Selfsufficientish.com

Final update before the plants head for the compost heap. It was an interesting exercise if nothing else. The one plant has managed to produce a single pepper around two inches long. It's currently a patchy red and green colour. The other plant flowered again over Christmas but nothing came of that ...

Some time ago we had to clear my wife's nan's house. Only a small terrace house but on the west coast of Scotland while we live in Staffordshire . We went up in my van and her brother in law hired a van and came too. Some things were given away to nan's friends , a fair bit was dumped ( old worn out...

Always remember having an eiderdown as a kid , remember it as warm and how every so often one of the feathers would poke its way out and as a kid I'd pull it all the way out. Never had a feather mattress though. The mattress we use at the moment is just a regular modern one. Mother had a memory foam...

I did a little search to try and find the lifespan of a hotel mattress . I thought I should seeing as I started this thread but can't find a definitive answer but interesting to hear you had regular trade from that hotel. The average if such a thing exsists seems to be anything from three to five ye...

Good to hear it. The whole gist of this thread is how some people turn their noses up at the idea of second hand mattresses ( or bedding in general) yet will happily sleep on hotel beds used by hundreds of people each year.

Sleeping bags for camping as much as anything else although for several years I've just used blankets . Just the principal is the same , using second hand stuff .The East German sleeping bag is probably more a collectors item to go with all the other East German stuff I collect. Incidentally the sle...

When my parents were older they started sleeping in seperate beds. I went round one day and my mother showed me the flannelette sheet off my father's bed. At some point he had managed to rip it , blamed on his toenails by my mother but it wasn't the rip my mother wanted to show me , it was the repai...

My wife recently asked me why I was watching a couple of sleeping bags on eBay. One was a British army artic bag which wasn't that old really and the other was an East German army bag so obviously pre 90's . The East German one especially has a more historical context but it wouldn't stop me sleepin...

I'm firmly in the camp of "it will come in useful one day", and so I keep nearly everything that could have a use, or could be used to repair something else. Great minds and all that ? Just what I do. I was recently preparing an area between a couple of sheds for slabbing and the soil I w...

Replace ever eight? Cynic in me sees a catchy sales pitch . I did try googling the subject and 'tinterweb seems divided on whether it's necessary or not.

Wholeheartedly agree with Ina . There might be some places where such a diet is possible but then in different parts of the world there would be substitutes till it got to the point of being almost unrecognisable from the original . I've nothing against the idea just that it's wholly impractical. Bu...

One of the arguments I have seen is that the iron based pellets not only cost more but are less effective. I can't personally comment never having done a side by side comparison . Being less effective seems to be levelled at anything that doesn't contain metaldehyde by some.

I agree there's not much hope with the glyphosate. To be honest I've got several bottles of slug pellets that have sat in the shed for probably decades unused and I avoid using weedkillers too as much as possible . Certainly never on my own property and only very rarely when a customer is very insis...

Our bones go into the woodburner too. Partly because it breaks them down so they go into the soil better ( we riddle the ashes) but also because it's then not attractive to flies and vermin. Most of our own food waste goes to our compost heaps but locally food waste can be put into the general waste...

Looking at the slabs leaning against the wall where they've been for a couple of years I decided they must go down so I actually started the job over the Christmas break. The area is between two sheds where I have plans to stack some timber . The soil I was digging out was put through a sieve . Real...