Potatoes are also amazing for establishing new garden beds. They break up the ground, attract lots of worms, and leave a lovely rich soil behind.

I use the standard potato-growing technique – dig a fairly deep trench (up to a foot deep), put the seed potatoes in the bottom, and cover them with an inch or so of dirt. As the shoots start coming through, keep backfilling the dirt around them. Keep hilling and mulching them until you can’t go any higher, then leave them until the tops start to die off. Finally, dig!

The girls gave me a hand pulling up our most recent potatoes last weekend.

It’s like a treasure hunt! Every time I turn over the soil, the girls rush in and try to outdo each other. There’s always a bit of competition to see who can collect the most potatoes.

These were the biggest two, although they were all pretty uniform:

After they’ve all been recovered, we brush the clods of dirt off the potatoes, sort them (use any damaged ones first), and let them dry a little in the sun.

Look at that lovely rich soil left behind! There were heaps of worms all through the garden bed.

The end result – a big tub of potatoes. We collected about 12 kg, having started with about 1 kg of sprouted potatoes from the cupboard. Not a bad return! They were all a lovely big size too – sometimes you get lots of little ones, but not this time.

And of course, the girls were proud to have gotten their hands dirty helping Dad!

We’re fortunate here on the South Coast. Our climate is mild enough that we can plant potatoes pretty much any time of the year. Gardening web sites tell you to plant them between August and October; that may give you the best yields, but really they’ll grow anytime the soil is above 10C (50F). If you have potatoes sprouting the cupboard, you’ve got nothing to lose by planting them out!

Do you grow potatoes? Do you have any special techniques to share?

Related posts:

1. Potato Harvest
2. Potato Harvest
3. Mulch Delivery

The FreeCycle Network is made up of almost 5,000 regional groups, with a total of nearly 9 million members. Happily our region is represented, with FreeCycle Illawarra.

The way it works is you first join up to your regional group, and then you’ll start receiving emails. Some will be people wanting things, some will be people offering things. You can only offer things for free (no money can change hands!), and all items must be legal and appropriate for all ages.

A few other local bloggers are active on FreeCycle, including NellyMary and Rich & Ally.

So, here are some of the cool things I’ve been able to pick up…

Lots of firewood. A guy at Gerringong had some trees fall down on his property, so I went down and cut them up with my chainsaw and brought back many trailer loads. I’m still splitting it, but we won’t go cold for a few winters!

A dog kennel.

A stainless steel BBQ plate. It’s very heavy and quite thick, so it’ll go great on a traditional stone-sided wood-fired barbie.

While collecting the above BBQ plate, I noticed the guy had a pile of scrap metal in his front yard waiting for the recycler. He said I could take whatever I wanted. These galvanised flues, and the capped flue below, will be great for building a wood-fired pizza oven like Gavin’s cob oven!

I’ve also given away some stuff on FreeCycle – a microwave and a few other small things.

So how about you – have you used FreeCycle? What did you give away or get?

Related posts:

1. Sustainable Illawarra Super Challenge Launches!
2. Chicken Sellers In The Illawarra
3. Upcoming Illawarra Seedsavers Meeting

(Note when I say “pumpkin” here, I’m using Australian usage – North Americans please substitute your term “winter squash”.)

The key is in understanding what factors lead to deterioration of your pumpkins, and addressing those factors in your storage system.

Vermin like rats and mice also love pumpkins and have been known to dig a tunnel into the center and set up a home inside!

Harvesting Pumpkins For Storage

Leave a long piece of stem attached to each pumpkin when you pick them. Don’t carry pumpkins by the stalk, and handle them carefully to avoid cuts and bruises. If the stalk is damaged or falls off, seal the attachment point by melting candle wax into it.

Leave the pumpkins in full sun for a couple of weeks before bringing them in for storage (cover or move them if it looks like rain). This will toughen the skin and improve their shelf life. The chook shed or dunny roof is the traditional place to harden off pumpkins!

Storing Pumpkins

The best storage place is somewhere cool, dark, dry and well-ventilated. A shed or garage, under-house storage area, or covered verandah can be excellent. The ideal storage temperature is around 12 C (about 55 F).

Pumpkins should be lifted off the ground to improve airflow around them, and should not be touching each other. Place them on newspaper or straw, on top of chicken wire or timber slats. Store them on their side, so that moisture doesn’t accumulate in the hollow around the stem.

Don’t store pumpkins near apples, pears or other ripening fruit. The ethylene gas the fruit gives off will hasten the deterioration of your pumpkins.

Check your stored pumpkins regularly. Remove (eat or discard) any that start to soften or rot, or have become damaged.

Over time, your stored pumpkins will get lighter as they lose moisture content. That’s not a bad thing though – they become sweeter and more richly-flavoured the longer they’re stored.

Best Pumpkin Varieties For Storage

Other Ways To Preserve Pumpkins

• cut them up and dehydrate them
• cook, mash and freeze (good for curries, soups, pumpkin bread, pumpkin scones, etc)
• make pumpkin soup, pumpkin pie, or pumpkin bread and freeze
• Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s pumpkin achar (pickled pumpkin)

What Can You Do With The Pumpkin Vines After Harvest?

Do you have any pumpkin storage tips or favourite recipes? Please leave a comment!

Related posts:

1. Why Grow Your Own Pumpkins?
2. Hand-Pollinating Pumpkin and Squash
3. Home-Grown Pumpkin Soup

Besides better taste, better nutrition, lack of herbicides/pesticides/fungicides, and absence of chemical treatments to prolong storage life and/or hasten ripening, there is still economic value in growing your own vegies.

Pumpkins (squash to North Americans) are one of my favourite crops, simply because they don’t ask anything of you for the whole growing season. If you start them in a nice patch of nutrient-rich compost, you won’t need to revisit them until picking time!

All 13 of the pumpkins below (plus a 14th that we ate a couple of weeks ago) came from a couple of vines that self-seeded out of a pile of compost.

I weighed one of the average-sized pumpkins, and it was 6 kg. So 14 pumpkins add up to about 84 kg. This type of pumpkin is currently selling in the supermarket for $2.49/kg (I’m using commercial produce prices, not the higher organic prices).

So that was over $200 worth of pumpkins that just popped up out of the dirt by themselves and waited for us to pick them!

These will last us for months, making lots of beautiful soups, stews and roasts through the winter.

Other low-effort crops I love include sweet potatoes, snow peas, climbing beans, sugar-snap peas, cherry tomatoes, chokoes, potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes and rhubarb, plus herbs like bay, parsley, mint and rosemary. They all seem to thrive without any need for care from sowing right through to harvest. Some even cut out the sowing step for me, and propagate themselves!

What are your favourite low-effort/high-payback crops?

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1. Dinner From The Backyard
2. Potato Harvest
3. What Is Lunar Planting?

Last week we had a truckload of mulch delivered from the Dunmore waste depot. It cost about $115 to have them deliver 9 cubic metres (12 cubic yards, or 4.6 tons), which I think is money well spent. Apparently you can go and fill your trailer with the stuff for free, but look at my trailer compared to the pile. I think it would have taken at least 10-15 trips to drag home that much mulch, and I would have had to do all the shovelling myself!

Can you see the steam rising out of the top of the pile? It’s partially composted, but still pretty hot.

And here’s a close-up to give you an idea of the structure and composition of the mulch. It’s made up of all the municipal green waste, shredded and partially composted. There’s a good mix of fine compost and larger chunks in it. There’s also more plastic and bits of painted wood than I’d like, but not enough to be a big concern. I can pick most of it out as I use the mulch.

So what am I going to do with all this mulch?

I’ve been digging some new garden beds, and in between them I’ve dug deep paths on contour. The paths are about a foot deep, and I dug that soil onto the beds to make them a little higher. In the bottom of the trenches I’m laying down cardboard (to smother any kikuyu grass that tries to grow back), and then filling them with this mulch.

Because the paths are on contour, they hold water when it rains and act like swales. The mulch soaks up the water and forms a reservoir, but because it’s loose and chunky the surface is still fine to walk on. The water will then be released to the surrounding garden beds slowly over the following week or two, reducing the need to water. As the plants in the beds get bigger, their roots will seek out the moisture in the paths and hopefully grow nice and deep and strong.

Normally you’d shy away from putting so much woody matter on garden beds for fear of locking up nitrogen in the soil. But the paths are between the beds, so the soil in the beds will not be affected. In addition, mycelium (fungi) will colonise the mulch paths. Plant roots and soil microorganisms work together with the mycelium to feed each other, for the benefit of the growing plants.

When the mulch in the paths eventually breaks down, it can be dug onto the garden beds as a rich humus dressing, and new mulch can be laid in the paths again.

Rob over at One Straw has a great explanation of the concept, which he calls pit and mound gardening.

It’s kind of like a mini swale/hugelkultur – garden paths don’t have to be unproductive!

I’ll post some photos soon. Hopefully I’ll get to do some more work on the garden beds over the weekend.

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1. Jamberoo Community Growers – Don Cairns Talk
2. Rotary Hoe Advice?
3. Backyard Veggie Patch Workshop in Jamberoo

First, Megan made another batch of meringues for the Jamberoo Community Growers meeting on Sunday. This uses egg whites, and she uses duck eggs when we have them – it makes the meringues hold their shape better, without cracking and collapsing. Duck egg whites are especially good for pavlovas too!

So I had a bunch of duck egg yolks.

Then at the JCG meeting, our friend Cathy brought along a heap of basil for the swap table. We’re “between harvests” of basil at the moment, so that was very fortuitous.

The pasta is dead simple to make. I use a recipe I saw on a Jamie Oliver show – it’s just one whole egg and 100g of “type 00″ flour per person. Type 00 is a finely-ground flour especially for pasta making. When I have leftover yolks, I use three of them instead of one whole egg. It makes for a richer, creamier pasta with a lovely golden colour to it.

You just mix the egg and flour together until you get a ball of dough. Knead it a bit until it’s silky and a bit stretchy, then wrap it in plastic wrap and sit it in the fridge for an hour to rest. Then take it out, knead it a little more, and start passing it through a pasta machine.

Mine is a simple manually-cranked pasta machine. It works great. Break the dough into small batches (I would break a 2-egg/200g dough mix into 4 pieces), flour it up so it’s not sticky, and pass it through on the widest roller setting a few times. Then pass the dough through once at each thickness, dialling it down to about the 2nd or 3rd last setting. I find it doesn’t come out very well if you go all the way to the thinnest setting. Keep flouring to keep the dough manageable.

Finally, pass the sheet of dough through the spaghetti/fettucine cutter. If your machine doesn’t have one of these, just flour up the sheet of dough, roll it up lengthwise, and cut it into thin sections so it unrolls into fettucine strips. I find it helps to toss the pasta in more flour at this stage so it doesn’t stick together while it waits for you to roll the other batches out.

Pesto sauce is also dead easy. Before you start, though, put a big pot of salted water on the stove to boil. You’ll need this to cook the pasta shortly.

Throw a heap of basil into a blender with some olive oil, garlic cloves and pine nuts, and whizz away. You can substitute parsley or other green leafy herbs for basil, and things like macadamias, bunyas, pecans, walnuts, cashews, etc for pine nuts. Just go with what you have! Then throw in some grated parmesan cheese (proper stuff, not the stuff that comes in a yellow can!).

If you want the pesto to taste and look really special, chop it by hand instead of blending it. Or smash it in a mortar and pestle. It’ll look a bit more rustic, with a nicer texture, and there will be more definition between the ingredients. It’s worth a go if you have the time.

By now the water should be boiling. Drop the pasta in, and boil it for about a minute or so. It really doesn’t need long. It helps to have lots of water, so it stays hot when the pasta goes in.

Drain the pasta, put it in a big serving bowl, and stir the pesto through it. Serve with a bit more shaved or grated parmesan on top, and maybe even some more pine nuts for decoration.

Yum!

Related posts:

1. Home Made Pasta
2. Home-Grown Pumpkin Soup
3. An Assortment of Duck and Chicken Eggs

I found them being offered “free to good home” on the Backyard Poultry notice board. By the way, that’s a great site if you’re looking to buy or sell poultry in Australia.

The family I got them from was really nice, and had obviously cared for them extremely well. They got them as little ducklings for their young daughter, but they grew too big for their backyard and were messing it up with poop everywhere. They’re named Sir Francis and Louie.

I think one of them is male – when alarmed it hisses and the hair on its head and neck stands up. The other one is slightly smaller, but I’m still not sure if it’s male or female. I’m really hoping at least one of them is female, but time will tell as they mature.

The plan is to use this pair as the start of a breeding flock. Once I know what I’ve got, I’ll get 1 or 2 more so I have 2 or 3 females and 1 male. Then we’ll breed muscovies – they’re supposed to be one of the best meat birds, with the lean and tender meat often compared to veal, and avoiding the greasiness that other duck breeds can have. They’re excellent mothers, too, and don’t need much help to raise their ducklings.

Have you ever raised muscovies? Have you eaten them? I’d be very interested to hear your experiences in the comments below!

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1. We’ve Got Ducks!

Pumpkin soup is great for impressing visitors. It’s so easy to make, it’s easy to grow all the ingredients you need, and it tastes amazing compared to the bought stuff.

The recipe is very laid-back:

I like to oven-roast the pumpkin before adding it to the soup – it gives a richer, more interesting flavour. Just peel and dice the pumpkin, and roast it on a tray in a moderate oven until it browns a little.

While the pumpkin is roasting, dice one or two onions. Gently heat some olive oil and butter in a big saucepan, and add the onions to soften.

Add the chopped garlic to the onions, then tip in the roasted pumpkin pieces and give it all a quick stir.

Add enough chicken or vegetable stock to completely cover the pumpkin – you can add more to stretch the soup further if more guests turn up unexpectedly! If you don’t have stock on hand, you can use salted water.

Add the bay leaves whole, and chop the rest of the herbs finely before adding them. Simmer for a while to let the herb flavours develop.

Just before you’re ready to serve, remove the bay leaves and use a stick blender to puree the soup. Keep going until there are no pumpkin lumps left.

As a last touch, season to taste with salt and freshly-ground black pepper.

Serve into soup bowls and dress with a dollop of sour cream or natural yoghurt and a garnish of parsley. Sorry, but I forgot to take a photo of the finished product!

If you have the time, some fresh-baked bread rolls go really well with a soup like this. A nice sourdough from your local bakery is lovely too.

Related posts:

1. Hand-Pollinating Pumpkin and Squash
2. Home Grown Pork
3. Home Made Bacon

The rotary hoe was a Krieger (have you ever heard of them?), 6.5 hp petrol motor, 50 cm width, self-propelled – as seen in the photo.

These things sell for about $600 new (plus $100+ shipping!) on eBay. The one I was going to bid on was the same thing, used only once, and ended up going for $340. It was less than an hour’s drive away, so would have been an easy pickup too.

So while I look for another used rotary hoe for sale, I’d love to hear your advice and feedback.

I want to hoe up a largeish area of kikuyu grass in my yard, to turn it into vegetable gardens. It’s on a slight slope, with an area of about 200-300 square metres (but not in a square – it goes in a big ring around some raised beds and a citrus grove).

My plan is to hoe the whole area, then dig paths through it on contour, shovelling the dirt onto the new beds. The paths will be filled with wood chip as a moisture reservoir and fungi haven, and the beds will be mulched with straw and planted out with herbs, vegies and other beneficial plants.

My first thought was to hire a rotary hoe for the day, but rental costs $150/day. Ouch! I don’t expect to have an ongoing need for a rotary hoe once the gardens are set up, so I thought hiring would be better than buying. But if I could buy a second-hand one for a decent price, use it to set up the garden beds, and then sell it again, I’d probably be out of pocket less than the $150 and would have all the time I need to do the job properly instead of rushing it all in a single day.

Have you tried anything like this before? Does a rotary hoe kill grass effectively, or will I get grass shoots coming up through the garden beds? Do you know anything about the Krieger brand? Is there anything in particular I should look for in a used rotary hoe?

Even better, do you live near me and have a rotary hoe that I could borrow, hire or buy?

Any and all advice appreciated!

No related posts.

A mate came over and helped me set it up. It’s definitely a two-person job!

The first thing we had to do was find a pair of trees to string it between. We have lots of trees on the property, but it still wasn’t an easy task. We needed sturdy trees that were far enough apart to get a good ride, but we had to stay within the length of the cable I had. The trees also had to provide a decent downhill slope – not too steep or it’d go too fast, and not too flat or it wouldn’t go at all.

To minimise damage to the trees, we passed the cable through a piece of rubber hose which we slipped around the tree. We then used clamps to secure the cable.

The other end of the cable had a large turnbuckle attached to it. We loosened it right off, secured both ends of the cable as tight as we could pull them by hand, and then wound up the turnbuckle to get as much tension in the cable as we could.

The turnbuckle also serves as an end-stop for the cable car (pulley), so the kids don’t slam into the bottom tree.

The cable car was built long ago in a workshop at BHP. It’s made out of a set of bicycle handlebars, bolted to the pulley bracket. It’s pretty cheap and simple, but very strong and works great.

Because we have small kids (and sometimes even smaller visitors!), we strung a plastic swing seat underneath the cable car. Kids can hold onto the handlebars if they like, or if they’re a bit small or unsure they can sit on the seat.

The kids love their new flying fox. It’s a simple piece of play equipment that provides hours of fun, and cost us nothing. Perfect!

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1. Backyard Revolution – 60 Minutes Story
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John Berger

I mentioned a few posts back that I had the belly of one side of our pig left whole, so I could try my hand at making bacon. Finally, I can report on the results!

Bacon made from the belly is typical in the US, but elsewhere is often referred to as “streaky bacon” (especially in English recipes) or “American-style bacon”.

I read a number of recipes online, and decided to go for something that didn’t require smoking. Mostly because I don’t have a smoker .

In the end, I chose a fairly simple wet-cure bacon recipe I found over at The Cottage Smallholder. I did two batches – one with maple syrup instead of treacle, and the other with golden syrup. Mostly because I didn’t have any treacle or molasses .

The bacon sits in the salty/sweet brine for 4 days in the fridge. It was still fairly soft when I took it out – a bit like pickled pork. I thought it’d be firmer, but then I’ve never done this before.

A wet-cured bacon isn’t going to last as long in the fridge as a dry-cured smoked bacon, so I decided to slice it up and freeze it in useful-sized batches. Of course, I had to fry up a few slices just to see how it turned out.

It was great! Salty, very slightly sweet, and absolutely delicious.

Next time I think I’ll try harder to find molasses, and see if it turns out any different. I’ll also definitely try a dry cure, and maybe even rig up a smoker and go the whole hog. Pardon the pun .

Have you ever tried curing bacon or ham? Any tips to share?

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1. Home Grown Pork
2. Home Made Laundry Soap
3. Home Made Pasta

What I really needed was a dedicated chicken processing station.

I bought a second-hand stainless steel kitchen sink from a stallholder at the Dapto Markets for $5. You can also get these cheap from recycling centers, scrap metal dealers, the garbage tip shop, garage sales, etc. Sometimes you even see them being thrown out in skips when people renovate their kitchens. The best type of sink is one with drainage racks on both sides, and a single sink in the middle.

I had some 90mm x 45mm framing timber left over from some previous projects, so I used that for the frame of the station. To keep cost down, you could pull apart some shipping pallets or scrounge something suitable from a second-hand building supplies place.

I was really happy with the final result:

The nice thing about using a kitchen sink is that you can scrub it down with bleach to sterilise it before starting work. Cleanup afterwards is quick and easy too.

No sooner had I built the frame, and it was time to process the first chicken on it – our big rooster, who was starting to really hurt the hens with his size and strength, and the massive spurs he’d grown. I’ve got another rooster who is going to step into his place, until my Australorp chicks grow big enough to take over.

The processing station worked beautifully. The height was perfect – I had measured up our kitchen benches and built this frame to the same height. I hung a garden hose over the back of the frame, and put a large bucket under the sink drainhole. It was very handy being able to wash off parts of the chicken as I worked on it, as well as being able to keep my hands and the knife clean.

Even if you don’t butcher your own chickens, this kind of setup is very handy for quickly washing off vegetables from the garden before bringing them inside, washing out plant pots, and cleaning up your hand tools.

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1. Processing Chickens
2. Plants For The Chicken Run
3. Chicken Tractor Lifting Handles

• Purchase of pigs ($80 each): $240
• Batteries (D cells) for electric fence: $28.20
• Garlic for worming: $7
• Straw for bedding: $10
• 12x bags pig weaner pellets ($14.50 each): $174
• 14x bags pig grower pellets ($18.50 each): $259
• 9x bags “Cool & Calm” horse pellets ($13.50 each): $121.50
• LHPA tattooing ($11 each): $33
• Fuel transporting to abattoir: $35
• Abattoir kill fee ($29 each): $87
• Abattoir-butcher freight ($19 each): $57
• Butcher cutting and packing ($40 each): $120

According to the butcher, we got about 74 kg of meat back. I’ll subtract the heads, tails, etc and round that down to an even 70 kg.

That comes out to an approximate cost of $5.58/kg. Not bad!

We kept our feed costs down a bit with the help of some friends. A nearby baker was giving us three big flour-sacks of day-old bread each week, and our greengrocer was giving us a big box of fruit and vegie scraps every week. The pigs also ate the weeds and grass in their runs (they had two different runs while they were here), and we fed them a lot of grass, weeds, and vegetable garden waste. We also got a few buckets of fruit from feral fruit trees and from under friends’ trees.

The Cool & Calm horse pellets were a way to keep feed costs down a little, and were also a useful substitute when I was running low on pig pellets (they are a special order item from feed suppliers around here). They are fairly similar to pig pellets in protein, fibre, etc, but probably lack the lysine (required for good pig growth). I alternated between pig pellets and Cool & Calm in successive feeds.

We chose not to castrate the pigs. Peoples’ opinions differ on whether this is necessary, and it didn’t seem worth the vet cost to me. It is supposed to reduce “boar taint” in the meat, but then that’s not usually a problem in boars killed under 6 months old anyway. It didn’t make the pigs hard to handle or anything, and we had three males so we weren’t going to have male-female interaction problems.

I haven’t included the electric fence equipment in the above list, since that was infrastructure that I’ll continue to use. The feed troughs, shelter, etc were all stuff I had lying around, and I was able to borrow a caged trailer for transport. I also haven’t included any running around in the car other than the abattoir trip, since most feed and bread pickups were on the way home from work anyway and the greengrocer dropped the scraps to us. These may be things to consider if you want to use my figures to estimate costs for your own pig project.

So there you have it! That’s all the costs and related info I can think of right now for our first foray into pig-raising. Hopefully this might help other people thinking of raising some pigs.

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments below, and feel free to ask questions if I’ve left anything out!

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1. Taking The Pigs To The Abattoir
2. Feeding Swill To Pigs
3. Swill Feeding Pigs In Las Vegas

The first idea I really liked was to use discarded bird cages to protect seedlings from pillaging wild birds and roaming chickens.

One thing I’ve noticed a lot is broken birdcages. They’re often a little rusty, or the bottom has fallen off, or the door hinge no longer works. What a great idea to rip the bottom off and place them over plants that need a little extra protection!

They look kind of cool dotted around the garden, too.

What tips do you have to protect plants from chickens and wildlife? Please share in the comments!

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2. Backyard Chickens Soar In Popularity
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The markets are a great place to buy second hand clothes, toys, tools, etc for very good prices. Or if you’ve accumulated a whole bunch of that sort of stuff yourself, you can book a stall and sell it off! There are also regulars at the markets selling fresh fruit and vegetables, plants, hot food, CDs, and all sorts of other things.

We also bought some basil seedlings, a mango tree, some fruit and vegies, a lace curtain to use as a moth net over the garden beds, and a few tools.

If you’re looking for something to do on a Sunday morning, I highly recommend it as a family outing!

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The recipe we’ve been using is very simple:

• 1 cup Lux flakes or 1 bar grated Sunlight soap
• 1/2 cup borax
• 1/2 cup washing soda
• 10 litres water

Add the Lux flakes (or grated soap) to 1.5 litres of water in a saucepan. Warm over a medium heat until the soap is dissolved. Add the Borax and washing soda, continue stirring until dissolved and mixture is just starting to thicken. Pour liquid into a large container or bucket, and add water to top up to 10 litres. Leave to cool and set into a gel, then store with a lid on top.

It only takes about 10 minutes, and gives you 10 litres of clothes washing gel for under $2. Compare that to 10 litres of shop-bought laundry liquid!

To use, simply scoop out a small amount (about 1/4 cup – or just use an old washing powder scoop), mix it with a little hot water to dissolve, then add it to your washing machine and wash with cold water.

After a few days the gel may separate (a bit like a custard left in the fridge!). This is fine – just mix it up with an egg-whisk until it’s nicely blended again.

If you want to get all fancy, you can experiment with adding essential oils to the gel mix to give it more of a fragrance. Or even better, just add a drop or two of the oil to the machine as the wash cycle starts – this way you can use different fragrances for different loads. Some people like to use a soothing oil like lavender for bedsheets, and a more invigorating oil like citrus for sports clothes. Tea tree oil and eucalyptus oil have antibacterial properties that are supposed to help with hard-to-shift odours.

To help shift stains, rub a bit of the gel into the stain before the wash.

If you prefer a powder to a liquid, you can mix soap flakes, borax and washing soda in the same quantities as above but without the water, and store in an airtight container. Shake well before each use, and add 2 tablespoons per wash.

Another great tip is to use normal white vinegar as a fabric softener. You won’t smell it on the clothes, but it will leave them nice and soft. And it’s cheap – 2 litres costs less than $2 and lasts many loads. I’ve also read that if you put your clothes through the dryer (What? You don’t use the sun to dry your clothes?!) the vinegar helps reduce static cling, meaning you don’t need to use dryer sheets.

I’ve read that using soap like this in a washing machine can lead to a build-up of soap residue. To prevent this, you can run the occasional wash with a commercial laundry detergent to break down the residue. If you’re using vinegar as a fabric softener, though, you won’t even need to do this!

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2. Reducing Electricity Consumption