not everyone can afford to buy the more environmentally-friendly choice. 

greenbee

betony said:

GreyQueen said:

The thing about steel is that it is 100% recyclable. If you google, you’ll see that post consumer steel packaging recycling rates at just under or just over 80% and that recycling is being done in Wales. Post industrial steel recycling rates, including demolition and old appliances, is circa 92%. I’ve been inside our recycling centre and they’ve steel and aluminium can crazy. Can’t get enough of them, gagging for them. These are valuable materials and they are being recycled here in the UK; the turnaround from you putting your can out in your recycling bin and someone buying another canned product in that metal is usually under a month.

Most steel used in packaging, manufacturing and building isn’t a virgin material, it’s very much on a merry go round in the material stream. Keep your cans on the move and there’ll be enough steel and aluminium to go around.

Heck, get a litter picker and go walking to retrieve stray alu drinks cans that the idle are littering the countryside with.

This is genuinely impressive! It's shame more can't be done with plastics recycling, but I know it has a limited lifespan. Manufacturers should be dissuaded from using it really, but that would most likely put up costs which are passed on to consumers and not everyone can afford to buy the more environmentally-friendly choice. 

You might find this interesting... https://theprint.in/environment/how-turning-trash-into-treasure-can-help-us-dig-our-way-out-of-covids-mess/482549/

3secondmemory

What are those skinny inflatable things outside petrol station is called, they look like  stick men dancing? That’s what my sweetcorn looks like in the wind this afternoon😂😂 i’ll better get out there and sort them out! 

I was very disappointed that my first attempt at growing Telegraph cucumbers was a complete failure- all seven of them bolted🙁 My only consolation is that the flowers are very pretty and colourful and I hope they attracted enough bees to pollinate my sweetcorn Properly 😃

[Deleted User]

We harvested the first two ears of sweetcorn yesterday and they were delicious.

GreyQueen

  betony, the valuable plastic is that used to bottle fizzy pop and water, and milk cartons, the other tubs, trays, pots etc are worth very little. In my region, they are baled and sold into Scandinavia to be burned in waste-to-power facilities. The hierarchy of value is alu cans, steel cans, pop bottles and milk bottles.

Bearing in mind the great difficulties recently in getting access to the municipal tips etc, I reckon a prudent part of prepping would be to organise the contents of dump runs carefully, to try and get as much gone in as few a trips as possible. I’ve also has to dismantle many a large item to make it transportable via foot or pushbike. If one takes the time, sometimes some parts can be recycled, some unfinished wood potentially burnable etc.

I have a growing frame on my Lottie built from a divan bed base minus its fabric, and very useful it is, too.

thriftwizard

We've had a few cobs off our little patch of corn & they've been lovely; more to come! I'll be making stock laterwith the cobs of the ones we had for lunch just now. We brought home the first little pumpkin yesterday, too; it's fairly tiny but the plant had died back & it was ripe, so home it came. There are a couple yet to come, not much bigger, but that's enough. There are some big squashes, we're still bringing home 8 or so courgettes/marrows per trip (roll out the "please help yourself" box) and the runner beans have finally got into their stride. And it's a very good year for raspberries; not just lots of them, they're very very tasty too!

We've also just had the first blackberry & apple crumble of the year. Windfall apples, plus blackberries from the back of the garden - I need to get out into the hedgerows & get scrumping!