Live on £4000 for a Year, 2009 Challenge, part 2

patchwork_cat

Our cats love to sit in the pots - I had 4 fancy lollo rosso, biando etc. growing outside all winter! ( was really pleased although pulled right up to the house) and Sooty slept on them! They never recovered!

taka

There was sun today? I've been locked in a darkened cell (ok my boxroom with no outside windows :rotfl: ) all day writing a report. I couldn't concentrate at work the at the end of last week as there is building work ongoing in my building (lots of drilling :mad:) so I'm trying to catch up today... *sigh*. I'm really nervous about handing it in - it's quite stilted and not very good. I haven't written any scientific writing longer than a page or so since I did my Honours project and that was 11 years ago. :eek: Oh well - hopefully practice makes perfect...

I have this irrational fear that my boss is going to laugh at it and spot a glaring error or 6, or something really basic I've got incorrect, or just look really dissapointed at which point I'll burst into tears ! (Guess what I dreamt about last night :rolleyes:). Most likely what will happen will be he will briefly flick through it, then bury it somewhere on his desk never to be seen again. :rolleyes:

SFT - why on earth are they having an issue with your blog? Very odd!

Time to get back to it... :rolleyes:

cw18

Lovely day here today too :T

Spent 3 hours (!) mowing the lawns, but that included edging them all so we can see the 'kerbs' again (not sure of the real term, but they're narrow grey bands that look like the sides of flagstones )

If it's nice tomorrow (looks promising ATM) then I'm taking my strimmer and extension lead down to DDs in the morning. Need to get her front tidy before she gets a warning from the council for the third year in a row ( :eek: ) so I'll run the strimmer over that as a starting point. The back half of her back garden also needs strimmer treatment as her mower won't reach that far without an extension - so I'll then leave the extension with her for now so she can mow the lot afterwards




Couple of questions for those of you who 'grow your own'.

If you have raised beds, how high are the sides?

I've been looking at some plastic ones (more child friendly and lower maintainance than wooden ones, although considerably more expensive to start with). I've found some that work out a lot cheaper than the ones I was looking at a few years back - but only 'cos there's a big difference in height which means I'd definitely need to double up on the ones I orginally saw. The 'originals' are 15cm, the others are 25cm - and to be honest, I have a feeling that the dalmatian will be trying to get into the crops even at 25cm !!!! If his food bowl is on top of two plastic boxes (about 30cm) he eats without a problem, but on top of 3 (45cm) he really struggles. So given he'd have to get over the sides and dig for things like carrots I might be OK with 25cm - but it could be a different story with things like caulis :eek: Would probably mean putting some kind of net screen round the edges of the raised beds as a deterrent, which I could also do with the 15cm ones which would bring down the start-up price. But would 15cm really be deep enough for growing crops like carrots and rhubarb? (guessing I'd need someone considerably deeper for potatoes). I'm on a pretty heavy soil, though not as clay-like as my last house, so I would need enough depth in the beds as the crops wouldn't want to try rooting any further down.

Also, does anyone have fruit trees? How much space would these take? (looking at the self-pollinating, dwarf root stock types).
One of the shopping channels had a 'mini orchard' set with 4 varieties today (pear, apple, plum and cherry), which they said need to be about one fence panel apart from each other and can grow in a 30 litre pot for the first 4 or 5 years -- seems an awfully small pot if they need that much space to me But if they need any more space than that I'm only going to have room for a couple


Supposed to be dejunking the house with a veangance this week, but am thinking that if the weather holds I may make a start on the garage tomorrow afternoon. If I can get some space sorted in there, then it'll give me somewhere to put packed boxes until I have a full car load to take to storage - and may even manage to make enough space in there to use the garage instead of a storage unit if we have decent weather for a couple of weeks (wishful thinking!)

liloandstitch

SiannieLaz wrote: »

Hey Lilo, I get the frozen fish fillets & just put them in the oven wrapped in foil with a little butter or oil, some herbs and a bit a lemon, they taste nearly as good as the fresh ones!

Thanks for this SiannieLaz. Do you cook them from frozen or defrost them first?

Cha97michelle, how wonderful of the ILs, that will be really wonderful getting those things done. How generous. And even better if it will save you money in the future.

We have had a lovely day, finally got some time out in the garden, and got some plants in and some bushes cut back. We had extras for dinner today, so 7 for a roastie, and a lovely apple crumble, and a second apple and rhubarb crumble - yummy. Ebay auctions have finished and made over £107 which was fab and far more that I thought we would get.

Tomorrow we are hoping to go to Hampton Court Palace which will be great. We will have something like afternoon tea out, but I will take sandwiches etc with us to keep costs down.

Hope everyone has a good day. Lilo

cha97michelle

[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Michelle/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot-5.jpg[/IMG]

Cheryl, thought i would put in a photo of my raised beds so you might get more idea, though it is only our 1st year so i'm no expert. It is an old rockery that we dug the shrubs out of, so it is a couple of feet above ground level at the front, but the wall on the back is about 5 feet. We've put a fence around it by getting some metal posts and then cable tying the netting around it, and we have marked out square feet using canes and some garden twine. There are 3 beds all the same size, and the soil gets more clay like as you go from left to right. This was because one of the cats thought we had made him his own personal latrine :rolleyes:

We also found a slug colony under the coping stones on the back wall, so we had to get rid of them, and now they have been replaced by a baby toad living under there.

We also have a mini orchard. a lemon, an orange, 3 dwarf apples and one dwarf pear. They are in zinc planters that are about 3 feet deep, and the diameter of a b n q orange bucket, and we haven't left a lot of space between them at the moment, but i think we will have to move them from the spot in front of the bed later in the year as the spot is very windy.

I should get round to loading the latest piccies as everything has gone rather bonkers. I have a lot of stuff like potatoes and strawberries growing in the black flower buckets mr M leaves out for free.

Hope some of this info is helpful for your thinking. would a net fence like that stop your doggie?

Michelle x

cw18

Thanks Michelle

Would a net fence stop him? Simple answer is "I don't know" :rolleyes2 He's not baaaaad, in that he knows where limitations normally are (if I leave the stair gate in the living room door open when I nip in - or out - to get something he doesn't always go through, and if he does it's only after a lengthy hesitation if I've been distracted/delayed in getting back to close it).

It's since dawned on me that the other worry - especially with the ones that are only 15cm - is his "watering" of the crops :eek: So I'm actually starting to wonder whether I'd have to double up the 25cm ones to stop that But if yours are 24inches at the lowest point, then that's closer to 61cm - so doubling up would be nearer to the same. The extra may also help my back when weeding etc, but I'm not so sure about when it comes time to harvest root crops.......

fallen_angel_shelley

Hi. I hope everyone is well and enjoying the sunshine? It’s good to see so many people still here and doing really well:T. I seem to have fallen of the frugal wagon, I got side tracked with uni work and exams, the foundation year was a lot harder that I thought it would be. I have signed up for Junes grocery challenge so at least that is a step in the right direction to getting back on the wagon.

Shelley :beer:

angela110660

My hubby just made a frame to keep the birds off our strawberries - which btw are planted in my daughter's old sandpit. He used some wire like you would put on a rabbit's cage - cut sides and a top joined all the pieces with those plastic tie things you can get at B&Q etc. Because our wire has quite big gaps not like chicken wire - we are putting plastic netting over it and tieing that on too so that the whole thing is bird proof but is easy to pick up and move once our strawbs ae ready to eat. Very pleased with his efforts.

Frugaldom

Good morning fruguys and gals

We had a lovely day yesterday but it's not looking particularly sunny today.

Hi FallenAngelShelley, nice seeing you back, hope you're enjoying the studies even if they are proving more challenging than first anticipated

CW, Any dalmations I have known would be over those kind of heights without as much as a blink. I'd have thought you'd have needed at least a couple of feet in height just to deter him. As for the 'watering' near a veggie patch, umm.... I think I'd definitely be going for a fence around the edge as well. (Speaking as one who has fences everywhere to keep hens out. )

I got the mini orchard for my Christmas and then added to it with the cheap fruit trees from Aldi. I now have 9 trees in total and have promised the landlord that I won't let them get too big. I'm sure they would do finein the large flexi-trugs, which is where I originally planned to plant mine so they were easily moved. However, we bit the bullet and planted straight into the ground with about 2 metres (ish) between them.

Cha, your raised bed looks good, is that cabbages & courgettes I can see in there?

Lilo, I buy the frozen fish and use it for making fish pies, fish cakes and also just serving with parsley sauce. It defrosts quickly in the microwave but I've also cooked it from frozen. If it's for pie or fish cakes, I defrost and cook it in the microwave before making up the pie/fishcakes with whatever else I add.

SFT, nice blog. I can see why they may suspect spam - you've travelled far too much for one person. :rotfl:When we're loading web pages, we need to watch out for lists of words that don't form sentences - the 'spiders' have been taught to spot these lists of countries / counties / places etc and can automatically assume you're trying to spam keywords into the search engines. With the likes of G00gle, they can now block out sites that appear to be spam. If the problem continues, you'll need to write each country into a short sentence. Hope this helps

Taka, good luck with the report, but do try to get some daylight so the vitamin D doesn't drop too low, I'm told that this mixed with calcium can do strange things to the brain if provided in insufficient quantities (or was it excessive quantities?) Either way, get some sunshine to make you happy

I've now forgotten what else I have read, so apologies to anyone I've overlooked, congratulations, commiserations and best wishes to each and every one of you, as appropriate

lingojingo

cha97michelle wrote: »

[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Michelle/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot-5.jpg[/IMG]We also found a slug colony under the coping stones on the back wall, so we had to get rid of them, and now they have been replaced by a baby toad living under there.

How did you get rid of the slugs? We're plagued with slugs and snails here - last week in all the wet weather they ate all the leaves off the bedding plants I planted last weekend! :mad: I need a pet hedgehog or three :rotfl:

On a positive note, the potatoes and tomatoes are suddenly growing really fast in their bags.

Like the idea of raised beds on the rockery. We have an old rockery at the end of the garden, also about 2 foot high at the front with the garden wall behind. It's on 3 tiers and I've got some strawberries on the top one, just starting to flower. The rest is still flowers, but it could be good to try veg there next year as my garden is really tiny.