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Put away your purse & become debt-averse

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  • Dottles1
    Dottles1 Posts: 495 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 100 Posts Name Dropper
    Me too Foxglove. I moved to a smaller house last august and now have a (much) smaller garden too. The new garden was really just lawn and slate chippings and nothing in the way of plants apart from an old rose bush that was overgrown and straggly but had been planted by the man who was the first house owner in the 50's. I have managed to dig it up and kept it in a bag for life over the winter while I was getting work done. I'm happy to say that it survived and now has pride of place in a new flower bed and is doing rather well. I did bring some plants with me that I lifted and split and most have come good but I am missing the magic of collecting seeds and not knowing what you will get until the following year. However, I do have a courgette plant in a border, Borlotti and runner beans, Kale, aubergine, tomatoes, peppers and 3 types of chilli in pots and 3 old compost bags with potatoes in. Not bad for a tiny garden if I do say so myself. I have also been given a lemon sorrel plant so looking for somewhere to plant it. The previous owners left me a butlers sink so I plan to plant herbs in that. Oh and I have some cut and come again salad leaves in a large pot and a cardboard shoe box which are ready to start cutting. I can't wait to start eating from my garden again. I love reading about your garden adventures and sooo jealous of your sweetcorn, I think that might be just a step too far for my tiny space.

    goodnight all
    CC1 Aug19 [STRIKE]£7587.85[/STRIKE] Aug 20 £0
    CC2 Aug 19 [STRIKE]£1185.58[/STRIKE] Aug 20 £0
    CC3 Aug 19 [STRIKE]£544.95[/STRIKE] Aug 20 £0
    O/D Aug [STRIKE]£20[/STRIKE] Sept [STRIKE] £100[/STRIKE] Oct £0
    CC4 Aug 2020 £0
    Total debt Aug 2019[STRIKE]£9318.38[/STRIKE] Aug 20 £0
  • foxgloves
    foxgloves Posts: 12,595 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    Hi Dottles, I had to smile when I read that you were feeling envious of my sweetcorn. You see, I read your post & thought 'Oh, she's got borlotti beans & I've never grown those, like that's fair', lol. Do you pick & eat them as fresh beans, or do you dry them for winter? I shall have to add those to my list.
    I don't have a very big space for the sweetcorn. It's grown in blocks & the plants can be quite close together. I've got 36 plants in a 4 x 9 row block, if that makes sense. We currently have quite a big garden - 30 feet wide by about 135 feet long. We've extended it about 5 feet recently.... legally this is probably a grey area, but that's a bit of a saga which I won't bore everyone with on here. We plan to move when Mr F retires, which is many years off, as I'm nowhere near pension age yet & he's a good bit younger than me, but when we do, we will be looking to have a smaller garden. It's amazing what you can grow in a small space. I know DawnW who posts on here & on the DFW Small Things thread has a small garden, yet she's always picking homegrown food. And I know 'vertical growing'has become quite a thing.
    It's good that you could bring some plant divisions from your old garden. We are currently selling our old family home, both my parents sadly having died in the last two years, & I took divisions of many hardy geraniums, which my Mum collected. I owe my green fingers & love of gardening to her & it makes my happy to see some of her treasured plants thriving in my tangly bee-friendly borders.
    Just finishing my coffee, then I've an hour of weeding planned.
    F x
    2025's challenges: 1) To fill our 10 Savings Pots to their healthiest level ever
    2) To read 100 books (36/100) 3) The Shrinking of Foxgloves 6.5kg/30kg

    "Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards" (Soren Kirkegaard 1813-55)
  • foxgloves
    foxgloves Posts: 12,595 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    Morning Debt Busters (& debt avoiders),
    Glorious day here - sunshine, blue sky, swifts soaring & I'm just having a coffee break on our shady courtyard. Mr F has had to work today, so I thought I'd get some jobs done, then we can have a (very) low cost outing tomorrow.
    So far, I've brought laundry day forward to make use of this free line drying weather, made a lentil loaf for tomorrow's roast dinner & got some bread proving.
    Next (& last) job on the list is rhubarb......as in pulling it, prepping it & making a rhubarb cake & a crumble base. The cake is for dessert tonight. I know we are a day late for summer solstice, but I like to mark the old festivals & we decided we'd do a bit of a BBQ tonight (which will be very grill based as we currently don't own a BBQ..... in fact I currently have the remnants of it planted up with zinnias & a sunflower!) & sit out with a bottle of wine as the sun goes down over our garden. I like looking out for bats too. So I thought it'd be nice to make this rhubarb cake, which I shall warm up & serve with ice cream. It's a recipe I've had for years. I copied it out from a library book & it's a useful recipe in that you can make it with any ripe stone fruits, apples, pears or rhubarb & as it's quite a damp cake, it's foolproof & good for dessert. It firms up a little when cold, so leftovers can easily go into lunchboxes & picnics. I do go on, don't I? Anyway, I thought it'd be nice to celebrate the turning of the season with some food from our own garden, hence the rhubarb cake, & I'll also cut some more lettuce & bits to go into a salad. Mr F says he's doing the meat (Man, he make fire....)
    Well, that's the end of my coffee...... I shall hie me away & fetch that rhubarb before I go off on a tangent about something else, like solicitors, knitting, cats, pants, chutney or all five....)
    So enjoy your weekends all, & remember that money doesn't jump out of your purses on its own. It needs help. So don't help it!
    F x
    2025's challenges: 1) To fill our 10 Savings Pots to their healthiest level ever
    2) To read 100 books (36/100) 3) The Shrinking of Foxgloves 6.5kg/30kg

    "Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards" (Soren Kirkegaard 1813-55)
  • Blackcats
    Blackcats Posts: 3,896 Forumite
    Sixth Anniversary 1,000 Posts Name Dropper
    Good morning Foxgloves. I saw the last 30 seconds of Gardeners World last night when Monty announced "so for this week Foxgloves rule" and I was impressed that he had acknowledged your status on DFW so publicly.
    I missed reading for a couple of days so luckily I could read the tales of mince in one sitting without the tension of waiting for the next instalment.
    I love the versatility of mince too. As a child we had 2 versions - mince with carrot and onions served with boiled potatoes or mince with carrot and onions and mashed potatoes aka shepherds pie. This was my favourite version because of the lovely crunchy potato topping.
    When I was about 10 I went to a friend's house for tea and we had spaghetti bolonese. I had never tasted anything so exotic. Only pasta in our house was macaroni. I rushed home and told my parents about it and my mum said "oh well I always knew that family were "arty" and dad said "oh yes you've only got to look at them to know that!" What the heck did that mean?
    When I lived in australia I went to buy mince at the butchers and he said "what is it with you pommies and your mince, you Brits love the stuff".
    So you see mince is a marker of social status, identifying you instantly as arty or a pommie.
  • foxgloves
    foxgloves Posts: 12,595 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    edited 22 June 2019 at 5:31PM
    I saw that on GW too, Blackcats, & my thoughts were 'Why have I hardly got any foxgloves this year?' before thinking that with the couple of years of family crises I've had, I probably didn't get round to sprinkling any seed to help things along. I have been potting on self-sown ones this year, though, so should have a good display next June.

    Oh the joys of 1970s cuisine!! Mince in our house was grim. This was because of two reasons:
    1) My Mum loathed cooking & would have been quite happy to live on jam sandwiches, scones & biscuits if she hadn't had two children to feed.
    2) My sister was a freaky eater as a child & would only eat a very limited range of meals.
    How did this affect mince in our household? Firstly because my Mum (who worked - at home - from 4pm to around 8.30pm each weekday, so wasn't available to eat with us) did as little to the mince as she could get away with. I am talking casserole dish, plonk mince within, add water, crumble on stock cube, apply lid, stick it in the oven. Then my sister's food freakery would ensure that it was eaten with a well-known brand of instant mashed potato which was mixed up in a jug of boiling water. As a substitute in a wallpaper paste shortage, that stuff would have had a purpose, but with a casserole dish of watery mince, oh my days........my sis would eat that (reluctantly), sausages, beefburgers, fish fingers, crispy pancakes, beans on toast & no vegetables except for 12 peas if she couldn't get out of having some, & yes, she did count them) & not a lot else. We also had a lot of ready meals, as they were Mum's ideal cooking scenario (my Dad ate at lunchtime in the RAF canteen), & they seemed so tasty compared to this bland fare. I often think that my generation must have ingested a lot of plastic from all that 'boil in the bag' stuff, though probably no different from all the microwave meals nuked in their plastic trays).
    Re your memories of spaghetti bolognese.......that sparked a memory with me too. It was one of the very early things we learned to cook in first year cookery lessons when we went up to the comp. I proudly took it home. My sister wouldn't touch it & Mum wouldn't have any either! It felt so disappointing, but Dad enjoyed it, so I shared it with him, & took over a lot of the home cooking as soon as possible! As soon as she left home for Uni, my sis became a real foodie & loves cooking as much as I do, so I think it was probably a bit of a 'control' thing as a child. I seemed to be in pretty much constant trouble anyway, so I think I probably felt rebellious enough at home without being a freaky eater!
    It's just occurred to me that the whole freaky eater thing is probably not at all compatible with food budgeting. I sometimes see these shopping programmes on TV, you know the ones where a family wants to get its food bills down, & I am absolutely astounded by the sheer number of parents who cook a different meal for each of their children because they 'don't like' things. We don't have children but if we had, this level of fussiness wouldn't have lasted five minutes in our house, let alone five years. I suppose the arrival of the microwave made it easier to pander to 'don't likes', I don't know. It seems to have resulted in an awful lot of kids only wanting to eat beige foods. I suppose the boy who came to birthday parties on our street when we were kids & would only eat rice crispies......even as we all tucked into sandwiches, jelly & ice cream, chocolate biscuits, sausages on sticks, etc, was an early forerunner of this. All the mums had to remember to get a box in or he would sit in front of all that scrummy party food with his lip wobbling!
    I've digressed again, haven't I? This post was about mince!
    F x
    2025's challenges: 1) To fill our 10 Savings Pots to their healthiest level ever
    2) To read 100 books (36/100) 3) The Shrinking of Foxgloves 6.5kg/30kg

    "Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards" (Soren Kirkegaard 1813-55)
  • Oh Foxgloves, I know the programme of which you speak. I love it, with some kind of weird voyerism. How much do they spend on food???
    I do wish though they would do some more realistic families sometimes though, I've picked up a couple of good recipes from the programme, but no budgeting tips.
    Outstanding mortgage: £23,181 (December 19)
    MFW 2020 Challenge Member #10 0/£2318
  • Blackcats
    Blackcats Posts: 3,896 Forumite
    Sixth Anniversary 1,000 Posts Name Dropper
    I had the opposite problem as my mum would rarely allow ready meals. We did have boil in the bag cod in parsley sauce but with home made mash, not the instant stuff that aliens ate. I really, really wanted smash but we never had it. Oh and we had a Vesta Chinese meal once with crispy noodles but that was never repeated even though I thought it was delicious. Mum was not adventurous with our food. In my late teens she introduced a new dish entitled Spanish chicken which was chicken cooked in the oven in a casserole dish with a tin of tomatoes served on rice. Yes rice - dad said it was ok but wouldn't want too much of the stuff. Of course we had rice pudding but that somehow was not viewed as risqu! like boiled rice.
    Both my parents have an enduring hatred of garlic and seem to be able to recognise it in any dish from about 50 yards away.
  • DawnW
    DawnW Posts: 7,758 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Name Dropper Photogenic
    My mum wasn't much of a cook either - though she did make great shortcrust pastry. She was a bit OCD (yes really, she had odd repetitive counting rituals and was very fussy that things remained in their place - didn't make for an easy childhood :() so would hardly ever let me do anything in the ktichen. And I hated 'domestic science' at school, so didn't really learn to cook until I got married and had my own kitchen. I remember the watery mince, and watery stews we had at home, though we did have proper mashed potatoes, even if they were lumpy :rotfl:But it was ace if she made a steak or apple pie :T And I loved her burnt at the edges roast potatoes and parsnips, too. :)

    My dad would have loved more adventurous food - he had served in India in the army and spoke fondly of curries. Occasionally he would get a Vesta one, with bits of dried meat in it like cardboard :eek: It was one thing I was pleased to be able to do for him in his latter years, make him a decent curry :)
  • I remember having boil in the bag fish in parsley sauce as a child :rotfl:.

    When I was at primary school my mum cooked quite traditional food and my favourite meals were bangers, mash and baked beans, and our Sunday lunch of roast chicken, roast potatoes and veg followed by blackberry and apple crumble. I also remember having toad in the hole and pork chops (not for the same meal :rotfl:).

    Getting to the mince :D we also had shepherds pie sometimes which I used to enjoy. We never had Smash, it was always proper potatoes. When I was at secondary school my mum become a little more adventurous and we would occasionally have spaghetti bolognese or lasagne.

    Unfortunately I hate cooking and if I lived alone I would probably have baked potato with different toppings every night :o.
    Finally Debt Free After 34 Years, But Still Need to Live Frugally
    Debt in July 2017 = £58,766 😱 DEBT FREE 31 OCTOBER 2017 :T 🎉
    EMERGENCY FUND 1 = £50/£5,000. EMERGENCY FUND 2 = £10/£5,000.
    CHRISTMAS SAVINGS = £0/£500. SEF = £1,400/£12,000 PREMIUM BONDS ME = £350. PREMIUM BONDS DH = £300.
    HOLIDAY MONEY = £0 TIME LEFT TO PAY OFF MORTGAGE = 5 YEARS 1 MONTHS
  • Onebrokelady
    Onebrokelady Posts: 7,800 Forumite
    Seventh Anniversary 1,000 Posts Name Dropper Photogenic
    My favourite mince meal was a pie made with tinned mince :eek: sometimes my mum would add tomato pur!e to the mince pie filling if she wanted to be a bit exotic:rotfl:
    Original Debt Owed Jan 18 = £17,630 Paid To Date = £6,510 Owed = £11,120
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