I say Hello and you say Goodbye.

Hello and welcome to Sooze, Northsider Dave and Frugal in Essex who have clicked the Google follower button and Goodbye to 2 people who've disappeared from Bloglovin'. Your loss!

My post yesterday stirred up lots of comments - all good fun. Thank you to everyone for joining in.
I'm back to normal today.

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We are getting some grey, damp depressing days over this side of the country at the moment and no sign in the forecast of much change. To avoid the black dog of depression creeping up on me, we have gone out for  a short walk every day in the odd fine spell.

C covered a few of the vegetable beds with black plastic, held down by metal pipes of the kind you see on bridge railings, all county council chuck outs and very handy, though I wish some were a bit shorter so I could move them more easily.
 Talking Suffolk County Council, we have had discussions lately with 2 people who still work for CC Highways  now working  with Kier Group .The CC passed all maintenance onto the private company to save money and it now costs more for the work to be priced up than it does for the actual job. They (Kier) are getting rid of road workers left, right and centre, heavens knows what happens when the roads need gritting, the poor blokes will be on very long shifts, just to add to the nonsense of it all Kier went and spent a few hundred thousands on new gritting lorries ( claiming the money back from the CC or rather us, the council tax payers) even though the CC already had enough and they stand unused for 40+ weeks of the year anyway.
We are just glad that C is out of it all, talking to his ex-colleagues is so depressing.

I spent a while hauling some more stuff out of the polytunnels and found more late peppers left than I thought, all this lot in fact.

Several have been sliced and put in the freezer and I wiped and wrapped the rest in kitchen roll and put them in the fridge salad drawer on an old tea-towel with another one over the top. Hopefully they will keep perfectly for quite a while.The kitchen roll and tea towels absorb moisture which is what makes veg go mouldy.
Also brought in today- and isn't it brilliant to still have these available from the poly-tunnel and garden - tomatoes, mixed leaf and beetroot.

 Before Halloween when we sold all the pumpkins, there were just 5 green ones left. These have now turned orange so yesterday they went out by the stall with a sign saying 'last pumpkins £1 each' and much to my surprise 3 have sold already. I  thought we might end up feeding them to the chickens.

Ruth Goodman, Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold are back on TV tonight. They've moved away from farming through the ages and are over in France taking part in a 25 year archeological experiment to build a medieval castle using only tools of the period. Might be interesting, we've been turning off the TV every Tuesday night for weeks ( and Wednesday and Thursdays too come to think about it) so we shall probably watch and see what it's like.

Back Tomorrow
Sue ☺

The first seeds are sown

 The growing year has started.
Pepper seeds (Jubilanska and Marconi Rossa) are in my windowsill electric propagator and lettuce( Cuore and Winter Density) and parsley beside them plus our micro greens which were a Christmas present from us to us! I missed parsley from my seed order so I've used last years seed but as they are one of the worst for keeping from one year to another they might not germinate. If not I'll need new seed. The peppers are started as early as possible to give them every chance to ripen even though they will be put  in a poly-tunnel.

My blog yesterday about Secret Santa gifts got several commentators agreeing that they don't always work. I'm hopeful that as it's just us, our children and partners, everyone will have some idea of what people like.

Thank you to Laura at No More Spending for her input regarding No Shopping Days. We live in the middle of open countryside so no shopping just means staying at home. I suppose if you go to work everyday surrounded by shops it must be harder not to be tempted to buy stuff.

Also Thank you to other blogging friends Karen, Jane, Pam, Bridget and Lizzy for comments and to Stacey At Mortgage Free Journey who is now reading my blog. Sft ( Saving for travel) said I was an inspiration which is a bit worrying!

Just to show we are not always perfectly frugal here are some of the stupid things we have done!

The year after we moved here we planted a small Christmas tree plantation of 50 trees. Christmas trees DO NOT like heavy clay soil - that's what we have here,so after a wet winter when they sat in muddy puddles we lost most of them.

We thought about moving a while back and Him Outside cleared out lots of "might come in handy" stuff from his workshop. When we didn't move after all he had to start collecting nails, nuts,bolts screws and odd bits of wood all over again. 

About 5 or 6 years ago when my Dad died and left us some money we used part of it to buy a touring caravan. After using it for a year we remembered why we had stopped caravanning about  10 years ago, then we  part exchanged it for a medium sized motor-home so we could have a touring holiday in Scotland. Then after one more year when we went right off traveling we sold the thing! No profits were made anywhere on all those deals. :-(

Three years ago we had a new kitchen extension built and alterations to the house. While we did it we lived in the conservatory, an old caravan and it's awning and a couple of rooms at the front of the house. After living in this muddle for 6 months we moved back in and being desperate to get organised before Christmas we bought a few things that we wouldn't normally have bought new, like 2  chairs that turned out to be too uncomfortable to use for longer than half an hour at a time and a horrible modern sideboard/cupboard for the living room which I'm stuck with looking at and hating everyday!
( No regrets about spending on the house extension as it was something we had wanted to do when we first moved in 21 years ago).

Then there are all the books I've had at various times, cleared out because of lack of space and then regretted later.

I could probably think of more given time but I'd better stop.

Hopefully we've learned all the lessons that can be learned about wasting money and none of the things we've done ever got us into debt.

Back tomorrow. I  WILL keep frugalling!

30 Ways to save £1 ---DAY 5 + Clearing up for winter

Mixed weather here today with rain first thing.

We had decided that we would take down the runner bean canes  but delayed until the rain stopped. So Him Outside did a bit of wood cutting and I did a little house work. I usually take off beans that are starting to dry out so that I can save them for next year but because of the wet warm weather there were very few. That job done I had a look around to see what else needed doing and realised we still had several red cabbages. I'd thought about doing some pickled red cabbage for Christmas gifts but as I'm not sure if anyone likes it and we definitely  don't, they might as well be sold. I'll hang a couple in nets in the shed to keep for red cabbage casserole. I also brought in several red peppers from the polytunnel, wrapped them individually in kitchen roll and put them in the salad drawer of the fridge.

All this storing of food reminded me to have a proper look at  one of the library books borrowed last Friday. This is all about various ways of preserving  food.

  It answers the question of why our stored squash never keep as long as they should, or at least I thought it had and then I turned a few pages and got confused.
On one page it say's keep them in the house at a temperature of between 16 and 20 degrees, then a bit further on it says store at 10 degrees. I've got them in the hay shed at the moment but that will be too cold later whichever page I look at.
There are several ideas for storing food including lots about fermentation the Korean way and from other countries too. I didn't fancy any of the recipes. Some look positively yuck. I think I'm just too old and too English!
I have no intention of paying anywhere near its proper price of £16.99, but I might put it on my list to look out for secondhand sometime in the future, perhaps 1p  from Amazon!


Now, Day 5 of the 30 ways to save £1 was

5. Buy refill packs of things if you can

We used to have a shop locally that we could get refills of Ecover washing up liquid. But it is no more. Large containers of Ecover liquid clothes wash and w-up-liq are available on line but delivery costs are high. So although my idea for buying refills is a good one there are not many available. I do buy good coffee in refill packs. Anyone know of anything else?  ( Does refilling the biscuit tin count?!)


Before I sign off for today, I must just say Welcome to Janice who is a new follower and thank you to everyone for comments yesterday and some from a few days ago too which made me smile.