Challenges

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…

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?