Yes, another 30DaysWild is over, but as you’ll see from Tuesday’s post (if it ever goes up) I have another fun thing to keep me thinking of wild things for the rest of the summer.
Second Half Update
For the third week of June I was somewhat preoccupied with caring for a certain member of the household. We did lots of looking at the grass, and deciding whether it was good to eat. Plenty of birds came into the garden. I had another trip to Titchfield Haven (and have booked another for July).
Catching up during the following weekend, I found a new survey, as described on Tuesday, the Flower-Insect Timed Count or FIT Count, which I can do any time it’s a sunny day, enough for insects to come out and look for pollen and nectar.
The wildflower patch
The wildflower patch as had several indundations with heavy rainstorms making it impassable for a day or two. I’ve got halfway though removing a large clump of crocosmia (if you’d like some, come over and get it). The plan is to keep that area bare of grass to give some more wildflowers a good start. The teasels have grown well, and are itching to find their permanent home there. Several of the seeds from my trip to the Gilbert White garden have emerged and will be transplanted there soon, along with some yellow rattle wildflower, which parasitises grass, and helps remove it from the area. That’ll give the wildflowers more chance.
Some of the flowers I planted last year are emerging, including red campion, lady’s bedstraw, viper’s bugloss and hawkbit. I’m still hoping the ragged robin will emerge from its very damp spots.
Write Wild
I made an effort to bring wildness into my writing this month (as well as my reading). I think the non-fiction Beach was well-received, and the mole’s tunnel attracted attention, too. Finding the Mother Tree inspired me to include the trees in the Man of the Woods, and the Fisherman was pretty wild, too. Thanks, KL Caley for giving me so many wild prompts!
I’ve reserved some of the flash fiction pieces in my catalogue for a future collection of clifi and environmental stories. I need to write a few more, though. There are several animal tales in Critters and Crises, which is on sale at Smashwords this month, in hope of garnering some reviews!
You might also be interested in Weird and Weirder, which is on pre-sale at Smashwords and launches next week, 8th July.
The Great Plastics Project
This kept me occupied on several wet days. I haven’t done much since, apart from throw out the non-recyclable bags I can’t do anything else with. I realise I still need to discuss this business of ‘single use’, which I think Trent Romer misinterpreted. He considered a plastic bag that was used for several things, like holding a loaf of bread, keeping it clean and uncontaminated, having marketing and content information printed on it, was ‘multiple-use’. In my view that’s multi-purpose, which is not the same thing at all as multiple use. He’s had to get most of his information on this from Europeans, so I can see the language barrier coming into play. European English is usually very specific, and they pick us Brits up on some of our casual use, too.
If the bread bag was designed to be refilled with bread and resold, that would be multiple use. Or bread bags designed as sealable sandwich bags as a second life.
By the way – have you seen these mistyclips? Stop your glasses misting up above your facemask! Completely non-plastic and made from recycled stuff.
Is that the end of 30DaysWild for the year?
I think I do something wild every day, just some are wilder than others. The garden birdwatch survey goes all year, and it’s just part of me to watch out for interesting things in the world about it.
I think I may need to be a little more aware of what I’m doing, though. Enjoy and savour these moments more. Value them instead of taking them for granted. There is far to much going on as we head back into a new normality that is not going forward into a better normality.
Stay wild. #staywild
Second recommendation I’ve seen for mistyclips – must investigate!
I was intending to add a photo, but couldnt at the time. I’m still a little short of disk space so only putting pictures on if I really need them.
Great reporting on the wildness 🙂 BTW, I agree about the bag–it’s not multi-use until it’s good for several different things. But is it multi-use if I take the plastic bread sacks from friends and relations who buy bread, and use it to keep my home-made bread fresh? I can usually re-use the bag 3 or 4 times before it gets holes ripped in it. But after that…. not much recycling around here.
Yes it is, and bravo you. But if the manufacturers designed it for multi-use it should last longer and not get ripped in use!
So it still comes down to….how to dispose of it at its ‘end-of-life’.
That’s why the first “R” is “Reduce.” We can reuse to a certain point, and recycle where possible, but there’s always entropy, so the best way is to avoid the plastic in the first place. I do wonder about getting some kind of air-tight bread box, but is that any better than giving a bit more life to someone else’s bread sacks? This is all more complex than we want!
I have a heavy cotton drawstring bag that my friend sent me from Germany. It is for homemade bread and even has a recipe (in German) on it as decoration. I’ve had it at least fifteen years, and it sits on my kitchen worktop most of the time. I even wash it sometimes 🙂 (not with bread in).
I wouldn’t say it keeps bread perfectly fresh. But it keeps it fresh enough. If you want to keep it really fresh, slice it and freeze it–but then it still needs some sort of reusable bag to put it in.
Actually you’ve made me think of the root of the problem. We expect things to last a long time. Not ‘make today, eat tomorrow and the next day’ until it runs out.
You’re right about the problem maybe being that we need/want food to keep for a long time. But honestly, with bread there isn’t much choice, if you live alone. I either need to have it keep (and at that, I have to freeze half a loaf at a time in warm weather), or take to making bread things that can be done in smaller amounts. Or eat less bread?
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