Chicken feed

Our chickens are fed  layers pellets ad lib but to get them out of the way when we are collecting eggs or filling up water troughs a scoop of wheat is really useful. They soon associate the appearance of a person with some wheat chucked in which is handy if they get out and you need to get them back in again.
Last year wheat prices were high, we bought some off a friend who was giving up chicken keeping and paid £180 for 32 sacks- and that was cheaper than the feed mill. This year the feed mill have wheat at about £8 for 25kg but luckily C spotted a farmer selling some on ebay for £3 a sack and went off today to collect 20 sacks.The price has dropped so much that some farmers may not bother to combine it especially if the weather doesn't improve.

While he was out I spent a couple of hours sorting out the onions which have been drying on the floor of the of the greenhouse. I rubbed the skins and dirt off and put the good ones into net bags to hang in the shed. The ones that look doubtful will be used by us or sold to be used straight away. It's a poor quality crop this year but if the decent ones keep alright we may have enough until the end of the year. We've already sold enough to more than cover the cost of the sets.

How annoying is this:- We had a one year investment bond at a local Building Society finish at the end of July and decided to move the money into  ISAs at Barclays that was paying a slightly better rate. Then in the post this morning a letter from Barclays telling us that the they will be unable to continue that ISA at that rate after November so will be changing it to a lower rate of interest - No mention yet of how low.
Honestly, saving money is blinkin' hard work. Perhaps we should go out on a wild spending spree and blow the lot! on the other hand maybe NOT.

Welcome to new followers on Bloglovin' and thanks for comments yesterday.
 The copy of Diary Of A Provincial Lady that I have on loan from the library has 4 books in one volume ( Diary of a PL, The PL goes further, The PL in America and The PL in Wartime) and is the Virago edition of 2011. I'm trying to find out if the Persephone reprint that was out in April is just the first one or all 4. ( The fifth in the series PL in Russia is not included in many editions, don't know why)
 This is post 490 and I will be doing a giveaway of some books for post 500. You will need to click the Google friends button to be in with a chance.
Counting down...............

Back Tomorrow
Sue

Know your prices

Approved Foods send me an email everyday to tell me about their special 'bargains'. I keep hoping they will have bread flour at a good price like they did last year which is the only time I've ordered. Yesterday at first glance their Hovis bread mix looks a possibility at 2 for £1 then I notice the weight - only 495g - so only enough for one loaf of bread. Now I know that Aldi Bread flour is 75p for 1.5kg, that's enough for 3 loaves. That makes each loaf  25p plus a teaspoon of yeast, salt and sugar which is only a few pence more. So the bread mix is NOT a bargain at all.
Neither is their plain flour at 60p for 1.5kg as Aldi is only 45p, and why would you pay 60p for a tin of plum tomatoes when all the supermarket value brands are 34p? ( and I know the AF ones are a branded product but so what?).
Then today they have 12.5kg of branded plain and self - raising flour for £4.99. Surely that MUST be a genuine bargain as it is supposedly reduced from £14.99. But no, work it out and you find that Aldi flour is still cheaper.
I shall keep waiting for a real bargain in things I want to order.
Now that the My Supermarket website includes Aldi ( perhaps it has for a while - I don't know) it's easy to check prices of things everywhere. Although if you are like us in a rural area, knowing how much things are at Aldi, Asda and Morrisons is not a lot of help when they are all 25 miles away.

Things are happening on the growing front as onion sets are in and a bed of Foremost early potatoes planted and re-covered with black plastic for a while. We had lettuce and radishes from the poly tunnel for lunch today after a couple of weeks without and the early potatoes C put in there are now up and growing.

Cabbages and parsnips are finished so we have just a few sprouts, purple sprouting broccoli and leeks left. It was looking hopeful for the purple sprouting to last a while as some plants were ahead of others but then the warm weather over the weekend made them all shoot so we are eating some almost everyday, steamed, stir-fry and tomorrow in a quiche. Leeks have been eaten in the pasties I made last week, made into fritters and baked in stock.

It got really windy this afternoon and the temperature dropped. The forecast is for cold nights so it might be a good idea to organise a bit of heat to keep this lot warm, just in case.

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Sue

Getting ship shape

I prefer not to leave things until the last moment so, even though there are a couple of weeks before the campsite opens, we have got the recreation/information room sorted. It had been used for storing the wood and roofing for the new toilets ( and for my new shed  ). We shifted the left-overs elsewhere, put the dustbins outside, brushed the cobwebs and swept out the dust.Then I sorted and chucked all the out of date tourist leaflets. Once it was easy to get new leaflets each year, but then the Norfolk based company were taken over and now they have very few leaflets for attractions in Suffolk. Some are on order but I'll have to visit a few places to get them direct. I've got 4 shelves of books for people to borrow, swap or buy, so they were unpacked from store. Darts and chalk ready for the dartboard, the child size  football table was cleaned,  seats and table dusted. Sorted.

I've had a look in the toilets and shower and the main thing to do there is to sweep out all the leaves that have blown in under the doors. I'll leave that for nearer the time.Then I brought all the loo brushes and holders in and dunked them in a sink full of hot water, washing up liquid and a bit of bleach and gave the shower curtain a wash. Another mornings work and we will be ready. Plus I must remember to order two more paper towel holders for the new loos.

Him Outside went off with tractor and trailer to fetch a load of top soil from our farmer friend. He used some to level all round the new gents loo shed, some to level the place where the trench is and then chucked some grass seed down and  finally more soil was used to fill up the back of the beds in the big poly tunnel.

Onion sets  arrived today. I order heat treated ones because in the past we had a lot of problems with an onion virus. Planting them is a long back-breaking job which I'm not looking forward to.

We've still got several cooking apples stored in a box in the shed ( as well as some in the freezer) so, to make a change from crumbles and pies, I made an apple meringue pie for dinner. We will certainly have enough until the next apple season.

The weather changed from warm and sunny this morning to cold and windy this afternoon and the forecast is for a chilly weekend. Oh dear, that's not good news for the apricot blossom.

Thanks to everyone for comments yesterday, I'm glad to have given a few people an idea for another book to look out for and welcome to a new follower - Susan- on Google friends and to Claire, Clare, Helen and Barbara via Bloglovin.

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Success and failure at Self Reliance?

The idea of being self sufficient has appealed to me since reading the John Seymour book in the late 1970s. The reality is that it is nigh impossible but we can be more self reliant.

Which is why this isn't just a picture of  some apples.

These are our apples, cooking and eating, and it's February17th and they are still looking OK. That's success! We've never had such good quality, long keeping before. AND we still have several wrapped in newspaper in boxes in the shed.

I checked through  the last net of onions today and had to chuck several. We have enough to see us through another few weeks but we've not grown the over-winter type this year after a couple of years of failures so we will have an onion gap over the summer.  That's a sort of failure at self reliance.

Aubergine seeds have been sown and popped in the propagator and I came across a packet of sweetpea seeds that were free last year so I've sown them in pots too.

While in Saxmundham picking up Him Outside from the railway station, I nipped into Tescos for milk. As I went past the reduced fruit and veg. section I noticed yellow stickers on some small packs of raspberries and strawberries. You'll never believe what the "reduced" price was -- £2.89! Reduced? I don't think so! and  probably pretty tasteless too at this time of the year. I wonder how far they had flown to get here. We will stick to eating our own apples and our own fruit from the freezer until rhubarb season.

Thank you to everyone for comments yesterday. Lovely to hear that people enjoy reading my ramblings from Suffolk.

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