From Frugal Foundations to Fortified Family Future

Watty1

A suggestion if you are happy with the location of the whirly thing is to look up postcrete (you might find a local face book page where someone will give away some of their left overs). It is a rapidly setting ready mixed concrete stuff around £6 for a full bag and it will fix the post holder very firmly into the ground so it never moves. (We do permanence for fixings around the Watty household given that we are on sand and we have substantially sized animals that like to move things)

Greying_Pilgrim

Yeah, thanks Watty - we use post-crete, we used it on the washing line post. I'm not sure the Whirly will be in that position longer term. At the mo, it's accessible from the steps and what will (hopefully in time) be the patio, but longer term, that is all going and the current position is in the 'lawn' bit. I am now seeing the value of having the whirly gig, but need to think about where a permanent placement could go - even if it was literally a round hole in the ground. I need to take into account that in time we will have grass to walk on 😁 and possibly a shed of some description in the space 🫤

We managed to get a hair cut, so I've updated the non-food budget line with that and another box of grass seed. We only went into one chazzer, nothing doing, but time was ticking (only put 2 hrs on the car in the car park), so we hightailed it to hB, where I got the grass seed, a bag of walnut halves, and picked up 2 packs of gala apples (16 in total), YS'd to 40p each. £2.49 spent in total. We then went to h3r0n and I picked up 2 YS'd packs of hot dog rolls for 47p each, 2 x 400g punnets of British strawberries for £1 each and a 2L tub of vanilla flavoured icecream for £2. The Strawberries look lovely, and were grown in Cambridgeshire. Total spent in her0n was £4.94.

Total food spend was £7.43.

I need to update my siggie figgie and the GC thread.

Greying X

greenbee

Bear in mind that you can use the whirly hole for a parasol if you need it :)

cheesymouse

or a parasol base for a whirly gig (not in high winds though……)!

Cherryfudge

What a great set of food bargains!

Not having an established place for the whirly could be an advantage as you will get to see the advantages or otherwise places where you try it out. I expect you'll soon work that out, though.

Baileys_Babe

When you make the patio if you include a hole for the whirligig you would be able to put the laundry out standing on the patio which would help prevent the garden from turning to a mud bath in winter.

Greying_Pilgrim

Good Morning MFW'rs

MMmm, I'd never thought about the parasol/whirly combo - good suggestions. We do have to be a bit mindful in our garden of the breeze/wind. I don't know if it's the orientation of the house, or the houses surrounding, or the trees, but we often get very 'swirly' breezes that can whip stuff over/across the garden etc. I personally love the 'sail' parasols, but it may not be the right thing for our garden. But I love to have lots of ideas that can be thought about/sifted through, applied to the local circumstances etc etc so it's all good.

And I suppose one thing I am guilty of is seeing plans in my head, and not being able to 'show' those to DH and LG. I mean even a 3D drawing doesn't always convey my idea - even if i was capable to drawing it! It's like with the levelling, I have done it before, so I knew the 'theory' could work, and I had an idea of how to apply it to our current garden, but without saying to DH, "we will need to lower this bit by 12 inches, build this patch up by 9 inches, and this patch up by 4 inches….." He couldn't see how we were going to get things level-er. I'm grateful that at least once we got about 2/3rds through the process, "level-er" started to magically appear, and he could see what we were aiming for - and he could see when I said "there's still a slight ridge, we need to work that section again.." what I was on about. But he won't have given any thought to the track of the sun (if we have a 'summerhouse' type shed), or if we plant fruit trees etc. Planning and initial vision isn't DH's forte, but he's a grafter, and I love that he is always 'Team Greying'. And although I am prone to procrastination/fear of failure, I do also believe in 'sitting' with a garden or house or room or whatever to see how you use it/need it to function etc before making changes. Having said that - I am not a perfectionist, and whilst the garden is going to be far better than it was, it does still have a slight slope - I haven't achieved crown green bowl pitch levels of surfacing 🫤

So we had pizza and wedges last night. It was 2/3rds mushroom and 1/3rd black olive pizza, and the l/o pieces were put in the freezer. I emptied the bag of……Melody? potatoes last night. I haven't quite used all of them, but I re-washed them and de-sprouted them (tbf they haven't gone mad with sprouting), and popped the extras in the fridge. There will be 2 suitable for baking, and the rest will come in for mashing or curries or more wedges. These were the Easter tatties. I think these were the MrAl/MrL offering - I'm pretty sure they had Melody. I have some Saxon (I think) left in the garage - they were from MrS. They aren't fairing so well regarding not sprouting, but are a tastier potato. I don't know how else I can store tatties - they are in a brown paper sack, in a cool garage…… Pud was strawberries and ice-cream. The vanilla flavoured icecream from h3ron wasn't the best I've ever had, but with the strawberries it didn't matter so much, as it didn't overpower their flavour. I probably wouldn't buy that icecream again, but the tub it comes in is going to be super useful for future food storage/picnic butties etc (and no, I ain't a picnic snob and no, my tupp3rwar3 doesn't all matchy-matchy 🤣 - you're not surprised, are you…… 🤣).

I only managed one half of the football, lawks it was dull. It was 1-0 to England last I saw. Still, it was marginally less painful to watch than the Women getting trounced by Spain on Friday. Well done Spain, super play, and on track to be World Champs again.

I watched a video last night of how to re-string a whirly-gig. Lawks, that put me off 🫤The chap was using rope, rather than plastic coated line. He was stringing a 4 arm one (mine is 3), but managed to NOT get line all tangled up as he repeatedly pulled all the line through every hole in each arm. He was hot on knots and tightening lashes, but then when he reached the end, the line wasn't tight enough, and he started undoing everything to tighten each round…….. I bet in the whirly-gig factory, they have a block on which the arms are placed whilst the 'lacing' is done, and it's a optimum splay. Maybe our old whirly gig had a replacement line, but it wasn't too saggy, and it didn't have knots on every round 🤔 I thought it was going to be straightforward to restring, as long as i had someone holding the reel of line, whilst I threaded through. If I have to unravel it all, I can forsee a massive birds nest tangle coming on…… Actually, I've now watched a bit of another video, an Irish chap was taking it 3 rows at a time - it seems like a better prospect (I'll watch is whole vid on the 3 arm version), although their design has 2 holes per row on one of the arms - mine does not 🙄

I am going to have to dry DH's workwear on the dehu. It's looking like we could have a downpour at any second and he needs workwear for tomorrow.

Lunch today could well be soup if the weather is as shonky as it's looking. Not too sure about tea yet. Did I mention that the sponge cake I made on Friday to use up the eggs worked out well. It was just a normal 4:4:4:2 sponge mix, doubled and I added some mixed spice and vanilla extract into the batter. Then when it had cooled, I sliced the cake in half and spread some of the MrL plum jam onto half the cake - so it's sort of a Vicky sponge - although isn't the proper jam for VS, Raspberry? Anyway, I liked it and DH liked it (likes any cake), and mentioned how floral it tasted. LG has yet to try a piece, as they decided to purchase a UPF flapjack from a shop over having momma's delicious home-made cake 😭

Right, my coffee cup is empty and I had better go and watch that re-stringing video. Doing it in sections seems a better proposition. There are 9 holes/lines on my whirly gig, so I think I will do a 3,4,2 arrangement, to take account of where the supporting struts meet the arms too.

Ta for popping in. Greying X

rtandon27

@Greying_Pilgrim - I'm also making use of the dehumidifier today - bringing in the last of last weekend's laundry that has been in the summer house for a week and 'finishing' it off so it can be put away. It has been so cold and wet this week that while not 'wet' those items are certainly not 'dry'. Added bonus is that the kitchen/bathroom/hall area is slightly warmer than it was yesterday as the dehumidifier is pumping out a bit of heat.