Our first frost

We had the first touch of frost of the Autumn overnight so that when I let the chickens out it was 4℃ compared to 13℃ yesterday morning. The sun was shining too which we certainly needed after all the rain.
Much too wet for working in the garden today except for getting in the rest of  tomatoes from the poly-tunnels. The red ones into the fridge and the green ones on a tray.

They will be put in the unheated dining room and will ripen gradually over the next few weeks, leaving a couple of riper ones in the tray helps the rest to turn red.
One other job done that didn't involve walking over any wet bits was to take the dead stuff off the rhubarb bed and barrow some compost all over.

C had to go to the doctors to make sure all his tablets were still doing their job so I popped into town and found a couple more gifts for Christmas. One of the things we do here is Christmas tree presents. I don't know how and where they started, but both Cs mum and my mum did them so I've carried on. It's just a little extra present to have after tea when Christmas day is almost finished. I try and find things during the year at car boot sales if possible but not much luck this year. So a trip to the hardware shop has sorted a couple of little gifts for some of the men of the family.

Thank you for comments about stats yesterday.
Back Tomorrow
Sue

Looking at the Stats on a wet Sunday

We really are getting the worst of the weather at the moment, grey, gloomy and rain forecast for all day. Still no sign of frost and when I went out to let the chickens out just after 7 this morning it was already 13 ℃. Grass ( and weeds I guess) grow at anything over 6 ℃ but it's too wet for grass cutting.

10.30am and we've already been in the shed and cut some more wood, the pile is getting bigger, plenty to last us for several weeks.  I'm not sure we will bother with going far today,  just round the field to collect the eggs and fill up the big chicken feeder. I may wrap a few Christmas presents and start sorting the seed purchasing list which I've been talking about doing for weeks.



Every now and again I amuse myself for 10 minutes looking at the Statistics page.

I know.......... too much time on my hands!

The all time most viewed post is this one

Entry	Pageviews
30 Ways to Save £1-- Day 30 + 50p for Christmas decorations... 30 Nov 2013, 16 comments	1838

I had no idea why this should be the most looked at, but now  I think I've found out. If you Google 50p Christmas decorations ( though why would you?) up comes my picture from the post.

Next on the list is "The truth about Country Living" from the other day and third is also from this month " Decisions,Decisions". So November must be a good month for writing popular posts but I'm sure it's not because my brain works better in November!

I see there have been 1,852 page views from Russia - goodness me, I'm glad we don't have a CCTV camera as I've heard they can look at us much more closely than I want to be looked at!

Interesting posts are looked at by between 750 and 800 on the same day but boring ones by only around 350 - 400. Extremely boring posts get less than 300 page views.How does anyone know if the post is boring or not?

Last time I filled a post by wittering on about blog stats I was getting around 1000 page views each day, now that's up to 1,500. Being a nosy old woman I would love too know how many page views YOU get each day?

Thanks for lots of nice comments yesterday.

Back Tomorrow
Sue ☺

Second to last- better luck next time?

For  2 years up until March 2013 we went to charity quiz nights that are held in local villages to raise money for churches etc. We were part of a team with our farmer friend and his wife M and a couple of other people. Then one night, for some reason M seemed to take offence because I volunteered to write the answers on the quiz sheet, she didn't join in the discussion over answers as usual, just whispering to her husband, it was so obvious to everyone else in the team that it was ridiculously embarrassing.
That happened to be the last quiz of the season but in autumn 2013 when the next quiz was advertised and C mentioned about quizzing they didn't seem keen. One day I happened to meet M walking her dog as I was biking home from the library van and decided to apologise for whatever I had done that had upset her. She wasn't very nice at all and said she found me really rather nasty.
After that I didn't particularly like the idea of spending an evening with her so we didn't volunteer to book a table for a quiz again. As far as I know they haven't quizzed anymore either.
But Hip Hip Hooray!  we now have two parts of our family in Suffolk, enough for a table of 6 people so I suggested a family night out at the quiz last night.
We were almost hopeless! 10th out of 11 tables.
But it was a lovely way to spend an evening with two of our children and their partners.



Heaven knows how C managed to chop our youngests bloke in half, but he hates having his photo taken anyway.

Our son and his partner stayed overnight and this morning he helped me barrow some soil down to fill the hole where the old shed base was, that was a great help as it would have taken me weeks on my own. We just got done before the rain started at 11.
Now we just need to level it out and chuck a bit of grass seed down.

We saw the first Christmas lights in someones front porch in the village last night, a wee bit early I thought. Although this afternoon at only 3 O'clock it is almost dark and we could do with Christmas lights here to cheer things up a bit.

Back Tomorrow
Sue ☺

November 21st -Opening the 5p tin

If you were around on frugal Blogland in April 2013 you will remember the 30 ways to save a £1,      ( You can see my list here if you are so inclined) , that lots of people did and earned £30 on Paypal, I can't remember who it was running this and giving away the £30, but I don't think they will do it again as there were rather a lot of entries.
 I redid   my list  one a day for each day in November last year and when I got to number 21  "save 5ps that you get in your change, they are small and fiddly and you won't miss them". I thought I really ought to listen to my own advice and  do that!
That's when I started putting every 5p into my telephone box money box. It was a bit slow at first, then there were more during the summer through the letterbox for veg, but not loads as we sell things in round numbers of 50p or £1.
Eventually it got quite heavy when I lifted it down from the shelf to add another one.
Now one year on, 21st November 2014, today is the day for tipping them out and counting.

 First clear space on table, tip out, round up the ones that got away and start piling them up in heaps of 10 and the grand total was £32.45p. The £2.45 has gone back in the tin, the £30 will be changed at the bank and that will be our meat money for Christmas. A nice big Gammon ham and 2 big chickens or if I can't get them I suppose it will have to be Turkey. We have 10 meat eaters  here for Christmas day and I like to have plenty left over so that I don't even have to think about what to eat for the best part of a week.
I didn't miss them from my purse so this was a good way to save a bit of money.

Thank you for comments yesterday and a warm welcome to Irene who has clicked the Google followers  button.
Back Tomorrow
Sue ☺

Stretching one of Frugal Queens recipes

I do hope Jane at Frugal Queen doesn't mind me sharing my idea for one of her recipes.
I noted it down from her blog a few weeks ago because it sounded good. The idea is a pie filling using bacon, potatoes,onion, leeks and a tin of condensed chicken soup. It sounded very tasty and I finally got round to making it today.
I had a thought that making pasties instead of a pie would make it easier for me to put some in the freezer for another day.
And this was how many I made

Because it was being divided up into more meals I used a bit more bacon than Froogs, 250g rather than 150g which was fried gently then 1 diced onion added and stirred around for a while. Two big leeks chopped small and 4 medium sized peeled potatoes diced quite small were then added to the pan with half a cup of water. Lid on and cook gently for a few minutes until soft. Finally stir in one can of condensed chicken soup , mix really well and let it go cold. Spoons full into centre of shortcrust pastry circle, seal up using water brushed round the edge then top shelf of oven 'til brown and lower shelf for another few minutes.
Very delicious but of course more pastry so more fattening than the original recipe.
We decided they are even better than my usual pasties made using minced beef.
The 8 we didn't eat were wrapped in foil and put in the freezer.
I might do a vegetarian version  sometime using mushrooms instead of the bacon and a can of condensed celery soup  or  maybe fresh celery and condensed mushroom soup.


The Christmas cakes made yesterday ( the recipe is on yesterdays post, and BTW I use cold tea for soaking the fruit, sherry or brandy would be extremely extravagant !)

  were wrapped in foil when they were cool and put away in the cupboard in the unheated dining room.
 I will feed them with a few teaspoons of brandy a couple of times over the next few weeks. Then add marzipan and ice much nearer to Christmas. The small one just has a circle of marzipan and icing on top, nothing around the sides that would make it far too sweet.

It's typical that the day I'm in the kitchen all morning - I also made 3 loaves of bread and an apple meringue pie - we have  had the best weather. I want to get biking again but haven't had a chance this week either too busy or too wet.
C went over to our neighbours and swept up leaves with her sweeper thing that goes on the ride on mower and he put some wires up for the Tiree Honeysuckle ( sent all the way here from my penfriend) and trained the blackberry canes around their wires. I thought he was going to be fed up during the months of recovery after the Hardly-a-Heart-Attack but he is pottering around getting everything done but with more stops in between for a cuppa. We said that when we were 20 years younger we did 2 hours work and then sat down for half an hour, now we do half an hours work and sit down for 2 hours!

Welcome to J  George who has put the number of Google followers back to 230 and also to someone on Bloglovin' which today won't let me in to see who you are.

Back Tomorrow
Sue

Christmas cake making and technology creeping in.

I put the fruit into soak on Sunday so today was the day to get the Christmas cakes all mixed and into the oven.

My Christmas Cake recipe is here  if you are interested. This year I did 2½ times the recipe and that's made one very large cake for us, one small and a mini one for gifts.

We watched and enjoyed the " Secrets of the Castle" on BBC 2 last night.. The bloke who does the reviews for The Guardian ( which I found on line and pinched the photo from ) wasn't sure it could be interesting for 5 one hour episodes, we will see.What I liked was the fact that they hadn't made everyone wear bright blue/orange/ whatever hard hats. Though I did notice some people had goggles and they all seemed to be wearing proper work boots.

Peter plus chisel

  Gill and Kev in comments said they would do series record. " What's that" I had to ask C.                 " Something we don't have on FreeSat" was the answer. We are so far behind with modern technology.  I supposed we will be forced to join in eventually, when people are swapped for machines as they have done in Barclays Bank in Ipswich. I went in to pay in a cheque and the whole place had changed, where there was once people was a row of computers. I turned round and left and paid the cheque in a our local branch. But I'm sure the same thing will happen there before long. One of the girls in there asked me recently why I still needed to use cheques. " To pay for things by post I said" she looked amazed. We get people coming to the campsite without cash and they want to pay by card but as far as I know it still costs a lot for businesses to have one of the card machines, so I have to say cash or cheque please.
The ads for all the different sorts of tablets/phones/things I don't understand on TV, all make them look amazingly clever, with apps to do all sorts of useful things and even Ilona at Life without money has got a Hudl and I don't even know what one of them is. I'm not sure my poor brain  could cope? It took me weeks to get the hang of blogging!
Although I do like the Symbols  thing I've just found so I can do ☺ or ✌ or ½ or ✔ or ☕ it's added a whole new dimension to the blog!

I've just noticed someone has vanished from Google  Friends, that's unusual, and the weird anti-women bloke is around leaving his rant on comments  again - boring.

Back Tomorrow
Sue ☺

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.

*    *    *    *    *    *    *

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 ☺