Blog – Page 5 – Sustainable Life Birmingham

Annual Sunflower Seed Donation to Raddlebarn

Sustainable Life donated it’s own sunflower seeds to Raddlebarn Primary school for the second year running, ready for the next term. Teachers in year one will aim to plant the seeds with the children and watch their sunflowers grow in the classroom before they can take them home.

We donated this year over 240 seeds to ensure every child in Year 1 had at least one successful sunflower plant.

Last years results: A sunflower grown by Killian Bale in Year 1 2015.

Stay tuned and heopfully we will have some updates on how their growing is progressing!

Do you know a school that needs sunflower seeds for in-school growing? Send us an email to suslife@spiderstudio.co.uk with the school name, address, point of contact name & email, year you wish to donate to and number of students in the year. We will do our best to fulfill as many requests as possible!

Sustainable Life Seed Bank

Sustainable Life were very pleased to have recieved a generous quantity of seeds from Bournville (a Wyevale) garden centre to allow us to run a variety of community programs but primarily to provide seeds for Raddlebarn Primary School. We are also very pleased to announce that we have a small amount of exces seeds not yet assigned to a community or charity project.

If you have a project in mind for 2016 that requires seeds, please get in touch with us via email: suslife@spiderstudio.co.uk and we will get back in touch as soon as possible to help your project become a reality.

New Gazebo for Highbury Orchard and Sustainable Life

Sometimes, we all need a little shelter from the rain! Sustainable Life have offered up our new gazebo for Highbury Orchard to use. This not only means we will have rain cover for our courses at Highbury Orchard but also highbury orchard cic will also have the use to do the same at their own events. The gazebo turned up a brilliant white so it’s easy to spot from the bottom of the orchard.

We already tested out this gazebo at our last course, what do you think?

Jelly Ear Hunting

Sometimes it is handy to get a look at a foragable item “in motion”. Pictures do not often do it justice when thinking about location and 3D appearance.

For this reason I have produced a short clip of my jelly hunt this year in a well known mushrooming spot in Birmingham.

View the video here.

These jelly ears were found in a man made wood consisting of Pine, Fir/Spruce and Elder. Jelly ears are commonly found on dead elder trees and here was no exception. For help identifying Jelly Ears for yourself you can also check out of Jelly Ear Identification post.

For comparison here is a picture of some of the jelly ears I found yesterday both fresh and old.

Volunteer Work for “Trees for Cities”

Today, sustainable life course leader Stephanie Adelaar took a trip down to her old haunt Walmley to help plant trees. Working with Kingstanding Food Community, Forest Schools Birmingham and Trees for Cities we helped to plant up over 50 meters with two lines of small trees packed together to form a mixed wood bush including hawthorns and sloes.

We got quite a lot done despite some set backs (lack of a coffee shop, rain etc). For more information check out their website.

Thimblemill Library Event

Sustainable Life attended the Thimblemill Library event and managed a stall showcasing our courses and produce. We felt it was really sucessful with many people complimenting our preserves and goat’s cheese! We also had lots of people interested in our future courses (yay!). Then later on we took a selection of people outside to thimblemill brook for a short foraging walk where we found:

Pears
Dandelions
Yarrow
Horseradish
Puffballs
Velvet Shanks
Inkcaps
and more!

Thimblemill Library Event Gallery.

Thimbleful Library Event, Bearwood

Sustainable Life have been invited by Grandma’s Apple Crumble (A heritage project) to have a stall at the gathering at Thimblemill Library in Bearwood on Sunday 15th November 2015. Here we will be available to answer questions, sign up to hear about our courses or just drop by and pick up an information pack. Our course leader Alan Bale will be attending the event to do a foraging walk at Thimblemill Brook and a brief talk.

Grandma’s Apple Crumble is self described as: project centring on food scarcity during World War One and how that relates to our current situation in the area. It’s about connecting people through a shared experience of what life is like for us today against the backdrop of what it was like back then. The project involves planting fruit trees by the Thimblemill Brook with Uplands School and a Gathering at Thimblemill Library on the 15 Nov 2015 to which the wider community is invited.

More information and pictures of this event will be forthcoming!

Highbury Harvest Festival

Sustainable Life had a small corner at the Highbury Harvest Festival this year where we demonstrated how to make nettle rope. You can view the gallery for this event here.

We had lots of fun at the festival this year and spent most of our time making short lengths of Nettle rope which turned into wonderful little bracelets! We tested the rope (with a few failures but mostly sucesses) to see how strong it is and used some of it to help tie the photograph boards down.

We had a lovely array of photographs from our last nettle workshop at Sarehole Mill (taken by Dean Gammon Photographer), and a basket of information bundles all about nettles, our next two workshops and a special offer!

We didn’t just make nettle rope either, we also threw together the start of a woven basket using nettles in the style of a willow basket weave (on display with a bramble basket). We had nettle tea on the boil for most of the afternoon with a selection of extras including cammomile and lemonbalm.

We were also very pleased to get a positive response to our Nettle and Neem oil moisturising bars and gave a few away!

Thank you to everyone who came over and had a look at our section and thank you to everyone who signed up interest to our courses for 2016! We hope to have many more dates planned for the next year very soon so stay tuned!

How to Make your Own Real Tomato Sauce

Do you have a thriving tomato plant in your home, garden, polytunnel or conservatory? Great! Then by now you are no doubt getting handfuls of tomatoes from it and looking at more unique ways of serving them up. This is a fantastic way of preserving the tomatoes and gaining a tasty sauce you don’t need to feel bad about adding to your dishes. This sauce keeps for up to 12 months sealed and 6 weeks once opened (if stored in the fridge when open). It tastes great too!

Ingredients

2.5kg tomatoes
1 large onion
2 tsp ground black peppercorns
2 tsp coriander
4 cloves crushed garlic
1 teaspoon tomato paste
2 teaspoons ginger (ground or juiced according to taste)
dash of chilli according to personal preference
600ml white wine vinegar
250g white sugar
1 tsp salt

Method

Roughly chop the tomatoes and onion, and place in a large pan with all the spices. Add the vinegar and bring to the boil then reduce the heat and simmer for 45 minutes.

Add the sugar and stir until dissolved then bring to the boil. Once boiling point is reached reduce the heat and simmer for 1 hour.

When the sauce is thick and pulpy blend or sieve the mixture according to your preference and store in an appropriate rubber sealed bottle.

How to Make Goat’s Cheese (Chevre)

Goat’s cheese (Chevre variety) is a light and soft crumbly cheese with a lemon zest. It’s a traditional favourite and making it for yourself can save quite a few pennies even if you don’t own your own goats. Standard store bought goat’s milk will do the job and one carton does roughly three ‘rolls’.

You can also use some plants instead of lemons to coagulate the milk such as Nettle, Sorrel and Yarrow. However I am still experimenting with these so more on these later on.

Ingredients

1/3 Carton of Goat’s Milk
1/2 Lemon

Method

Heat the Goat’s milk until it reaches 180c. The milk should suddenly expand and go crazy in your pot attempting to boil over. Immediately turn off the heat and remove the pan from the hob.

Add Lemon Juice and let it sit for a moment. The milk should curdle but it will be difficult to spot this as it’s quite a subtle thing with goat’s milk.

You shouldn’t have to wait more than a few sceonds.

Place a muslin cloth over a bowl and pour the mixture in. Allow it to sit for at least 2 hours. The cheese will sit on the top. The liquid is called whey and can be used in a variety of ways including as rice stock water for extra flavour.

Wrap the cheese curds in baking paper and store in the fridge to firm up over night.