Having looked into this a bit more I discover that a lady up the hill from us did indeed used to feed resturant waste to her wormeries but that she had to give the business up.
Why?
Becuase she could not sell the compost.
Why?
Becuase we import stuff cheaper than she could produce it for. Why are we importing compost? And she said it was from the Netherlands I think (well around there somewhere) - this concerns me as I bet it is peat we are actually importing and the peat bogs are a bit of an endangered habitate plus it is the cold climate carbon sink (like the rain forestests only for cold climate - peat is made from moss you see and it takes ages for it to all stake up like that and make peat.)
This is even worse when you think about the fact that we will be using lots of fuel to ship the stuff over - now I like international trade but things like this annoy me - there is no reason to import this stuff 🙁
Someone pointed out we have land which we could use for this perpose - for a start the land is not currently ours it belongs to Al's family but not directly us. Plus having spoken to this lady I think that we'd have trouble doing more than 30 resturants.
Still it is now on my todo list for when we have a) free time and b) money.
I am actually wondering about the practicalities of producing alcohol for non-culinary uses from such waste plus what of the volitile gases like methan etc... Maybe with the help of a chem eng student or three we could design some big ol' bacteria compost muching vats with pipes and what not to syphon stuff of?
This is obviously a new idea so it is not well thought out and there's bound to be fifty million problems but still its worth thinking about surely?
p.s. people feel free to still this idea and run with it though let people know about it and dont get your pantent locked in a safe so no one can do anything please?
I was awoken today by a baby brandishing a much scribbled on envolope and in fact she was still scribbling and indeed - she refused to give over what Daddy inisted she had for Mummy!
After a bit of wrestling and a little bit of a winge Jean gave me the lovely card she picked herself in Tescos - apparently it was the shiniest one there - fortunatly its purple shiny 🙂 So obviously she knows my tastes already!
She'd signed it herself too - there was a lovely scribble - an improovement on last year ink foot and hand print!
She had also made me a presant at nursery which was also wrapped in purple paper!!! How did they know?
It's that poem about sticky finger prints everywhere that i remember David (my brother) coming home from Playshcool with. It was surrounded by her hand print in gold paint and laminated with a glittery hanging up thing!
I've put it up in the bedroom as I was feeling sentimental!
Today has actually been a veryu strange day what with snow, torrential down pours, hail and lovely warm sunshine? Then ontop of that some ponys have moved into the paddock - fortunatly they have coats on or rugs or what ever they are called as it really begain snowing heavily just as they had finished moving them in!
Poor Jean was mistaken as a boy yet again! The owner of the ponys assumed that the blue baby grow and blue coat meant she was a boy.
Actually Jeany had a bit of a nasty fall today 🙁 She was running along the drive and had a bit of a dive bomb, wham straight on her beak - she has a graze and bump to show for it. We were really worried as when she got up again she appeared to not be able to walk and kept falling over. Thinking that she must have hit her head really hard we scooped her inside to have a proper look - this was when Al found that her wellys were mysteriously full of stones!
No wonder she couldnt walk - they must have been working their way down the wellys. Jean really likes stones and rocks she's even trying to smuggle them into the house now!
Sigh.
The house is very damp, unsurprisingly as there is a river running under bits of the structure, all be it the garage! And apparently the only way to get rid of this damp is to open windows, unfortunatly the window frames have swollen and it has been freezing so I did not want to open a window we may not be able to shut, in fact as we are still getting frosts here I didnt really want the windows open at all - its hard enough to keep the place warm as it is.
But the weather was nice it was almost a summers day outside so we opend the bedroom window, having switched all the heating off, and yes it got rid of a lot of the damp but then it started getting dark and we tried to close the windows.
The frame was so swollen that we had had to bash at the frames to open them, the same technique did not work to close them. And a frost had started settling so we did not want to leave it ajar. Our solution?
A bit drastic but something we thought wouldnt be too bad - we sanded the frames but alas there was just too much of an over hang of window and window frame so off Al went to get the plain. We plained it and got it shut.
This was a few days ago and the damp was gone - for a while - this morning I noticed the condensation on the windows again and told Al to open them whilst I was out at meetings.
This he did and it all appeared fine until he came to shut them up again to get me and Jean. The window frame at the bottom turned out to be rotten so when he attempted to 'slam' the window shut the bottom which for some reason is more swollen hit the window frame and sheared a bit off - yes it was that rotten and twisted the whole frame so that the glass in the bottom panel cracked 🙁
This is going to be a bit of a pain. Al wants to put a metal bracket on the wood to hold the frame together but this of course relys on us being able to find descent non rotten root to screw into - something that may well be impossible. Also this is a very short term fix and it looks like we will have to be replacing at least one window frame and one panel of glass 🙁
Now I do not believe that the frame has become that rotten in just the 1.5 yrs we have lived here - grrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!
Sarah, Wormery | sarah | 
Tue 20th Mar 2007 9:29 pm | 
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