Put away your purse & become debt-averse

HairyHandofDartmoor

Hopefully the dry weather will continue (ha! Fat chance!) so we can get more anecdotes from the Foxgloves garden .

Toni'sfriend

Thank you, Foxgloves. I bought petunias last year and they were lovely. Lasted for ages. Will look at the others. 

Honeysucklelou2

Re pots, nasturtiums can grow well in pots. Quick to grow and in a variety of colours they always make a cheery addition to pots or containers. There is one variety called  Jewel Cherry Rose, that comes in a pink colour which is a change from the usual orange and yellows.

Lavender does well in pots as well, especially as they  can cope with the pots drying out a bit, as pots will do quickly in hot weather.  My garden has very acidic soil, so can’t grow lavenders very well unless in pots. Lavender can be bought in pink or white as well as the traditional purple.

Dottles1

I've always been interested in having a wormery too but I've been concerned that I might neglect it when busy so have held off.  It might well be something I start when I retire in July.

foxgloves

Dottles2 - They don't take very much maintenance at all, but obviously you do need to put sufficient veggie scraps in for them to eat. I think one of the main problems is worms drowning in prolonged periods of rain. You do need to run off containers of liquid worm feed regularly then & if it is really torrential (not a problem at the moment as my wormery is in the greenhouse for winter), I sometimes put a bigger container underneath & just leave the tap open. On the whole, it is a low maintenance operation though. 
F 

foxgloves

Hi everyone,
I'm sure you will all be shocked to hear that today has been very rainy. So glad we made the effort to go & support our local market as only about a third of the usual traders had turned out in the awful weather & I was pleased to be able to put a little bit of trade their way. 
Despite the overarching sogginess of the proceedings, we did have a decent morning on the financial front. This week's grocery shopping came in at £8 under budget which made me feel we were off to a good start. We went for coffee in our favourite indie coffee shop & found that I had a free one on my loyalty card. We also decided to share a cake to save money & generous waistlines. Mr F chose......& came back with a cookie the size of his head! Very nice though & we did warm up a bit. We thenfelt sufficiently revived by caffiene & carbohydrate to go & get a consultation with a local firm about another of our planned home improvement jobs. I'd estimated this one at £3500 & when I saw some of the different aspects of the work/materials being costed out, I started to worry that it was going to be quite a chunk more than that, but it wasn't. It actually came in at £252 under my guesstimate & even with the additional £150 we will need to cost in to pay a plasterer, it will leave us with £102 left towards some of the other work, so I was pleased with that. I was also pleased we'd done some research, had a good chat about what both wanted, as it is so much better to arrive feeling confident that we are on the same page, rather than to start disagreeing in the shop in front of all & sundry. We don't argue much at all, but if we do, we can be a right pair of drama queens......well, me mostly, if I'm honest, so rather than provide free entertainment for fellow shoppers, lol, it is always worth just taking the time to feel prepared.....especially on kind of buildy type stuff, where our knowledge would pretty much fit on a pasta tube!
Anyway, we placed an order for the work & their surveyor is coming out next week to have a look, so fingers crossed everything will be straightforward & of course more than anything, we are hoping that they don't start removing things only to find that Mr DIY Numpty has previously put in some of his extra special bodging efforts at some point. It does sound from some of the comments on here that he has several cousins dotted around the country!
Anyway.......have also cleaned the house (had help today as it's The Beloved's day off) & finished a couple of outstanding admin jobs. It is not my cooking night, so I intend to do nothing more energetic tonight than cast off a sock, sew in the ends, read & maybe watch a bit of TV. 
Hope there is at least somebody out there whose weekend plans have not been rained off. Ours have.....again, but it can't be helped. At least our home isn't flooded. My heart goes out to all those people who are having to deal with that catastrophic scenario.
Love F x

moving_forward

Glad your quotes are coming back on the right side of budget Foxgloves.  Very brave taking it all on at once, enjoy your rest x

foxgloves

Hello m'dears,
Well I wonder if anyone can guess what got in the way of our plans today. Yes, despite an uptick in the weather forecast for our region first thing, it was soon all back to normal with rain, hail & a heavy grey sky. Even when an hour of blue sky did appear, it was soon seen on its way as another round of hailstones blew in. So our walk & visit to an outdoor event over in a neighbouring county was postponed & we have both been getting on with our own tasks. Both have involved a decent amount of decluttering, I'm pleased to say. Mr F is having a truly mammoth sort out of all things tech & audio visual including all the CDs & Blu-rays (our guest bedroom looks like a branch of HMV) & I purloined the dining table in the conservatory to progress a big project of my own....I'm not going into detail because although I share quite a lot on here, I try not to give away enough to identify myself. My family & friends know that I really enjoy living more simply these days, but they don't know, for example, that we once owed £35K of debt in addition to our mortgage. As I have quite a lot of interests, I have several unfinished projects, a situation which wasn't helped with having the summer when Dad's illness took a turn for the worse, his death, followed the next year by Mum's death too. Even discounting the stress & sadness, it's an almost overwhelming amount of work clearing out the family home, getting it fit for sale, etc, etc, so many of my unfinished projects obviously just sat around not getting done. I'm now able to get some of them completed, & if today is anything to go by, it's going to feel quite satisfying. Also, some of these tasks will result in a newly crafted or refurbed item for our house, so I will have that extra satisfaction from having shopped a little bit of a new look from home.
Well, the wind is getting up again, so I'm heartily thankful that the storm damaged holly tree has now been felled - sad as it always is to lose a tree - before it succeeded in crashing through our neighbour's new fence. Mr F is busy prepping one of his favourite recipes - Madhur Jaffrey's Whole Indian-spiced chicken. It's lovely with garlic rice, which he is also making, & will do us an additional two days of meals & almost certainly a packed lunch too, so as always with roast chicken, it's an economical choice. I treated myself to a gardening magazine yesterday so I'm going to read that by the fire, also a new novel I've started from the library. 
Oh, & talking of books, I've decluttered a pile from the landing into the charity shop bag, so that felt good too. I find it quite difficult to get rid of books, but I don't intend to buy any additional book shelves, so I need to operate pretty much a 'one in, one out' system.
Hope you have all had a way more exciting day than me,
F x

foxgloves

Moving_forward - Yes, me too. It's certainly better than the alternative! I don't think I'm being very brave, as the main building stuff & full heating upgrade doesn't start until the last week of August.......we wanted to use a local builder & we initially thought we might get in for June, but another couple got in just before us with their quote, so their extension is being built first. The work we were quoted for yesterday is a smaller job, but will still involve chopping out the back of the chimney, taking a chunk out of a wall & some brickwork. It sounded like a lot of work when they ran through it all, but we were assured that it will all be completed on the same day, with just a plasterer to call afterwards to tidy up wall edges. I've been warned that it will raise unbelievable levels of dust, so I have a list of questions to ask the surveyor when he calls next week. But between that & the main work in August, most of the jobs are much smaller maintenance things we intend to do ourselves. We might get a quote for laying a new courtyard out the back - truly Mr DIY Numpty's crowning achievement for awfulness...I don't know whether he lived here for ages or was just horribly productive over just a couple of years (I bet it was him who smashed up an old greenhouse & buried it under the lawn too).....& if we did go ahead with that, we'd want it done before August ideally, to get all the mess out of the way before we have new flooring.
So Moving_forwards.....I don't know that I'm being brave as you suggested, I think it's just that we are now in a financial position to get a lot of very necessary improvement work done & we really do want to crack on.
F x

foxgloves

Oh my giddy aunt.......today has been DRY, so we went out!!! I mean, no bells & whistles, we just went to one of our favourite places just across into the next county. We had coffee & cinnamon buns, watched the wildlife, chatted about the coming week which is a bit full on with one thing & another, before having a chilly, but sunny walk. That's all we did! But because we have felt confined to barracks by endless infernal rain, it felt like a lovely morning.
This afternoon back at home, we've had two brief sleet showers, but sleet isn't actual rain, is it, so I am going to count today as officially a rain-free day. 
Over the next week, I have two days of workmen & also a surveyor coming to assess our forthcoming chimney chop-out. I have quite a lot of stuff I want to get done myself....none of which should involve spending any money, I'm pleased to say, plus I need to make a lot more effort with eating healthily (which has slipped big time) & getting my daily steps back up to where I like them to be. And there's a bit of stressful stuff this week, too, which I won't go into on here, but I am pretty sure I will be overthinking it big time between 3 am & getting-up time over the next few days at the very least. As for the rest of today? Just got the washer to load for an early hours wash on economy tariff, then my evening will be very much leisure-based, involving wrestling Cat for the fireside, reading & catching up with a Scandi-crime series we are watching.
Have a cosy evening, all. And let's see what next week brings.
F xx