Are you serious about going green?

What with COP26 going on in Glasgow, and the pledges to cut global methane emissions, preserve rainforests and limit coal-burning, it's time to reflect on our own individual behaviour with respect to the planet that we all share.

• Are you painfully aware that manmade climate change is real, and that the likelihood of a 3C global temperature rise by the end of this century would be catastrophic for humanity and for the environment?
• Or is this just something you accept and brush off with a "meh" before scrolling down to the next news item or turning the page of your newspaper?
• Or do you deny that such as thing as anthropogenic atmospheric warming exists, believing this to be nothing more than a conspiracy?

Has the reality of climate change altered your behaviour as a consumer, as a householder, as a commuter?

Do you have a nagging sense of guilt that you should be doing more as an individual to hold back the inexorable heating up of our planet? Or do you think that this is exclusively the role of governments and corporations?

What are you doing to cut your CO₂ footprint?

Let's start with travelling to work.

Do you subscribe to game theory, thinking "why should I make sacrifices to my lifestyle, why should I give up comfort and convenience, if others continue to live as they always have?" Game theory is central to the conundrum of driving to work in traffic jams. Whatever incentives and disincentives the authorities devise - cheaper, better, public transport, road-pricing, higher fuel duties - the net result of getting more people out of cars and onto buses is... more people driving to work because the roads seem less congested. The average car in cities of the developed world is used to drive 1.2 people an average  11km (6.8 miles) to work,

I gave up driving to work in 2011; I did not replace my 20-year-old Nissan Micra 1.0 when it reached the end of its useful life two years later. I do not own a car. I do, however own three 125cc motorbikes, cherished and ridden only on warm sunny days, no more than a couple of thousand kilometres per year in total. I walk to do my food shopping. By not buying more than I can carry, I do not waste food. I recycle waste into six streams (general, paper/card, plastics, steel, aluminium and glass). Vegetable stalks, peelings, coffee grounds etc go into the garden. Radically, since 2011, I don't use the toilet at home to wee, instead I store urine for use as mole-deterrent and fertiliser (but then I have a big garden). This saves between 10 and 15 tonnes of clean water a year. I do not mow my lawn, allowing a meadow with wildflowers to grow back, attracting bees and butterflies. I use a scythe to maintain a small lawn around the house. 

My diet contains little meat, the occasional beef steak as a rare treat. I buy second-hand clothes wherever possible (though, I must say, all of them were bought in London - see below).

My father's death and Covid have effectively curtailed my regular flights to London. According to ICOA's Carbon Emissions Calculator, each return flight from WAW to LHR contributed 276 kilograms of carbon dioxide - over a quarter of a tonne. Times ten such flights a year, that's nearly three tonnes. Just me flying, no suitcase, just hand luggage. To put into perspective, driving a large diesel-engined SUV 16,000km / 10,000 miles a year produces five tonnes of carbon dioxide.

At times I feel I am an outlier. Do you think it's weird to take such steps to reduce to a minimum my environmental footprint upon this planet? Human life in the developed and indeed developing world cannot continue as it has done. If every human had the living standard of the average American, we'd need the natural resources of between four and half planet Earths. My consciousness plans to return after the physical demise of my body, so I feel a long-term stake in the future.

Do have a look at this BBC explainer, Four Things You can do about Your Carbon Footprint.

This time last year:
Nail-biting walk

This time three years ago:
Insights in the search for consciousness

This time four years ago:
Loving Vincent - review

This time eight years ago:
UFO credibility test

This time nine years ago:
Junction ready for road to unbuilt sports centre

This time ten years ago:
Park nad Książecem - Vistula escarpment, beautiful autumn

This time 13 years ago:
Obama wins US presidential election

The Wilderness and the Garden

I have an acre of land in Jakubowizna, fecund and unkempt. Upon it has stood these past 30 years a small house; the rest is vegetation. Grass, trees, flowers, weeds - all are thriving. Living, growing, expanding, getting in each other's way, reaching for the light, pushing their roots deep into the earth for water and the soil's nourishment. Berries and fruit grow according to their will, dropping when ripe.

And then along come I. In my hands, a scythe, a fork, a spade, secuteurs, a lopper, and shears. I see the weed, it stands in my path - I cut it. Dense trees - pruned back. Undergrowth hacked. Yet I have moral objections to slaughtering plant life; I see the bees hopping from flower to flower - I must spare the meadow. Yes - some lawn round the house, some paths through the trees and around the plot, access to the berries and the plum trees and apple trees...

Other than fruit-bearing trees, I would like three species of tree in my garden. Pine and silver birch - for aesthetic reasons. I love looking at those two trees especially when the sun shines on their trunks in the early evening. And the oak, the mighty oak that from the acorn grows. The sacred oak, from which, in Polish, my surname derives.

Left: this oaken sapling was spared the scythe, despite being on the path between the front garden and the house. Soon, the leaves will fall off it, leaving a bare, unidentifiable twig. I shall allow it to grow where it is. There's another one about a metre to the left of this one; likewise, I'll let it grow. But there will come a time when one will have to make way for the other. Oaks take up much space.

I have tried to replant oak saplings where I want them - but so far, my attempts ended in failure. So now I am planting acorns and pine-cones into soil loosely tipped into large glass jars (below). Will the seeds bring forth new trees? The jars will be left outdoors over the winter. We'll see in spring.

Since I bought my first house nearly 40 years ago, my father always warned me against planting trees too near buildings and fences. As a soil engineer, he knew well the damage roots can do to brickwork, concrete and pipes. Climate change means stronger winds; my neighbours, mindful of the fact they've recently seen gales of record ferocity, have felled or pruned all the tall trees that could potentially topple onto to their house. Forest fires, though not yet a major threat here in Poland, are something of which I'm aware, which is why I intend to have a gravel drive on the eastern side of the plot, between my house and the untended forest next to it, to act if necessary as a fire break.

So my first principle is keeping plants back from the perimeter of the house and garage. 

Privacy is important, but not with a fast-growing conifer screen, rather I would prefer the trees already along my fence-line to grow, but pruned sensibly. The north end of the garden, from where the sun doesn't shine, can be more densely wooded. In good time.

Stinging nettles are said to be good to eat - though in spring, before they flower. I'd like to plant sorrel (szczaw), I love the taste.

This time last year:
Back in Aviation Valley

This time two years ago:
My flight to Rzeszów - delayed!

This time five years ago:
English as she is used in Europe

This time six years ago:
Where asphalt is needed - Nowy Podolszyn to Zgorzala
[six years on it's still not there]

This time 11 years ago:
I cycle to work along the cyclepath along ul. Rosoła

This time 12 years ago:
First apple 

This time 13 years ago:
Late summer spiders webs

Eat Polish apples, drink Polish cider

So Putin's pulled down the shutters on Polish food imports - this will hurt those Polish producers and middlemen who thought they could prosper by feeding The Bear. The embargo will reverberate across the Polish economy - GDP growth is likely to slow by a few tenths of a percentage point (outturn for 2014 more likely to be 2.9% than 3.3%), while inflation will fall - maybe even into deflationary territory - as a result of oversupply on the Polish market.

The #JedzJabłka ('eat apples') campaign across the social media is gaining traction; if you want to hit back at Putin, buy Polish apples. Poland is the world's number one exporter of apples and number two producer of apples. Outside in our garden, the apple tree is groaning with apples that come September will start falling to the ground in abundance.

As Poland begins coming to terms with an apple mountain of unprecedented proportions, media pundits have taken up my call for a massive expansion of Polish cider-making, which requires above all a change in absurd excise rules that class cider over 5% as a fruit wine, rather than as a beer equivalent. [I wrote about this last month.]

The absurdity came to a head the other day when Celtic, a Scottish foot-ball club, visited Warsaw to play against Legia, a Polish foot-ball club. Celtic is sponsored by Magners, a cider brand unavailable in Poland, containing 4.5% alcohol by volume. Legia is sponsored by Królewskie, a well-known beer brand containing 5.8% alcohol by volume. Now, because Magners is a cider and the advertising of cider - even on the shirts of visiting foot-ballers is prohibited in Poland - the Celtic players had to change their shirts to ones not bearing the brand. Beer adverts, on the other hand, are fine. And because Poles like the taste, brewers get round the ban by simply adding apple juice to beer (Redds, Warka Radler, Lech etc). This is the type of regulatory madness must be stamped out with extreme prejudice.

If Poland is to soak up the apples that Putin won't buy, it needs to be able to add value to them - by pressing them in local cider-presses and fermenting the resulting juice into high-quality cider. And advertise that cider in the same way that beer is advertised. And exported in quantity to the free world.

In the meanwhile, Polish cider sales are booming. From nearly zero in 2012, Polish consumers drank 2m litres of cider in 2013; this year sales are expected to reach 10m litres (By way of reference, British consumers drank 1,000m litres of cider last year - the UK being the world's no. 1 cider producer and consumer of cider.) And things are looking good at Auchan - the price of Weston's Old Rosie has come down from 17zł to 10zł a half-litre bottle - a benchmark of cider excellence.

Below: Polish cider (Cydr Lubelski) and Polish apples. I bought this cider because it was the only Polish brand available in Auchan today - there was Warka Perry and lots of fruity concoctions from the Baltics - plus of course Weston's Old Rosie and Weston's Vintage.

Mr Finance Minister please - get rid of the requirement for an excise band over the bottle, reduce the excise duty on all ciders to the same level as beer, and scrap the ban on cider advertising. And do so quickly, before Putin's embargo can do any lasting harm to Poland's agricultural economy. Below: the banderola, or excise band. You'll find this on cigarettes and vodka - but why-oh-why on cider? This is plain nuts.

Poland has such a huge potential when it comes to cider. It just needs the ministries to deregulate and liberalise. The market will do the rest.

Additional reading - in Polish
Countdown to Putin's fruit embargo
and
Poles are eating 'Freedom Apples' (and drinking cider in solidarity)
and (thanks for the link Paddy)
Cider ad ban likely to be scrapped

This time last year:
Hottest week ever (37C - that's 9C more than it was today)

This time two years ago:
Progress along the second line of the Warsaw Metro (still no sign of its impending completion as I write)

This time three years ago:
Doric arches, ul. Targowa

This time four years ago:
A place in the country, everyone's ideal

This time seven years ago:
I must go down to the sea again

My ogród is my działka

Weather-wise, it's such a lovely day. From yesterday evening until tomorrow morning there will not be a single cloud in the heavens above Our City. Hot (30C), dry, with just a whisper of a breeze. Absolutely ideal. Time, then, to make the most of it - some sun-protection cream, a deck-chair, and a day to enjoy the garden (below). Enjoying rest and solitude, I ponder on the nature of the garden in the context of Poland.

Like the English word 'garden', with it's roots in the French verb 'garder', with concept of keeping or protecting something, the root of the Polish word ogród is seen the Russian 'Gorod' (town), and the concept of surrounding a place with a fence (as in defence) in order to protect it. A garden, and an ogród, must be ogrodzone or fenced off. Living in a house on a plot of land, one has one's own działka, or literally, plot.

I wrote (here and here) about the importance of the działka (which has come to mean summer house) in Polish society. Most Poles live in flats in towns and cities and many of those own a działka in the countryside. Like Russians and the dachas.

The word działka comes from the verb dzielić, 'to divide'. Small parcels of land, divided among workers' families; larger parcels of land, divided among the Party faithful. The future of many działki, in particular those in sought-after urban areas, is uncertain, as their legal status is often in the hands of local authorities who are partial to the blandishments of developers.

Below: American blueberries (borówki). I pick nearly half a kilo; it's a good year for this berry. Sadly, blackcurrants (czarne porzeczki), which I love, have not come into fruit this year at all (and I can't see them in the shops, either).

Left: the transience of joy. A pair of dragonflies, my favourite insects. I ponder on the fact that today the garden is entirely free of mossies (the dreaded culex pipiens), which is the staple diet of the delightful dragonfly, and I wish them bountiful offspring.

Meanwhile, back in the house, an update on the cat situation. While Eddie and I were in Wales, Feluś and Izia have gone to a new home, leaving Czester and his mum Lila (below). Lila's breeding days are over; she's the 'cat in the kaftan', having been sterilised last week (no more kittens for Lila, then). Mum and son are doing what cats like doing best when it's 26C outside - taking a well-deserved nap.

Eddie comes home and we cook a spicy Punjabi chicken curry together (with Basmati rice and fresh spinach), washed back with a Lidl shandy. As I write this post, it's just gone nine pm and it's still 26C outside.

This time last year:
Poland's 'lemmings' will sink the Right

This time two years ago:
Mazowieckie province tempts with mini- and micro-breaks

This time three years ago:
Pride and anger

Pregnant cats should not climb trees

Moni's cat that came from Łódź to become a permanent part of the household is pregnant. Liluś eats more, spends more time resting on rugs or radiators and is less frisky. However, that other call of nature - the imperative to ascend trees - proved stronger than the maternal instinct. She spent all night up this silver birch. But by morning the thought of a full cat bowl prompted her to make a cautious descent into my waiting arms.

Being a tortoiseshell-and-white tabby, her offsprings' colour will be determined by gender. Only the females will acquire tortoiseshell colouration; Lila's male kittens are more likely to reflect the father's coat. Five or six weeks to go...

This time last year:
TPSA turns Orange

This time two years ago:
Prophesies

This time three years ago:
Volcano shuts down aviation over NW Europe

This time four years ago:
Large, charismatic fowl

This time five years ago:
Antonov An-26 in the twilight of its career

Sublime evening in the garden

The Golden Time of Day; the magic hour draws near. I sit on a deckchair sipping a beer (Żywiec Porter, an excellent brew let down - as most Polish beers are - by being too sweet), gazing across the side garden as the sun dips below the trees. That sublime mood of well-being comes over me.

Time to immortalise the evening for the blog. I nip in for the camera, and take a few shots to share here. Below: looking south-west from the patio - the trees and bushes have matured over the nine and half years since we moved into a house that essentially had no garden, just 1,200 sq. m. of soil.

Below: view of the house from the back garden. Sky made bluer with polarising filter. Some bare patches in the soil, resulting from most recent mole invasion.

Spidery autumn

The garden is full of spiders. Between every shrub or tree, there's a spider's web. And at the centre of these webs are garden spiders of all sizes. I notice an interesting thing - that the smaller and medium sized spiders are entirely OK about a human wandering up to them with a tripod and zooming a long black lens in on them. On the other hand, the largest spiders - the really impressive ones - take immediate fright and leg it back into the cover of the bushes. So the spiders I offer are merely the medium-sized ones. Why do the large ones run off? Are they conditioned to know that their very bulk makes them tasty morsels to birds? Which rather implies a degree of self-consiousness... "I'm big enough to be considered food by that large mammal with that black three-legged thing over there - RUN!"

Another thing of interest is the variations in how neat and symmetrical a spider makes its web. Is the web neat because the spider possesses the neatness gene? Or because the wind wasn't blowing so hard? Is there a evolutionary advantage to spinning neat, symmetrical webs? Above: Spider on the left's a bit of an untidy specimen compared to the one on the right. Biology or environment?

I bring out the 55mm Macro-Nikkor, bounce some sunlight onto the subject with a table mirror, and - what a beast! Worth clicking to see the portrait of a spider, shot from its underside, in its full glory.

I wonder what it's thinking, other than sensing a threat in my (close) presence with macro lens. Do spiders have consciousness as in self-awareness?

Fieldfare in midwinter

I spotted this bird in our garden from the ground floor study - this is somewhat rarer than the brown-all-over common-or-garden thrush. The grey head and speckled belly struck me as unusual.

Thanks to reader Mis for identifying the bird as a kwiczoł - fieldfare - which according to Wikipedia is a migratory bird that normally winters in the south.

And a propos of our garden, two molehills appeared overnight, great brown heaps of soil on the virgin snow. This being midwinter, I'm not going to be reeling out the hose to flush the vermin out. I hope there'll not be too much more mole activity before the spring (!).

Winter itself is turning miserable, with temperatures rising above zero. It's still a long, long, long time until spring arrives in this part of Europe. I hope for another freeze (never mind the gas bill!)

UPDATE: 16 January and there are now five molehills on the back lawn.

This time last year:
Kraków beckons once more
Melting snow, disappearing winter

First apple

What's that splash of red on our apple tree? Why, it's an apple. Indeed the very first one on the tree, planted five years ago. While our garden has proved fruitful, with lots of blackberries (turned into delicious smoothies by my wife, blended with raspberries and blueberries), sour cherries, white raspberries and wild strawberries, our apple tree has not, until now, borne any fruit. So it's a pleasure to see at least one apple on it.

This is, in any event, a bumper year for Polish apples; prices have fallen to the point where many growers are not bothering to pick them. The price for industrial apple (for juice) is 10 grosze a kilo - literally a penny a pound.

Colleagues in the office bring delicious apples in from their family działki, with the right balance of crispness, sweetness and acidity. The unsprayed apples might have blemishes and be an odd size, but are tastier than the standardised hypermarket bought apples. I await with interest what our first apple will taste like!

Have the moles got the message?

Didn't want to write too soon, but this morning was the third day in a row I woke to find no new mole holes on our lawn. It may yet be premature to say that talpine activity has been halted. My theory is that after three long high-pressure blasts with the garden hose, which (after 20+ minutes each) must have flooded the deepest recesses of the moles' tunnels, there must have been Casualties. The bodies of the drowned moles have started decomposing; the smell must be putting off others from coming this way. The ultrasound sticks are still beeping, some folk remedies have been put to use (bottles on sticks). My fear is returning from holiday and finding 100+ molehills on the lawn; that's still some way off. Until then, it's fingers crossed!

Many thanks to the many readers who've sent in their suggestions for ridding our garden of this particular pest.

POSTSCRIPT (I hope) Back from holidays on 11 August to find no new molehills.

No garden for moles

I am open to all methods of fighting mole infestation other than poisons. I looked at some yesterday; the packets all have warnings like "do not use if you have a cat or dog in the garden" or "do not use if you grow berries in your garden". Both apply to us, so no poison. Above: ripening blackcurrants on the edge of the lawn, close to the area of greatest mole intensity. Following last night's attempted to flood the moles out, I woke up to find a further four new moleholes have appeared overnight (two of them pictured right). I responded with a further concerted attack on the moles with high-pressure water. Eddie extended the hose to stretch right across to the far end of the garden, and we poured several cubic metres of water into the other end of the tunnel system. 

Our gardener told me this morning that the mild winter has led to a massive explosion in the mole population and the problem is evident in many of his clients' gardens. Nicole B from Hungary has helpfully suggested I use "holunder", which I discovered in Wikipedia is the German for elderberry. I read: "The crushed foliage and immature fruit have a strong fetid smell" There are elder trees on ul. Kórnicka, along the path leading to the railway track. I shall collect some fetid vegetation and pump it into the tunnel system. Our gardener has suggested keeping 'molewatch' at dusk; half an hour after sunset, lie still on the lawn, wait, watch, listen. And be ready to move fast with the spade.

[The answer, ladies and gents, is human urine, fresh or fermented. Carefully remove the molehill with gloved hands, restoring the lawn, find the entrance to the tunnel network, and pour in the pee. Five, ten litres per hole will do the trick - and do wonders for the grass above the tunnels.]

Moles in my own garden

I woke up on Saturday morning to the sight of several molehills on our back lawn. My wife, having taken advice from our gardeners, bought three ultrasound devices, seen stuck into the molehills (above), which give off an annoying high-pitched beep every 30 seconds. The number of molehills has not increased overnight, so it seems effective as a deterent (I didn't want to lay poison traps for environmental reasons; there's lots of fruit growing in the borders. We've not had a mole outbreak like this before; our cat (which has killed several moles) must be getting lazy. Cut back on the Kit-e-Kat! To live, you must kill!

A Celebration of The Garden

What do I love most about deep suburb, living on the city's rim? Urban Varsovians have their little balconies and their podwórka, I have this. The sublime. Man and nature in spiritual and aesthetic harmony.

This post prompts me to talk about the use of polarising filters in photography. The circular polariser allows one to get bluer skies. Is this trickery? My view is this. On sunny days, I'm wearing polarised sunglasses. They give this effect. This is how the world looks like to me. So when I photograph my world, I want a subjective record of how a given scene looked and felt to me; I want to conjure up the same atmosphere/mood/feeling I got when looking at the scene.

The same applies to tweaks in Photoshop. As well as judicious cropping and compressing, I use Photoshop to make my photos more vivid - this is usually done by increasing contrast and saturation a touch, and reducing brightness a touch. My aim in doing so is to bring the emotional impact of the photo closer to that which I felt at the time.

As you can see, the blueness of the sky varies from photo to photo. This depends on the camera angle. If you point your thumb towards the sun and form a right angle with your forefinger, it will point to the darkest, bluest part of the sky - and the polarising filter will exaggerate this effect. Of course, you need a single lens reflex (SLR) type camera to see the sky darkening and lightening in the viewfinder as you turn the filter.

How do we keep our garden looking so beautful, you are all asking yourselves. My secret - I do not do a hand's turn but leave it to the professionals who know what they're doing. Eats quite a hole into the family budget over the summer months, but hey! it's worth it.