KonMari 2018 - The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up

Wednesday2000 · 21 February 2018 at 2:20PM

All the bins and recycling went out today. I did keep a glass jar from my cucumber pickles as it was a nice shape and will use it to store rice or lentils. It was on here that people were saying about keeping pretty glass jars as storage? :DI use old veggie containers as storage in drawers too. They are a handy size.

I used up the last half of a whole big container of white vinegar cleaning the patio yesterday.

I also binned a dress that I bought from a charity shop for £1 last year. It was just a short summer one but the strap broke and it wasn't a good fit anyway. I used it to clean the kitchen floor before it went in the bin.

Fen1 · 21 February 2018 at 3:52PM

I am highly allergic to the rapeseed plant: all of it, not just the pollen. My eyes itch and my breathing becomes difficult just walking past a field of the green shoots sprouting up. Yes, it is that bad.

I will not buy rapeseed oil and fund the farming of such a hideous, invasive plant. It makes the lives of those of us who are allergic sheer misery. When I move house next I will have to see whether they plant rapeseed in the area. I've lived in both rapeseed and non-rapeseed areas, and the difference is tremendous.

The government and big-farming would like to say there is no such thing as rapeseed allergy. BS. Speak to my consultant allergist.

System · 21 February 2018 at 6:36PM

Fen1 wrote: »

I am highly allergic to the rapeseed plant: all of it, not just the pollen. My eyes itch and my breathing becomes difficult just walking past a field of the green shoots sprouting up. Yes, it is that bad.

I will not buy rapeseed oil and fund the farming of such a hideous, invasive plant. It makes the lives of those of us who are allergic sheer misery. When I move house next I will have to see whether they plant rapeseed in the area. I've lived in both rapeseed and non-rapeseed areas, and the difference is tremendous.

The government and big-farming would like to say there is no such thing as rapeseed allergy. BS. Speak to my consultant allergist.

I agree, I am also very allergic to rapeseed. We once viewed a lovely house but spotted the rapeseed field at the bottom of the garden.

[Deleted User] · 21 February 2018 at 6:37PM

fen, farmers now have to rotate their crops ie my local farmer said that he has to do 5 rotations ie 5 different crops and therefore I will be expecting to see oilseed rape one year, where there only used to be wheat. Oilseed pollen is heavy and does not travel but the plant flower produces VOCs which gives the perfume, which does travel and causes the allergy

My husband could not go past a yellow oilseed field without suffering, so I used to quickly put the re-circulation on in the car. I also used large VOC filters in the house and kept all the vents shut. It seemed to travel particularly far in the evening. Much rapeseed oil is used in biodiesel

I would not touch mass produced commercially grown rapeseed oil, like canola. I have seen the crops sprayed with strong weedkiller, glyphosate and that kills off all the foliage. The seed is then used commercially. You can buy organic cold pressed rapeseed oil and that is what I use. It has a high smoke point and it avoids carcinogenic compounds when cooking

Fen, nothing but nothing is going to stop commercial big business and that includes growing crops on perfectly good arable land, just to feed bio digestors and power stations

wort · 21 February 2018 at 7:05PM

I managed to scrape together a carrier bag of things for the women's refuge, which I can hand in at yoga tonight.

Fen1 · 21 February 2018 at 7:23PM

Kittie: why on earth are you buying a product that you know caused your husband harm? Organic or commercial, the plant itself is still the same, and just as nasty.
There are plenty of alternatives to rapeseed. There is absolutely no need to encourage the production, even if we cannot stop it. But at least we can try.

I am a country girl - a farmer's granddaughter - so I know farming policy full well. It is idiotic, driven by bureaucrats, greed and flawed science. I also know a fair few farmers who really don't understand science, and do things because that's the way they've always done it, and do what they're told, or are just plain incompetent. There's not enough profit in farming to try beyond the norm. And so the land is poisoned, and the air is poisoned, and the water is poisoned. Any farmer who tries anything different will have a very hard time if it in so many different ways. I know farmers who've done their best, but get scrwd royally by rules and regulations.

I volunteer in wildlife conservation, so I know the awful things we are doing to the countryside, but chipping away bit by bit can work. Some of the thoughtless/greedy/poor science practices of yesteryear have been minimised or stopped so some aspects of our countryside is slowly recovering ( but with a long way to go.) Chipping away today can help tomorrow , even if that tomorrow is decades away.

GreyQueen · 21 February 2018 at 8:25PM

My family were farmers (v. small farms) into the early 20th century and got wiped out in the bad agricultural depressions of the twenties and thirties. Small farms on poor soil, not really viable as more than subsistence and long since absorbed into much larger concerns, some of which are run by international food conglomerates and staffed by badly-treated migrant labour. It makes me very sad and very angry, to think of the pass we have come to, as a country. I am only glad my great-grands never lived to see it.:(

Particularly when I see the topsoil washing off the fields and down the roads in heavy rain, the ditches neglected and causing floods, the hedges flailed into wretched stumps or grubbed out altogether turning the countryside into praries where dinosaur-sized agricultural machinery mashes the soil into a lifeless mud. Yields drop, rainwater runoff increases, soil-dwelling creatures are depleted, acquifers are plundered............ there is no end to this wickedness.

We're losing our topsoil very rapidly. When you lose your topsoil, it's game over. This is how civilisations fail. People who spend time fretting about nuclear armageddon (people in general, not aiming at folks here) ought to be very frightened about topsoil, it's loss and the general degradation of the environment.

I 'farm' on a micro-scale, all 300 square meters of it, aka the allotment. It was a farm until the interwar years, and then has been allotments ever since I regard the soil up there as a lifetime project, treat it as the precious thing it is, and bolster its fertility and biodiversity whenever I can. When I see the soil-dwelling spiders, the centipedes and the many many beetles, I feel that all is well with the world.

Of course, when I see the leatherjackets and the cutworms, they're up and onto the birdtable in a second, and the robins and blackbirds garden companionably alongside me, nipping up the little pesties which I can hardly see.

silvasava · 21 February 2018 at 9:59PM

I used to use rapeseed oil but have now changed my cooking fats to coconut oil, olive oil, butter and goose fat. I'm also very much against the use of palm oil in products. TBH food shopping an be an absolute nightmare when you are trying to be ethical and healthy.
Another book in the CS bag and another imminent. Did kondo some of the dead foliage in the garden yesterday and some nettles - accompanied by my Robin. Very sad that I discovered a dead hedgehog. Didn't know there was one around in the garden otherwise I would have fed him - such a shame.

Siebrie · 21 February 2018 at 10:22PM

Out: 1 pair of holey underpants (hurray!)

Other than that, I am mainly wombling at the moment, as my workplace is changing from offices to open plan, and people are turfing out so many items for binning, that are still perfectly good. I know that I cannot safe the world, but I try to do my bit by taking some of these items* home and passing them on.

*8 pillows, 20 pillow cases, 1 duvet, 1 mattress protector, 2 pots of organic jam well within date, about a 1,000 new pens and pencils, 3 boxes of notebooks with the old company logo, 1 T-shirt, 2 baseball caps, .....

Charis · 22 February 2018 at 12:19AM

GreyQueen wrote: »

Particularly when I see the topsoil washing off the fields and down the roads in heavy rain, the ditches neglected and causing floods, the hedges flailed into wretched stumps or grubbed out altogether turning the countryside into praries where dinosaur-sized agricultural machinery mashes the soil into a lifeless mud. Yields drop, rainwater runoff increases, soil-dwelling creatures are depleted, acquifers are plundered............ there is no end to this wickedness.

We're losing our topsoil very rapidly. When you lose your topsoil, it's game over. This is how civilisations fail. People who spend time fretting about nuclear armageddon (people in general, not aiming at folks here) ought to be very frightened about topsoil, it's loss and the general degradation of the environment.

I agree absolutely GQ. I live in farming country and we had terrible floods here in 2007. Part of the reason was that no one here bothers to clear out the drainage ditches any more. Even parts of the M5 were completely flooded. It was a big enough crisis that drivers had to be rescued in inflatable boats. My friend, who used to keep livestock, is very familiar with the farming environment and predicted the floods well before they happened. She has a number of farming friends and she has warned me before about the loss of nutrients in the ground. Farmers put back some nutrients artificially, but nowhere near all those that are taken out. Wheat has been engineered to produce more than one (nutrient deficient) crop a year and she told me time is running out. She thought maybe three decades were all we had left. A couple of months ago she was shocked by the news that a local arable farmer gave her. He reckons there is only ten years left in his land, after that it will be too nutrient deficient to farm. There is nothing left for the microbes and insects that are part and parcel of healthy soil

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KonMari 2018 - The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up

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