Improving your Ish in 2010

[Flo]

Everyone making plans to be that bit more Ish in the coming year? Even in little things?

Mine's a small one in making more of my own herbal teas. Well that's the first one.

So who else has plans?

[countrygirl]

I have so much that id like to do i just dont know where to start.

I think my downfalls is i am so disorganised. So i maybe need a list and stick with it.

I bought everything i need yesterday to try and make my own bread so i suppose thats top of my list.

[Flo]

You've just made a good plan then - to have a plan and stick with it.

Start with the little things so that you feel good about your achievements eh? Then you will feel better about tackling bigger ideas.

[Rosendula]

Countrygirl, it's a really good plan because it's the start of things you probably haven't even thought of yet. I found that after a couple of weeks of eating no bread other than my own home-made bread, I couldn't stand the thought of going back. Even my eldest daughter, when she had some shop-bought bread at friends' houses said mine is better and started calling shop-bought bread 'pretend bread'. And that was a teenager!!! I then began to wonder what other things are better home-made, so started experimenting. The kitchen transformed (in my eyes) from being the most depressing room in the house, associated only with boring chores and hassle to a play room/lab. I now make all sorts that a couple of years ago I wouldn't have dreamed of attempting.

So what's my plan? When I was in full-time employment almost everything we ate was from the supermarket and went straight from its box into the oven. We didn't have enough room to store a full week's worth of groceries, so we had to go shopping 2 or 3 times a week. As I started making my own 'proper' food, this reduced to once or twice a week. Then I really started to go for it and over the last year managed to reduce it to an average of once every 10 days - sometimes more often, sometimes less often. So my next goal is to get it down to once a month. It means being better organised as well as more creative, but I'm determined so I will succeed (I hope)

[homegrown]

My ish aims are to start making wines, herb vinegers, bake my own bread every week or even day, develop the Green Man business further and make my kids christmas presents for this year.

[grahamhobbs]

Well can we dream.......We have a big allotment and are almost self-sufficient in vegetables and much fruit but I could do with another small plot as we don't have quite enough space to grow all the carrots, cauliflower, dried beans, etc we would like (just got a message that there's some vacant plots going not far away, must get on to that)... then if I could get 2 plots, one could become a vineyard and I could make my own wine (instead of relying on my french friend), then if I could get 3 extra plots, I could start growing my own cereals and grinding our own flour (we bake bread every couple of days). That leaves learning to make our own cheese...but I don't think they will let me keep a cow on the allotment!

More serious projects are to build a communal bread oven (started) and cider press on our allotment, and to get the OH to make stuff including patchwork quilts on her new sewing machine (xmas present from me...sorry girls).

[Green Aura]

Over the couple of years we've made great strides into our new life up here in the NW Highlands. There have been a few calamities (I refer to my mother's seed sowing skills ) but many triumphs.

Although I still need to wrestle control of portion sizes, our diet has changed dramatically from take-outs 2-3 nights a week to.....we've had fish and chips twice and a chinese once this year I've also set myself the challenge of putting something back in the freezer for everything I take out. So if I get out a chicken, a batch of chicken stock, or a portion of leftovers, goes back in. Keeps the freezer full and when we do feel like not cooking there's always something to grab.

Like Rosey said in another thread, I can't bear the taste (but mainly the texture) of "pretend bread" - I love that description - and our idea of fast food these days is a bowl of hot and sour soup, made from scratch. I've made my own hot pepper sauce, vinegar, sauerkraut and mincemeat for the first time and I'm just getting round to Tom Yum paste, kimchi, Worcester sauce, and I've even got a recipe for HP sauce

So, as always at this time of year, I've started looking to what I want to achieve next year (2010 for those reading this in years to come ).

I think the main issue I want to grapple with is sorting out the heating/energy use in this house. Being all-electric, and coal, our options are limited and I've been ruminating, asking questions on here and generally furtling about on Google to try and find the best solution. I think I've got it sorted (in my head at least) and I've started with the stove. So when I've made OH understand my plans (it's not driven by microchips so it doesn't compute ) we'll progress.

The garden also has to be reclaimed - no more beds full of radishes! The hungry gap is going to be a lot wider this year so I'm starting my tomatoes off at the weekend and will continue in a more orderly fashion from there. Having discovered that tomatoes don't survive up here, in a polytunnel, until Christmas, we won't need to try that again But I'm determined to get more out of both it and the raised beds next year.

The other thing I'd like to do this year is to start making my own clothes again - I've not done for years.

I'm sure there are lot's of other things I've not thought of but I think that's enough to be going on with. Any thoughts?

[Green Aura]

Ha!!!!! My other (new found resolution) is to not only read other threads before I start my own, but also to learn more about doing stuff on th Ish forum.

With that in mind I've successfully (I hope) merged my thread with this one

[fruitcake]

ooo, I always have lots of plans including:-

digging the rest of my raised beds - which I now have to do cos I've ordered so much seed
getting my washing poles actually in the garden instead of lying behind the shed
moving my soft fruit so's I can sort out an area for a polytunnel
growing and drying/freezing more herbs this year
knitting the jumper I bought the wool for over a year ago
to be less of a shopaholic - i don't go shopping very often anymore so when I do i find I have a bit of a tendency to get carried away
cycling to work more
keeping up with the car sharing when not on bike
make more preserves and experiment with stuff other than jam

I'm sure there are more but I suspect that's prob enough to be going on with

[crowsashes]

mines simple, to get a big wall planner so i can see everything well in advance ( i hate that things seem to crop up!)
the other is to make sure i dont buy anything new (within reason) another thing is to make even more of my own stuff, from blankets, clothes to jams etc and lastly its to actually get out foraging much more reguarly have 2 patches of woodland and fields and hedgrows within walking distance and i plan to take advantage of them!

[KathyLauren]

I am not big on new year resolutions, but I did come up with one.

I want to do a year-long energy and carbon dioxide audit on my family. It won't be complete (How do you calculate how much energy went into some overpackaged doodad you bought?), but I want to figure it out for the obvious items: fuel for the car, electricity and heating wood. For the latter, I'd like to include the offset from growing our own.

It may be pointless, but I'd just like to know, y'know?

[spitfire]

my new years goals are pretty much the same as the previous posts, doing more things myself etc. but i have some others. i use coupons a lot and stock up when things are on sale which is good, but i intend to add up the coupon/sale savings when i get home after every trip and put the equivilent dollar amount in savings. i counted up my savings from my trip to the stores last week and it was $12.00....... i usually go once a week..thats $144.00 per year in savings just from coupons/sales... i could put that money towards being more ish.

[crowsashes]

i really like that coupon idea! might steal that for myself!

[citizentwiglet]

There are some great ideas here!

I'm not very good at resolutions, so I'm going to start small and add on as I gain experience. I've started making my own cards - and I have realised that my hordes of old cards that have been kept 'for some reason' will be perfect for cut-outs, colours and textures for punch-outs etc etc.
I started making my own jams and chutneys this year too, which have been pretty successful; and even the less successful ones have been edible, so I intend to do more pootling about in the kitchen.

Going to save every penny - I HATE shopping anyway, so that's not too bad; but I do need to be careful with the 'trip to free museum but £8.00 spent on coffees, buns and orange juice' tricks that I fall for quite a lot. I am going to invest in a decent breadmaker - I do love doing it by hand, but with the sprogs under my feet I don't get a chance to do it as often as I'd like to (Fin always falls over / tries to eat something he shouldn't when my hands are covered in dough), plus I'm too tight to turn my oven on often enough to keep us all in bread!

I have the community garden to look forward to, as well....I can't wait to get planting and generally pottering about the place tending to my (not so wee) raised bed; and it'll be nice to meet likeminded folk too - I do get a bit lonely sometimes being at home with the kids.

[Helsbells]

I love making new years resolutions.
My ish ones include:
Watching tv less so I have more time to do ish things,
Throwing less away,
Buying less from the supermarket,
Pay off my overdraft so I can change to an ethical bank,
And not quite so ish is to get back to the weight I was on my wedding day!

I know I need to try to be more specific with these such as only throw away one bag of rubbish every two weeks, rather than just throw away less, but I need t decide these still.