Put away your purse & become debt-averse

Greetings Debt-busters,
Well, only 1 spend today & that's just for some ice-cream to have with a couple of 'use-it-up' items from the freezer.
Apart from that, we've been making good use of our own resources. I've planted out lots more bedding plants, all grown from free packets of seed & most of the seed trays I used (already recycled as many were supermarket plastic meat trays) will still be useable next year.
Have fed a few shrubs & fruit trees using free liquid plant food tapped off from our worm composter & done some pond maintenance. This was blimming tiring, so good free exercise, but also a joy, as I counted 10 frogs enjoying the pond & cutting back the overgrown margins revealed so many 'lost' plants I'd forgotten about, plus a mystery one in a tub, which I don't recognise & certainly didn't plant. It's covered in buds so I will soon be able to identify my free planty treasure.
Mr f has been extending our garden. It's a bit of a saga but basically, there's a strip of 'no man's land' at the bottom of our garden. Our neighbours have claimed 'their' bit, so we have decided to do the same & this will extend our wildlife corner by 2m & also provide a better area for compost bins. So he's been clearing, sawing, bonfire tending, etc, & even that's thrown up some free resources........woodash for raking into the garden & lots of long, thin straight trunks which will make excellent bean poles instead of buying new canes.
We're also going to shred some of the cleared branches as last time we did that, the shreddings made fab compost.
In the Spendy Decades, all this physical hard work would have sent us straight for the takeaway leaflet stash, but no, we have nice food in to cook for tonight & we're not going to mess the budget up by paying soneone to cook & deliver our dinner because 'we deserve it' or any of the other lame spendy excuses which used to lure us straight into ordering a takeaway. That way lies ruin!
F x

So nice to be able to start picking a few little bits from the veggie garden - a bunch of coriander & watercress to add to tonight's salad, & it looks as though I'll be cutting our own lettuces from next week. Rhubarb currently providing a crop too.
Been busy in the garden most of today, apart from an hour at my desk to update budgets & do a few surveys. Just waiting for confirmation of a payment, then will be up to over £19 again on Prolific. Onepoll slow atm but I need less than £7 till payout & have got that £40 well & truly earmarked for the Loan Pay Down Fund.
Am visiting family at the weekend & don't have a gift to take, so I've potted up some spare home grown bedding plants to take & will make some rhubarb & ginger muffins too. That's some proper 'shopping from home' as I have all the ingredients in already & the plants were grown from free packets of seeds.
Ok, must crack on & get tomorrow's packed lunch made.
Have a nice evening, all.
F x

Hi all,
Well, I found that needlework kit, which still had the price on. Hmmmm. nearly £30. Amd it has been sitting in a box underneath my craft stash for....well, I'd have said about 4 years, but I remember that actually, I bought it when my nephew was 3. He's now 15, so I think that shows what a colossal waste of money that kit has been so far! Bad Old Spendy Foxgloves!!
But I have been New Resourceful Foxgloves for some years now & I fully intend to get this kit finished.......my investigations showed that I only stitched about 2 square cms of it before consigning it to a cardboard box. It makes up into a lovely bag. The lining, cord for binding the edges & making the handle & little glass beads for embellishing the stitched design are all there and I am planning to get it finished to give as a 50th gift later this summer. I think I have some metallic thread somewhere too, so I may embroider her birthdate & initials somewhere in the design. Then I can present the 2 other little gifts I intend to buy nicely wrapped inside the bag. It's for someone who really appreciates hand crafted things & is a keen crafter herself, so hopefully she will really like it.
So that's a 'shop from home' which should be successful. While i was sorting through all the threads, instructions, etc, I remembered that I have a huge box of additional craft stuff up in the loft from when I used to make jewellery for craft fairs, years ago. I wonder if there are supplies in there which I could divide into bundles for selling on ebay. Worth a thought. I approached all my past hobbies with my usual spendiness, so it's a shame for potentially useful stuff to be sitting in the loft doing sweet B all.

A useful day for getting next week's meal plans done. Am basing them around a roast chicken on Sunday with additional meals to use up the rest of the meat, a freezer dive/jacket potato night, a meal from the freezer and the other 2 nights will be a home made pizza & a cheap Madhur Jaffrey curry recipe. Already done the shopping list, so we can do an online order tonight & will hopefully be closer to our weekly spend target than we were last week when we bought a few BH treats.
OK, must crack on.
Hope anyone reading this is still busy debt-busting.
F x

Lol, CCL & Wish...... I have always loved gardening. My Mum is a keen gardener & I used to have a little patch of garden & a tiny corner of greenhouse when I was a child. Even when I lived in a rented flat with no garden at all (well, apart from a concrete planter out the front where all sorts of undesirables used to sit, as I lived in the same block as the local drug dealer!), I still used to have a couple of grow bags outside against a sunny wall to raise my own tomatoes & peppers. When I bought a little house, I had a small walled garden & was able to add first early potatoes, beans & courgettes, as well as a small herb bed to the mix. I do have quite a big garden now, although not as big as some people perhaps imagine from all the gardening that goes on! We now live in a 1930s house which has the usual 1930s long, narrow garden, so it's only about 30 feet wide, but is 130 feet long, & we were lucky to have 3 mature fruit trees when we moved in.....an apple, pear & greengage. That's all we inherited of any use though, as the rest of it was metre high weeds & the previous occupant's rubbish piled up under every hedge. Two thirds of the garden is flower beds (very much tangled cottage garden style) & the remaining third is used for growing food......greenhouse, veggie beds, raised beds made from old railway sleepers, herb bed & wildlife area (which my partner is currently extending) with compost bins, worm composter, etc. We are not self-sufficient in food, but we probably could be, if we put the rest of the garden to food instead of flowers & lawn. I bet whoever lived here during wartime had a brilliant 'dig for victory' garden, as I think it would be at least as big as an allotment. At least we'll have that as an emergency option up our sleeves post-Brexit if the fresh fruit & veg is all sitting rotting on queuing lorries at Dover! This year, we are growing first early potatoes, 2 types of squash, courgettes, cucumbers, french beans, tomatoes, aubergines, chillies, peppers, sweetcorn, lettuces, rocket, radishes, spring onions, herbs & strawberries......& we have rhubarb & the aforementioned fruit trees. It's a lot of work, but I am not too fussy about weeds & having to have it all in straight lines, etc. And on the plus side, it does provide me with a lot of exercise. On the down side, all the clearing, digging & bending has meant I have hurt my back again (also happened this time last year) so am taking it much easier today.....no garden jobs & as little bending as possible until it improves. Am currently walking around like an ancient crone!!
F x