The Garden Party

We had our first garden party this weekend. Not the sort with tea and cakes but the sort where your friends come over to help you in the garden in return for food and beer.

The big job this weekend was to clear all the branches from the trees we cut down last year. The foliage piled in our garden virtually covered the entire space. Our guests tackled this with a wood chipper hired from Diggers.ie reducing the pile into a somewhat smaller mountain of wood chips. Looking at the back of my garden from the front for the first time in ages, I had forgotten how vast the space was. It still looks unkempt but with the trees out of the way you can see the potential of the space.

On Sunday we started the digging, marking out an area of land that was to be our veggie patch. My final plan is to have half of the garden devoted to vegetables but to start with we dug one large bed. It's a great feeling to bury your hands in the soil for the first time. It's so full of life; worms, roots and organic matter just crumbling in your hands readying itself to release it's goodness into the food we grow. It didn't take too long to dig the patch, three of us with shovels and spades lifting the sods, leveling out the ground and turning the soil. Within 30 minutes we were all leaning on our spades looking at the brown square of land now ready to accept plants.

On Monday we planted our first seeds, filling improvised seed trays with a variety of vegetables and flowers: carrots, lettuce, beetroot, onions, squash courgettes and sunflowers. We also planted marigolds which, according to our guest gardening expert Laura keep the pests away.

I was dying to put something into the new bed straight away, so I took my wilting herbs from the kitchen windowsill and planted them out in the new patch. Apparently I don't have long to wait until I will see the first few shoots in my seed trays. Three to four days... at the moment I feel like checking them every few minutes like an impatient child I can't wait to see them grow.

A big thank-you to everyone who came and helped us out this weekend.
To Barry who loved the machinery and sawing.
To Graham for his energy.
To Laura for being an expert and giving me knowledge.
Thanks. I'm looking forward to seeing you again for our first feast from the homegrown veggies.

Organic Product Review - Flourish Organics Hemp & Macadamia Face Cream

Flourish Organics is a small company based in Killarney Co. Kerry. I first encountered them at a trade fair last year and was impressed by their range of skincare products.

I have been suffering from dry skin recently, probably due to central heating over the winter months. I always find it pays to alternate between moisturisers so that the skin doesn't get too used to one. So I was delighted to try out the Hemp and Macadamia face cream. It has a mild scent which is great, no heavy perfume just the smell of it's constituent parts. It sinks into the skin quickly which means it doesn't leave that sticky greasy feeling. It seems rich enough to be used as either a night or a day cream. As a bonus, my skin seems to love it, the dry patches have almost been eliminated and my skin feels beautifully soft, it glows now and it is possible for me to go without make up without needing to hide behind my hair. On their website Flourish say that one of the ingredients is said to have anti ageing properties so I guess it must be good for 'mature' skin like mine.

You can buy Flourish online at their website. I'm going to have to check out the vanilla and white chocolate lip balm next.

The product range is not yet certified organic but they do contain a large quantity of organic ingredients, the ingredients that aren't certified organic are natural and safe.

Paper Diary Week Two

Day 6
Monday 2nd March

I’m sitting here staring at a PDF form that I am supposed to print out, fill in and sign. How on earth am I going to manage this??? I’ve attempted to copy and paste it into a word document but this just results in the formatting going mad and in no way solves how to sign it without printing it. I really can’t see a solution but it seems so early in my pledge to do this. I guess I shall just have to placate myself by thinking that if I had got the company to send me a hard copy it would be even worse, not only would there be the paper of the form its self but also two envelopes. With luck, they might take a scanned version of this form which would mean only using one sheet of paper and no envelope at all.

Day 7
Tuesday 3rd March

The post keeps coming in. Why is it some companies seem to spew out an endless amount of material. We are a Mac based office, we have never allowed a PC to darken our doors, yet I find myself on the Dell mailing list . How do you unsubscribe from the torrents of post that they and others send? It seems to be a lot harder than unsubscribing from an email list and infinitely more annoying, imagine the cost to the environment of all this unsolicited paper being sent out everyday.


Day 9
Thursday 5th March

I’ve signed up to the free trial of a programme called ‘Receipt Wallet’ and have been really enjoying playing with it this afternoon. The general gist of it is that you can scan receipts and invoices and also import others as PDF files, this should eliminate any need to print them. You then add information to each of the scanned documents such as the date, how much the invoice is for and what tax is due on it. The programme then files it for you. It’s just a very clever very straight forward way of ordering your receipts and should make the book keepers job a lot easier. The one disadvantage so far is that it doesn’t recognise word files or web archives so it can be a bit of a pain converting everything to PDF or… even worse for my PayPal receipts copying and pasting them into word and then converting to a PDF. I have to say though you do feel ultra organised when you can see each receipt in it’s place with all the information relevant easy to access. I was worried that once I had scanned the files they would be in some weird format that I wouldn’t be able to get at after the trial had ended but to my delight, they were all there in a nice folder partitioned by date. Surprisingly, to me at least, the software only costs 40 dollars so I am tempted to make the investment. I’ve another 15 days to think about it though.

Other than that it’s been quite uneventful, my desk still looks lovely and neat although a coffee pot, a mug and a digital camera are strewn across it now, it seems I have a need to clutter up the space one way or another. I also seem to have put the ‘In tray’ on the long finger as well as inputting info from the index cards… I guess I’ll just have to save them for another day that seems to be unremarkable in a paper sort of way.

Day 10
Friday 6th March
No post today so I managed a completely paper free day in every way. Tomorrow I am attending BizCamp Dublin, I have downloaded the schedule onto my iPod so I can avoid having to pick up a paper one when I arrive. I’m hoping that the slow typing speed on the iPod will be just quick enough to make good notes during the day.

Paper Diary Week One

Day 1 Wednesday 25th February (Ash Wednesday)

Today I walked into the office and looked at the piles of paper for the last time. For the next 47 days we shall be attempting to keep it paper free.

The first thing I did was break the fast. There was an article in the local paper about Feelgood Organic Hampers and our pledge and I wanted to scan it for the Facebook page so it had to be bought, but this with any luck will be my first and last slip on this journey.

We set about emptying our desks of paper, of ridding every nook and cranny of the office of the stuff. There was a lot more work involved in this than I had anticipated. The pile of paper to be dealt with swallowed the floor space before being laid to rest in the recycle bin, which began to grow beyond it's own structure. Eventually we were free of it, no loose receipt or post it note was left. The desks seemed empty and vast. Suddenly there was space and the space left room for clear thinking.

We have replaced post it notes with white boards and notepads with iPods but there is of course some paper we need to keep hold of for the time being. The index card file will need to be added to our computer address book but this will happen slowly over the next few weeks. The biggest challenge ahead is to not allow any new paper in and, more importantly, not to create any paperwork.

I think there may even be enough room for a plant on my desk now, tomorrow I may go and steal one from our hallway.

Day 2
Thursday 26th Feb

I’m beginning to wonder how I managed this last year without my iPod. Software solutions certainly seem to be a big part of living with out paper. Mix this with some more traditional tools such as whiteboards, blackboards and chalk and almost all bases are covered. I guess it could work out quite expensive if you threw yourself into software entirely. My computer, only 2 years old already creaks and grinds when it has to cope with the many programmes I keep open in order to deal with our Lenten pledge.

What I would love at the moment is a pocket sized wetwipe board. I am really missing my little moleskin notebook and there are times when I just want to scribble something down and using the iPod can seem like a chore. If anyone has one or wants to invent one you’ve got a customer here!

I have managed to use no paper at all today, although there is still some in my in tray to dispense with. I’m about to outsource my book keeping and I’m wondering how they will react to me insisting on either emailing them everything or submitting it on CD. I’m a bit torn over the idea of burning stuff to CD which could potentially be far worse from the environment than the paper alternative.

Day 3
Friday 27th of Feb
My first challenge of the day arrived in the post. A price list and brochure of new products from one of our suppliers. We do need this piece of paper but there must be an alternative. The solution was to set up a standard email response so that in future we can respond immediately, asking suppliers to send information by email. Of course the trick is to nip it in the bud before they send it, so I shall have to put it on my to do list to contact all my suppliers regarding this.

We also received a paper invoice today. We are new customers to the company involved so we will ensure that all future invoices come by email. We already pay all our suppliers by bank transfer or Direct Debit to avoid the unnecessary use of cheques, envelopes and stamps.

One question that still needs to be addressed is how we are to deal with our Farmers Market pricelist. This document not only allows us to keep tabs on stock but is also a tool to help calculate how much VAT we have collected at the different rates.

This week we are simply using last weeks pricelist, marking up our sales in a different colour. A better solution does need to be found however, the one pricelist can only last so long!