New year, new projects

Happy New Year everyone! I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas/Solstice/holiday season. Here's to 2011!

I am not a great one for resolutions. I realised early on that I tend to set such worthy but dull and joyless goals to achieve over the coming months; I actually do myself a great service when I neglect them half way through January. Besides, all the regular green and frugal goals just roll over from the previous year anyway - pay off debts, use less energy, eat healthier seasonal food. So this year, instead, I have a few experiments to run with.

For all the wonderful presents Santa brought this year, he was outdone before he even took to the skies by a nice lady from the city council. On Christmas Eve a hefty letter thudded through our letterbox, offering us an allotment! We have been on the list for 3 and a half years and I almost cried tears of joy when I read through the contract and rules and regulations (never before have I been so happy to wade through so much bureaucracy). As demand is so high and land so scarce here, our plot is 1/3 the size of a traditional plot, but 75m² is still a sizable space to work with in conjunction with the space on our patio. So my big project for 2011 is to experiment with growing stuff. Specifically, I want to grow as much edible, delicious produce as possible for as little work, inputs and money as possible. I have a hunch that this will take much longer than one year, but I have dusted of my permaculture and gardening manuals and begun my masterplan.

This feeds nicely into my other main project for the year, one that will probably involve lots of little experiments. 4 years of a relatively mindless data entry job, combined with parenting related lack of sleep has unfortunately whittled away what was previously an insatiable curiosity to a mindless consumer of media and current affairs information. The rot needs to stop before I am completely Zombiefied, so this will be a year of reading weighty books, asking deeper questions and thinking deeply about things, along with lots of practical experiments along the way. It will also be a year of checking the national and international news just once a week as opposed to several times a day and perhaps also the occassional Internet fast. So experiment 2 can be summed up thus - an experiment to eradicate boredom from my life.

Both of these projects, alongside all of the ongoing goals that roll over year on year are more than enough to keep me occupied for 12 months. I have no idea where the second one will be taking me yet, but it has to be somewhere interesting. There is a third experiment in the offing - but you will have to wait a few weeks for that one...

What do you have planned for 2011?