Sustainability stories - Ludlow LM

Barbara Mark, Ludlow LM

There are 3 of us in our house, my son of 24 and me and my husband. We are all trying to run businesses from the property. Our energy bills are quite high but we are in the house full time and a lot of that is sitting still in front of a computer, and you get cold doing that. I have no control over their life styles but I do provide the food and cleaning services. However I will say none of us are great shoppers and live on minimal clothing shopping expeditions. In fact my husband’s clothes have to get quite holy before I can force him out to the shops. Also our kitchen appliances and household furniture is simple and all getting rather old as well. So we are not extravagant with those things. We do try and mend things before we go out and buy new. We are at the moment trying to get new springs to mend out door handles.

Here are the things I did to achieve a 10% reduction in my CO2 footprint. I have grown more vegetables and stopped buying any vegetables from abroad. This means I am using seasonal vegetables and am experimenting with different crops, especially winter ones. For two days a week I have cut out meat in our main meal and am looking into reducing it some more. I reduced the times I drove into town to once a week because I saved up the things I needed to do and then did them all in one visit. It takes a bit of planning and it is quite upsetting when it does not work out. I have to visit my mother at a nursing home now but this is much less than the three visits a day to her home in the next village that I was doing. I have not bought any new cloths and am using up the old ones in the wardrobe that I never particularly liked. I did buy a pair of shoes though. I only vacuum and clean the house once a week, saving on cleaning products and electricity. I usually use eco friendly products for this but I will use bleach or a stronger cleaner if I need to. Lastly, our two holidays a year are in this country and when we arrive at our destination we try very hard not to use our car.

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