The essential problem for the beautiful mediaeval market town of Bradford on Avon is the amount of traffic that goes through the town. I have filmed two minutes of traffic on a Thursday night at 9:30pm. view video

This film below was taken at 9:30pm on a Thursday evening.  Even on a quiet weekday evening it is quite surprising how many cars there are going in both directions. There are no shops or supermarkets open and people would hardly be returning home from work.

I'll also film two minutes during the day

Update: planning approved the application

"Freshford Mill – Councillor Hugh Delap of Freshford Parish Council has been in contact with the YRD Freshford Ltd administrator. They have raised concerns over a Freshford website which
has un-factual information about the village in general and the Mill in particular posted on it. HD confirmed that this is nothing to do with the PC and is not endorsed by them." From freshford parish council minutes October 2011

Statement: although the website is not identified by name we have not received any requests from Freshford Parish council or any resident of Freshford to amend any content at any time on this website either recently or in the past.   Geoff Edwards Editorial team

Neighbourhood forums

The Localism Bill does promote neighbourhood forums but is somewhat unclear Neighbourhood planning changes in the Localism bill  This website does have a forum on which registered users may exchange views, publish articles, raise concerns and provides an opportunity for others to discuss these concerns. 

The website does thus provide a valuable service to the village and is part of the means be which residents may take part in the democratic process. The forum will of course contain expressions, opinions, and questions that may not be factual. Surely, the YRD Freshford Ltd adminstrator is not suggesting that unfavourable articles and comment be removed?  

"Freshford Mill – Councillor Hugh Delap of Freshford Parish Council has been in contact with the YRD Freshford Ltd administrator. They have raised concerns over a Freshford website which has un-factual information about the village in general and the Mill in particular posted on it. HD confirmed that this is nothing to do with the PC and is not endorsed by them." From freshford parish council minutes October 2011

Statement: although the website is not identified by name we have not received any requests from Freshford Parish council or any resident of Freshford to amend any content at any time on this website either recently or in the past. Freshford Mill forum update

Wiltshire is to have some of its potholed roads resurfaced at long last. Resurfacing roads involves temporary road closures and diversions. The work is scheduled for February 2012 to March and maybe affected by adverse weather. Details of the closures may be accessed on Westwood Parish council's website home page See the right hand side column under Road Safety.

I have written a general purpose recipe calculator for making chutney.  The problem with large quantities is that they will need to be cooked in batches. The size of the batches will depend on the size of the pan used. I have included the users preserving pan size, this allows for batches to be calculated according to that capacity. The calculator is set to my pan size which is 16 litres and uses the Green Pepper and Apple Chutney recipe as an example. After downloading the spreadsheet, just replace the ingredients with your own and adjust the pan size if necessary to yours. 

Important the first ingredient in the list is the one used to calculate the recipe. The calculator is in the same spreadsheet as the recipes. Excel chutney recipe calculator 

If you still have plenty of apples why not make chutney?  I have created a spreadsheet that calculates the proportion of ingredients for making different chutneys. At present there are two recipe spreadsheets, one for Pear chutney and one for Green pepper and Apple chutney. I have now made the recipe calculater general. Read more and download the Excel spreadsheet.  Recipe Calculator

Is it cheaper to cook using a crockpot which is a slow cooker rather than use an oven? Yes, I found this article when I Googled "how many Kilowatts  needed to oven cook a chicken" economic cooking the maths

I have a Crockpot and I am intending to buy a cast iron Dutch oven cooking pot as well which I will use in my garden and also in my electric oven and when camping. For outside use my fuel will be wood there is always plenty of twigs that I can burn as well, so my fuel will cost nothing.

Chutney not jam!

There isn't much point in having a calculator for jam is there as the ingredients are just fruit and sugar.

I have a recipe for pear chutney that I used both last year and this year. This year we have had a bumper crop of both apples and pears.  Pears are hard to keep and the chutney I made last year was very tasty,  I still have a few jars left.  It is often not easy to calculate the quantities required and so with the ripening of my second pear tree and an even larger crop I had to work out quantities for making chutney with 16 kg of fruit! That makes nearly 36 kg of chutney  :)

What I did was write an MS Excel spreadsheet. All that is required is to enter the quantity of fruit into the cell coloured green and the spreadsheet calculates the quantities for you. It can be downloaded here : Pear Chutney The spreadsheet quantity entered was set at 5 kg when I uploaded the file, just replace that with your quantity. The calculations are of course completely accurate. The recipe can be varied, for example one could add more or less onions.

 My next problem is how to conserve over 38 kg of chutney with my limited supply of jam jars!  I have read that using zip lock freezer bags is a suitable solution - fill them and lay them flat, it is then easier to store them in the freezer.  Of course you're better off with a chest freezer.

Large quantities of fruit for chutney?

It is one thing to have an Excel spreadsheet to calculate the quantities of ingredients for making a large amount of chutney but then the problem is the size of your pan. I have a 16 litre maslin pan bought locally at Knees in Trowbridge -the oldest department store in the West country. My pan can take 7 kg of  total ingredients in the pear recipe. Although that quantity starts off higher than the pot it renders down to a just manageable quantity. Unfortunately, I have not allowed for other recipies where the main flavour ingredient ie. green peppers is quite a lot less than the usual apple part of the recipe. I have modifed this post below but not the recipe yet.

If 7kg of total ingredients (excluding vinegar etc)  is optimal for a 16L pan then each litre of capacity will take 7/16 or 0.438  Use that factor to find out how much fruit you can use in your size pan. For example an eleven litre pan will take 11x0.438=4.81 kg total ingredients.

The result may not be a simple quantity of,  for example, 3.5 kg but the Excel recipe spreadsheet will manage any quantity of fruit.

Update:

Green pepper and Apple chutney

I have amended  the spreadsheet and improved it and also added a recipe for green pepper and apple chutney. I get my recipes from the Internet and trust they are good ones.

The improvements to the spreadsheet enable the recipes to be varied in the proportion of the different ingredients. Extra ingredients can also be added by using Insert - Rows. Heavy ingredients need to be entered in the upper part of the spreadsheet as the weight of the recipe will change.