As I mentioned the other week, we currently doing some work on our new house before moving in – the stuff that is far, far easier to do when the house is empty.

One of the biggest jobs has been taking down a 1970s style cemented-up crazy-paving stone wall in the dining room – it made the room look like a tiny dark cave. We’ve kept the better condition stones for using in the paved bit of the garden and the rest will form the foundation under where our chickens will live.

For some reason though, someone, at some point, thought it would be a great idea to put loads of pipes behind and embedded in the cement and actually across the open hole of the fireplace so we’ve had to have them moved around into more sensible places. The old pipes have now been removed and are lying in small sections in the garden.

They look like copper pipes so they *might* clean up and there *might* be enough of them to make something like this wonderful copper pipe pan rack. I also could keep the pipes and try using them to protect my veggies next year – there seems to be some disagreement about whether or not copper at the border keeps slugs out of raised beds but if it’s there and not doing anything else, it might be worth a try.

What else could I do with the bits though? I realise there is a high value to scrap copper and the like at the moment but I would rather reuse it around the home/garden instead of selling it for scrap, have it shipped off halfway around the world then brought back to again, so we can buy it again in another shape.

So any suggestions?

Last week’s post about glowsticks reminded me that we’ve got a torn up high visibility jacket (well, waistcoat) in the cellar. It’s been there for a good few years now – I found it on the top of a wheelie bin in our street after we’d had a period of roadworks and I thought “ooh, I can do something with that” – but never got around to doing anything with it.

Given they tend to be used by people doing hard physical work, I suspect jackets and other high vis clothing gets damaged quite a lot – are there any recycling schemes in place for companies/organisations that go through a lot of them?

On a smaller scale, any suggestions for reuses? Anything that can take advantage of the fluorescent fabric and reflective strips?

One of our worst habits is wasting food. Not huge amounts but enough to make me want to change our ways.

Sometimes it’s store-cupboard stuff that goes well out of date without us noticing – stuff we bought on 3-for-2 offers but got bored after the second one, or stuff we bought because we were, for example, eating a lot of nut roasts at that point but then we seemed to forget about them and developed a blind spot around their part of the shelf whenever we looked into the cupboard for something for dinner. Other times, it’s fridge stuff – salad mostly or half-eaten packs of cheese – or stuff that was once store-cupboard but is now fridge stuff: partially used cans of beans or custard that turn before we can use the second half.

We’re not overly fussy eaters and generally regard best before and use by dates as guidelines – if it smells alright and looks alright, we’ll eat it. I’m also happy making soup, chillis and curries out of misc things that need eating, and we’ve tried to cut down the very short-life veg we buy: we’re going to grow pick-and-come-again lettuces in our new-house sun-porch and realised that in many places a pickled pepper or the like will serve just as well as fresh. But I still think there is more we could be doing.

What do you do to make sure you don’t waste food? Do you only buy for a couple of meals at a time? Do you plan weekly menus that you stick to? Do you have procedures to make sure you use up cupboard items in a timely manner? Love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

We’ve had another email from Louise:

I wear specs and get prescription lenses for my sunglasses. I now have several original ‘lenses’ from sunglasses, which have been replaced with the prescription ones I need. Is there a charity that could use them? They all have UV filters and come from pricey glasses so should be of a good quality. It would be a shame to throw them out and for me they’re just useless clutter.

Even charities who collect prescription spectacles for redistribution overseas don’t collect loose prescription lens so unfortunately I doubt anyone will collect non-prescription ones. I would love to be wrong though – anyone know of any charities collecting them?

And what about complete sunglasses which are no longer required? Do any charities/organisations collect those for redistribution?

What about reuses? If the lenses are quite small, they might make giant but interesting earrings; if they’re really big round ones, they could be the start of a great bug halloween costume :)

Any other suggestions?

As I mentioned last week, we’ve finally, FINALLY, got the keys to our new house and are frantically doing some essential works before we can move in. One not quite essential but desirable thing is for us to fence in the wild bit of the garden – ultimately so we can have chickens* and use the fences to grow things up/along.

One side of the garden was previously dry stone walled but a lot of the stones have been pilfered for use elsewhere in the garden – we’ll try to reconstruct as much of it as we can but I think we’ll have build some sort of fencing for the rest.

John’s dad has suggested using wood from pallets to make simple horizontal-slatted fences. There is also the option of live fencing – growing some sort of hedgerow or bramble bush – but that’ll take time to grow in.

So any suggestions? Having a garden needing this sort of work is new to me so any ideas would be gratefully received!

* the chickens will need pretty high fences or a covered run. We haven’t quite decided what we’ll do with that yet but we’ll try to future-proof the new fences so we can add to them in the future.

(Photo by betacam)