Much Less Spent This Month - And An Explanation for Ana and Others

 After the expenses of April with several annual bills falling due plus dentist and heating oil, May was much better. The only known extras above the normal monthly spending were ED and EGS birthdays and car breakdown insurance.

The normal outgoings are Council Tax, Phone and broadband, monthly electric bill, charity donation, diesel for the car (two lots this month as I've been out and about) totalled £375 and food of course. 

Then there is always something that needs buying in a house- this month I needed new AA batteries and some mastic to redo around the shower enclosure base. All was going well with not too much spent until the cold tap in the en-suite started drip, drip, dripping. BiL looked but said it's one of those new ones without a washer but with a 'cartridge' thing instead, and you have to have the right one. He didn't fancy the job - so I had to call in a proper plumber! Got a recommendation for someone local and it was soon sorted but cost £85! Yikes. - and that was someone reliable who didn't rip off old people!

Garden spending totalled £9.38 for parsley from aldi, courgette plants, bean plants, trailing thyme and a clay flowerpot  from car-boot sales.

A wide top small clay pot for the plant stand to replace one that was starting to be frost damaged

Food spending was up this month, after two lower spend months. Mainly due to replacing items that had been used up to restock the freezer and cupboards. Although prices of things like milk and other dairy products have gone up. I had a pensioners discount Fish and Chip meal for £5 as I'd not had one for a few months and coffee out three times. 

A few frugal notes for those who like to read the list.............

• Gift of bundle of  Rhubarb from my sister. Mine is not doing well.
• Big bundle of asparagus for £1.50 from boot sale, made me two meals with poached egg and wholemeal bread.
• Eggs from roadside stall are still just £2 a dozen
• Found a really good quality t-shirt for £3.49 from charity shop. Lovely jade green and looks hardly worn.
• 4 x 25L bags of free compost from District Council giveaways
• BiL had a small bag of tile cement in his garage which I borrowed so I could re-attach some of the quarry tiles on the front step.
• Reading library books for free
• Home made bread from the bread-maker - 50/50 wholemeal/white this month
• Dishwasher used only every 2 or 3 days
• Washing machine used twice a week only
• Tumble dryer not used all month
• Lights not needed until 8.30 in the evenings for reading.
• Two big bags dishwasher salt for £2 from boot sale
• New kitchen sieve from boot sale 50p
• No flowers bought - I've been bringing in a few roses from the garden.
• Given up feeding the birds for the summer as the huge starling family are clearing out the mealworms and fat balls in 10 minutes. Just leaves the starling proof sunflower heart feeder.
• Free referral to physio appointment for next month to look at my knee problem.
• Made 4 x Two cheese, onion, spinach puff pastry bakes  - instead of buying more 'vegetarian taste test' products.
• Cooked up a big batch of Quorn and vegetable korma curry - 10 meals total
• I put the refill filters for my water jug on my Amazon wish list and keep an eye on the prices because they go up and down. This month they went down by £3 to £9.99 for the pack of three so I ordered, I've still got one filter left in the cupboard so OK now for a year of good filtered water for the coffee maker and to drink with no limescale.
• I use Sensodyne small head toothbrushes and found packs with buy two get one free, so got two packs, 6 toothbrushes should last me a while. Sensodyne toothpaste is cheaper at Aldi than anywhere else.
• First few strawberries from my few plants and  handful of  Very early raspberries - they were a surprise find.

 Personal spending included the first  book find of the year from a boot-sale for £1 and then another for another £1, the old scrap book, mentioned earlier in the month. A much needed hair cut, exercise group, jigsaw puzzle and a new Puzzler Magazine. I also printed out a couple of grandchildren photos for my frames. The £10 spent at Sibton church for 5 books, a birthday card, coffee and sausage roll was added to the charity part of the accounts (clever accounting!)

Finally a special treat..........a   subscription to Discovery+ TV so I can watch the French Open Tennis. Just have to remember how to cancel after a month. Discovery+ has amalgamated with TNT Sports, and cost a lot more than last year , but I decided I'd rather have this than an outing to the Mid Suffolk Railway for their 1940s day, which I'd pencilled in the diary - especially as it was wet and chilly and I don't bother with the big Suffolk Agricultural Show now, so that's a saving of nearly £30 anyway. After the first 3 days of tennis there were still 6 Brits going into the second round of matches and Cam Norrie and Jack Draper both played well to get through. By Thursday evening all the women were out and just  three British men left, apparently that's the first time since 1968 that there have been three British men in the third round. There will be at least one of them in the 4th round as Cam Norrie and Jacob Fearnley play each other today. Still several Brits in various double matches which never get as much publicity.

Looking forward - June is usually a good low-spend month, the only extras above the normal are the annual payment for the Garden Waste Bin. But whenever I say it's going to be a low spend month something usually happens to upset that plan so I didn't ought to mention it - ooops too late! 

Have a good weekend and I'll be back soon. 

And here is my explanation of why I use the mobile library-

The mobile libraries (3 in Suffolk) travel around all the villages so that people can go on and choose books or collect books they have reserved on line, especially useful in villages that are many miles from a physical library building and especially useful for elderly who can't drive. We can reserve books on line and ask for them to be sent to any Suffolk library or to the mobile library. I have read so many books in my 70 years that most of what I read are new books by favourite authors and I rarely find books I want actually on the shelves.
If the books go to a library building they have to be collected within one week of arriving there whereas the mobile saves them up to bring all at once. Also I can keep books for up to two visits (that is 8 weeks) where as people borrowing from town libraries have them stamped for just 3 weeks.
Yes I could drive to a library but it seems silly to do that when I can stroll up the road once every four weeks to collect my books. If I was to use a town library I would need to drive to town (10 miles or 20 minutes) every week to collect my books.
The mobile library service is always under threat of stopping as it is gradually used less and less. When I worked on one we had 5 mobile libraries covering the whole County (several 100 villages) and visiting every two weeks. Now there are just 3 visiting every 4 weeks.
The mobile libraries have depots in 3 different parts of the County where they park and where all books waiting to go on the various routes are stored so my books are not actually somewhere where I can go and collect them at the moment. Hence hoping that the delivery van (a small van that takes reserved books and new books around to all 40 libraries in the County) will bring my books to my nearest library before the next mobile visit at the end of June.
For the last 20 years I have been using the mobile libraries as it's a case of use them or lose them.
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A Very Small Strawberry Patch

 I had no intention of growing Strawberries because Brother in Law Andrew has a big strawberry patch that seems to produce loads every year without him doing much to them, and being a type 2 diabetic he shouldn't eat too many - that's what I tell him before I go and raid the patch several times every summer!

But my sister brought me a little gift for my birthday of 3 of her strawberry runners, which needed repotting and I thought three wouldn't  do much so bought three more plants from a boot sale.

So now I have the smallest ever strawberry bed!

Will I get enough for a bowl of Strawberries, that is the question.

Back Tomorrow

Sue

Last Week In Suffolk

First of all must say a BIG Thank you to everyone for comments on Saturday, lots of discussion, food for thought and ideas. Some I've already tried and didn't like (charity shop) and others aren't practical for where I live. I already belong to 2 WI's and an Over 60s group so that's enough of the "joining stuff" done! Coach trips are a no - as I really don't like traveling by coach or being on holiday with other people (except for family- I can just about cope with them!) I'm never bored at home so will keep thinking..........and blogging.

 

 My tomatoes in the greenhouse are behaving very strangely, shooting up very tall but with hardly any flower trusses. The first flowers are just beginning to set, must start feeding them. I've left side shoots to grow on a couple of plants to see if they'll give me some extra tomatoes and will pinch off the growing tips on them before they get up to roof height.

Cut the first cucumber from the greenhouse.It wasn't fully grown but thought I might as well use it instead of buying one, there are lots more coming and it will be the usual giving-them-away thing, they are always boom or bust!

Looks bigger than it was!

 While tying in the cucumber and tomato plants on Saturday I found myself covered with Ants - tickly! They had set up home, with dozens of eggs under one of the Aubergine pots which I had moved to stand on top of the water butt I have in the greenhouse. I'm afraid that ant powder was deployed as a 'herd' of ants inside a pot can be very destructive.

Hopefully I've bought the last bunch of beetroot (£1.50 at Carboot sale for 8 smallish in the bunch) for a while although mine are far too close together and we've not had much rain to fatten them up so are very tiny but that means they won't take long to cook. I'm loving beetroot again this year after being off them for a while.

 Last Monday I nipped off the first tiny......very tiny....... courgettes so the plants can get more established, didn't waste them, even though chopped up they were hardly more than a tablespoon full, but added them to my curry.

 

My 6 strawberry plants in two tubs are doing surprisingly well  with some every day for 12 days ranging in number from 4 to 14. I had to search the blog to find out when the plants had been put in the tubs and discovered they were runners from some I had previously at Clay Cottage - so this is their 2nd fruiting year.

I stopped by Brother-in-Laws house to see how his strawberries were doing and as usual he'd not told me there were any ready and there were loads getting too ripe. He said he was picking some for his sister and would take off some for me too. He dropped them in on his way through later, so 2lb are in the freezer for jam - even if they are a bit too ripe- and some turned into a couli and popped in the freezer to go with ice-cream.

Quickly read over the two very hot days was the first of the six bargain books of country writing that I picked up at the car-boot sale last Wednesday.

Simon Barnes was for many years a sports correspondent for a big newspaper but now is free-lance writing books about wildlife and traveling to Africa in his work with a conservation trust. This book is about the acres of marshland he owns and cares for near the River Waveney in Norfolk and also about his son Eddie who has Downs Syndrome but who knows nearly as much about the birds and wildlife on their land as Simon does. A lovely book as he writes really well. Recommended.

 

 

Below is a mummy(?) Red Legged Partridge and one baby just by my front door on Saturday morning. They had a nest directly opposite me in the long grassy bit of the churchyard......much noise and alarm calls earlier in the year gave their position away! The sad thing to tell you is that earlier last week she had brought 11 babies across the road to see what they could find on the shingle of my driveway. Why she found it necessary to bring them over the road is a mystery when there is a couple of acres of grassland behind the churchyard. But after less than a week just the one left.  Cats or birds of prey have taken the rest I guess.

 Back Tomorrow

Sue

 

Saturday Catch Up

This week.................................

My first strawberry from my six plants ripened this week - just the one so far- so I thought I'd better go and see if the big strawberry patch at BiL's was producing because I knew he wouldn't think to let me know when they were ready. Good thing I did as just the one lot of rain on Wednesday night had already started to spoil them. Brought home a colander full but some were already too squishy for jam. 1½ pounds popped into the freezer for later. I'm just going to make a few jars for the Christmas Hampers.

Friday was exciting as the information about my State Pension arrived.  I'm only entitled to the basic State Pension as most of my life was spent at home with children but it's still nice to know I have some money coming in each month as well as the spouses pension from the County Council. I'm frequently thankful that Colin loved his job as a bridge inspector and stayed long enough for the pension.

Flowers on the table this week are some of my own roses, thanks to the previous owners there are plenty to pick. They don't last long indoors and even less time outdoors when it rains. The Peonies and Geums also got flattened with Wednesday night's and Friday's rain although it was much needed everywhere else.

Weather forecast for Sunday isn't looking hopeful for a car-boot sale so not many plans for the weekend. On Saturday I just have to go and show my ID to book the hire of a turf removal machine thingy so I can make my raised vegetable beds. Decided that would be much easier than any other method when I tried to dig some slots for the wooden bed sides to sit in - Much Too Hard. According to the Gardeners World website if I stack the turf upside down and cover it, it will rot down and provide some good soil to add to the flower and veg beds in a year or so.

Hope there are some dry spells for the tennis to get finished at  Queens, then its a countdown to Wimbledon starting on the 28th.

This week I've been grateful for

• Some rain for the garden
• Strawberries from BiL's garden
• Tennis on TV
• Time to do some cross stitch
• A quiet swimming session
  

Have a good weekend wherever you are. I shall be back Monday.

Sue

Yesterday

Very pleased with what I got done outside yesterday  - first the biggish job of cutting down all the raspberry canes that have finished fruiting. Two big wheelbarrows full added to the bonfire heap. It's easy to see which canes need cutting down while the leaves are still on them =  all the ones that have gone yellow and starting to die off. Somewhere in the overgrown muddle that is the raspberry area are some Autumn fruiting canes - hopefully.

I came in to have a coffee after the clearing up and THUD - the postman brought me a new book - I'm so enjoying this buying  books thing - I told my sister about Mum always saying when giving me birthday or Christmas money " for goodness sake don't spend it on books" and she doesn't remember Mum ever saying anything similar to her. So it seems it's only me with guilt about spending money on things I love best.

These were the two books I bought for July. I'm reading The Splendid and the Vile - it's fascinating but I'm not going to get it finished before the mobile library brings my great ol' heap of reservations.

While I was indoors a man came from UK Power Network with information about a planned power cut in mid - August . Just for one morning when they are working on some power lines down the road - so no problem.

Back outside and I remembered I wanted to wrap some duct tape around my washing line - trying to make it last a bit longer as the outer plastic has split in several places. Then I filled some small pots with compost for pegging in some strawberry runners that have appeared from the new plants in pots on the patio. I'm thinking about abandoning the strawberry bed we made when we came here - it's just too dry where it is and too far to carry water and if I don't bother with squash and pumpkins in pots then I've enough big pots to have several filled with strawberries on the patio - within reach of the outside tap and hosepipe.

After lunch I strimmed around the edges of the raspberry bed and did some more grass cutting with the ride on mower, after that it was time for a cuppa and I spent the rest of the afternoon watching the Battle of the Brits tennis. So Very good to see some live sport on TV and a favourite sport too. Saw a trail for snooker starting Friday as well.
 

A good day
Back Tomorrow
Sue

Strawberries From Another Garden

A week or so ago I asked Brother in Law if he would have any strawberries to spare and he said yes......probably. (He doesn't like to commit himself to anything too much!)
Then on Tuesday night he phoned to say he'd picked nearly 2lb  and would put them in his fridge and if I waited until Wednesday evening there would be a few more.
So Wednesday in the almost non stop drizzle I picked a pound of gooseberries and topped and tailed them, washed lots of jars and in the evening went over and collected just over 2lb pound of delicious plump strawberries.

And early Thursday morning  I cooked up the gooseberries in one pan until they were a mush, the hulled and halved strawberries in the jam pan, added the gooseberries to the strawberries then the sugar and  cooked until setting point and made 7 various sized jars of Strawberry and gooseberry jam. Doing the jam this way means it looks and tastes just like strawberry jam but without the problem of lack of pectin.

Scones with jam for another year is sorted.

Back Tomorrow

Sue

Strange Times End of Week 12 Saturday Round Up

A funny ol' week in Suffolk. First the weather going from very hot to very chilly and extra windy in just 2 days and then on and off all week I've felt not quite well, sore throat and earache and tired - no cough or fever and I could still taste things so not  THE virus.

Anyway, enough of the moaning................... as the 'whatever it is' is going I'm sure.

So what's been happening here this week while I've been drinking loads of water, popping paracetamol and lazing around reading........................................

On the local  facebook page I read that work has started clearing the site in Stowmarket where they are going to build a new Aldi. I got quite used to Aldi during the year in Ipswich so it will be handy having one in Stow. It's quite ironic really that there actually was an Aldi in Stowmarket years and years ago when nobody really knew what they were. Everyone at that time was so used to shopping at Asda - which is right in the town centre, that the Aldi didn't survive.

It was good to see live  snooker on TV this week, not because I love snooker but because there are so many old repeated programmes on at the moment  it made a change to see something new and live. They've found a way to play safely - no audience and lots of testing and cleaning but it worked OK. Plus news that cricket will be on free TV for the first for over 20 years, wish Col was still around he would have been so pleased.
Sad to see the final programme in Grayson Perry's Art Club series. I really enjoyed seeing him and his wife Phillipa working at home. 
Springwatch programmes have been on for a couple of weeks and they've been interesting, good to see what's happening in the countryside in other parts of the country when all we have here are arable fields.  Although I got quite excited one day this week when I heard a Cuckoo - first time this year and just on the one day and nearly at the end of its visiting time too and I also spotted Swifts, plenty of House Martins around but that was my first sight of Swifts this year - still not seen Swallows.

My experiment of sowing runner beans quite late has begun. I soaked some and then put in trays in the shade on the floor of the greenhouse on 1st June to get them going (must make a note of how long they take to grow and when I plant them out) and plan to do the same again on the 1st July. I hope the first lot will start to produce beans about 4 - 6 weeks after the climbing French beans and the second sowing will carry on producing to the end of October..........that's the theory.
One of my big cucumber plants has keeled over and almost died this week - not the sacrificial cucumber, that's still hanging on, but one of the three in big pots, it's clinging onto life but not growing, not sure why.
A disappointing email from Thompson and Morgan - "sorry we can't supply your melon plant after all" - what a shame - it was going to be a fun extra to try, but they'll refund me and if I remember I'll try again next year.
Two weeks ago I promised to keep a running total of food from the garden, back then it looked like this

•  6 small lettuces (very small - as in about 8 leaves each!)
• 2 cucumbers
• a few asparagus spears
• lots of rhubarb

Now it's

• 9 small lettuces (I now have a gap because the next sowing took ages to get going)
• 3 Cucumbers - and 2 more given away to the neighbours
• a few asparagus spears
• lots of rhubarb
• 4 strawberries. The lack of rain (9 or 10 weeks without?) and not being able to water them means the plants in my main strawberry bed have all died so all I have is 6 new plants in 2 big pots on the patio which are close enough to water.  They were scrumptious.
  

Hope my BiL can supply some for me from his garden so I can make some jam.............. Commercial growers have new plants every year and you can see why as new plants always produce lovely big strawberries, whereas fruit from older plants tends to be smaller and more "seedy".

 Thursday night, one night away from the June full moon - The Rose Moon - and I watched it rise from the living room, too cold and windy to venture outside

This week I'm grateful for
A warm house when the weather turned cold
Lots of hobbies
The first rain for 2 months on Friday

Have a good weekend - the weather forecast is horrible - a stay at home weekend - like all the others in the last 12 weeks!

Back Monday
Sue

Strawberries

In all the houses I've lived in, strawberries have been the fruit that's been planted first. They only take a year to produce a crop which is so  useful.

The only place we didn't bother with them was during the  time we were renting before buying the smallholding and then the year in Ipswich.







When we had 3 children at home in the early smallholding years we had 4 beds of plants. All started in successive  years and after their 4th year the bed would be cleared. Then as the kids left home we gradually got down to just a couple of beds. Most of the time we had plants that I'd propagated by pegging the runners into pots and then every few years I'd buy some new plants from the seed catalogues. Strawberry plants like seed potatoes have to be from certified producers to avoid the import of diseases, although you often see them for sale at car boot sales but I wouldn't buy them there.

To avoid weeds and to keep the fruit clean I've tried them grown through holes cut in plastic or used straw, now with just a small bed I don't bother with anything.It's easy just to wipe any fruit that get a bit dirty. Wet straw is also wonderful for harbouring slugs!

The Strawberry Fairy in the Flower Fairy books is the wild strawberry, something I've only ever seen once when we were on holiday somewhere in the country where the weather is wetter than Suffolk.

I tried to grow them from seed once but with no luck.



















The plants I got in the 'Bargain Fruit Offer' were squashed into two planters and stood inside the cold frame. They gave me a few strawberries a week or two earlier than the outside bed. Now they are producing runners so I lifted one planter out to make room for pegging a few runners into pots ready to transplant somewhere later. Somewhere being the important word here as I have no idea where I'm going to put all the plants!

There's only room for a few in the Strawberry bed to make up for some lost in last summer's drought.

I had a look in my Plant Folklore book but nothing at all about strawberries. Although in my book of quotations I found this attributed to Queen Elizabeth 1st by Francis Bacon from the C16

Like strawberry wives, that laid two or three great strawberries at the mouth of their pot, and all the rest were little ones.

This made me smile as on the few occasions we had enough strawberries to sell that's exactly what I did!

Back Tomorrow

Sue

The Bargain Fruit Parcel

That bargain fruit plant offer arrived, luckily it came last Friday midday giving me all of the lovely sunny afternoon to sort everything out.

 The 12  strawberry plants were planted into pots, given a good watering and left in the greenhouse. 3 Gooseberry bushes and 6  raspberry canes were stood in water  for an hour before planting out and cutting back. The 2 blueberries I left in the pots they were in as they were very wet and had almost no root system.
Several £s worth of seeds but mostly things I don't want. So they will go in the car boot box.
200g of fruit fertilizer will be used on the new raspberry bed.
Even without the seeds I think still a good  value purchase, although it might be a year or two before I harvest the amount of fruit shown in the ad!

The weather continued to be sunny on Saturday and Sunday but still chilly. People who have been able to sit out for coffee or lunch are very lucky! and must have very sheltered gardens although it is often colder in East Anglia in the spring because we stick out into the cold North Sea.
 I got some more grass cut  Saturday with the small mower as well as going out -  which is for tomorrows post and in the afternoon there were two rugby matches on TV which I watched while writing posts and loading photos.
Spent ages on Sunday trying to find a photo of the inside of the greenhouse on the blog to see what pots were used where last summer. Reason being because I started sorting the greenhouse, just putting the big pots in place  with the trays they will stand in, for cucumbers,tomatoes, aubergines and peppers. But I ran out of big pots before I ran out of space - very odd - what pots did I use? where are they now? No idea as I couldn't find a clear photo anywhere on the blog.

What I did find was this list made last August, after just 3 months alone and puzzling how I would get through the winter.
Well, I got through the winter OK so added some ticks to all the ones that have been done. ...Feels like success!

• Clear the garden✓ 
• Clear the greenhouse and wash down✓
• Wash all the used pots ✓
• Clear the patio pots of summer stuff and then✓
• Plant up some pots for winter colour✓ (Although everything has died off now)
• Keep swimming✓
• Keep going to monthly craft group (No, too gossipy! anyway it clashed with swimming day)
• Sort through Colin's clothes and send to charity shop/clothes bank (I cleared his chest of drawers several weeks ago because I need to move it but the wardrobe is still full) (Almost finished)
• Make a memory box for the grandchildren. A lovely idea that a friend (who was a Cruse Bereavement counselor) gave me.(Started)
• Go through Col's books and sort.......... to Ziffit/Charity shop/ keep/donate to Mid Suffolk Light Railway Museum ( I've actually made a start on this already)✓
• Go through Colin's DVDs and CDs and sort as above✓
• Visit more churches in Suffolk ✓
• Day out in Bury St Edmunds ✓
• Day out in Felixstowe (It was too cold to linger when I went)
• Make lots of birthday cards - I've stocked up on 3D Decoupage sheets ready to get started✓
• Start the HUGE job of sorting out all the might-come-in-handy stuff in the workshop. I have no idea what a lot of it is anyway. Sort into crates for selling at Auction and stuff for a skip. (ongoing for many months I think)
• Help at a charity shop? ✓
• Read (goes without saying!)✓
• Visit local NT properties that are open. (Haven't got to any as Sutton Hoo has been closed all winter- waste of membership so far)
• Chop kindling and pick up twigs for fire lighting.✓

I had completely forgotten about that list so it was good to find it.

Hello and welcome to some more followers and thank you for all the comments on Saturday's post

 Back Tomorrow
Sue

A Fruity Temptation

Every Wednesday the email from Money Saving Experts arrives in the inbox, sometimes I open it to have a look, often I don't bother.
Last week I looked and spotted something that looked interesting .....................

£18 Berry Plants Bargain

And this was the bargain

If you go via this MSE Blagged Thompson and Morgan link you can get a bundle of 23 berry plants plus some vegetable seeds for £17.94 delivered (normally £56.95). You'll also get 200g of Incredicrop fertiliser. 
The offer ends at 11.59pm on Sun 3 Feb, or when 4,000 plant bundles have gone, which ever is sooner – so go quick if it’s something you want.
The bundle includes:

• 12 Strawberry bare root runners
• Six Raspberry bare root canes
• Three Gooseberry bare root bushes
• Two Blueberry potted bushes
• £10ish worth of vegetable seeds, in at least 3 different varieties
• 200g Incredicrop fertiliser

Now this IS a bargain that appealed. The raspberry canes will replace some that didn't survive last summers dry weather. The strawberry runners can be potted and kept in the cold frame for an early crop. If  the seeds are ones I won't use they will go in the car-boot box. There's room for the gooseberry bushes in the middle of the fruit bed and the blueberries will be a real treat as it's many years since I owned a blueberry bush.

I now need to stay here for at least 2 more summers to get the benefit of this bargain buy!

Hopefully they will arrive in good condition very soon and I can get them potted up. Just need some ericaseous compost for the blueberries.

Back Tomorrow
Sue