The Rising Cost of Motoring

I came across an interesting article on walesonline.co.uk about the decline in car driving in Wales. Until 2007 the miles driven by Welsh motorists had been increasing, with a record 13.9 billion miles covered that year. By 2010 that had fallen to 13.3 billion miles. A similar trend is happening all over the UK with a 3% decline in “car use” since the peak and a 15% increase in cycling. The cause is the rising price of fuel. Motoring is becoming more expensive.

In the late 1990s during the dot com bubble, I worked for a Dublin based dot com business. I worked mostly from home, but had to go to Dublin at least once a week, a return journey of 130 miles. At the time I was driving a 1300 cc Toyota Starlet, from empty the fuel tank could be filled for ten Irish pounds. If I drove for economy this would take me to Dublin and back twice. So my daily commute of 130 miles cost me five pounds, the equivalent of perhaps six euros now.

Our 1996 Nissan Micra

My mother still drives that same car and she tell me it now takes about 40 euros to fill it with fuel. On this basis car fuel is almost three and half time more expensive now than it was in the late 1990s. If I were still doing the same commute today it would now cost me twenty euros on fuel alone. Throw in new road toll charges and higher parking charges and it would now cost at least five times more to do that 130 mile commute than it did in the late 1990s. Luckily I no longer have to commute to Dublin.

We now drive a 1996 Nissan Micra, a small and very light car (750 kg) with a 1000 cc engine. When driven carefully on a long journey it is possible to get close to seventy miles a gallon with it. With insurance and car tax also cheap, this is about as cheap as modern motoring comes.

But like the average UK driver we are cutting our mileage as much as possible. I now use a bicyle for all short journeys. The nearest village is two miles away, this is where our local shop, bank, post office, filling station and pub are. I no longer use the car to travel there unless I need to carry something heavy home. I have weaned myself off the ridiculous habit of doing short journeys in a car.

I use the bike for going to the pub, to visit friends and go to parties in the local area. These events often involve the consumption of alcohol and I sometimes end up over the legal limit for taking a vehicle on a public road. The beauty of the bike over the car, is that I can push it home.

Raised Beds

When I started learning about vegetable growing in the 1970s, most households in my community still had a kitchen garden. But almost everyone grew their vegetables in rows. It was only in the 1980s that I first came across raised beds.

There are medieval woodcuts of plants growing on raised beds. In Ireland before the famine crops were grown in lazy beds made by spade cultivation. Growing kitchen garden crops in rows is a modern system that came from field cultivation, where the crops were tended with horsepower, alleys were needed for the horse to walk on.

By the mid 1980s there were very few kitchen gardens left in Ireland, it was the preserve of eccentrics, greenies and hippies. But many of these eccentrics (myself included) were using raised beds. The recent collapse of the Irish economy has created a boom in kitchen gardening and most of these new Irish kitchen gardeners are using raised beds.

Raised beds have many advantages over row cultivation. The space that was used making room for the horse in drills, can be set to work growing crops. When space is limited raised beds will produce a much higher yield than rows. A crop like cabbage with broad leaves when planted close will form a canopy, smother weeds and save labour.

With raised beds the soil is not dug annually. This has three major advantages, first and most importantly digging is hard, time consuming manual labour. Second soil has a very complex microbial flora and fauna, with some microbes living close to the surface and some living deep. Digging inverts the soil, burying the surface life deep and bringing the deep life close to the surface. Disturbing the soils microbial life will not enhance productivity.

Third, fertile soil contains a vast bank of weed seeds. To germinate, a weed seed must be close to the surface. Every time the soil is dug a new crop of weed seeds are brought close to the surface, controlling these weeds after they germinate is a major job. By not digging, the weed seeds are left buried and the only weeds that need control are those that land on the surface of the bed.

In the damp Irish climate slugs are one of the most serious pests in the kitchen garden. They can devastate a bed of seedlings in a few hours. My raised beds are concrete and surrounded by concrete paths. There is no problem with slugs, because there is no dark, damp place for them to hide during the day. This is often not the case with timber beds, timber expands and contracts as it get wet and drys out. This can cause a small gap to develop between the timber and the soil, an ideal hiding place for slugs.

With beds compost is applied as a surface mulch and the worms carry it down. I built my raised beds nine years ago when we moved into our current house. I have never dug them since and do all cultivation with a hand fork and trowel. A few hours of leisurely work in spring and the ground is ready for planting, rather than many hours of digging, forking and raking.

Raised beds have only major disadvantage, it takes a lot of extra work to build them the first year. But this extra time is amply repaid in subsequent years, provided the beds are made of some long lived material like concrete or brick.

Food Stocks

I do most of the grocery shopping in our house. Until a few years ago I would make a shopping list and buy a weeks supply of food. But I now keep a well stocked larder. When shopping I'm mainly buying stock for the larder which will be stored for several months before it's used. I'm a recent convert to this system, my mother grew up doing this and still does. The only management issue is devising a rotation system that uses the oldest stock first.

Perishable items like fruit, veg, meat, milk and eggs, I buy every weekly and use quickly. In the autumn I get most fruit and veg from the garden and I don’t buy a lot of meat at any time of year. I never buy any kind of processed food, apart from being too expensive, it does not taste as good and is not as nutritious as home cooked food. And the packaging has to be disposed of, which is an ever growing cost.

Keeping a larder means always having the ingredients to make a meal in the house. In an increasingly unstable world it's a buffer against any immediate crisis and gives a feeling of security.

The following is a list of items I always have in the larder.

Tinned Tomatoes
Tinned Tuna
Pasta
Noodles
Oatflakes
Plain Flour
Strong White Flour
Rice
Lentils
Chickpeas
Olive Oil
Butter
Pepper
Salt
Sugar
Dried Herbs
Yeast
Soy Sauce
Curry Powder
Powered Milk
Cornflour
Tea
Coffee
Custard Powder
Potatoes