Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves

Lovely today, thanks 1LuckyLady. Doesn't it lift your spirits to see some sunshine.....a lovely Brimstone butterfly too.

Spent lots of time in the garden today. It's good free fitness & toning activity and I found all sorts of planty treasures while I was clearing & digging.
Back in the Spendy Decades, I used to spend ridiculous amounts of money in garden centres......of course it was invariably the bank's money too, rather than mine. New plants were a big weakness & I've quite a big garden to fill. It's not very wide (about 30 ft) but it's 130 ft long. About a third is our veggie garden & the rest of it is lawn & big flower beds. Well, it's AMAZING what treasures can be found at this time of year. All those self-sown plants are FREE & just waiting to be transplanted. Today I found 6 big healthy foxgloves, 1 aquilegia, 8 pot marigolds, 2 parsley plants & 2 strawberry plants. The parsley is now in my herb bed, the strawberries have been added to the strawberry tower & I've started filling gaps in the flowerbeds with the rest. I did love going to the garden centre for a big planty splurge, but it's very satisfying to find free self-sown ones & to divide up clumps of stuff I already have to make new.
Can't wait to see what I might find next time. Back aching from digging though!
F

brizzledfw

Liking the diary foxgloves.. Have just subscribed..

foxgloves

Welcome Brizzledfw.
I've really been applying the 'Shop from home first' principle this morning & will pop back later to bore you all with it.
F x

redofromstart

I love wasting money in garden centres on new things for me to kill

Love free plants even more though, every so often I find another shrub (usually azaleas or hydrangeas) that I put a stone over a branch a few years ago in my last fit of gardening enthusiasm.

foxgloves

Redofromstart - Oh, do you mean getting free new shrubs by 'layering', where you weight a branch or stem down & it roots? I've only done that with penstemons but it did work. Agree free plants are the best kind. I used to spend such silly money at the garden centre.....I mean, £50 just to plant up a couple of tubs outside my front door every season. Yes, they looked nice, but not '50 quid nice'. Foxgloves, aquilegias, centaurea, alchemilla, marigolds & borage seed prolifically in our garden, but that's fine by me as they all flower their socks off & cost me now't!

foxgloves

Hi Diary readers,
Heard from Ziffit today & they've paid me for the last small box of books & CDs I sold them. That's another little bit for the Loan Pay Down Fund.

Well, it's been a real 'Shop from home first' kind of day. Had 4 things on my shopping list today. Two of them were potatoes & lettuce. Checked veg basket & found we still have 3 large potatoes. Double-checked meal plans & we just need 2 for jacket potato night tomorrow, so crossed potatoes off the list. We had run out of lettuce & I'd planned to serve salad with tonight's meal, but shopping from home turned up a quarter of a white cabbage & half a leftover red onion & we have mayo & carrots, so I decided to make chunky coleslaw instead. So that was lettuce crossed off too. The other 2 items weren't supermarket items so that meant I didn't need to visit the supermarket at all, so avoided all the little temptations that go hand in hand with that purse emptying horror, the 'top-up shop'. My Spendy Decades were full of top-up shops....I'm sure there were weeks when I shopped for food 5 days out of 7......sometimes simply because I fancied something different to all the stuff I'd got in......& you know how it is, you get to the check-out & find the invisible supermarket pixies have somehow managed to fill your basket with premium brand crisps, chocolate, big pants inducing desserts & glossy magazines. And you only went in for milk & crispbreads!!
I'll tell you about the rest of today's shopping from home in a minute......

foxgloves

OK, sat down with a nice hot cafetiere & did some Easter planning today. I love baking & agreed to provide home baked pork pies, an Easter cake & a trifle for a family buffet. We are a small family & we always give gifts at Easter. I intend to make all mine & they'll be 'foodie' things.....biscuits, fudge etc. Found all my recipes & wrote complete list of all ingredients needed......29 of them. Then went through cupboards & was able to cross off 11 of them. Also decided to bake Mary Berry's Easter biscuits....partly because they're traditional & yum, but also because they include ingredients I'll have leftover from making the cake.
Also checked supplies of cellophane bags, ribbons & home made gift tags & I have plenty, so will be able to present my gifts attractively. This will definitely be a lot cheaper than buying everybody an Easter egg or similar & I will enjoy making & baking everything. Giving home made fudge as a gift has been a revelation. I mean, how can a collection of such a few inexpensive ingredients produce so much joy in the recipient?
Anyway......plans are in place & a much reduced Easter baking shopping list at the ready. Feeling organised & being organised always saves us money.
Oh, all that talk of Easter goodies has made me fancy some mini-eggs. My money's safe though. I've zero intention of going out now & I shan't have the car tomorrow.
Saved from myself again!
F x

redofromstart

Yes, we have dry stone walls that back onto the 'shrubbery' and lots of elderly shrubs so sometimes it is accidental layering and sometimes I forget I did it.

Nice work on the make do front.

foxgloves

Well, either way, it's free plants, Redofromstart, & that can't be bad!

Morning everybody else,
I'm intending to do my mid-month budget check-in today, so there'll be a bit of number-crunching going on. Just need a bucket of coffee first.......
F

foxgloves

Oh....it felt like Calculators at Dawn today. I always aim to do my Big Budget Day at the end of the month, either on.pay day or as soon afterwards as possible. I also like to do a mid-month budget check-in around the 14th or 15th to make sure we're on the right track & no weird 'money leaks' have appeared.
So that was pretty much my morning. Not exactly riveting on the entertainment front, but don't you just feel better seeing the figures in black & white?
No nasty surprises today. The only bit I couldn't reconcile was about a fiver of surplus cash. I shoved that in the grocery budget as the forensic levels of investigstion required to determine its true home seemed more than a fiver's worth of my time!