Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves

Ladyholly & CLF - I hadn't heard about the dodgy batch of courgette seed so I looked it up, & yes, it does seem to be some sort of cross pollination or something biological which has produced this inedible & sickness inducing batch. Thankfully we have harvested & eaten fruits from all nine of our courgette plants & don't have any of the weird bitter ones. Seeds are natural things & you can sometimes get oddities. I can remember a butternut squash plant, grown from a packet of seed I bought myself which wasn't a butternut at all. It produced very dark green fruits, perfectly smooth, about the size of a large grapefruit. They were incredibly hard even to cut into & had a bitter smell, so I didn't bother attempting to eatthem. Assume some kind of cross pollination/throwback to an ancestral gene, I don't know. The other two seeds from the same packet did produce butternuts. 
F 

foxgloves

Hello rainy people..... although you may all be soaking up the sunshine for all I know. It was quite nice this morning but heavy showers moved in just after lunch. 
Useful day in the garden. I got so slarmed with green tomato dye that I had to get straight in the bath when I came in & I'm just chatting to you while I wait for my newly painted electric blue toenails to dry.
Have done all sorts of random garden jobs today: Weeded a small area near the patio then re-planted with newly divided pink primroses for spring, re-potted a heucherella & a small Christmas tree which I grew from seed. Removed a lot of bindweed which makes its way in from next door, planted out a big dahlia gifted to me by best friend, then tackled jungley greenhouse. The key thing once we reach late August is to concentrate on food crops ripening, rather than plants becoming triffids, so I've lopped the tops off all my tomato & pepper plants, & cut some of the growth points out of the aubergines & chillies. Cucumber plants are getting ropey but haven't yet turned up their toes so I shall keep feeding those to try & get the baby fruits on there to picking size.
Mr F continued his long ongoing project of hacking his way through the vegetation around the shed. He uncovered more long buried rubbish today - looks like a previous resident's old discarded plumbing supplies - & underneath all of that, he actually uncovered a path! He is now excavating down to this path level to see if it runs right the way around the shed. If it does, it will look much smarter properly uncovered, as well as making our access for maintenance much easier. I thought he'd dug up at least 6 jewelled anglo-saxon sword pommels by the way he was going on!
Well the kettle is whistling & I'm going to sit & read my book. I've started the new Camilla Lackberg novel - 'The Gilded cage' & I already think there are a lot of secrets to be uncovered.
Hope everyone still keeping well. The local council here is really re-iterating covid precautions here as there is a significant local spike. Lockdown threatened if things don't stabilise.
F x
P. S Today's pickings: 1 cucumber, 1 pepper, 1 mug of blackberries. 

ladyholly

Carrilovesfanta I know the item mentioned mr Fothergills but they didnt say if any other company was affected. They interviewed a chap who had eaten a small amount and he said he spent the night in the bathroom so I thought it was worth passing on.

savingmore

ooh, blackberry vinegar sounds delish...thanks for the suggestion foxgloves, will look up a recipe tomorrow.  going to try pickled blackberries as well.  thought fin trying pickled kale as i have a huge crop....any ideas on kale?  

foxgloves

Hi Savingmore,
I can't really help with kale suggestions, as I haven't yet tried growing it. I am considering it though, mainly because of my understanding that it stands well into winter - I've seen photos of redbor kale looking very picturesque with a dusting of snow on the leaves. I've grown other brassicas - cabbage, cauli, as well as other greens, spinach, perpetual spinach, chard, etc. I've made pickled red cabbage a few times & also batch-cooked red cabbage & apples for the freezer (Christmas dinner veg as I don't like sprouts!). I can't envisage pickled kale, but I know Chinese leaves are used in a lot of kimchi recipes, aren't they, so sometimes these things are worth a try. If you are a grower, I bet your freezer is already rammed, but I like to prioritise using gluts to make & freeze future meals if possible. If your variety of kale is one which stands into winter though, it may be that you can just pick it a bit more gradually than things like courgettes & tomatoes, which need using as & when they are ready? 
I wonder if Kantankrus grows kale & has any ideas on this, as she defo has an alloment, also carrielovesfanta is an allotment person too.
F x

foxgloves

Morning Frugal Friends,
The late rain showers yesterday have perked the garden up & it felt lovely & fresh wandering down to have a look at all our hard work yesterday. Mr F is still so chuffed with the path he uncovered that I swear he's been up & down it at least 6 times today already! I've done a bit of picking - 1.2 kg courgettes, 1.3 kg tomatoes & two nice chunky bunches of sage, now tied & hung from our kitchen beam for drying. I've updated the grocery budget to include Week 4's food spends, but my attempt to pay the money off our 'Just for points' credit card failed when it went to 'Verified by Visa' & thence to a screen of gobbledigook when I submitted my password. I am wondering if there has been a rise in internet banking-type fraud during Lockdown, as I've noticed how many security checks there were the other day when I made a BACS transfer to the builder, & also, having not been asked for my 'Verified by Visa' password on any transaction for probably around 2 years, suddenly over the last week, I have been asked for it in 3 consecutive transactions. I will check our banking (both the CC & current account) tomorrow & on Tuesday to see if this payment did in fact go through. 
Other stuff? Well, nothing very exciting, it feels like the lull before the storm, really as tomorrow & Tues will be last chance to get things shifted, laundered, prepped, etc, before the builders start work on Wednesday. We have synchronised our diaries for the next few weeks so that we can at least try for a semblance of organisation on the domestic front. Mr F has several days of leave booked so that will mean one of us can be on builder duty & the other can have the car & be able to get into town, etc. The builders will need access to all rooms of the house, so there won't be any one room I can sort of retire to to get stuff done without potentially needing to move, so I am intending to do heaps of garden tasks on dry days while they are here.
I intend to have a nice peaceful afternoon reading my library book - it is getting very intriguing - the author is dropping tiny bits of back story in every couple of chapters & it's clear that everything is definitely not as it seems. Mr F is doing roast pork later, so I can't let an opportunity pass to use up some of our vast crop of apples, so I am going to make a pan of apple sauce in a minute, then fill the washer for a laundry load on the cheap tariff (while we've still got it, as post-builders, I will need to change from Economy 7 to a standard tariff) and that, m'dears, is as many jobs as I intend to do today! 
Peace & love,
F x

DawnW

Re kale, to be honest I just leave it till I want to eat it, it overwinters fine wherever we have lived, and keeps going into the spring. I have to protect it from wood pigeons here though. I grow the Tuscan cavalo nero kind now, but have grown ordinary curly kale in the past

Kantankrus_Mare

foxgloves said:

Hi Savingmore,
I can't really help with kale suggestions, as I haven't yet tried growing it. I am considering it though, mainly because of my understanding that it stands well into winter - I've seen photos of redbor kale looking very picturesque with a dusting of snow on the leaves. I've grown other brassicas - cabbage, cauli, as well as other greens, spinach, perpetual spinach, chard, etc. I've made pickled red cabbage a few times & also batch-cooked red cabbage & apples for the freezer (Christmas dinner veg as I don't like sprouts!). I can't envisage pickled kale, but I know Chinese leaves are used in a lot of kimchi recipes, aren't they, so sometimes these things are worth a try. If you are a grower, I bet your freezer is already rammed, but I like to prioritise using gluts to make & freeze future meals if possible. If your variety of kale is one which stands into winter though, it may be that you can just pick it a bit more gradually than things like courgettes & tomatoes, which need using as & when they are ready? 
I wonder if Kantankrus grows kale & has any ideas on this, as she defo has an alloment, also carrielovesfanta is an allotment person too.
F x

Just having a quick catch up and saw this. Kale isnt something i grow. Ive only recently discovered how well Chard grows over winter.
X

crazy_cat_lady

I'm very late to this party but surely soaking your fruit in salt water would dehydrate it? It would definitely make any bugs float because salt water is higher density than just water (hence floating in the dead sea). 

savingmore

Thanks for replying about kale.  Yes it’s is hardy but I have quite a lot as I got carried away when planting, and we eat it everyday....i love pickled food, so will have a go and report back.  i only have a smallish freezer, so no more room for Tetris 5🤣🤣🤣. filled up with apples, blackberries and plums.  feeling very virtuous after a couple of busy weeks picking and prepping.  did a couple of hours of weeding and replanting some of my veg this morning in the allotment.  very therapeutic and listened to some of Dave Ramsey’s podcasts too on financial management.  lovely sunday morning.