Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves

Oh......meant to tell you....I've been thinking back to when I first left home & entered the Spendy Decades. I have been contemplating why this happened & think a big wodge of it can be traced back to when I truly discovered expressing my personality through my surroundings......& that meant spending money. I will expand on this at a later date if I remember. It could well turn into a bit of a Debtisode.
F x

welshspendthrift

foxgloves said:

Greetings Money Savers,
I didn't get around to posting yesterday. It was my intention to post, but then I had half a bottle of wine, nearly toppled into a dahlia & frankly didn't think I'd be contributing anything of value!
Busy day in the garden today. I intended to clear a little bed by the bird feeders & to replant it with some of the pink primroses which are such a staple of our garden in Spring & a few other bits & bobs. Well, I didn't get that done. I was walking through the veggie plot on my way to the shed to fetch my kneeler & tools when I noticed that the beans required urgent picking again. About-turned & trotted back for the colander. Did some picking. Had to trot back for another one. Filled that also. Weighed out a container full to go with tomorrow night's meal, then prepped, blanched & froze the rest. Thought I'd better see if anything else needed picking. Yep! Courgettes & tomatoes. Working my way through the greenhouse felt akin to hacking my way through a jungle. Fetched a trug & cut back tomato plants, peppers & chillies. The important thing as August progresses is to get the tropical fruiting veggies swelling, ripe & picked. I don't really want heaps of miniscule little peppers starting now, as they are unlikely all to get to a decent size/ripe before the cooler nights return, so I have taken the opportunity to thin them out. One of the cucumber plants had worked its way along the grapevine & needed showing who's boss, so I did that too. Plenty of baby fruits still setting on that. Paused for lunch - cheese on toast with a sun-ripened tomato!
Then a bit of clearing & weeding in the small bed underneath the pear tree and as it looked so improved, I extended out for another couple of metres in each direction. I'm not intending to do much else today - am heading for my pondside bench with my book in a minute (latest Kathy Reichs novel). Only need to make some jacket wedges for tonight as we saved lots of leftover BBQ from yesterday - was ridiculously excited that the BBQ made some space in the freezer, but I have already filled it with beans. Ah well....... I don't want to moan, as I am grateful to have food with so many people reliant on food banks in the UK, even before the Covid emergency & wish our system could be fairer & more equal for everybody.
Money saving:
Today's harvest - 1.7 kg french beans, 1.4 kg courgettes, 1.8 kg tomatoes & 1 cucumber. 
Eating yummy leftovers.
Not money saving:
Coffee machine packing up yesterday. It defied Mr F's best efforts to google the issue & mend it, & naturally it is out of warranty. We run on caffeine in our house, so have ordered a new one to be collected tomorrow. We will be boxing up useful parts of the old one in case we need spares, especially as it has a glass jug, which can easily be broken.
Hope everyone has had a decent weekend. Our town is unfortunately in the news for the wrong reasons - a Covid spike - so we are very much hoping that the mobile testing unit which is rolling up tomorrow will manage to put a lid on it & that we can all avoid a local lockdown.
Busy week planned here, as we are getting scarily close to the builders arriving. I need to be a Woman of Achievement next week for sure!
F xx

Wow foxgloves that’s amazing Im in awe of your vegetable haul, being a novice where most of veg leaves are eaten too death by slugs and ? . However I have a yellow courgette which has survived against the odds, how do I know when it’s ready to be picked please? I also have a few green tomatoes which will hopefully start turn8ng red soon. Shame about the coffee machine 😢
Hope you have a nice evening. OH is making a prawn risotto so I’ll be catching up with some garden jobs while he’s cooking 😀

foxgloves

Hi Welshspendthrift,
Courgettes can be eaten at any stage from baby ones the size of a finger right up to a marrow. So the best thing to do is pick yours when it is the size you want to eat. If it gets too big though, the plant will be reluctant to put out new fruits. I'm only feeding ours once a week from today as they are fruiting well.
F x

welshspendthrift

Thank you have picked it think they were meant to be baby ones anyway and it was about 5 inches long so that will be nice with my portobello pizza tomorrow! 😀 think am going to feed mine tonight see if the little tiny one and another flower will make 2 more. I found some grey caterpillars in the Swiss chard so I think they are the culprits that have been eating the chard, put them in the council green bin but maybe should have done that? Now going to dispose of my purple kale which has tiny eating holes all over😢 wonder if it’s too late to plant some more? On a good note orange beetroot appears to be growing well, leaves have holes in so no salad beetroot leaves. 😀

foxgloves

Welshspendthrift - Pretty much every vegetable or fruit you grow has things which eat it. It's just a case of applying barriers like mesh, netting or beer traps, etc, depending on what it is. For instance, our most destructive pests are allium leaf miner & sparrows! So we know that we need to cover garlic, leeks, etc, with anti-insect mesh and the young plants routinely shredded by our sparrow army i. e beans & lettuces need netting until they are big enough to withstand naughty pecking.
A single courgette plant usually produces several fruits. 
F

welshspendthrift

Thank you foxgloves great advice will be better prepared next year 😀

foxgloves

Morning all, A brand new week & there are so many things I need/want to do, I can't even decide where to start. So I'm going to mix up a sourdough, fling a dress on & go for a walk before it gets too hot..... & by the time I get back, I shall have a plan for the week.
See you later, 
F x

foxgloves

Hello again, 
Well, it was a useful walk for two reasons. First it upped my step count. On the past 3 days, I didn't quite achieve this week's 9000 steps a day target on the 30-day challenge I'm doing. Today was the last of the 9000 steps section & I needed 11,989 steps to make up the shortfall. A brisk walk around the village first thing plus a generally busy day has meant I've walked over 12,000 steps so I haven't cheated & just a week to go now. The other reason a walk was a good idea was to think about prioroties for the week. There is nothing like builders arriving exactly two weeks today tp concentrate the mind on where we are going to put all the stuff we need to move! Freeing up cupboard space needs to be this week's priority. Today's activities: Sorted clean laundry & did the ironing, baked a sourdough loaf, gathered 2kg windfall apples which I put with some of our homegrown tomatoes & made a nice big juicy cauldron of Bengal chutney. Also cooked sufficient salmon for tonight's meal plus my lunch for two days, cleared out jam jar cupboard, threw out two tins & brought other nicer ones into use. Have also made a start on decluttering the cleaning cupboard. Will aim to finish that tomorrow. A big rubbish sack propped up by the kitchen bin is motivating me, as I can see that I'm already throwing quite a lot of unnecessary stuff away.
Hoping to finish my latest pair of mittens tonight but don't think I'll get round to casting on the next pair until tomorrow. Nice to get my ample yarn stash knitted up though & I'm sure a charity will be glad of a basket of hand knitted mittens to sell later in the year. 
Off to label my chutney now... two jars will definitely be saved for Christmas hampers, along with some of this year's marmalade. 
Ok, that's me, 
Cheers all, 
F x

foxgloves

Hello Melty People, 
Oh this horrible muggy heat. It is so energy sapping. Never-the-less, I pressed on with some useful jobs. Not a no spend day as I placed a B*dy Sh*p order, but I made use of a money-off code & a voucher so felt I'd got my stuff for a good price.
Job-wise... I hoed two courgette beds, squash, beans, celeriac & rhubarb bed and did today's pickings: 1kg courgettes, 1.8kg apples & a few blackberries, swept tge courtyard & deadheaded pots. Also shifted a pile of financial admin, inc updating grocery budget & personal spends.
Dinner was a total money saving classic. Mr F defrosted two lone single portions of quorn bolognese sauce & quorn chilli, bunged them together in a pan with extra chilli & we ate that on jacket potatoes with stir-fried courgettes.
We've done a bit of initial number crunching tonight as we received the payment schedule from our builder & it is for less than we were expecting. We are pretty sure that the cost of a couple of things which were quoted for separately have been missed off the payment schedule so we have made sorting this out a priority for tomorrow morning. I also have a query about VAT which I'll raise at the same time.
I'd be lying if I said I'd done much more kitchen cupboard clearing, but did bin off one item & put one in the charity shop bag pile. Must do better as all that stuff in our current pantry will have to be stored somewhere!
Let's hope we can all ignore this sticky heat enough to get at least some sleep.
F x

foxgloves

Evening Campers!
I wish I WAS camping......although chance would be a fine thing as still haven't done anything about repairing or replacing our lovely faithful tent that I managed to fall through last September. I've enjoyed today, despite it having been really the most mundane of days. Mr F was off work today so we went into town to buy a new spade (himself having snapped the latest in a long line of the things). We also bought WD40 (I told you it was mundane!) as I'm chivvying him into giving all our door & window mechanisms a bit of a service, I chose two nice fabrics from the market to make a few more face masks & treated myself to a double pack (bargainaceous) of magazines as still have plenty of my August 'spends' left. Then we headed to our favourite coffee shop for lunch, as it is participating in the 'Eat out' discount scheme. And I'm pleased to say that I stuck to my recently adopted habit of eating fewer carbs at lunchtime by choosing a Greek salad. This place does awesome millionnaire's slices but my weekly treat day is Saturday. Today is Wednesday, so I thought of my black velvet dress & how I'd like to feel good in it this autumn.....rather than how it looks at the moment, which is reasonably hot on my top half but the bottom half resembles a pile of unruly spuds trying to exit a sack. That did the trick. Cake dodged!!
This afternoon, I did rather too much sitting on my backside so once I got myself shifted, I had to keep alternating what I was doing with marching up & down the garden so as to get my 10,000 steps. I'm on the last week of my 30-day steps challenge now & need to achieve 10,000 steps each day. I have made a bit of room in the bottom drawer of the freezer by removing a 500g bag of last September's blackberries & cooking them up with a colander of our windfall apples. The resulting compote is in the fridge ready to dollop on porridge (which Mr F is apparently making tomorrow despite 30 degree temperature!) & yoghurt. I also tipped out all the different bags of chillies & re-bagged only the best ones as this year's crops won't be too far away. I'm picking jalopenos already. Last year's rejects have been composted - let's give the local woodlice a taste of Mexico for a change.....though they'd better not expect it every day & turn up their noses at their standard fare of old prunings, veg peelings, coffee grounds, etc!
Contacted builder to say I thought the payment schedule was less than the total quote. He replied to say that it is correct & everything has been included, so I can only concur that my original calculations must have contained an error. There was a nice surprise about the VAT, anyway. The quote was very helpful with each different job costed individually & as it clearly said in each case 'includes materials & labour', I assumed that we needed to add on VAT. So I had done this for the purposes of the budget we've ring-fenced for home improvements, but our builder has confirmed that the quoted costs are fully inclusive of VAT so I unexpectedly have £2k to put back into the pot towards our next project.......or to use should they uncover any horrors while they are here doing the work. With the DIY numpty who has at some point lived in this house, I'm afraid that can't be ruled out!
Well, I must fetch an icy cold drink before I melt into a weird blob.
Take care m'dears. Please remember to drink plenty of water as these are such energy-sapping temperatures.
Love F x