How to Get Through The Tough Times The Old Style Way.

charlies-aunt

Whats the difference between seed and ordinary potatoes?

I have half a dozen titchy 'Rooster' spuds rolling round the bottom of the veg box - they're a bit soft and starting to sprout . . . . just wondering if I can plant and grow from these? Has anyone tried this before?

rachbc

I planted seed and sprouted eating pots last year - the eatin ones did much much better!!

GreyQueen

Greying Pilgrim I hadn't found your kind post to be flippant in the slightest, I am here to learn as well as have a lark. Thank you for your pointers.

Seeds spuds are grown under special conditions to be "virus free" so that you'll get healthy crops. You can plant regular spuds and they will grow, but they might get poorly and be diseased. I get a yield of 9:1 of spuds harvested to spuds sown, so I consider my seeds spuds at £2.99 for 2.5 kg at G*dfreys money well spent. If it's Maris Piper/ Maris Bard, they come from the Cambridgeshire potato breeding centre, if they're Pentland Crown/ Javelin/ whatever, they're from the Scottish station. Potato blight (phytophera infestans*) is endemic in Britain and Ireland and lives in the soil. If it is sufficiently warm and humid, the spores activate and travel across country on the prevailing south-westerlies, hence the spud-breeding stations are in the east.

All right, you lot, this forum is too addictive and I am going to my allotment to dig my tattie patch right NOW.

Love and peas, GQ x

* spelled that from memory so probably not quite accurate. It is the same thing as affects tomatoes, as someone said further up the thread, as both plants belong to the same family Solanacae.*

* probably miss-spelled that, too.;)

kezlou

afternoon all!

Well i finished the tea cosey and cafeteria and guess what they work :j:j Ah that kept me amused last night making them, while OH mucked about with the internet.

I about to repot the rhubarb, when the blumming sun went in and dark clouds came over:mad::mad::mad:.

Not sure if were going to pop to a car boot sale today, we need more fuel and it might not be on. So its matter of risking it. Hmmm decisions.

Gping to MIL house today for dinner, going to ask her f she has any spare strawberries plants for me. She normally gives us loads of strawberries and rhubarb, some of which we freeze to use throughout the year. So i might have some soon to put tin the yard.

Gailey i can't believe how little your peeps ate! At our party every savoury thing was truly demolished. Were still eating the cakes and biscuits like, so its not too bad lol we nade a kilo of chicken nuggets which went in minutes, literally.. All the sandwiches disappered, cheese rolls, tuna, egg, all of it gone. Maybe 6/7 year olds eat more than 5 year olds, who knows. Or maybe they just gannets:o.In the end i must have made three lots of tuna, 3 lots of cheese and 2 lots of egg mayo, crazy or what?!

Oh and please don't take offence at what i've written, its just an observation. Just wish our party was like that!. Me and Oh prepped a buffet style meal, with mainly savoury on the kitchen table and sweet stuff on the work tops. ALl of which were in easy of the children.

Oh and trust on the tv side, i'm sorry i can't remember who wrote it, you won't miss sky etc. We haven't had it for 7 seven years and just the iplayer and such to watch tv we feel the need. We still have a landline and broadband, as i managed to egt a cheap deal with virgin. We went three or four weeks wihout in the web and my gawd what it hard. It was awful, its hard to believe how much we rely on it in our daily lives.


We had more electricy cuts yesterday, so not impressed, its been happening every bleeding week. So i got on the phone to the board and basically told them what had been happening, you know what they said, "well the problems in your house, so if you want us to come out its a £69 charge":mad::mad:. They no faults in your area". I even took the phone outside, all i could hear was house alarms going off. I was furious, they wouldn't take any responsibilty or send someone to the sub station to see what the problem was. In the end after 30 mins of my neighbours also phoning up and kicking off, they got the problem fixed four hours after i reported it, well i say fixed, it kept going on and off. The cheeky gets tried saying we hadn't had a power cut back in december. Err yes we did, we had no heating for almost a week. Finally got them to admit it had happened. Oh i'm so angry at them, i keep having to check the freezer to make sure the foods still edible.

Just makes it all that bit harder to keep on track.
sorry for whining all.

Mrs_Veg_Plot

Has anyone any suggestions as to what else I can do to reduce the cost of our living. The main things we are doing are as follows

I am full time (37.5hrs) and always work an extra shift at the weekends.
We have reduced to one car. I walk home from work every day except the weekends when OH picks me up. OH will cycle to and from work when the evenings are a bit lighter.
I have had my tax re calculated and my tax code has been reduced (will see exactly how much by per month this month).
I cook from scratch and meal plan. Have down branded and buy the majority of groceries as own brand. Have halved the weekly shop compaired to this time last year. Make my own bread, cakes and biscuits.
We have changed our suppliers where we have found better deals.
We grow quite a bit of our own veg, mainly salad type stuff last year and some veg (including winter veg) as we started late but have started early this year.
OH has started to sell stuff on ebay and is planning to go to carboots as we have a lot of stuff in the attic.

What else are you all doing out there?

kezlou

chocclare -

Seed and shop bught eating spuds can bought be put in the ground and grown. I do it all the time.

Potato seeds are heat treated to stop them getting diseased and to stave off blight.

Shop spuds aren't and thus are supposedly more prone to disease.

In my personal experience, i've not had blight on potatoes, only on tomatoes.

Now i did actually experiment using both types of spuds in pots and my patch of mud and guess what the shop spuds were great, big chunky baking spuds, little ones all great, perfectly formed. While the seeds didn't do half as well and had little holes in them.

I'm not saying don't use seeds, as i probably will this year, if i see a good offer. Just offering some advice.


Hope that makes sense:o

ChocClare

gailey - re your electricity payments, if you're with Scottish Power, what they do is an annual review of your credit balance, and if you're in credit by more than 3 months' direct debit, then they'll refund you the difference. So, in your case, if you pay £100 per month (for example) and you were in credit by £416, then they'd repay the £116 and you'd still be £300 in credit.

jediteacher - your post about your tumble drier reminded me of something I'd been meaning to post.

First off, I know this isn't for everyone, as there is a certain amount of investment involved. Anyway, back in January, DH called Scottish Power and said, what do we have to do to get Economy 7. The answer was that we needed a new meter, and that the daily rate would be fractionally more. We did our sums and paid £53 for a new meter to be installed.

However, between 2330 and 0630, our electricity is 3p per unit instead of 12p per unit. We already had a load of timers hanging around the place, so we have set the dishwasher, the immersion in DD's room, the washing machine and - occasionally - the tumble drier - to come on at night or very early in the morning to take advantage of this. We have already noticed a difference in our electricity bill compared to this time last year. As I say, you've got to invest the initial £53 so it may not be for everyone (plus noise is a factor for those with close neighbours/thin walls). But worth a thought, as these are all things which gobble through electricity.

GreyQueen, you could do this and get your revenge on IB (only joking) :rotfl:

budgetboo

Interesting the family stuff. Currently my sis lives with my Mum and it works really well for them. Both benefit from congenial company (your Mum doesn't irritate the way housemates do as you have similar food tastes, hygiene standards, interests etc) and do it for this reason more than the finance side of things. However my sis has v. mild special needs, nothing awful but she's sure she doesn't want kids for example. I'm half an hour away and both my mother and I have hated it when I've lived any further away over the years.

We've all agreed already that when Mum gets REALLY old then as long as she has her marbles she'll move in with me and my son as they get on brilliantly. I can't see any disadvantages as my Mum has similar interests to us, and again I think she's good company. It'd just be one extra to cook for. Partly she thinks my life style will suit her best when she's very elderly (go old style Mum!).

She's said if she gets advanced alzheimers she wants to be in a nursing home, which is fair enough as I have no medical training. My son would clash with my sn sis though if they had to live together as his special needs make him waaaaay too lively for her, especially in the mornings, and my lifestyle wouldn't suit her. However she's up at that point for going to live with my other sister & her hubby and child - their family is less Old style and more socialble than my household. I grow my own veg etc, think good life versus yummy mummy as an extreme way of describing it. My yummy mummy sis would drive my Mum bonkers if she had to live with her, she'd rather relax in the garden watchng my son dig the tattie patch than hold dinner parties lol!

It's all in the fine details of the families personal habits as to whether or not you can live together. My Mums feels like home from home, whereas my sisters and her hubby's place I'm always a bit pleased to get home from even though I love her dearly.

As a family we've thought this through as 3 adult sisters because we were raised to share the load and have each others backs. My Mum is a widow and in a sense she's reaping the benefits of teaching us we were a team from toddlerhood. If this isn't taught in infancy I don't see how people can suddenly change mindset in adulthood. The nice thing is any significant others we've had have always seen the benefits, a couple of my youthful ex's are still good friends with my Mum

ifonlyitwaseasier

Mrs_Veg_Plot wrote: »

Has anyone any suggestions as to what else I can do to reduce the cost of our living. The main things we are doing are as follows

I am full time (37.5hrs) and always work an extra shift at the weekends.
We have reduced to one car. I walk home from work every day except the weekends when OH picks me up. OH will cycle to and from work when the evenings are a bit lighter.
I have had my tax re calculated and my tax code has been reduced (will see exactly how much by per month this month).
I cook from scratch and meal plan. Have down branded and buy the majority of groceries as own brand. Have halved the weekly shop compaired to this time last year. Make my own bread, cakes and biscuits.
We have changed our suppliers where we have found better deals.
We grow quite a bit of our own veg, mainly salad type stuff last year and some veg (including winter veg) as we started late but have started early this year.
OH has started to sell stuff on ebay and is planning to go to carboots as we have a lot of stuff in the attic.

What else are you all doing out there?

well i have worked out that the train costs £30 per week or i can pay £45(inc parking) and drive, the time saved is about 30mins per day each way.....
hubby walks to and from work most days tho i pick him up when he does a late.
we are planning to grow as much as we can this year but that depends on me getting my arris in gear and planning it out.
i don't sell on ebay mainly as i haven't the time to post anything.
but at least i have a job this year and as we are now halfway thro our DF plan that makes a hell of a difference to us
Re shopping, we tend to get own brands or offers we will use, use lidl's a lot, and have even persuaded my fussy husband that lidls own brand fizzy's are as nice as name brands



live is continuing as usual here, still a sadness pervades but thats only to be expected right now, it will lift and we will go on.

ioiwe

ChocClare

kezlou wrote: »

chocclare -

Seed and shop bught eating spuds can bought be put in the ground and grown. I do it all the time.

Potato seeds are heat treated to stop them getting diseased and to stave off blight.

Shop spuds aren't and thus are supposedly more prone to disease.

In my personal experience, i've not had blight on potatoes, only on tomatoes.

Now i did actually experiment using both types of spuds in pots and my patch of mud and guess what the shop spuds were great, big chunky baking spuds, little ones all great, perfectly formed. While the seeds didn't do half as well and had little holes in them.

I'm not saying don't use seeds, as i probably will this year, if i see a good offer. Just offering some advice.


Hope that makes sense:o

Thanks, kezlou! Wasn't me who asked but thanks anyway!:D