Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

EssexHebridean

I'm very impressed that your cucumbers are already at the harvesting stage - mine have barely even started climbing their trellis!

foxgloves

@Suffolk_lass - Yes, I didn't know anything about grafted veg plants except for someone trialling them, I think, on 'G's W' a couple of years ago. I have always grown from seed so they didn't feel relevant to me. So why the change of heart with cucumbers? Well, I like to grow the 'all female' F1 varieties as they are prolific & non-bitter but the seeds are around £3.99 for a pack of 4 seeds so call that £1 a seed. They would all germinate & grow well to the potting up into 9cm pots stage. They'd take well to their pots & look really happy……until they weren't! Every year, I'd have first one, then another cark it. I only require 2 plants for my greenhouse grow bag but sometimes I'd have to buy a plant to put with the single one I had left which deigned to stay alive. Last year, I was at a garden centre to look at something else (2 of my cukes had died & another one was on life support) & spotted that they were selling grafted cucumber plants at 2 for £12. I thought that was expensive tbh but factoring in the £4 I'd already spent on seeds, the heat they'd had in my propagator & the cost of buying in 2 standard replacements to compensate for deaths, I thought I'd give them a try. They come with a little clip (like a ponytail clip) where the graft has been made until it is nicely fused & the nurseries like to graft a good tasting variety of fruit onto a strongly prolific random old squash rootstock. Last year's grafted cukes were great so I bought a couple for this year - the fruiting top growth is 'Merlin' - I hadn't grown this variety before - they are small - medium sized fruits - not the tiny lunchbox size, bigger than that, but not the very long supermarket varieties. They are really juicy, have been cropping very well & I am hoping they will go on for a good while yet…..though we all know that when cucumber plants decide they're done, that's it! They hadn't gone up in price this year, which I was expecting because the cost of compost seems to keep rising plus energy costs of heated glasshouses, etc, so I am happy with our choice to buy them again.

So, @EssexHebridean - This might help answer your comment about us having cut so many cucumbers already. I suspect that mad old squash rootstock they're grafted onto is maybe driving production? Also, the young plants had been grown in a heated commercial greenhouse so didn't have to contend with our chilly conservatory & unheated greenhouse when they emerged from the propagator, which my seed-sown non-grafted ones would have grumpily had to do.

Hope this is at least a bit helpful.

F

EssexHebridean

Ahh yes indeed - my poor like cukes had to fight their way through from seed and have been outdoors since they germinated, albeit until they got their first proper leaves in the mini greenhouse. Since then though they've been fending for themselves in all weathers - not surprising they're rather behind where yours are I should think! I shall immediately cut them some well deserved slack! 😁

Meant to say by the way - I have followed your lead with Tromboncino squash this year so we'll see how those go for us - as with yours, they have arches to grow up!

foxgloves

Hello Wednesday Pence-Wranglers,

Pleasant useful morning. Mr F's day off so we treated ourselves to breakfast in our favourite cafe in town (see 'Today's Positive Customer Experiences', I chose thread & bias binding afterwards as shall shortly be cutting out my next dress (since re-discovering simple sewing last summer) & then we swung by Waitbl00m to do our grocery shopping. This afternoon, I've been perusing library cookbooks - more about those later - but first I thought it would be nice to include 3 positive customer experiences from this morning. There are so many transactions that feel below-par or just average, I think we can sometimes forget the occasions which do feel like good service. And 3 in a row this morning:

1. Remember that box of books I sold & dropped off locally to be collected by the carrier & conveyed to W*b? I think I mentioned that they never received it. I sent them a rather terse email with all the tracking ID, date, etc, & the upshot was that they were unable to trace anything at all via the tracking other than me leaving the parcel at the shop. Hmmm. Visited the shop this morning not with any great hope or expectation. Wrong! The manager was fetched & she instantly knew exactly which parcel I was talking about. The assistant who dealt with me dropping it off was from a different branch & didn't know that this branch no longer offers a collection point service for this carrier. They couldn't let me know as all the info on the delivery label I printed off concerned the recipient, there were no contact details for me so they couldn't let me know what had happened. So they had kept my parcel all that time in the hope that I would eventually turn up to complain that it didn't appear to have been sent. As this was easily a month ago, I was grateful that they hadn't simply binned it & was able to thank them for hanging onto it for me before taking it to a different drop-shop on the other side of town. Mr F was very surprised as he had spent all week telling me 'You'll not see that again'.

2. Coffee shop loyalty scheme. Our fave coffee shop in town is an indie so is a bit more expensive than the well-known chains, but the coffee is fab & the food offer very good so we like to support it. A while back, Mr F signed up for their loyalty app but hadn't subsequently given much thought to it apart from getting it scanned when we've been in for a coffee. Today, he discovered he had £8 of loyalty points & used them to reduce our bill - this will be applied at a £4 saving to each of our Personal Spends, which is what we use for coffee shop visits unless it's something that's been pre-budgeted from elsewhere. This feels like a useful loyalty scheme. It's a lovely historic venue & going for lunch there always feels like a bit of a special occasion, so we thought that saving up loyalty points will be a great way of treating ourselves to lunch out at some point with a negligible hit to the budget. I love collecting coffee card stamps for a free cappuccino but I think this is more versatile as the points can just be spent like currency. So that felt nicely positive…..

3. And then there was a 3rd thing!! We were in Waitbl00m making good headway with our list when we got to the fridge aisles for our butter, yoghurt, etc. We like their own label of lighter spreadable butter but when I looked, they were all very short dated, only a week hence & we couldn't have eaten a whole container by then, even taking into account the 16-tog duvet of butter Mr F ideally likes on his toast. I commented to him that there weren't any with suitable dates when a member of staff who had arrived nearby for shelf stacking overbheard & came to look at the dates, then asked me if I would like L*rpak as an alternative as the dates were better. I said no I wouldn't, because it's too expensive & she replied that she was going to give us a free one because our chosen product was not available with a suitable shelf-life date. She disappeared with a tub of said product, returned with a receipt affixed to it & put it into our trolley. I thanked her very much as I did think that went above & beyond my expectations. I could have bought the full fat variety or something else & I said so, but she was adamant & said it was a goodwill gesture because we had not been able to buy our usual product because of the short dates. I know it is only a little thing in the grand scheme of life but I did actually feel like a valued customer & I liked that feeling.

Oh, I still want to resume the cookery book discussion we were having on here recently…..hang on, I will put that in another post……

F

foxgloves

This afternoon, I've been quite leisurely, talking to cats & perusing 3 cookbooks I borrowed from the library last week. We were discussing on here recently about how useful it is to do this first, to check that the book contains plenty of recipes we will actually cook. I know that back in the Spendaceous Era, I'd just have bought brand new & added to my shelves of other cookbooks from which I made maybe 1, 2 or, let's be honest, NO recipes. And this afternoon has been a good example of why borrowing from the library first can be so useful in a money saving way. Of the 3 books, the one I thought would be the most useful was lovely, but had many recipes of which I have similar versions in other books I already have. There was 1 recipe I thought I'd make, so that wouldn't have been worth an outright purchase………(despite the fact that I briefly considered doing exactly that when I spotted it on display in used-to-be Smiths last week!) One of the books had 3 or 4 things I'd probably cook, about what I expected, so I have made a note of the title in case I am unable to renew it & need to borrow it again (it's HF-Ws new one about high fibre hero veg). Now the 3rd book I thought I'd enjoy flicking through but as it was based on healthy sub-600 calorie tasty meals, I didn't expect to find much I didn't already know or make, but there turned out to be so many nice recipes that I have noted the title to buy! The point I'm making is that without borrowing them from the library first, I'd have bought the title which actually turned out to be least useful to me & eschewed the one which in reality, contained so many recipes I want both to make & eat that I ran out of bookmarks while I was going through it! So the £20 I am going to spend is now going to be much better targeted. It's just 'Try before you buy' really, isn't it?

Well, Mr F is busy on veg watering duties & Soot has started a kitchen-pacing vigil in case there's any danger of his dinner appearing anytime soon. It's not my cooking night. Chef is going to make Tuna chipotle wedge melt, an recipe from, if I remember rightly, a years old edition of the Waitbl00m free paper. I'm going to read. I cook on Mon, Tues, Thurs & Fri and Mr F does Weds & the weekend. We both enjoy cooking so this works well for us.

Does this bloody woman ever stop gabbing, you are probably all wondering, so I am off!

Cheers, F x

PennysIntoPounds

What very lovely experiences, gives you faith society can learn its manners and function decently!

EssexHebridean

Somewhere from your mentions of assorted food you have reminded me that I have a bag of tortilla chips in the cupboard, so I might go down the chilli and tortillas route for tea tomorrow…! Sometimes I'm slightly bewildered with how my brain works, but when it comes up with something useful like that I'm not complaining!

Suffolk_lass

Back to cucumbers for a moment - I am going to ask if any of the four places I shop at have any plans for the grafted plants to get an earlier start. I have too many plants (7 in total, but 5 in the greenhouse) but as one or more might still dive to the soil in that familiar withering motion, I am keeping them all - I am trying mini crisp, mini munch and Diva (because they are!) plus a little round yellow one (Crystal Lemon) that is in with the strawberries. It's a contest to see which of the latter two can standstill and do nothing for the longest time.

2Scratters

On the subject of customer service or going the extra mile. This isn't my story but was on the local FB group. A delivery had been made to an address and picture taken by delivery person but it was not the correct address. It is a road the runs into our 2 villages(now small towns) and people do get their post mixed up. However this parcel had been collected by a DPD driver and knew the correct address they wrote on it too saying where they had picked it up from. How nice was that?

2 Scratters xx

foxgloves

@Suffolk_lass - Our grafted cucumber plants were from a big local garden centre in the Bl*e Diamond chain so if you have a branch in your area, you'd probably find them around April.

@2Scratters - Yes, that was good service.