May The Force Be With YOU!

Jonesy88

AuntyRuby - I've made my money through selling everything not nailed down! Sold things like my kindle (as i have an ipad now) and a designer bag. Sad to see the bag go but it wasnt a favourite so would rather the cash.

Mrs Toast - hugs.

Kat - I watched Skint aswell. Interesting moral question about buying stolen food, I think i would though if it meant feeding my family properly. However manners do not cost a thing.

Today wasnt a SFD, but i'm having quite a messy month tidying up a lot of loose ends.

Living_a_good_life

Evening all - loving the gardening talk - we have a small garden and I have learnt by mistakes to choose the most expensive things to buy at the shops that take up the least space - green house has tomatoes cucumber courgette pepper and chillis going in it along with salad stuff. We have "regrown" those living salad tray you get for £1 twice so far - bargain! The proper sown salad will be ready shortly too I hope!

We did have a small veg plot but a combination of slugs, cabbage whites and carrot fly meant it wasnt worth while as it was just too small an area and everything got mullered. So at the end of last year we reclaimed a chunk back to grass and put strawberries in what was left. In pots we have a blueberry bush, black berry bush and a gooseberry and a couple of rasp canes at the back of the border.

Oh and I shoved some new spuds in a couple of spud bags and some runner beans in a plastic crate and some radishes in a trug. We wont get heaps but it uses up some old seed, fills a space and shows the kids where food really comes from. It will do for now!!

No sfd for me today - went for a very naughty lunch at a local establishment with a friend for a debrief. It cost me £10 and was worth every penny :beer:

Right kids are in bed - both are shattered - going to work until DH gets home.

Love to all

LAGL xx

PS Mrs Toast :grouphug: sorry this looks dodgy!!

NinjaSavingKat

LAGL - I love the sound of your garden. Every nook there is something to eat!:T.. Do those potatoe sacks work okay? Have you used them before.. and more importantly do you have to grow your salad leaves in stages or do they grow back.. I love salad and feel I'd just tear through the lot (excuse the pun) and not have any for a while... might be worth a shot as the seeds are SO cheap..

Thank you for your post, this whole gardening thing is exciting I just want to go home and rummage in the garden...

Living_a_good_life

Spud sacks work well on a small scale - we grow charlotte in them and get a few meals from them - I think you would get more grown in the ground but at the moment we dont have the option. We grew them in a big plastic trug one year and that was as good.

Salad - sow little and often works best for us - the home sown stuff works on a cut and come again basis too. It gets to a point where you need to restart. Im planning to use the plastic trays you get fruit and stuff in from the supermarkets to keep the little and often bit going.

Brassicas of any sort didnt work for us on a small scale, onions,carrots and main crop spuds are cheap to buy and we dont have space- I need to shove a few baby carrots in some pots at some point soon. French beans are fab as they grow up so dont take much space and give masses! And herbs are brilliant but keep mint and lemon balm in pots as they will take over

Happy planting, LAGL xx

PS have you come across http://www.landshare.net/ it was on river cottage a while back - people with a bit of land post available sites and people that want to grow use it - fantastic idea!

32b3in2013

Hi

I have not been on here for a while as I went back to work and it's all kicked off.

New totals below

Slimming world £9.90/£20
Food £61.34/£100
Outings £43.65/£100
Anti Virus £20/£20
General spends £23.90/£30
Petrol £30/£50
NSD 1/22

I need to start having SFD. I have no doubt that I will stay within budget this month, but I want to clock up a few more SFDs.

Hope everyone is well.

32b3

Bouncyminky

Hello all - precious time on laptop finally.

6 SFD's so far - hoping to get into double figures this month.
207.63/450 - food etc - still hoping to come in under £400 if we can
4.80/20 travel
0/60 although car running very low so will need to fill up soon
94.71/105 - although OH just cracked his tooth so will need to have this seen to.

I have meal planned for this week and made OH do a gigantic batch of tomato sauce (tin toms with hidden veg and herbs) which we have used for pizza topping, with pasta tonight, to add to many mini meals for DS through the week and there are still 2 batches.

OH fancied the Dominos hot dog stuffed pizza so made his own - fraction of the price! I got the idea of batch cooking from here and think it is definately the way forward, you can then have homecooked but still have nights off from cooking - which are useful for us after a day at work.

Will try and make a sweet potato and butternut squash soup tomorrow for DS and myself and again freeze other portions. Will have to spend a bit tomorrow as DD having a friend over after school and has begged for pizza so will need to go to SM and get a mini basics.

My boss bought in lots of choc today for us to munch whilst we had a meeting - yum - kept me going through the day.

Hugs to Mrs Toast, impressed by all the garden talk and amazed by the girl called Jack. I'd also forgotten about freecycle. A friend at work was asking for ideas of where to go for cheap bedroom furniture - I was able to speil off a few including freecycle - it really feels like you are helping someone when you make suggestions that may save them tons of money.

NSK - cous cous can be really pepped up lovely with spices like paprika and curry powder and herbs or even a stock cube. I do paprika and herbs and my DS loves it - cheap as chips.

Oh getting the hang of the smilies now and even found where I can do my signature so may fiddle with that next.

Supposed to be sunny tomorrow (at least in the SW) so should be able to take kids to the park on the way home from school and tire them out. Fingers crossed that it goes well as last couple of times we had another child home my DD (6 years old) got very upset that they wouldn't do what she told them to do - I'm sure she isn't like this at school!!! Don't know where she gets her bossiness from!

I found a great quote the other day - thinking of framing it.

If you want to feel rich, just count all the things you have that money cannot buy.

nannygladys

Evening all

What a horrible day, did two loads of washing, put it on the line in sunshine and an hour later was getting back in being pelted with hail:eek: so its on the airers and radiators:(

Did my budgets and it wasn't as bad as it could have been, I actually get paid on Friday and it has to last 4 weeks, so as I have done an inventory of cupboards and freezer I really only have to buy essentials eg milk, so I am going to let myself have £10 a week for food, £10 a week for fuel and £20 in reserve, so I will be withdrawing £100 on Friday to last me for the four weeks, cant work it out until the end of the month, but when we start June I will, oh and I had a SFD today, so that's number 6.

Im going to have to be extra frugal this month and NOT spend on anything unless its truly needed as I have to show the bank I can make inroads into the the OD.

Hope everyone is having a good month, and on the gardening front Im so far behind, I haven't even planted my potatoes yet, just spinach beet:( I really must get started

Off to update signature
Nannyg
PS Baby is DD3's 1st child, but my 3rd DGC, and shes lovely but there again Im biased:D

thriftylass

Love all the gardening talk. Hopefully get the chuckies (gravel for southerners out this summer end start a proper veg plot. So far got only a few pots with toms, strawberries, two fruit bushes, peppers, chillies and herbs.

Had another SFD today. Still loads of party food to take for lunches the next days. Had leftover veg curry with a bit of fresh chicken for tea and tried to make naan to go with it. Wasn't anything like naan but turned out to be edible bread like things.

abundant1972

Hi Everyone.

Apologies for my absence <again>!!!

Am afraid I'm going to bow out of this month's challenge - what with weddings, and meals out with work, and service station stop offs and kind of feeling all over the place generally - I've totally lost track of where I'm at.

I know I've got some money left but I also put some on the credit card when I was away and slipped into the 'I'll worry about that later' attitude!!! Darn it.

I have enough to last me the next 2 weeks still - but my spend totals are up the spout. Will aim for as many SFD's as I can from here on out.

Sorry guys and gals! I'll be back...

:cool:

Siouxsie32

Oh don't go Abundant, we love you here If you have enough money to last the rest of the month, why not draw a line in the quicksand that we've all been caught in at some point, and start again from tomorrow with your new, revised budgets. If you've overspent, you'll need to stick with us more than ever rather than trying to go it alone.

I'm loving all the garden/allotment talk. I'd love to be able to join in but a) I live in a shoebox with a garden the size of a matchbox and b) I'm too scared of spiders to venture that close to the ground :eek: What can I grow indoors on a window ledge? I tried herbs a few times, but when I cut them to eat, they never grew back so it seemed a waste of time and money.

Not sure if you've all read Martin's email, but if you have a Tesco Clubcard, go and grab £15 free train travel with redspottedhanky. I did it this evening and the confirmation emails have come through already.

Budgetwise, I had a nightmare the other night when I went into work and realised I forgot my dinner :eek: With a 12 hour shift ahead of me, there was nothing else for it but to go to the work canteen. Grrrr! £3.21 spent from my misc budget unnecessarily :mad: I also voluntarily spent £5 tonight on £10 Starbucks credit. We're almost halfway through the month though and I still have around half of my misc budget left so I'm happy. That includes a meal I had out with a few friends last week. Unlike my usual friends that I dine with, they split the bill according to what we had so I only paid £10 :T Being a non-drinking veggie is great when the bill's split this way!

Managed a small ebay sale and have 9 more items listed. No watchers mind you, but at least they're listed. You gotta be in it to win it as they say

Jack-mania has made me feel super confident about having money left from my food budget this month (with a view to reducing it slightly next month!!). I still have a few dinners in the freezer and a cupboard full of enough stuff to feed me for at least another week so I predict an on target end to the month

So far then, my figures look like this.....
SFD: 10/21
Food: £44/£80
Petrol: £50/£50
Misc: £42.57/£80