Put away your purse & become debt-averse

Onebrokelady

The pesto looks lovely and I love the basket too😊

foxgloves

Thanks @OBL, I am sending you a virtual spoonful!

Morning all, Just finishing my coffee before making a start on my big weekly house clean. Am I in the mood for this? Nope! But the temperature has dropped by about 5 or 6 degrees here today so I feel I could actually commit to a bit of dysonnage & mop-waving without melting onto the tiles in a puddle.
Poor Mr F last night.... we'd just got in bed & he said 'You look really thoughtful'. I said 'Yeah, I'm just pondering something'.
'Oh, what's that then?'
' I was wondering if I should include a new category on Spreadsheet 2 for grocery budget surplus......'
Have decided I can see no real benefits to this. If there is money left in the grocery budget at the end of the month, which I think we' d all have to agree is a Good Thing, I think it would be better to add it to the Savings Pot/s most in need of it at the time. 
Well, I can't carry on sitting here pontificating about the minutiae of my budgeting system...... time to get this dusty house in order. I want it all done by 10.30 as that's about my boredom threshold for cleaning. 
F x

marionmgcars

 Love reading about the garden supplies.  This year I made gooseberry jam for first time.  Today I made cushion covers from fabric I made in my stash.  Enjoyed making them, so pleased I made the effort

foxgloves

Lovely idea to use stash materials to make something new for your house, @marionmgcars. Your cushions look really good. I'm glad you haven't been finding my diary toooooo boring to read. I feel I've done little else except drone on about courgettes & vegetable-related tedium recently. 
Deadheading again today. I do think that if I can get the worst of the dry & dead bits chopped off, it will give the later flowering stuff space to shine. Also bird poo to clear up, as somehow a young blackbird got shut up in our conservatory overnight & let's just say that its bowels were not unaffected by the trauma of this. Still, at least I'm not out spending my money in cafes & gift shops! 
F x

Blackcats

Yay!  You've finished knitting your blanket squares.  Just the sewing up to do now 😅
 I've been disciplined and have been sewing in the ends from my striped blanket as I change colours.  My last blanket I left all the ends til it was finished and it was a right old chore.

foxgloves

Good idea, @Blackcats, because sewing in ends is the worst part of any project. I am probably going to leave sewing up my squares until Autumn as it feels like an overly 'warm' job to be tackling now & we will have no need of it until then. Intend to catch up with a few smaller projects for presents, my sister's charity stall, etc. 
F x

foxgloves

Morning Monday Money Savers,
Just had a budget update session - it's become a regular habit for the beginning of the week, but as it is my Big Budget Day tomorrow, I wanted everything to be as straight as possible. Nearly £17 left in the grocery budget at the end of Week 4's food shop, so I have added it to our House & Garden Pot. 
Have also had a look at our latest energy statement which has just arrived. We are currently £216-34 in credit. This is useful as it is the summer 'credit' which subsidises the colder months, as we all know. I did wonder if, with August & September still to go, this level of credit is a little high & whether I should opt for a refund or to lower our payments. I've compared the tentacled provider's estimate of our annual usage (£1098-42) with the total annual amount we pay (£1232-76) & there is a £134-34 difference (potential overpayment). With energy prices flagged to rise this winter, I am not convinced this is quite enough of a surplus to warrant doing anything about it atm. I think I'll continue to keep an eye on it & see what our account is looking like at the end of the financial year. This would pretty much mirror what I did this year, when I claimed a refund. I think that is probably more sensible than altering things now.
Can report a good shopping from home item. Our postponed city centre trip is this coming weekend & I had been thinking about buying myself a lovely new notebook as my old one is full. I always have a notebook on the go for jotting down this & that, my list of books to read, websites, recommendations, alterations to knitting patterns - everything & anything. Then I remembered a couple of nice hardback spiral bound A5 notebooks my friend bought me a while back & so I am using one of those instead. I was planning on buying a nice one, so that is probably between £10 & £15 saved. Yay to shopping from home!!
A very routine Monday here - 1st load of laundry pegged out to dry for free, 2nd lot just about to be added to it & last load started off. Haven't done today's garden pickings yet, but have had the quickest wander down & it is looking like a cucumber, courgettes, chard, chillies & tomatoes. I might pop out for a walk later & have plenty of weeding & deadheading/cutting back to do in both the borders & veggie garden for some additional exercise.
Not a no-spend day as have ordered some more nematodes in case the evil weevils are getting primed for new chomping.
I'm really hoping for a productive week, so it's good to be feeling nicely positive on a Monday morning.
Cheers all,
F x

CRANKY40

Walking around the garden and coming back indoors with food is one of my favourite things to do. I've ordered nematodes for ants as they first of all invaded my sage tub and killed that and now they've killed my blueberry bushes that were also in a tub. 

foxgloves

Me too, @CRANKY40. We had an advance party of ants in our conservatory a few weeks ago. I put lots of mint down (bruised it a bit first) & the numbers dwindled down to just single figures of hardcore ants. Sprinkled dried mint into crevices, put a bit more fresh down & they vanished. Ants hate anything in the mint family, especially pennyroyal, but I don't have any of the atm. 
F

CRANKY40

Thanks for that info @foxgloves. I have lost of mint that grows in a flowerbed were nothing else will grow. Watch out ants, I'm coming for you. I just need to move a few other pots out of the way first so that they don't move house like they did after they'd destroyed the sage.