A cost effective reconstruction of a countryside house embedding sustainable principles to provide accommodation for business and leisure visitors.

Elements of the project:

• Roof based solar electricity generation
• Roof based solar hot water generation
• Rain water harvesting for use in toilets, washing machines & dish washers
• Wood burning winter time heating & cooking
• Reed bed system to clean grey water
• Ultra low flush liquid only toilets alongside dry toilets for solids
• Highest standards of insulation

Necessities:

• Replacement of the existing asbestos roof
• Rewiring
• Plumbing

Principles

• Refurbishment & reuse wherever possible in prefence to replacement

After much searching for a hat pattern on the Internet, to no avail, I developed the baker’s boy hat knitting pattern. The baker’s boy cap knitting pattern is an easy knitted alternative to the crochet hats being worn this season.

The baker boy hat is inspired by designs such as the newsboy cap or twiggy style hat – made up in sections, however in this baker’s boy hat pattern all the sections are knitted in one go, rather than sewn together afterwards. The baker boy cap can have either a hard or soft peak, visor, or brim, according to the preference of the maker.

The baker boy hat pattern was conceived in London, developed in South Bohemia and completed in St Ives, Cornwall, and is now being knitted internationally.

Knit your own baker boy hat in an evening. The baker boy cap is a simple pattern knit on two needles (not circular), using only basic knit, purl, increase and decrease stitches.

The baker boy hat pattern is clear and straight forward, and includes photos and a stitch diagram for you to follow as you knit your baker boy hat.

You will need:

• 100g chunky wool (150 metres)
• 5.5mm knitting needles
• 6 hours (for an experienced knitter)

This really is the perfect way to use up wool from a favourite (but unfashionable) old jumper. Or search charity shops for an inexpensive luxurious cashmere or mohair jumpers to recycle into your own unique work.

Please send us a photo of your finished baker boy hat if you would like to have it included in our baker boy hat gallery.

This pattern is also available to download directly from http://www.baker-boy-hat.co.uk. This pattern is provided as a pdf file. If you need another format, please contact us. Many thanks for looking.

There has been a sudden drop in temperature. I needed gloves which were quick to make, warm and practical. The solution was to knit a glove that is made in one piece with no sewing required; and for speed, knitted horizontally instead of vertically in a chunky wool.

Because of the cold, I don’t personally like fingerless gloves or mittens, which have to be removed every time you need to do anything with your hands. These are a good compromise.

These gloves are particularly handy for mobile phone users because the stretchy finger tips finish with a small hole. If you need to answer your mobile you can poke out a finger, or write a text without having to expose your whole hand to the cold. The Handy Mobile Phone Glove pattern can also be made up as a traditional pair of gloves if you prefer.

This is a brand new pattern, designed in South Bohemia at the start of Winter 2007.

Knit your own gloves in a single winter evening. This is a simple pattern knit on two needles (no fiddly 3 needle bits), using basic knit stitch, increase and decrease stitches and picking up cast off stitches.

The pattern is clear and straight forward, and includes photos and a stitch diagram for you to follow as you knit your gloves.

You will need:

• 100g chunky wool (150 metres)
• 5 mm knitting needles
• 8 hours (for an experienced knitter)

This really is another perfect way to use up wool from a favourite (but unfashionable) old jumper. Or search charity shops for an inexpensive luxurious cashmere or mohair for your own unique work.

Please send us a photo of your finished gloves if you would like to have them included in our knitters gallery.

This pattern is only available on Ebay, or as a download from the payloads web site. This pattern is provided as a pdf file. If you need another format, please contact us. Many thanks for looking.

Now the temperatures have dropped and the season has finished, I’m really missing it. It was lovely to take 1/2 hour or so every day to meander through the forest together & I now feel like I know my locale that bit better. I wonder if the start of the hunting season is also a push factor to the conclusion of mushroom picking here – as some varieties still grow now… if you’re wondering around in the forest, there’s a risk of being mistaken for something else (two easy ways to die through misidentification in mushroom picking).

So, in conclusion, we have identified and eaten the following types of mushrooms & are alive to tell the tale:

• Yellow foot Chanterelle
• Chanterelle
• Hawks wing (a type of tooth fungus which is edible but can be bitter).
• Hedgehog mushroom
• Parasole
• Boletus edulis (or penny bun)
• Boletus badius (Bay bolete)
• Boletus erythropus (or red foot bolete – this one is great fun & looks really scary with it’s amazing colour changes)
• Boletus subtomentosus (or suede bolete)

Not a bad range seeing as we didn’t even bother buying mushrooms when we lived in the UK (the supermarket button mushrooms are so dull!!!). M said he has eaten more mushrooms in the last month than in the rest of his life.

Many sources had told us that Czechs are fairly relaxed about mushroom identification, but they have a saying that someone with a mushroom book in the forest is on their way to hospital. Our experience is that people are ultra conservative & will only eat varieties which have always been eaten by their families. They may not be looking them up in books, but a few generations of experience is far more important.

Nový Mlýn is at an altitude of 540 metres above sea level. It is this factor which is the main influence on our climate. We’re about 90 metres higher than our nearest town, Tábor, but close in altitude to a neighbouring town Pelhřimov. The average temperatures are likely to be above 10 degrees c for six months of the year (that includes night time temperatures).

Our approach to heating is decidedly ‘suck it and see’. This winter we will use the traditional heating method for this area – i.e. wood burning stoves, and see how successful this is. Will we manage to keep warm? How much wood will we need? Will the daily work of setting fires become a grind? There’s one way to find out.

We’ve moved our bedroom so it’s above the dining room & kitchen, which we keep warm during the day. The bedroom is now adjoining the room upstairs with the super efficient barrel shaped stove. So far, so good, but the temperature outside is a mere 0, and it has much further to go.

Convert one of your toilets into a Rock Bog by putting one or two large stones in the bottom of the pan, then reducing the amount of water in the flush with stones or bricks so that you have just a 1 or 2 litre flush.

Why? You’ll have a super efficient liquid only loo which can be used by men AND women (no not so mellow yellow splash back for the ladies). You will save water and money AND it will look nice (a Zen garden in your loo!).

A free idea for you from Bog – the accessible eco bathroom

Background:
There is a problem with our drainage and water connection, which means that our indoor toilet is suitable for liquid only, and I have to bring in rain water to flush it (yes, obviously very inconvenient, and not a realistic alternative for our necessities), however I noticed that we were using huge amounts of water for flushing because the volume of water in the bottom of the toilet is so big, meaning that you had to go fill up the bucket for flushing several times a day.

I know that there is an Austrian university which is developing a liquid only toilet which does not have a big u bend so only a little water is necessary to flush waste water through. My idea was to put some biggish stones in the loo to reduce the volume of water there. It’s worked. I now need only a couple of litres to flush, rather than 5 or 10. The rocks also provide a visual reminder not to put anything other than liquids down the loo.

I was thinking that this would work in households with more than one toilet because you could designate one to be liquids only, put yet more stones in the cistern to cut down the amount of water being flushed, but still keep the water clean. It would just mean that people would have to get into the habit of using different toilets for different occasions.

When I lived in London, I wanted to do an MBA (masters in business administration), but there was no way in hell that my employers would commit to this. Instead I researched the syllabus of a decent MBA & studied each area in turn, using resources such as the library system. I don’t have the kudos of the qualification, but what I learned has been incredibly useful.

So… I will employ the same technique to learning about project management. I’ve project managed before – market research, events & playschemes, but I’ve had an inkling that there must be more method to complex projects than a business plan and a Gantt chart.

I had a bit of a search around to look at various project management software, and discovered that there are massive numbers of such programs. And they can be massively complicated or simple enough to miss massively important details.  I’m going to hold off on selection until I have a better understanding of what I’ll need it to do… but from my initial investigation some of them don’t even have budgets.

Likewise, there are plenty of websites purporting to be the industry standard in professional representation. One that I thought looked credible was the PMI – which has a qualification ‘Project Management Professional’.  Lots of companies offer training towards this qualification, such as this 5 day course. Now, with the help of wikipedia, we can begin.

Czech mushroom collection is an institution. We tried this for ourselves for the first time on Sunday and after an hour in the forest came back with a full basket. We were collecting the safest mushrooms – those from the Bolete family & I felt confident in identifying these. We fried them in oil, butter and garlic & they were very tasty. I continued to sort & chop our new food source and came across this…

I realised that it was unlike the other mushrooms we’d collected when the flesh turned from a pale yellow to a deep blue almost instantly (quicker than me putting the knife down and picking up the camera).

A little research revealed it to be Boletus Luridus. A fantastic name for a mushroom with a chameleon’s range of colour. At least this threw up the possibility of poisonous mushrooms in the Bolete family – before we did. The other one which is dangerous is Boletus Satanus – you could guess from the name… however this is distinctive with a white cap and red stalk. Apparently none of the Bolete family can kill you, but at least I know that some can make you very, very ill.

An interesting wikipedia article about the Slavic mushroom picking traditions puts it quite succinctly…  they think we’re being paranoid. A lovely American mushroom site is at pains to point out that the author (of the site and of the book 100 edible mushrooms), does not eat them at all.

We both spent the next few hours being rather too carefully observant of any physical sensations, and worrying ourselves into feeling slightly queasy.  The power of suggestion.  It was a lovely sensation the next morning, to know we’d just been typically Englishly paranoid.

Today it’s been raining, so I can’t wait to go out mushroom collecting again early tomorrow.