Fresh eggs every morning. You can’t beat them – especially not if you plucked them from under the chicken yourself.

Once you’ve checked with your local environmental health authority for any regulations that would forbid you from keeping poultry in your residential area, and re-read the deeds of your home for the same, it’s time to start deciding what to buy and where from.

Here’s Blagger’s ‘Friday Five’ rundown of the first sites you should turn to on the road to egg and meat self-sufficiency.

SOME HENS The Battery Hen Welfare Trust (BHWT) re-homes former battery hens once they have come to the end of their productive lives. Most battery hens are slaughtered when they are less than a year old, as their rates of laying drop fractionally. They’re then made into pet food.

The Trust rescues these hens and works to re-house them with at-home farmers who want a pair or more for their garden. The hens should still be highly productive, although they may be missing a small part of their beaks, which could have been snipped off by the farmer to stop them from pecking each other. There are Trust sites around the country, allowing you to do a good deed for local abused birds wherever you live.

If you’re still not convinced that you should rescue a hen, then check out the Trust’s Gallery of Spoilt Hens to see how friendly, sociable and happy they can be in the right environment.

HEN DIRECTORY If you’d rather buy your flock brand new, then check out the extensive list of breeds at Omlet. Very few sites give both pictures and characteristic of the most common breeds, yet this extensive egg-cyclopedia does both, with aplomb. If you need to match your hens to your hydrangea, or your bantams to your bougenvelia, this makes it about as easy as picking from the Argos catalogue.

Sadly Omlet won’t deliver livestock to anywhere more than two hours’ drive from its base in Oxford, so check here, and then buy elsewhere if you don’t fall within its catchment area.

HOMES FOR HENS We’re sticking with Omlet for our third recommendation, proving that this supplier really is the home farmer’s best choice for getting started with chickens.

You probably shouldn’t be building your own chicken run. It’ll save money, but it certainly won’t save time, and unless you get it right you’re going to end up with damp, unhappy and possibly unwell birds. The easy alternative is Omlet’s funky Eglus. These easily-maintained, easily-cleaned, double-skinned homes are ideal for between two and ten hens (depending which one you buy). They’re built with the busy owner in mind, with quick-access doors for retrieving eggs and topping up the food, and the whole thing can be easily dismantled and hosed down for hygiene.

Best of all, they come with a unique anti-fox skirt that should keep your feathery ladies safe from the nightly neighbourhood prowler. They’ve got so much confidence it will keep your flock safe that they’ve even given it a guarantee.

And, as the Eglu is plastic and metal rather than live animals, Omlet will even deliver it beyond it two-hour cut-off.

CHICKEN FEED Chickens love offcuts from your kitchen vegetable prep (and they’ll ransack your plot if you let them roam free) but you shouldn’t feed them on veg alone. They need a carefully-balanced diet including grit, pellets and corn. Fortunately it’s not expensive to kit out your chicken larder, and so you should look at getting in a supply of food before buying your birds.

Suppliers like Flyte So Fancy and G J W Titmuss supply poultry feed at excellent prices. Flyte is selling 20kg bags of Organic Mixed Corn for poultry for £10.95 – a mix that it claims will ‘provide the vitamins and minerals needed in a balanced diet’. Titmuss sells the same quantity of Small Holder Free Range Layers Meal for £6.95.

HEALTHY HENS Chickens can get sick, just like the rest of us, so being on good terms with your local vet is a must. However, a lot of problems can often be sorted at home, which is where the net can help.

The Urban Chicken wiki has pages on common ailments that can afflict your flock, including lice, worms, and impacted or watery crop. It gives some simple suggestions for diagnosing and remedying problems, but even if it doesn’t put your hens back on the road to rude health, it is at least a good starting point, allowing you to talk to your vet with some authority.

Technorati Tags:
self sufficiency, self+sufficiency, self-sufficiency, chicken, poultry, keeping chickens

Inclusion in this list should not be construed as recommendation.

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A lot of self-sufficiency revolves around the allotment or garden. You can’t grow your own food, keep chickens or generate your own electricity without access to the outside world (herbs aside), and so before you start living the dream you have to get hold of a few outdoor essentials. Here, we’ve picked out five must-have items.

If you’re going to spend any time digging in your garden, then a sturdy fork, spade and hoe are a must-have set. Spending a little money here will pay dividends, with decent handles that won’t chap your hands, and strong shafts that will last for years.

BUT: be careful when buying that spade and consider whether you actually need a shovel. Confused by the difference? A shovel has an angled neck where the flat lifting area joins the handle. Lay it on the ground, and the shovely bit would stick up into the air. It’s good for picking up great mounds of earth and moving them from one place to another, so would be perfect for digging over your plot for the first time. A spade, on the other hand, is flatter with an almost straight line going from the handle to the head. It’s good for digging the soil once in place, and is what you’ll use to maintain your plot over time. If you can afford both, invest in two, but if not, then either would do the job in the long run – they’ll just make you work in slightly different ways.

One of the best natural resource savers you can buy is a water butt, which taps into a downpipe from your guttering and captures the excess rain water. A decent butt will hold over 100 litres, which will be enough to water an average plot for several weeks between rainfalls, and they fill up surprisingly quickly.

Can’t be bothered to keep filling your watering can from its tiny tap? Then consider something like the £19.98 B&Q Easy Watering Water Butt Kit, which attaches to the butt and drip-feeds the plot through the night and day.

Boots… because you shouldn’t go digging without a stout pair of boots. You can use an old pair of shoes to get you going, but you risk losing a toe or two over time. If you can’t afford metal-capped boots then at least buy a pair of Wellingtons, which will save you from getting mud up your legs or losing a shoe in a boggy plot. Most DIY stores sell their least expensive pairs for less than £10, so there’s really no excuse for not buying some.

If you can’t afford a greenhouse, then a cold frame or temporary plastic lean-to greenhouse is the perfect tool to get your seedlings off to a healthy start. Expect to pay around £150 for a decent-sized lean-to complete with shelves, although you can get a plastic and polythene construction for much less. You can pick up one like that pictured to the left for less than £20 on eBay.

If you prefer something a little more substantial, then this one from Walton Sheds costs £199 including tax and delivery and comes with a base. A cheaper option from Garden Oasis is this £129 item, which offers you four metres of storage space across three shelves and the floor.

Beyond pots (and we’re not recommending them as you can make your own) the most useful re-usable items you can have are bamboo canes. We can’t overemphasise how handy these are, so stock up whenever you see them cheap, and buy the longest ones you can find. They are strong and flexible, and are by far the best support you can find for tomatoes, beans, squashes and all manner of climbing plants. Plus, because bamboo grows so quickly, they are a green and easily replenished resource that looks far better in your garden than a wigwam of metal poles.

What are your must-have garden tools? Let us know through the comments below.

Technorati Tags:
gardening, vegetables, self-sufficiency

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How will you power your gadgets when the lights go out? We consume more energy than ever these days, and with that comes the potential for brown-outs and black-outs, plunging us into darkness and making our gadgets worse than useless.

And while running your own home turbine may make you immune to power cuts, it only makes issues of energy conservation are ever more important. Every minute of listening to a mains-powered radio on the electricity you produced yourself could mean ten minutes less of light at night.

So it’s fortunate that clockwork technology, made popular by the introduction of the Baygen wind-up radio, is coming on in leaps and bounds, and it’s now possible to power all but the most esoteric of everyday gadgets with a quick burst of hand cranking. Here, we’ve rounded up five essential clockwork add-ons to keep close at hand.

The Cyba-Lite Wind-Up Lantern is a powerful, bright lantern that’s perfect for camping or lighting up the greenhouse when you’re doing some after-work planting. There are two intensity settings – low and high – allowing you to maximise either running time or illumination, with a minute of winding giving up to 10 minutes of light. A bundled adaptor lets you charge it from a car cigarette lighter, to passively feed the batteries as you drive to wherever you’ll use it. When not in use, the lamp part retracts into the base, keeping it safe from knocks and bumps. Expect to pay around £30.

There are more wind-up radios than trash tracks in the charts these days, but with features and prices to suit every pocket and need, there’s sure to be one that meets your requirements. You want digital? Check out the £99 Freeplay Devo Portable. Too expensive? Then how about the budget, FM-only Solar Wind-up Radio, which as you’ll guess from the name includes a solar panel. It costs £10.99. The best looking, though, has to be the Eton FR200 (right), which comes in a choice of red or blue, costs £24.99 and includes a built-in torch.

At £4.95, this wind-up mobile phone charger is nothing short of a bargain. It comes with five different adaptors that should happily interface with 99.9% of current phones and PDAs (there’s a list on the retailer’s website). It’ll also charge an iPod, with the addition of a £1.50 adaptor, which is truly impressive. So how long does it run for? Well, according to the specs, a 60-second crank will give you two minutes’ talktime or an hour’s-worth of standby, so while it’s not a replacement for proper socket-and-plug charging it’s great for emergency breakdowns.

You’d have to have a pretty big car to fit the Cyba-Lite in your glove box, but a wind-up torch, like this handy £3.99 one from Robert Dyas (which comes bundled with a free keyring light) should be small enough to fit just about anywhere. A minute of winding should provide enough power for 30 minutes of illumination from its three built-in LEDs. With no need for batteries, though, we have to wonder why Robert Dyas is trying to sell Duracells alongside it.

Finally, a wind-up watch is a total no-brainer. There’s something special about tending to it, caring for it and feeding it with a little twist of the winder each morning. Wind-up watches cost next to nothing when bought second hand (no pun intended) and you can pick up a nice one on eBay for less than £10. They’re usually older, and have a little bit of history, but that all adds to the charm. The history of mine? It’s an old Soviet propaganda watch, complete with hammer and sickle, shipped straight from Siberia, for £10.50 all in. It looks and feels cheap, but that’s half the fun.

What are your favourite clockwork or wind-up gadgets? Leave a comment below.

Technorati Tags:
electricity+generation, energy+efficiency, energy+saving, home+generation, freeplay, radio, cyba-lite, self+sufficiency

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Gas and electricity prices are on the up, leading many consumers to look for an alternative supplier. Yet it seems there are just as many sites vying to give you that information as there are energy companies clamouring for an ever-increasing share of your cash. If you want to be self-sufficient, saving money is a must.

Here we’ve picked five to help you make the choice. All of them made the same recommendations once we’d filled in their questionnaire about our gas and electricity usage, indicating that they work from a very similar, or perhaps identical, database.

uSwitch is probably the best known of all the utility comparison sites. It was one of the first, and over the years has expended beyond gas and electric to compare loans, insurance, mortgages and digital TV.

The questionnaire for judging the best gas and electric suppliers is couched in simple terms (electricity consumption questions include examples, like ‘family home’, ‘working couple’ and ‘second home’ to cut through the jargon) and you have the option of saying you have no details handy when it asks for your current consumption. Switching advice can then be made on the basis of price, recommendations from users, or a supplier’s green credentials.

It remains an excellent resource, but there is now so much competition in this field, that uSwitch needs no longer be your first and only choice.

Simply Switch, like uSwitch, goes beyond simple utilities to include heating insurance, mortgages and business savings, among other things. Our current energy supplier wasn’t listed among its choices, despite featuring on every other comparison service here. Should this happen to you, it recommends a series of broadly similar competitors: find your supplier in the list and substitute it for the competitor. Sadly there was no equivalent for our supplier, either, at which point we were advised to call the company’s freefone number.

Assuming your supplier is included, we really liked the way this site went about estimating your consumption based on the size of your house and how many people live there. The other sites do something very similar, but it’s more obvious here and great for first timers.

Recommendations can be made on the basis of price, green credentials, Internet administration tools or capped prices, and filtered to include all products, or only those for which you can apply.

Money Supermarket has by far the simplest questionnaire of the lot. You can take either the detailed exam, where you’ll enter the same kind of information as you would for any other site here, or opt for the simple survey, where you do nothing more than choose your supplier. You can optionally change your consumption details, but leaving them set to the defaults gave the same results in our test as running through the detailed option. Very impressive.

Once you’ve switched your utilities, you can go on to compare travel, phones and broadband, among other things. We also like the gas and electricity price rise calendar, which shows who has just changed their prices, and whether they went up or down. Check this before following anyone’s recommendations, as opting for a supplier who has yet to revise their prices could see you switching just before they get a whole lot more expensive.

Money Supermarket is very open about who pays it commission for touting their products, and it was good to see a link to this information right beside the recommended tariffs.

Energy Helpline sounds like a government body, but it’s actually just another independent comparison site. Like the others featured here, it can estimate your consumption if you don’t have your bills to hand, and it lets you do this in one of two ways: the simple way, with only two questions (the size of your home for electric and gas), or the detailed way in which you tell it how often you cook, what kind of house you have and how you use your energy. It uses similar plain-English terms to those of uSwitch, and supplements them with an option for running a ‘very warm house’.

Recommendations can be made on service ratings, green credentials, Internet features or – one we particularly like – extended call centre working hours, so you can have your queries sorted out whenever they crop up, not just when it’s convenient for your supplier.

Energy Choices is a little less flexible than the other suppliers profiled here, as it expects you to know how much gas and electricity you consume, by entering either the total cost of your bills, or the actual kWh used on a yearly, quarterly or monthly basis.

That point aside, it was a quick and easy single-screen process to get to our recommendation, and we liked the way that although we asked for dual fuel, where gas and electric are quoted from the same supplier, it suggested very clearly we might also like to take a look at an alternative option of buying from two separate recommended suppliers, which would save us money over the course of the year.

Inclusion in this list is no indication of endorsement. Other utility comparison services are available.

Technorati Tags:
energy+efficiency, energy+saving, saving

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The saying ‘it’s not easy being green’ no longer rings true. The options for buying cleaner, more ethical, lower carbon products are growing by the day. So much so, in fact, that there are almost too many options. Here is Blagger’s pick of the top five online ethical or eco superstores.

Nigel’s Eco Store is one of the longest-running online ethical outlets, and it’s well stocked with everyday essentials, like detergent-free washing products, quick boiling kettles and environmentally-friendly pencils. It’s run from Brighton by, not surprisingly, Nigel, who maintains a blog highlighting events and new products. It was also named winner in the shopping category of Yahoo!’s Finds of the Year for 2007.

The Offset Shop is great for those times when you absolutely positively have to shop from one particular retailer, like Sainsbury’s, Boots or PC World. If you go to those stores – and dozens more – by clicking through the links here, it offsets 1kg of carbon for every £2 you spend. There are even car insurance deals which offset a massive 2900kg, equivalent to the amount pumped out by the average family car in a year.

Ethical Superstore runs along much the same lines as Nigel’s Eco Store, and has direct links to your favourite ethical brands, such as Ecover and Cafedirect, so you can do your shopping at speed. We particularly liked the charity gifts section, allowing you to donate mosquito nets, seeds and solar-powered water purifiers to the third world any time of the year, not just at Christmas.

GuardianEcoStore is a re-branded eco-outlet running under the banner of the UK’s most stylish newspaper. Pricing is available in pounds, euros and dollars, but this is more than a money-making affiliate store, as direct links to Tread Lightly, where it encourages readers to make a weekly eco pledge, shows that the environment really matters to this paper.

Ecotopia Eco shop has some wonderfully quirky products, like the return to sender labels specifically for junk mail, mens’ solar shavers and bags made in the Philippines from gathered rubbish. The only thing we don’t like is the delivery charges that apply on orders up to £100 (as with GuardianEcoStore). At Nigel’s Eco Store it’s only £75.

Technorati Tags:
ethical+shopping

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For this week’s Five Friday Favourites, we’re taking a look at video and audio podcasts that cover growing and making your own food, plus one that looks at general money-saving tips.

The links below connect directly to the audio and video streams, which you can subscribe to using iTunes or an RSS reader and listen to or view using your computer or a video-capable media player, such as the iPod.

Martin’s Weekly MoneySaving Musings (right), is a video edition of money-saving expert Martin Lewis’ weekly email. It’s tightly UK-focused, so great for Brit subscribers, and packed full of useful material contributed by both Martin himself and users of his busy forums. Video quality is fair, but neither the podcast itself, nor the presentation style, are up to the standard we’ve come to expect after watching shows like Delicious TV Vegetarian or gardenfork.tv (both below).

Tales from Terry’s Allotment is an audio-only programme, so is great for having on in the background while you do other things. It’s a gentle stroll around Terry’s Welsh allotment – as the name would suggest – looking at what’s currently growing, and what jobs need doing. All recorded on site you get a great feeling of being outdoors with Terry and his interviewer and again, being UK-based, it’s well-suited to British gardeners who may be doing the same jobs on their own plots. Terry Walton will already be known to some subscribers from the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2.

Delicious TV’s Totally Vegetarian (left) doesn’t ever stray into the garden – except for the odd barbeque – but this American video podcast is great for anyone who wants to cook their own food. It’s purely vegetarian, and the recipes are simple enough for anyone to tackle (although as presenter Terri frequently makes use of a blender you may need one yourself to follow along). Being American-produced, some ingredients have different names to the ones we use, and some measurements are given as cups, which we don’t often use for measuring in the UK, but either way it’s a well-produced, well-presented cookery show that’s as good as anything you’d find on British TV. The recipes themselves can be found on the associated website.

Alternative Kitchen Garden is another audio-only podcast, and like Tales from Terry’s Allotment is UK-produced, so all of the tips are relevant to British subscribers at the time of year you’re listening. The advice is no-nonsense, simple, and easy to follow, although the presentation, by Emma, is a little dry. The only trouble is, the 6th January issue covered things that, although still current, you should have started working on between 21 and 26 December, which is a little late. More information can be found on the show’s weblog.

gardenfork.tv takes you right from the plot to the table, with both gardening and cooking, and branches out into all sorts of DIY tips, like how to strip paint, get rid of beetles and take photos. The style is laid back and the recipes simple, and we like the re-use of an old camper oven for doing the baking, which is true to the spirit of Blagger-style self-sufficiency and making do. The associated episode blog includes all of the recipes included in the shows. More than a few appearances are also made by the presenter’s dogs, which although perhaps not the best example of kitchen hygiene, give the show a quirky life all of its own.

Technorati Tags:
cooking, garden, gardening, self sufficiency, self+sufficiency

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For this week’s Five Friday Favourites, we’re continuing the theme of planning for the food growing year ahead by picking five of the UK’s less common online seed outlets, whose catalogues may have passed you by.

Chiltern Seeds (actually based in Cumbria) sells over 4,500 varieties of rare or old seeds, covering both flowers and vegetables. With so many to choose from it has several varieties of each kind of vegetable on offer, so easily puts your local garden centre to shame. Its web site is informative, giving you a little background on much of what it sells, and delivery is very reasonable at £1.50 in the UK, and £2.50 for Europe.
The Real Seed Catalogue concentrates solely on kitchen garden seeds, so there’s no need to click through page after page of flowers and shrubs to find what you want. Its site is very personable and approachable, with ‘Ben’ and ‘Kate’ testing all of the seeds that they sell by growing them themselves and only selling the varieties that produce the best results. So, while the range is smaller it’s probably a good choice for the nervous first-time gardener.
If you love cooking Italian food then Seeds of Italy has definite bookmark potential. The tomato section alone makes it worth a visit, with specific varieties for making tomato sauce and others for preserving. It has an extensive selection of mushrooms, which will be a sensible step up for anyone who has started with a DIY or garden centre mushroom growing kit, and even truffle trees for a bit of luxury at less than restaurant prices.
If selling heritage seeds on a modern medium like the web sounds like something of a jarring contrast, then pop along to Thomas Etty Esq. Not only is the layout old-fashioned, but the pages of its catalogue are presented as attached PDFs, while a retro take on the ‘under construction’ banner flown on developing websites asks ‘May it please you to note that we continue to modify and improve this electrical website, and we crave your indulgence whilst this neccessary work continues.’
And for readers in Ireland, there’s Brown Envelope Seeds, which has excellent indoor and outdoor sowing grids on the seed description pages. More extensive information for growing each vegetable and saving its seeds for later re-use is provided in an associated wiki, linked from each seed page. Pricing is in euros, and payment handled by PayPal.

Inclusion in the above list does not imply endorsement.

Technorati Tags:
garden, gardening, vegetables, seeds

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