Lots more Sneaky Ways to save the pennies

[Deleted User]

If you stick a little squirt of vinegar into the tomato ketchup bottle and give it a good shake you can usually get the last bit out.My DGS go through enormous amounts of ketchup at times and I am always doing the balancing act with bottles in their house

YorksLass

VfM4meplse wrote: »

Now this really is penny pinching but it works, are you ready...?

:rotfl:Nope, it's not penny pinching - it's saving pennies that, as all of us here know, make £££s!

Primrose wrote: »

Oh the "upside down" bottle balancing trick is a regular one in our household too with hand wash and hair shampoo also regularly being mixed. It's quite satisfying to see those last remaining little drops being squeezed out!

I'm not much good at juggling small spherical objects but by golly I've got the balancing upside down bottles down to a T!

JackieO wrote: »

If you stick a little squirt of vinegar into the tomato ketchup bottle and give it a good shake you can usually get the last bit out.My DGS go through enormous amounts of ketchup at times and I am always doing the balancing act with bottles in their house

Yep, I do this too but with water rather than vinegar; the very last dregs usually get tipped into any tomato-based sauce. If it's brown sauce that goes into gravy.

Primrose: I do this with 2-litre lemonade bottles to make mini cloches that just fit inside a small plant pot.

Primrose

YorksLass wrote: »

Primrose: I do this with 2-litre lemonade bottles to make mini cloches that just fit inside a small plant pot.

I grow my climbing beans up individual canes rather than a tied frame so jumbo lemonade bottles make ideal cloches for small bean seedlings. The only problem is lifting them up to the top of a 6 foot+ tall cane to remove them when they start trying to grow out of the top of the bottle or on day when the sun gets too hot and threatens to cook them !

Gem-gem

My hubby always cuts up the tubes of tomato pur!e, toothpaste and shampoo so that we can get every last bit out.

Gem-gem

Had a bad day at work today so instead of cooking, hubby and I were going to go out for date night. On the way to we**erspoons we popped into the supermarket and picked up: a large meat pizza for 50p; 4 x 1pts of milk for 9p each; 4 x wholemeal batons of bread for 9p each; 8 tiger rolls for 18p and 4 crusty rolls for 9p and finally a garlic pizza for 26p. In total we spent £1.84. Today I found 20p by the road near work and hubby found £2.10 on the high street at various places. So today's food didn't cost us anything.
We didn't make to the pub, but ended going home cooking the pizza and adding rocket to it after and drinking some of the cider that hubby bought with his £5 Morr**on voucher. (It was free). So in total a very cheap evening. Saved lots of pennies.

Gem-gem

Primrose wrote: »

I may have mentioned this before but if you grow your own vegetables and buy bottled mineral water, buy the square 5 litre plastic bottles. When empty, just cut of the bottom of the bottles with a sharp knife.


They make excellent individual cloches for small tomatoes, courgettes, etc. and you can place a cane through the ventilation hole at the top to keep it in place on windy days. Most of them also come with a plastic carrying ring around the neck which enables you to store them all on a long bamboo cane when not in use. Similar shaped plastic cloches in garden centres cost a small fortune.

Thanks for the tip about the cloches.

mcculloch29

Not just tomato puree. toothpaste and shampoo but almost anything in a tube can be cut open to get out the contents. Hand cream often has a week's supply hiding within.

I use laundry gel and use my kitchen shears to cut the bottle in half when "empty". I then put both halves of the bottle in a 3/4 full load.

Doing this also washes the bottle out nicely ready for recycling. There's always some gel left within.

ancientofdays

I use a plastic funnel for decanting dregs of hand wash etc. It doesn't fall over, unlike the times when I've tried the balancing act.

VfM4meplse

mcculloch29 wrote: »

Not just tomato puree. toothpaste and shampoo but almost anything in a tube can be cut open to get out the contents. Hand cream often has a week's supply hiding within.

Agreed. I did this with an old tube of fragranced cream that came from a gift set. It's come out of my handbag now (too risky!) and sits on my dressing table, where I shall be prioritising it's use over other scents until it's gone (it won't smell nice once oxidised).

Datchet

JessaEra wrote: »

Since I love gardening, I used those empty tin cans and bottled water as a seedbed for my vegetable seedlings. I also make some flower vases out from empty wines decorated with some colored paper and recycled Christmas d!cor.

Good prompt - thanks ! Garden centres and marketing around gardens are designed to fleece us! What is supposed to be a thrift practice - home-grown veg - can prove very expensive if one gives in to all the hype. We recycle all pots and planters, use toilet roll middles and compost as much as we can. We also sell rhubarb and seedlings on our drive to off-set costs ( mostly compost )

One indulgence is a gardening mag subscription - which yields so many freebie seeds and competition wins that I like to kid myself that it pays for itself!

Some rain would be good... I'm looking at having to haul Jerry- cans of water down the plot this week to get the fava beans and potatoes going...

Happy saving!