Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

foxgloves · 18 August 2023 at 10:10AM

@maryb - No he isn't aware of any schemes like that. I used to work for the same organisation before my redundancy & there was very little in the way of staff perks at all. There were one or two when I first started work in the profession in the late 1980s, but they were withdrawn as it was felt that they could be open to abuse.
F

foxgloves · 18 August 2023 at 10:42AM

Morning Campers!
An utterly grey day here this morning - chilly & drizzle. It will perk the garden up, but I can't say it is doing the same for me. Friday is my regular cleaning day, so I cracked on with it early & have been quite productive. Apart from sorting bread dough into its banneton when ready, I am intending to spend the rest of the day on leisure activities. Small wins:
*Whole house cleaned using minimal products.
*Changed bed linen. Have loaded washer but will wait until better weather for free line-drying.
*Mixed up a sourdough - on it's first proving, though I need to go & do the stretching & folding shortly,
*Entered a competition.
*Did a couple of surveys. Need to keep an eye on P/A as I have decided not to abandon my monthly target of minimum £40, hopefully £50. Currently at £22.13, but 13 days left so we'll see.
*Finished crocheting together the granny squares for Soot's new blanket last night, so just need to crochet around the edge, then it is finished & I will start on the squares for Ash's. It's good to see the bag of yarn stash odds & ends getting smaller as I upcycle them into new useful items.
*Mr F did a good shop last night - a little more than the last couple of weeks because there were a couple of more expensive items on the list, but there is now only cat food to buy, so I am hoping we will still be on target for the week.
That, alongside some reading, piano playing & watching a TV episode will be my day. We have planned a stay-at-home weekend to get some garden jobs done. Mr F is keen to get the shed-painting finished, as that came to a halt with all the rain & he is also limited to days when he's not working. I need to pick a lot of tomatoes & to progress cutting back the borders. The small section I started about 3 weeks ago has put on new growth & is looking so tidy compared with the extremely relaxed tangle of the rest of it. Still a fair bit of colour, so am choosing what gets cut back carefully. If we make good progress tomorrow, we are treating ourself to Sunday breakfast at the village farm shop cafe.
Wheelie-bin thoughts. What? This woman is sitting there pondering wheelie bins? Well, sort of! On Monday morning, our bin was put out for emptying & I went down the drive just to add some rubbish to it & was really struck by just how little was in there. It was barely even a quarter full. We are both quite waste-conscious & aim to be environmentally-friendly, but even so, I was surprised by how little rubbish we had generated in two weeks (fortnightly bin collection). Of course, there is also the recycling wheelie bin & the garden waste one, so I'm talking about the stuff which goes in the general bin & from thence, off to landfill. I think various things are contributing to this.......we are trying to favour products with recyclable or no packaging, we are using our local eco-refill shop more often, we aim for zero food waste so there's no food going in there, glass goes off to the bottle bank, stretchy plastic, crisp bags & pet food pouches to the C**p collection point, fruit & veg scraps are composted for our garden or go into the worm composter & we repurpose any 'rubbish' we think might have a new life - for example decent lidded containers. We have been doing this for ages, but I just found it interesting & encouraging that the results are now starting to show in terms of producing very small fortnightly binfuls for collection. Thinking ahead to Autumn (my favourite season) - I always think of October as the first month in the gardening year - our theme is going to be 'Feed the soil'. It has provided 2 decades of food & flowers for us, saving a decent chunk of grocery spend over the years, & although we do always make compost, we are going to step this up & see what else we can do to give back. I shall also find nourishment in doing this, as I love to be outside in our own green space with my hands in the soil.
Well, I see another survey has appeared, so I will get on with that, then finish blanket no.1.
In non-spendy solidarity this damp Friday,
F x

Baileys_Babe · 18 August 2023 at 2:08PM

Like you our general waste collection is fortnightly, our bin is rarely more than a quarter full and that's for a family of 4. We also reuse, repurpose, recycle or refuse packaging, which must help. In contrast both our neighboring households, each with 2 people, put out a very full bin fortnightly and frequently 2 very full bins each - how do they generate so much rubbish? They both put out their recycling bins so they must be doing some recycling.

We making our purchases we do consider the packaging for example something we often use is usually sold in 100g tubs (similar to bicarbonate of soda tubs), we have couple of empty tubs and don't have a use for them, we have found the same product for sale in a 1kg lidded bucket and we will use it before it goes out of date. We've filled up the 2 empty tubs and put the in the kitchen and the rest has gone into the stores.
The advantages for us are we are:
⭐ using the existing tubs
⭐ we have plenty in stock and can manage our stock better
⭐ I'm not having to make a trip to a store I don't usually shop at
⭐ we will have a useful lidded bucket, once it is empty
⭐ we have saved 40% of the cost

I do appreciate that we are fortunate to be able to pay the cost up front and having space to store our bulk buys.

maryb · 18 August 2023 at 2:19PM

we are are the same. - we have fortnightly non recyclable bin collections and sometimes I don’t have anything in the wheelie bin to so don’t have to put it out. Our bin is really too big but on occasion it is useful eg if we are decorating and have black plastic sacks full of old wallpaper to get rid of.

I was ridiculously pleased with myself this week. - the food caddy didn’t have anything in it so I didn’t put that out for collection. I do try and minimize food waste but I’m not always as successful as that. I compost all our veg scraps. Which reminds me, I keep meaning to empty the old compost bin and spread the contents on the garden because the second bin is now full. So I will get some exercise turning that and leaving it to do it’s thing while I fill up the empty one. I shall be interested to see if I have potatoes growing in there - there’s a few haulms forcing their way out of the trapdoor but they never had any flowers so I don’t know if they will have done anything

foxgloves · 18 August 2023 at 3:30PM

Soot's new autumn blanket is finished. All yarn from my stash - odds & ends from other projects, a few colours from sorting out my Mum's craft stash, & I have some leftover so will be crocheting another 35 squares for Ash's blanket. Ideally I'd like one for up on the landing too as they do like to loll about up there near the radiator in the cooler months.
F

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foxgloves · 18 August 2023 at 3:49PM

@Baileys_Babe & @maryb - Yes, it is satisfying when household (&money) management is working properly & much, much less is being thrown away. I can remember years ago reading something in which an environmentalist said, "There is no 'away'". That stuck with me as it is so true. Non-biodegradable stuff which goes to landfill will just sit there, some of it pretty much for ever. I imagine people centuries hence, when I think modes of living will have to be very different, digging into our landfill sites & thinking we were the most wasteful, planet-destroying era ever.
Maryb - We don't have a food waste collection, but that's one thing I can honestly say we are hot on......we rarely bin any food waste because meal planning, shopping to a list & weekly triage of the fridge & produce baskets mean that we don't have any. Occasionally, like everyone else, we find we have a lemon or clementine which has sprouted blue fur overnight, but they are composted. We are both omnivores, so we do have animal bones sometimes. After I've made stock with them, I could theoretically bury them in the garden for breaking down naturally into nutrients - the only reason I don't do that is because there are foxes in our village & much as I like foxes, I don't want them coming into the garden & having run-ins with our cats. On the occasions I have watched those TV programmes helping families with their grocery budgets, I have been horrified by the amount of perfectly good food being thrown away. The worst one - years ago, but it has stuck with me, was an episode with a couple who roasted a chicken every week then only ate the breast meat. The entire rest of the chicken was binned! I honestly thought I would have to run for the village defibrillator for Mr F....he sat there with his mouth open, just couldn't believe anyone could be so dismissive of perfectly good food! It's not often he is stuck for words!
Back before the LBM, when I was very spendy, I honestly thought I was 'green', but I was deluding myself because although I often chose a trendy environmentally-badged option, I was simply buying too much, just generally over-consuming. The greenest option is often ignored, isn't it? The decision simply to buy less, & this is now reflecting positively in our bin contents, as well as our budget.
F

Baileys_Babe · 18 August 2023 at 4:31PM

Soot's new blanket is lovely, come winter I hope he appreciates the love that has gone into making it.

scandimore · 18 August 2023 at 4:44PM

Lovely blanket foxgloves! I'm just learning to crochet and want to make similar for our living room, maybe one big one as our cats will just choose to fight over one blanket even when they have one each.