Indubitably one of my favourite annual rituals. The making of the jam. It turned out quite well. It's certainly delicious, but I did not get the pectin quite right. Experimentation is the name of the game and there are only really two things that can go wrong with jam making. You can either make it too runny or too set. Too runny is just called fruit cordial and too set is called jelly. Not a problem! The number of times I have ended up with rather less jam than I was planning, and rather more cordial are "many". But it is all about bottling the flavour and the goodness of fruits to keep you in variety and sunshine over the winter, so it doesn't much matter if you spread it on toast, or dilute it and drink it.

Making your own soap or cleaning products isn’t just a throwback hobby - it’s a quiet act of rebellion. Cleaning products, an important and hugely profitable arm of the chemical industry is, as you might expect, just awfully polluting, and also tied up by very few massive multinational corporations - the sort that is in a great part responsible for consumerist modern living and immesurable harm to the planet. They have been so successful in their social conditioning, that even though everyone knows of old school cleaning products from the kitchen, it seems hard to believe that they actually work. So, this challenge is as much about re-training ourselves a little away from clever marketing and polished design in plastic bottles as it is about actually cleaning things. Although, what we learn here will definitely be helpful in the future, and is essential knowledge for the self sufficient vegan. Oh yeah, very few shop-bought cleaning products are vegan either! I love AI generated art. It's so quirky and surreal. So here we go, are you ready to step outside the industrial cycle of plastic-packaged, chemical-laden products and take back control with ingredients you can recognise, pronounce, and source ethically? Shall we connect to something real: the alchemy of transformation using basic, natural components.

WHY? To develop a greater awareness of the life that surrounds us in the bushes and the trees and in the sky. To get us to look up, and look around Knowledge for its own sake is a beautiful thing. When it connects us to the living world, it becomes magical It IS magic. If you can identify birds when you are out with friends and family, everyone enjoys their time more. HOW? • Download the Merlin Bird ID app (for android and iPhone) from your phone's app store. • Spend a few minutes every day, listening with your phone for birds near you • If you enjoy pen and paper, find an old notebook, and write your daily list. Maybe with illustrations? • The app itself records your lifetime list, and also has many details on each bird - their habitat, examples of their song and more. • Try to learn how to identify at least one bird by its song without the app. Reflections Do you get a different set of birds at different times of day? In the morning or just before sunset? Focus on one bird, and learn its song. It might take some days to recognise your first one. After that, it gets easier. How many of the birds do you think you could visually recognise? Did you know any of them by ear at the start of your journal? How many had you learned by the end? Has your appreciation of time outside changed during this challenge or did you spend more time outside than you might have done otherwise?