Plastic Bag RANT

I have spent ages today picking bits of plastic carrier bag out of our front hedge.....GGGGRRRHHHHH

We live MILES away from a town or village...there are NO shops nearby so WHAT are plastic carrier bags doing in our hedge???

I had to wrestle a bit out of the beaks of one of the hens!!! Imagine what THAT would have done to her insides~!!!

Well no I don't actually HAVE to...I am a member of the RSPB and have seen images of Albatross chicks dead due to being fed plastic bags by their unsuspecting parents who think the bits of plastic is food. If you watched a series of wildlife fund raising appeal programmes on BBC recently , you may well have seen the images, too. The skeletons of chicks, with where their stomachs USED to be, full of bits of plastic, which then blow out of the rotting carcasses to be eaten by some other poor unsuspecting wild bird or mammal.

Around 300 polythene bags per adult per annum is used globally. On average we use each plastic bag for approximately 12 minutes before disposing of it. It then lasts and lasts in the environment. The plastic bags last and last and a lot end up in the oceans....... Just because we can't BE BOTHERED to REMEMBER to take a shopping bag with us????

Plastic bags are NOT usually necessary...a cotton or jute bag is easy to roll up and carry with us, will do the job as well ( or better!) and when it reaches the end of its life can be composted...and in its lifetime will be used hundreds of times!!

Plastic bags are a petroleum product made from oil....an oh so precious resourse we are going to run out of sometime soon. Why on earth are we wasting a dwindling, oh so precious comodity on PLASTIC BAGS??? to carry STUFF in???? home from the shops, when we COULD be using cotton or Jute or Hemp or Canvas bags....?

When I am doing my "compostwoman " bit .............promoting discount compost bins for my local council........we give away free Jute shopping bags..and I get a real thrill to spot them when I am out and about...because I KNOW I have saved a bit of oil from being wasted as a plastic bag and a bit of plastic being used once ( or a couple of times).

So ......a PLEA....from me.

USE a recycleable or compostable bag and save wildlife and recources!! PLEASE!!!!

Rats update!

Ha HA!!! There is a 4 foot tunnel UNDER the weldmesh, but the little blighters can't get in!!!

VICTORY!!

Rats 0: compost family 1


I had posted about this on the lovely INEBG forum
and its turned into a sort of "Colditz" and "The Great Escape " discussion...with the Rats trying to get into ( rather than out of) the enclosure......

Rat proofing the Eglu.

Today we finally sorted out the problem with Rats tunneling into the Eglu (I hope)

You can see where the rats have tunnelled in under the wire skirt of the Eglu run in this picture.


We moved the Eglu sideways and dug over and raked where the Eglu currently stands....its on some of the veg patch at the moment.

We then got some weldmesh ( 1 inch square) and put it down on the ground where the Eglu and run will stand.

And put the Eglu on top....

Ta da!! A (hopefully) rat proof run!! I added a tray of nice leaf mold freshly dug out from the compost bin for the girls to scratch over when they are shut in the run first thing in the morning... and their water and feeder as well, of course.

The girls are only shut in the Eglu and run from dusk till we get up in the morning....then they are let out to roam the orchard area which has a circumference of about 50 m. So they are only in the small Eglu run for an hour of so.

I MAY put down a thick layer of leaf mold and bark chippings for them to scratch around in but I need to check that its ok for them to scratch around of top of the weldmesh as I DO NOT want them to hurt their claws by scratching over it!!

I LOVE my hens!!

Free Range Chickens on C4 : Hugh's Chicken Run

We have 2 hens called Henny Penny and Ginger. They live in a green Eglu in the orchard, they have a 50 m circumference area to roam in when they are penned in...and the whole of the garden to free range in once they have laid their eggs
(we only do this cos Henny tends to lay where ever she is...and with 3/4 of an acre of wilderness garden it gets a bit hard to play "hunt the egg"!!!


So...they are VERY free range hens! They are bright, friendly, inquisitive and such good fun! How ANYONE can possibly think it is OK to shut hens up in very little space is beyond me and ESPECIALLY when you get to see what the NATURAL behaviour of a hen actually IS...I find it truly beyond comprehension.

BUT THAT is what the life of a battery hen is like and UNLESS YOU only ever buy free range or Organic eggs (AND make sure thats what ALL other products you eat which have got egg in) then YOU may well be eating eggs laid by hens who live in FAR FAR less than ideal conditions ( I am restraining my language deliberately here...) The same goes for the chicken meat you eat. Unless it is free range or ideally Organic....it may well have been reared in an intensive broiler unit.

More than 850 million broiler chickens are slaughtered every year in the UK. And of these hundreds of millions of chickens, most of them - more than 95% - are reared inside, produced in industrial conditions in vast, enclosed sheds. Their lives are pitiful – but at least they’re short...

Standard chickens are grown from newly hatched chick to oven-ready bird in an astonishing 39 days, that’s just over 5 weeks. (An organic chicken, which grows at a natural pace, takes more than twice as long.)

How do they do this? Poultry scientists have bred chickens which grow fast. As they grow, their living space – smaller than an A4 piece of paper for each bird – gets more and more cramped as they near the end of their short lives. With around 17 birds packed into each square metre they have barely enough space to walk, preen themselves, stretch their wings or even turn around.

Such cramped conditions and rapid growth cause severe welfare problems. Chronic lameness is common – one third of chickens have difficulty walking without pain. The stress on their hearts and lungs can cause heart failure. About 5% die or have to be culled prematurely.

A typical chicken shed holds 40,000 birds… They never set foot outside or see natural light… They feed around the clock - with as little as one hour of darkness for every 24 hour period.

It’s not nice – but it’s certainly cheap. And THAT is how supermarkets can afford to offer you two whole birds for a fiver… or sell a whole fresh British chicken for £2.

There is another way… You could rear your own hens for eggs and/or to eat......or if that's not for you...you could make sure you ONLY buy free reange ( and ideally Organic) eggs AND meat!!!

AND you should DEFINATELY watch Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall in Hugh's Chicken Run: 7th, 8th and 9th January 2008, 9pm, Channel 4 and join his Chicken Out! Campaign. Part of this new campaign will be a new TV series on Channel 4, which will help you to understand the conditions in which most table birds are reared, and to put pressure on the industry to raise its standards. Chicken Out! is being led by River Cottage locals, especially in and around Axminster, who are boycotting intensively-reared chickens and choosing free range instead. Hugh F-W needs you to do the same.

And I PROMISE you, once you have tried the taste of proper free range chicken meat you will NEVER want to eat anything else!

New Year!!

I sort of think , on Jan 1st, that I SHOULD make some resolutions....so here goes...

I will try to be more rigorous in my "Buy nothing" campaign...sourcing second hand, charity shop or Freecycle for items if at all possible. I have done this in 2007 but I want to do it even more in 2008!!

I want to reduce the amount of seeds I buy, by saving or bartering even more.

I would LIKE to lose some weight!! (but am too fond of food and too weak willed I suspect...)

I want to make more soaps, cosmetics, wine, jam, chutney etc etc in 2008 and try to sell some of my homemade produce..( or better still barter it for things I would otherwise have to purchase with money...)

I want to improve my ( not very good) health. Some of my ill health is not under my control, I have ME/CFS and my immune system is a bit iffy, BUT I could do more to help myself ( like going to bed earlier or trying to be less stressed out by "stuff".)

Hmmm what else could I have??? Will have to have another think!!

Anyway, a very Happy New Year to anyone who drops by to read my random mutterings !