frugal fit and female

chattering tv presenters and almost silent hubbies

2012-10-22T13:37:00.001+01:00

We were watching 'How Britain worked' last might.
The presenter is a mechanic and motorcycle racer.
He can talk the hind leg off a Donkey!
I thought he was speaking quite quickly but OH didn't comment on it so I decided it was my ears playing tricks, then DS came downstairs and screwed his face up as the TV chappy nattered happily on.
We decided that the best strategy was to latch on to the first syllable and then concentrate the ears very hard until he drew breath.

The TV series looks to be quite interesting so long as you ar prepared to soldier your way through the speed banter. I do love the old photographs he uses to illustrate the 'grafters' of yesteryear.

OH is not the greatest talker in the world and will happily sit without saying a word all day until I could scream.
When out shopping with him, he will absent mindedly cross the street without word or indication and wander into shops oblivious of the rest of us.

Oh for a chattering chap to brighten the day.

I am thinking of maybe changing my blog title to something a little less 'fitness' sounding.
I do still keep up my fitness levels but there is only so much to say about fitness before it becomes repetitive.

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chopping down the clover field

2012-10-17T13:02:00.001+01:00

Well it isnt a field at all but I liked the sound of it.
I chopped the clover that has been growing in the onion beds.
It stays in the earth and helps to improve the structure of the soil.

The Phacelia still has bees buzzing to and fro so I will leave that for longer and then chop and dig it in , in the same way.

I still havent got the new onion beds sorted.
Yesterday I dug over half the spud bed (the half that is now empty).
The onions and garlic will go in there to over winter.

OH bought me and himself new (2nd hand) leathers for the motorbike.
Mine are a very fetching white with green and purple zigzags.
His are black and have a wolf logo.

We are going to look the Bees Knees next time we go for a ride together.

I canned quite a lot of Pumpkin on Monday.
The biggest pumpkin yielded 11 jars .
Then I roasted the seeds which are quite like crisps (to snack on).
I did mine with no oil by using a browning plate in the microwave.
You are supposed to use oil but they are much healthier without .
OH tends to glutton-out on anything the least bit snackable so I put them in a screw top jar and whisked them away out of sight .

There are 2 more pumpkins out there but I don't know if they have time to ripen off as we are already getting ground frosts in the morning.

Indoors it is about 15 degrees c in the mornings.
The front room warms up to 17 once the sun hits it.
I brought the greenhouse heater in so that we could give the bathroom a 10 minute zap before bathing or showering, rather than turn the heating on all over the house just for the same effect.
The heater is from OH's work and was being thrown away but is really for a greenhouse.
It would be far too expensive to run it over the winter for the amount of food I might produce from the greenhouse.

The greenhouse is now empty of plants except the box of carrots.
It becomes a store room over winter.

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My online earning is going well.
Today I cashed out 10 pounds in Amazon vouchers from Ipsos
There is a 25 pound voucher to cash in from another survey site and nearly 30 pounds from one other so Christmas and the last birthday of the year are accounted for.
We are lucky with birthdays as they are evenly spaced across the year.
I go on Mccains site once a week and play their games which pay in spud shillings.
The shillings go towards a voucher and I am hoping to have 10 pounds to redeem in a couple of weeks.
Sadly they are winding up their voucher earning scheme in december .

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At the moment I am reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo which you can find on Guttenberg
I'm also reading Micah Clarke by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (free on Amazon).

Les Miserables is very long and a little hard going with its turns of language and descriptions.
If you think Dickens is too descriptive, you wont like this one but if you don't mind long detailed outlines,you will most likely love it.

Micah Clarke is one of Doyles Historic Novels which are by far his best genre and although they are very prose filled, they have a huge lot of history and factual information also.
This one is about the Monmouth uprising (after the English Civil war).

2012-10-13T14:24:00.000+01:00

OH had his exam yesterday which he sits at home with a transcriber to do the writing.
He can manage to write fairly well but his reading speed is painfully slow due to dislexia.

I took myself off into town to save being a hovering prescence.
First I went to the take away and bought my lunch.
I could have taken a sandwich and a drink from home but it is October and there is nowhere really to picnic out of the weather at this time of year.
Our town is notorious for having nothing to do and nowhere to do it.

I spent an hour sipping a big cup of tea and reading my ebook but ofcourse one cant keep that up indefinitely and even take away shops need their tables to be filled and emptied to remain in business.

Next I went for a roam around the charity shops.
I have nothing that we need so although it was an interesting browse, there was no buying involved.

After a long walk around of about 2 hours and feeling quite thirsty again, I stopped at a cafe and bought a huge mug of tea and resumed my ebook.

Around 3pm I met up with OH at the cinema so that we could see the film Looper which is on at the moment.
I had 2 cinema tickets from my online earnings at maximiles so it cost us nothing.

DS had an interview for a possible job so couldn't come too.
It turned out to be door to door canvassing which he is definitely not cut out for so I guess he wont be hearing back from them.
DD did a similar job a couple of years back and found it tedious even though she was marginally successful at it.
She also did something similar for a couple of days a few weeks back and was chased by a dog at one house. She discovered that the charity company wanted their canvassers to appear for work 2 hours before they were paid and to work through any breaks to 'make up the quotas'.
Needless to say, she found something else as quickly as she could working less hours and paying actual regular wages.

I wish the government could see the sort of jobs that are available themselves 'fly on the wall' style. I think they would then understand why people have trouble finding work.

I have resumed my skipping (jump rope) today.
5 minutes this morning without shoes was about all I could manage.
If you have only skipped when shod, try 'no shoes' it is a whole new ball game.
I was going to resume last week but OH has been at home revising and there was nowhere to skip without it sounding .
Outdoors has not been an option due to the rain.
We haven't run in ages as OH twisted his knee and I ususally only run with him.

I have been keeping an eye on eating though and still weigh the same as last year when we ran, worked out and skipped .
OH has had to reign back on his snacking as he had put on a bit of ballooniness (2 stone).
He is a bit of a chocolate addict which is fine when he is cycling,running and karatiing but not when he isn't.

Reading old favourites

2012-10-11T15:27:00.001+01:00

This week I have been re-reading Agnes Gray by Ann Bronte.
I had forgotten how comical it gets in places.
Quite suprising when you think it was written around 1840 something.

I looked up the Brontes, wondering how closely their own lives mirror their stories and discovered that Ann died aged only 29.

All the children in that family died before they were 40 and there were 6 to begin with.

Only one of the 5 sisters ever married .
They were mostly kept at home except for a couple of stints in boarding schools.
The first school managed to kill the two older girls when they were 11 and 10 by neglecting them until they had caught TB.

As far as their stories go, they seem far more romantic and exciting than the girl's actual real lives.

Novels were often seen as unsavoury reading for girls back in those days and I wonder if it was because they might be seen to give girls ideas of actually being able to choose to marry for something other than position in life and even heaven forbid, not marry at all but actually pursue their own interests.

I cant help but feel a little pang of regret for some of the lost simplicity of life but I don't supppose, had I been around in those days,that I would have turned down the chance to let machinery do the drudge jobs.
Rich people back then, would have employed servants to do them so maybe we are not so very different, just a lot richer overall.

I Victorian ladies could jump to us through time, I wonder what they would make of their modern contempories

Battery bits and bobs

2012-10-05T17:41:00.002+01:00

Oh got his new CMOS battery in the post today.
He got it from china via ebay.
Some people would baulk at ebay stuff from china but if you think about it, nearly everything we used in the 1970's had 'MADE IN HONGKONG' printed on it.
The computer itself is made in Taiwan after all.

OH managed to dismantle and install the new battery with minimal help which pleased him and me as he now knows he can dismantle and reassemble his lappy himself and I now know he can too :P

He even had to do a little bit of soldering as the end connector was slightly different.

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The garden is a muddy green expanse at present.
The runner beans are still producing well.
Brassicas are strong looking.
I have seeds from Spinach,rocket and nasturtiums for next year.
The shallots I put by to replant, will be going in sometime this month along with some garlic from last year and a few new bulbs.
I bought new golden onions as we have eaten most of the ones I harvested this year.

The leeks are embarrassingly like spring onions still but may pick up some once the weather cools more.

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I have been doing a toothpaste trial this week.
Cant say which paste but it was quite good for making them feel clean and smooth.
Must look out for it when it comes on the market.

I quite often do trials for goods for companies.
You sign up with a company that does surveys and every now and then they will ask if you will do a trial. Sometimes they dont send anything afterall ,I suppose because they have enough people to choose from and you dont get picked but often you do.
They will ask how it went and you can usually keep the rest of the item to use up at home.
I love giving my opinion on new things.

whizzy peecees and muddy spuds

2012-09-28T19:42:00.000+01:00

I spent my birthday money on 4gb of memory for the new lappy.
It now has 8gb which is more than any other pc in the house.

We have a LOT of computers in this house.

There are 6 that belong entirely to me. 3 laptops and 2 Windows machines and a Mac.
OH has a further 2 macs and a laptop,netbook and a tablet.
DS has a laptop and a desktop and DD has 2 laptops and a desktop.
Then there are at least 2 spare pcs and 2 amigas in the roof.

When I was about 18, I bought my first computer so I feel like I have grown up with technology as mich as the kids have.

The extensa laptop has been running puppy linux and is pretty nippy for an oldun.
I decided to combine one of the old extensa batteries with a battery from the old aspire.
I had to take the Aspire battery apart and do some soldering but it works so far.
I can get about 1.45 hours out of the combination .
The second extensa battery was better to begin with and is now giving just over 2 hours of running time.

So 3 more or less dead batteries have been resurected and mean I can run for 3 and 3/4 hours.
The charging is done on economy 7.

The new lappy has a newer battery and can run for around 4 hours all told.

I have dug up another load of spuds.
They are about a months worth and now only half of the spud bed still has spuds in so hopefully another 2 months of spud are still to harvest.

The Pumpkin is picked.
It is pretty big and heavy.
There is another one out there that is still dark green but nearly as big and a smaller one about 7" diameter.

Upgrades to speed up an old Laptop

2012-09-17T13:12:00.002+01:00

Oh has had his laptop about 5 years.
It is an aspire 9300.
When he got it ,it had windows vista and has always plodded along slowly compared with everyone else's machines.
Even my older extensa (from the rubbish pile) with single core CPU and linux was faster.
Recently he has been having start up problems which we decided must be the hard drive having ruled out all else.
He bought a new bigger hard drive and we put windows 7 on .
Now it is zooming along. It is so much faster that he says it is like having a new laptop.
Considering we changed only the hard drive and the OS, it is a vast improvement.

I am playing with the oldest (Extensa) laptop at the moment.
I have 2 batteries for it but both are knackered.
At present I am trying to get some more charging capacity into the better of the two.
This morning I plugged it in and charged till it stopped(at 11.20% capacity),then ran it down again to 0%,now it is on its second charge and is at 11.34 so far.I think this will take a while but I believe I can get it back up to something more useful. The 11.20% took 35 minutes to run back down with the backlight turned off. Once I have one working better, I shall play with the other one.

I really haven't done a great deal on the gardening front this week.
I did start clearing the fruit bush overgrowth and will continue with that as and when.

I harvested another collection of marrows on Thursday. We had the little dinky ones to bulk out the tomato sauce on our bolognaise. There are still runner beans to harvest but the French beans are finished.

The Phacelia is covered in Bees.
They mainly seem to be the big fat ones but there are a few smaller brown ones which I believe are the honey bees.
No wonder it is called Bees friend.

I have scarlet clover growing in 2 beds.
Apparently it is a bean related plant so must remember not to put beans in the same place next spring.
The flower heads of clover can be dried and used in Tea to make a natural treatment for Menopause symptoms. I am trying it out.

If only we had house elves

2012-09-12T18:46:00.001+01:00

Do other people not actually live in their houses or is it just that we are the slobbiest family in the entire world?

I was just looking through an article called other peoples pantries.
The pantries are so clean and tidy, not a torn packet or rubber band in sight!

Unlike our own which is a motley jumble of boxes,bags packets and tins, some piled on top of others.

I have noticed that other people have clean, clean worktops, shiny like new, not a stain or cut in sight.
Mine are somewhat discoloured and scratched. The result of spills that wouldn't come off and little dears cutting without the cutting board over the years.

Our wood floors are a little dusty and smudged. They used to get cleaned far more often.
The sliding windows in the back have deep scratching where out German Shepherd dog wanted out.
Our stairs have a gouge where a piece of the wall was dropped when we were rebuilding our walk-in cupboard as a bathroom to make room for DD to have her own bedroom.

Others have beautiful built in wardrobes and all their clothes are tidily concealed within.
Ours are sectioned shelves made of unfinished fibre board ,some are a little saggy as the smaller sections are lined with books. My clothes live in a collection of deep cardboard boxes that act as drawers. OH has the same on his side of the shelves.We have linen coloured curtains which we bought to hide it all but they never get drawn closed because it is such a hassle to have to drag them back all the time.

Several of our doors were part stripped to reveal the awful shiny stain beneath, not wanting to reveal it all,we never got round to covering it back up.

Once,when the kids still went to school, we visited a house across the road from us to collect the little boy in my sons class. Their house was showroom like. My daughter who was about 4 said, why have all the chairs got cloths on them?' and the other mother said 'well I cant get the chairs in the washing machine!' which was very funny. My daughter did laugh! I smiled and wondered if she would faint if she were to come into our house..

When I read the Harry Potter series of books, I recognised the Burrow (The Weasley House) at once, it was where we live !

The pot of gold

2012-09-10T20:08:00.001+01:00

I once had to explain to my daughter that there was a limit to the pile of gold,just as there was to her pocket money. Once it was gone, it was gone!
She expressed her surprise.
She had it seemed thought that adults had a never ending supply of riches and were just being mean when they said no.

For some families,I believe that misunderstanding is never resolved.
The children are under the impression that their adults say no because they don't want them to have nice things.
It is reinforced by other children who will explain quite innocently (or not ) that their parents have given them all these nice things because they love them and want them to have everything.

The child who is not enlightened is going to be the adult that cant say no to themselves .

They will learn at some stage in life that the things they value the most are the hardest won.

It is interesting to see how many children actually do the family shop.
They accompany their adult to the shop and proceed to tell them what to buy.
The adult sometimes raises an objection,often it is 'oh but you don't like XYZ' (and this said in a very questioning style as if to say 'please don't choose this and then reject it once we get home' but the child somehow has the power and will simply point out that they do like it since they had it at thingummies house.
Into the basket it will go. Although more likely the trolley as they want to make sure there is room for all those treats.
That child will have an uphill struggle when they get to the age of responsibility.
How can they say no to themselves, no one else ever has?

One quite polite little boy in the queue in poundland was just like that.
In the line his mother pointed to the chocolates and said 'oh grab a box of maltesers please johnny'.
Johnny said '2,one for me and one for you!'
We can share them says mummy but says nothing when he brings 2 and puts them in the basket.
You must share yours with uncle dave she says.
Back over he goes and picks up another packet, 'no uncle dave can have one too' he says and she says nothing again but proceeds to pay for 3 boxes of chocolates when she had chosen one for sharing.

The child has learned that mummy is not in charge and he doesn't have to share if he doesn't want to.

windows and washing machines

2012-09-08T18:53:00.001+01:00

OH has been having trouble with his lappy.
It starts from cold if you go into safe mode and then all day long it will boot fine,then next day it needs safe mode again on the first boot.
It was going fine till the wretched automatic updates.
He being a non techy type of person, deleted everything and then tried to run the recovery thing.
It seemed not to fix it.
Yesterday I ran the recovery again and it did not help.
Today we formatted the drive and recovered yet again.
Not sure if it is software related at all.
I am thinking maybe getting it stable and then upgrading to 7 instead of the dreaded vista will make it seem a better machine in any case as this machine on which I am typing is the exact same model as his and runs about twice as fast.
Funny how it is always windows update that seems to muck things up.

The new old washing machine is installed.
It is an indesit W311 or something like that.
It only fills cold which is a bit of a downer but at least it means we can wash on cold if we want.
When we got it plumbed in,I pulled out the detergent drawer and discovered a 6 year accumulation of fabric softener and powder,thick like old fat under it.
The drawer itself was covered in mold and so was the space it fits into.

We ran it on the hottest wash last night 90 degrees (probably for the only time in its entire useful life) ,empty after I cleaned out as much gunk as possible.

OH is sworn to weighing his laundry before filling as it is his clutziness with overloading that has killed several of the previous machines.

penny and penny laid up can lose money

2012-09-05T15:11:00.001+01:00

Buying a few foods when they are cheap and storing them is a bigger saving than saving the money that they would have cost and then spending it on them later,even allowing for the interest earned on that money.

This needs more explanation.
Prices double every 10 years.
If food cost £100 in 2002, it will cost 200 in 2012 at least in the UK
If you put £100 in an ISA (tax free savings)at 5% in 2002, it will grow as follows

Year Savings Weekly grocery spend

=105 110
=110.25 120
=115.76 130
=121.54 140
=128.20 150
=134.61 160
=141.34 170
=148.40 180
=155.82 190
=163.61 200

Assuming prices rise every year by 1 10th of the original

This is very basic I know but Now look at it another way...
You pay 100 a week for food for a family of 5 or 6 people (some I know, spend a lot more).
If you were to put away £5'200 as a years food buffer, you would lose far more than £5
It would be around £260 or 5% in the first year alone.

You can store food for more than 1 year ,it just depends how you do it.

Tinned foods can be stored a long time.They have been heat sealed and the contents are sterile.
Food sealed in jars with air tight seals.
Dried foods
Food dried and then sealed in air tight containers
Food sealed in airtight food bags using a vacuum sealer
Frozen foods
Pickles
Salted foods
Foods immersed in oils

You would be hard pressed to find anywhere giving you 10% on your saved money tax free and risk free.

Prices really are that quick at rising. I used to buy fish fingers in Asda.
Once I could get 5 packets of 12 for £1,then it went to 4 at 25p and they reduce the packs to 10 fingers then 3 at 30p and now a packet of basic cheapo fish fingers is 60p ,so 5 packets would cost me £3. That is in about the last 10 years but is a huge leap in price of 200% even if you ignore the reduction in contents.
The tube of puree that cost me 30 pence last year now cost 48p
Tins of tomato are about 7p more this year than last 25 up to 31
'value' bread is 24 up to 48p and is terrible pasty muck,all air and stodge.

10 years ago sunflower spread was about 34p a 500g tub.
You are unlikely to find it for less than 89 pence now. Almost a 200% leap again.

Invisible savings

Sometimes the biggest savings are the invisible ones.
Anything which saves you from spending will be an invisible saving.

The Bread machine

Our bread machine was around £38 new (bought with vouchers from surveys)
It took around 8 months I think to pay for itself (The saving per loaf of bread each time was taken away from the cost of the machine until the balance was zero).
Since that time it has earned its keep. I think we have had it about 9 years. In that time it has had 2 new bread pans and one new bread paddle. Costing around £23 altogether.
A loaf costs about 29 pence to make and so saves around 60p a loaf if we bought a similar ready made loaf.
We have between 3 and 4 loaves a week say it is 3 (now and 4 when DD is home).
this is a saving of 93.69 a year or about £ 750 over its life span so far.

The whole investment of £61 has accrued a saving of £750 in 9 years.

If you also allow for the weekly pizza dough that it churns out,that would be even greater as a home made pizza is equal to a big filling pizza at £3 a shot in Iceland or Morrisons (29p at home plus toppings)

The dehydrator

This was around £130 I think around 8 years ago.It is 12 square feet of drying space.

This year alone it must have dried at least 30 courgettes ASDA £1.50 for 3 so £45
Around 100 runner beans ASDA £1 for about 8 beans so £12.50
30 portions worth of spinach ASDA £1.50 for about 3 portions £15
30 portions worth of Kale ASDA 94p for about 3 portions £9.40

So £ 81.90

It is used for drying bananas and mushrooms when they are reduced in the stores. So I estimate it saves around £100 a year.

The whole investment of £130 has accrued a saving of £670 in 8 years.

Rocket and egg sarnies

2012-09-05T14:26:00.000+01:00

We have loads of Rocket in the garden at present.
It has started to flower so I will leave some to seed.

It seemed only right to have a boiled egg sandwich with heaps of rocket while it is so abundant.

There was one lonely little spring onion that got chopped and added and the smallest tomatoes in the world that wouldn't have looked out of place in a 1/12th dolls house kitchen.

I dug a 4 foot section of spuds and have about as many white spuds for my efforts as were planted entirely.
About 5/13 of the spuds are now dug up.

Another marrow emerged from the undergrowth that is the squash patch.

The pumpkin is a beautiful golden orange now.
It must be about 14 inches diameter.
OH says to keep an eye on it as Halloween approaches but I think we are the only people who can see it .

Last night we had HM Fish and chips using some cod that OH bought in the fish and chip shop- scraps bag.
The Chips and Green Beans were home made and grown so it was a very economical meal .
About 50p for the cod (2 bits each for 3 of us is less than half the bag at £1).Nothing for the chips,nothing for the Beans.
About 15p for the batter.
So 65p for the meal or around 22 pence each

I find Caterpillars every day on the Brassicas but just pick them off and chuck them.
There is a nice looking cabbage waiting to be harvested.
I always cut them leaving the stalk as the leaves continue to grow out if you do and you can come and pick them off when you want them.

The veg patch is beginning to wind down now.
I have seen my first sighting this year of an advert for onion sets .
Another month and I shall start clearing the fruit area .
It is very weedy and overgrown.
I left it too late early this year and so there is a lot to do.

Things I learned this year about growing at home..

Make sure to pot the tomatoes on into big pots else there isn't enough water even if you water them religiously.
Earthing up spuds with cut grass is much much better than with earth because they get a greater depth of cover, it is looser and they are being fed at the same time.
You can grow carrots in boxes in the greenhouse.
Sowing early gets some stuff off to a good start but some stuff needs the heat AND light of longer days.
You can grow spring onions in the greenhouse if you are patient.
Capillary action only works for about a 6 inch run at most.
Covering up water containers with window netting keeps the gnats off.
Pheasant berries make a raisin substitute.
Nasturtium seeds can be pickled.
If you have a good identity book,you can find edible fungi in the garden.
Molochia is Jews Mallow which is edible and prolific.

Brand new old machines!

2012-09-03T13:07:00.003+01:00

The new old dishwasher (from Freegle) is installed.

Hooray hooray
I hate washing up by hand!
I guess it is the feeling that it is all dumped on me regardless of how much there is.

OH and DD went and fetched it on Saturday in our little tiny hatchback car.
We have a small trailer but the previous owner of the washer didn't know where we would be able to park it while we fetched the machine, so they went without it.

I am quite amazed at how meticulous some people are with their machines.
I clean ours out after each use but never thought to actually bleach it .
This one is like new and is 23 years old.
They said they hardly used it so I am hoping it will last a while.
It is an AEG which is a company with a good reputation.
Our last machine (an Indesit) was from Freecycle and lasted about 5 years but was much much older (maybe as old as this one).

We left the old broken one outside the front gate after I had extracted the baskets to be used as crop protection.
The scrap man drives around several times a week and this morning he knocked and asked if he could have it.
I like scrap men. They are the original recyclers.
It doesn't worry me that they sell the bits or metal because it would be wasted otherwise.

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Yesterday, OH managed to mangle the washing machine!
He is notoriously clumsy and is banned from most of the machines of the house but the washing machine is used by all because it is just easier if everyone does their own laundry.
While I was arranging courgettes on the drier trays ,a humungous machine gun rattling with a loud bang came from the kitchen.
Yes, it was the washing machine dying.
OH rushed in and extracted a large amount of clothes and went and hung them on the line outside.
He came sheepishly back in and turned the machine back on with one towel in but the damage was done.

This machine came from freecycle about 3 years ago I think.
It was a Servis (they went out of business) and was a replacement for our own Servis because the Drum had snapped off (from overloading OH!).
They were terrible machines but better than washing by hand.
The machine had a broken motor when we collected it but we had a broken machine with a working motor so it was win, win. The owner needed it gone,we needed the machine and the scrap man got the carcass.

Anyway,winding forwards
OH having broken the thing, went on Ebay and bought another (£50 and collect it ourselves).
This one is an Indesit which is a better make.
We haven't got it yet as he will be fetching it at the weekend.

We can live without a machine for a week easily.

*************************************************************************

Cant help wondering what number 3 will be as these things always do come in 3's

'Funny food'

2012-08-31T23:13:00.000+01:00

The marrow and ginger jam was fine.

It looks looser in the jar than the normal jams I make but is actually quite spreadable and firm once opened.
All but one jar sealed properly.
We have already worked our way through one jar and will start the non sealed jar next.

My Aunty used sometimes to give Mum jam to bring back when we visited.
Marrow or Rhubarb and Ginger I seem to remember.
We ate so much junk back then that it tasted 'funny' to have real Jam and I expect mum and dad finished it off between them.

My mother seldom made preserves of any kind.
I remember seeing tins of Marmade but never Seville Oranges used to make marmalade.
One year they had an awful lot of onions from somewhere which they pickled .
They were very strong tasting to we kids who were only used to little silver skinned onions from the xmas hamper.

I cant help thinking we were walking junk food zombies.
Nearly everything was laced with sugar or salt back then.
Those huge Wagon Wheel biscuits, Jammie Dodgers, Tea time fancies.
We had them every Sunday tea, 'dip in and grab' sandwiches of cucumber or beetroot in vinegar (never without).
A salad made almost entirely of lettuce with a few slithers of tomato in a bowl.
Shiphams Meat paste or fish paste in tiny jars shared between 5.
We were allowed to take the bread (already spread with cheap marg) and load it with the other ingredients.
No one was allowed biscuits or 'cakes' till they had had the sandwiches.
Mum would say 'who wants the last....'and my brother no doubt hungrier than we girls would already have his hand on the offering before the article was even named ,with a loud aggressive MEEE.

To drink there was water from the tap but usually there were no drinks at the table,you just helped yourself at the sink throughout the day.
You could have tea though and we were given it with sugar in our baby bottles and so were quite used to being caffeined up to the eyeballs and sugared to the point of cavities.
Dad drank nothing else and always had 3 sugars (He had about 3 peg teeth in his whole head).

Dinners during the week were usually something and veg.
We ate a lot of cheap tinned sausages or pressed meats.
Now and again mum would make a pie but usually she bought processed meat products that she would divide up into small amounts and there would be that awful powdered potato that you were supposed to add milk and water to with a dot of butter.
I think the more expensive 'mash' had those things incorporated already but the cheap ones were cheap for a reason and tasted of nothing very much when only how water was added.
We ate processed peas that were mushy and granular with a thick dropping consistency. They cooked up a sort of khaki colour and were heavily salted by us as we automatically put salt and white pepper on everything labeled dinner.
Carrots were almost always tinned too and had a sort of slippery,slimy property to them.

We would have real meat on Sunday for Dinner which was mid day.
Real potatoes too .

There was pudding every day.
Sometimes jelly and something.
Mostly those little pots of slop that are coloured and flavoured and called things like 'smooth melody' or 'top pudding'.

There was always Supper too .
This often consisted of toast or bread and something.
We quite often had dripping which was the juices of the Sunday roast ,mashed up with the little meaty bits.
This was lovely with some salt.
Other times it would be banana sandwiches with sugar.

We hardly ever had fruit as a whole piece of food.
It was chopped up in one form or another .

Dad would bring home jam donuts if he won anything at the betting shop.
That and the cigarette voucher Christmas and birthday gifts were the only time I ever remember him 'paying' for anything.
Did mum get Gifts too?
I really cant remember.

Anyway, Breakfast..
Usually this was cereal in a box.
Mostly Kellogs something or other.
We sometimes had boiled eggs and even fried eggs and bacon very occasionally.
The milk was I think watered down as it always tasted of nothing .

We never drank actual milk on its own or juice of any sort.

Once in a while there would be 'orange or lemon squash' which tasted of chemicals and was highly sweetened.

Pop was only bought at Christmas,birthdays or if the cousin visited.

If it was a school outing, we would be bought a tin of cola or some such thing.
Iced fancies were usually given and a sandwich.
(I hate icing so often threw my biscuits away).

Now and again we would have actual real food.
I visited various friends after school and tasted home cooked meals which were yummy but I didn't comment about them at home ,Mum took offense very easily.
At school we had school dinners which were made on the premises.
They were lovely and filling and flavourful.
There was always pudding and a drink of orange squash or water.

Most children who at dinner in school,had tea at home of sandwiches or a small portion of something.
We had free school meals ,ate the lot and then a second dinner at home with pudding.
I can only imagine that our own home food was so awful that the calories were empty (bulked out foods with nothing substantial) because I was never over weight and neither was my constantly eating brother.

My little sister however, was fed sweets almost every day after school and expanded accordingly.
Her portion sizes were equal to our own which didn't help matters.

Xmas was a time of indulgence all round.
Ours was generally a hamper of stuff that mum paid into all year.
There were tins of meat, vegetables,fruit and nuts.
We would have a turkey from the butcher and pop.
The adults had sherry but I think the bottle was perpetual because I don't remember ever seeing them buy it.
Maybe it was gifted from mums employers (she was a cash in hand cleaner for various people).
Dad drank Drambui in tiny little frosted green glasses. One little tot of it at a time.
A big tin of Quality street was a yearly thing. Did it come in the hamper? Dad only ate the soft centres given his lack of teeth.

The pop bottles were taken back to the shop for the deposit money.

Dad always carved the turkey and made mince pies. He had once seen mum make them and decided he could do better. They were brimming with mince but the pastry was usually rock hard and shiny with glaze.

If you got a mice pie outside of home,it was like eating manna, soft and short pastry with a sugary coating.
We never complained of course, we just shoveled them down.

It's cooling down

2012-08-31T21:55:00.000+01:00

The Summer is no more! Who knew?
Well I think it is kind of a relief really.
For one thing, Autumn is supposed to be cooler and when we get a sunny day, it is a bonus.
That is much more pleasant than 'Summer' being only one sunny day in 30 for some reason, even if the weather is exactly the same as June ,July and August's has been.

I have been playing campfires in the garden.
I take the junk mail down to the compost bin area and burn it in the storm kettle.
The water is enough to fill our big red tea pot ,enough for 6 mugs of tea.
I wait for the ashes to cool down and throw them in the compost.
Lately I have been trying to light the fire without matches and it is not easy.
Even using a steel ,I only manage it every 3rd time .
The rest of the time, I resort to a lighter.

Today was spent in clearing the old dishwasher ready for it to be put out.
I have been using it as a cupboard in which to keep the plastic tubs and containers that I reuse in the kitchen so they are all over the table at the moment in the dining room.

I think it might end up as the scrap man's treasure.
We have been offered a working one from freecycle and OH and hopefully DS will fetch it tomorrow.
I could easily go but there are 2 men here and really I think I should expect DS to pitch in and help while he has no work and lives here completely free of charge.

The Dishwasher lives in the old downstairs loo area.
There is no loo in there as it was cracked many years ago and we took it out and sealed over the hole in the floor(with a bin lid and concrete in-case we should ever refit a loo).
The cold water pipe is handy for the machine.
The outlet has a little stand pipe that OH made which goes to the downpipe outside through a hole in the wall.
The lobby leading to the back door has a freezer with a fridge standing on top of it as our kitchen is too small to accommodate them.
Tomorrow we will have to move them out of the way ,just so we can move the machines out and in.

**************************************************************************

The garden is looking green and a bit messy.
There are still some courgettes appearing on the plants despite the mad harvesting.
I picked about 7 portions of Runner beans yesterday too.
They are in the dehydrator which runs at night on economy 7 (cheap electricity).
The very smallest beans will dry in one night but bigger specimens take 2.

**************************************************************************

The little dears are back to school next week.
Hoo bloomin ray!
This holiday there has been a screamer out nearly every day.
By screamer, I mean a female child who's parents don't know what anti social means.
The child screams at every given opportunity and is out there right now (it is gone 9pm and pitch dark).
She is about 4 years old if I have heard correctly (the children speak loudly and shout mostly and are not shy about broadcasting there address, ages,names etc) .
They live about 3 or 4 gardens away as the crow flies but the sound travels so that they seem as though they are under the window or in the next garden.
One cannot really be surprised by their volume, their mother swears like a navvy .
They are called every name under the sun and ordered to F off if they don't like it.
Apparently ,they are doing her head in!

Thankfully,we do not live next door.

****************************************************************************

My neighbour's grandson now has a small daughter.
She arrived around January time and so is still a sweety.
Her daddy seems to dote on her rather as mine doted on me I believe .
He is not to be seen recently without the little one attached somewhere about his person like a mascot at a football game.
We have known him since he was around 2 years old.
He is very good with the little one.

*****************************************************************************

According to my mother, my father was always very good with the little ones.
Strangely that is a double edged sword.
Being good with the little ones in our case, involved dad absolutely worshipping the youngest child to the point of idiocy.
Many a time I remember my older brother being chastised for my wrong doings.
It was always his fault because where else must I have learned to act or speak like that?
Actually I probably picked up an awful lot of my misdemenours from nursery school where I went before I was old enough to go to the local school.
We lived in an area of high immigration and very low standards of living,not because there were many immigrants as such but because it was an area of low earners and rubbish housing.
The nursery was free because mum had to work.

I got my own turn as the older sister a few years later and became the slapping target for about 7 years until I complained at school to a teacher( deputy head) who promptly drove me to my home and asked my parents what was meant . My mother admitted that dad was 'heavy handed' and the teacher (quite bravely I thought) told dad to lay off or be reported to the Social services.
He never slapped me ever again.

******************************************************************************

The harvest

2012-08-28T12:17:00.001+01:00

I dug some of our spuds up last week.
I have dug about 1/5th of the whole crop and possibly have 6 weeks supply for 3 adults (2 will only eat them under shotgun circumstances anyway).

Have you tried marrow and ginger jam making?
I did some for the first time this year and it is like eating ginger beer on toast.

My birthday this month was lovely.
OH bought me a brand new laptop!
He also bought me a lovely green cover with a little light for my ereader .
DS bought me some vouchers to shop with online and a big chocolate birthday cake!

We had fish and chips as a birthday tea too:)
*******************************************************************************
OH has decided to give up on his OU studies.
He announced yesterday that he had given up as he wasn't able to understand how to do it all.
At the time, he was attempting to recover his computer, having messed it up with a bad update install and I thought he was talking about that.
Really and truly, I have no idea why he had ever started the course in the first place.
He has spent 4 years banging his head in frustration over it while all the time admitting he had no thought to use the resulting qualification in any way.??

Actually I do wonder if it was more about trying to keep up with various sisters who had taken on courses and finished the studying.
One sister who shall remain nameless here (as usual) proclaimed that she was now better than other people who did not have a degree (much to my disgust as you can imagine).
Unfortunately, that is the attitude of quite a lot of snotty people and they live in ignorance of the skills and ingenuity of people everywhere who choose not to go get a piece of paper to 'prove' they can think,talk,breath and write all at the same time.

*****************************************************************************
DS, who incidentally has spent 4 years getting his degree, still has no job after 14 months of looking.
DD, having graduated this year, is looking too and so far, nothing, after a false start with a firm who specialized in chugging turned out to be a bunch of sweat shoppers under the guise of charity fundraisers.

*****************************************************************************

Preserving stuff

2012-08-15T13:31:00.000+01:00

I have been harvesting a fair bit this last week.

The dehydrator has been busy every night drying Beans, Kale, Courgettes, and spinach .
We also have a Vacuum sealer which has helped keep the freezer from overflowing because it compacts things into flatter shaped bags.

Yesterday I decided we needed the bottom shelf of the freezer back (it is only a 3 shelf under-counter style ).
There were 6 Seville oranges and 4 lemons in there waiting to be made into marmalade.
I sorted through the saved empty jars to find enough with lids.
It took about 1 1/2 hours to chop them all up and boil it down in the microwave.

Last week I made Marrow and Ginger jam using ground ginger.
The result has turned out quite sloppy as there wasn't enough pectin despite a goodly amount of lemon juice.
I can see it being mostly used as pie fillings but no matter.

There are about 8 good sized marrows under DD's bed now.
Hopefully they will last w while without needing to be dried or frozen.

cutting bottles

2012-08-03T19:10:00.000+01:00

I have been trying to cut the ends off the vinegar bottles that I buy in sains or asda.
There are at least 10 every couple of months because that is the cheapest way to buy a gallon of vinegar.
I do try to put them in the recycling bin but they take up a lot of bin space and weigh the plastic kitchen bin bag down.

I tried to cut a straight line using a glass cutter but it is almost impossible to get it straight and steady.
Next I looked online for glass cutting comments.
There was a very interesting utube video about using hot and cold water to separate your scored bottle.

Then I found a home made jig on Instructables and that is what I made this morning.
My jig is an old shelf we had lying around in the shed and I already had the screws and the glass cutter so the whole thing was free.

Hmm, it is easier said than done though , cutting a bottle.
I dont know if my cutter is a cheapo thing or blunt but it was difficult to get a continuous scored line even using the jig that holds the bottle perfectly.

My endevours so far have resulted in various wobbly edged glass shapes.
I want them for mini garden cloches as they are glass and wont blow away.
The plants wont care about the edges being wobbly but my eye is offended just the same.

I shall persevere!

I love instructables and today while looking for the instructions for the jig, I decided to use some of my surveys money to buy a pro membership. I can download their instructables as pdfs then or download their ebooks which are compilations of various things.

2 years membership is about £24 so very good value when you think of all the info that I find on there.

Home Haircut day

2012-08-01T14:49:00.000+01:00

Todays victim was me.
Not so scary as it sounds because I am my own hair cutter.
If I scream stop at any point during the proceedings, it is instantly acknowledged.
I used a combination of tools for this.

The robocut machine that I bought a couple of years ago.
Haircutting scissors.
A thinning tool and thinning scissors.
A hair line guide.
A web cam on a USB cable.
Mirror and comb.

It sounds like a lot but I have been a self snipper for ages (25 years)and you do tend to accumulate new tools along the way.

First I chop to 2 1/2 inches with the machine,my hair is rarely longer than 3" anyway). I leave the crown part alone at this point.
Then 2" at back and sides.
Next fit the web cam to check the back of my head.
I used the thinning tools to do my fringe (Bangs) and the hair line tool to do a neat line round the back of my neck.
The scissors help here of course and the mirror lets me check the front without having to keep changing the web cam position .
I go round each ear and tidy the edge to make a line following on from the fringe.

I'll no doubt notice a few stray bits that need tidying over the day so the scissors are kept handy for that.
The Robocut layers hair so it isn't just one thickness like it is knitted.

I did DS's hair a few weeks back.
For that I used the wondercomb thingummy that I bought from ebay.
It is a comb with a depth piece that you use to give the right length then you just cut over the comb with scissors.
I made a similar thing some years ago for our clippers so that I could do the back of mine without needing to see it. My gauge was only cardboard fitted with an afro comb but it worked till the cardboard got too soft and bendy.

OH uses a phillips self clipper I bought him around 4 years ago.
He does his about every 6 weeks and tidies the back with the ordinary clippers as he says you get more of a blended look that way. It saves him about £50 a year to do his own .

I only do mine about every 2 months but a womans haircut is around £20 so it saves me about £120 a year or £10 a month.

DD does her own ,she has long hair and just does the fringe .Every so often she will see an advertisement for a free haircut if she models for a trainee so she does get a salon cut sometimes.She colours her hair herself with Henna .

Tiny toms and preserving produce

2012-07-31T19:04:00.001+01:00

We ate our first two red Tomatoes today.
They were dinky little things.
I cut each one as small as I could and DS and I had them in 1 sandwich each !

I have been dehydrating this week also.
Not bodily, I am drying produce.
The L'equip machine I bought a few years ago is still going strong.
This weekend I dried about 9 courgettes on Saturday, 9 on Sunday
Monday I dried about 5 and around a cupful of runner beans
Today was 6 trays of Spinach
Tonight will be 3 more trays of courgettes(about 5 or 6 fruits) and a cupful of runner beans.

When they are dry, they are put into screw top jars till we use them.

Drying is an efficient way to store produce and takes up less room than most other storage.
Also it is cheap fuel wise as it is an overnight job to dry them and then they don't use any more until you cook them which you would have to do anyway.
We still have a jar of dried onions from about 3 years ago which is perfectly edible.

I pickled a large jar of onions for Christmas.
We have 2 jars of pickled beetroot from several years back which is fine still.

I looked up courgettes online and discovered Asda selling 4 fruits for a whole £1

The Kale is now edible and very flavour-some after a couple of months of just spinach interspersed with Molokia

The row nearest the camera is the Kale. I am used to curly leafed Kale so was it took a while to realise that this plant was really Kale and not just a mis-labeling error for which I am notorious.

The carrot bed did turn out to be mostly grass pretending to be carrot seedlings sadly.
I have resown but don't know if it will be any more successful this time around.
There are about 7 actual original carrots remaining.
The box in the greenhouse is looking quite leafy.

There are actually carroty ends showing which look about 1/2" thick!

Just as well with the price of grub at the moment.

I was cleaning my bike up yesterday and found the panniers we bought for it in Holland.
They are sturdy and well made ,not like the rubbish you can buy here.
I fitted my bike rack on and then added the panniers and bungeed the lock to the rack between them.
Inside one were 3 or 4 receipts for sainsburys from 2003.
Carrots were 40p a kilo and brocolli was not much more.
Milk was about 29p for a litre of UHT

On Friday,I finished clearing the next bed of weeds.
It is sown with Alfafa which I think I remember is from the bean family.
This will get chopped off and dug in in a few months time the same as the clover and phacelia.

Green everywhere

2012-07-27T10:47:00.000+01:00

The good weather has helped things along in the garden.

This is the view now and the one back in April looking over the fence dividing the lawn and the veg plot.

The peas are doing much better than expected.

About 6 of the plants were transplanted from modules and the rest are direct sowings.

The courgette/Zucchini bed is about 3 feet tall and lush with growth.

I am picking them and dehydrating as there are too many to eat .

Outdoor tomatoes have picked up well. There are fruits on some which is rather suprising considering they were the left overs from those that are living in the greenhouse.

Here are the outdoor plants with the newly cleared ground that I have been working on this week beyond.

Here are the washington cherry in the greenhouse

and the marmande with their unusual shaped fruits

Behind them is the old window blind that I had to incorporate yesterday due to the ridiculous 50 degree heat in the greenhouse with the windows wide open and the fan running for hours.

This is a quick snap of the strawberry beds with the cardboard mulch.

Most of the strawberry plants seem to have strawberry leaf spot but it didn't effect the fruit at all.

The cardboard should help to keep it contained.

I will have to keep my eye on them though because I don't see any runners yet and I might need to train them into pots as they cant very well root into the cardboard.

Cardboard Mulch and Slug Pellets

2012-07-18T10:21:00.002+01:00

Yesterday was a dry day!
I took advantage of the weather to get outside and do a lot more weeding of the strawberry beds.
There are two beds,each about 3 feet X 5 feet.
Originally,I had 3 strawberry plants and they have propagated themselves over the years so now there must be around 100 plants or so.
DS is tidying his room and produced some cardboard boxes that were just what I need for mulching the beds once the weeds were reduced.
Hopefully the cardboard will help suppress any more weeds for a while (im hoping for all of the rest of the year).
In the spring, I will remove it if it is still pick up-able and dig out everything and then plant the best of the plants in the newly cleared beds.

The slugs seem prolific and have been nibbling on the new clover plants much to my disgust.
Pellets have been administered.
The Phacelia is now starting to show in the 3rd Green manure bed.

Magnesium deficiency is showing still in the potato leaves.
I watered them with Epsom salts several weeks ago and that did help but with all this rain I guess it was time for another dose.

Carrots,weeds and Strawberries

2012-07-16T17:57:00.000+01:00

The Carrot bed is full but of what?
Many of the grass like seedlings actually might just be grass after all.
I weeded and weeded and now there are a few actual positive sightings of carrot tops but most of it looks like little grasses.
However on pulling one up,there is a distinctive carroty niff so I replanted it and have left well alone.

The strawberries are finished fruiting and I am hard at work weeding the grass,Nettles and creeping buttercup out .
The two beds are crowded but they are beginning to take up some semblance of a strawberry patch as opposed to a miniature jungle.
Many snail and ant eggs are uncovered along with their parents.

I have sown clover in two of the onion beds and phacelia in the other.
These are green manures to improve the soil.
The clover is already up .
Amongst the Strawberries, I found several vetch seed pods and collected a few as they are supposed to be useful also as green manure.

Last week I bought a berry picking tool.
It looks like a Dustpan but the bottom is a comb rather than solid.
To use it ,you have to sort of scoop at the berries which become caught in the comb and drop into the pan.
It is an ingenious contraption, simple and effective.
I remember Ray Mears featuring a similar tool in one of his episodes.
It has sped up the berry harvesting by about 90% as previously I could spend an hour an evening on just harvesting raspberries and red currants.

My poor Berries are very crowded with weeds and will get a proper clear out once they have finished fruiting.
The Cleavers,Rogue Blackberry brambles and Bear Bind are everywhere.

On the harvesting side...
We have had quite a few courgettes and a few French beans and even one or two runners today.
There aren't many peas but they are lovely when we have had any.

Today was spent in weeding the strawbs and in hunting indoors for DS' document folder in which he had put all his qualification details and then mislaid the whole lot.
I found it .
The rain has been persistent.
There is fruit on the tomatoes but I don't know if they will ripen with so little sunshine.

We cheered ourselves up with pork chops and chips for tea.
The chops were courtesy of Lidls who were selling them half price this week.
The green veg was all from the garden which is satisfying.

Long trips,Fish'n'chips,soggy drips

2012-07-07T19:54:00.001+01:00

We traveled this week.
All the way to Scotland (nearly 600 miles) to see our daughter.
She had her graduation ceremony.
It was also the first time we have met her boyfriend.
He seems a nice young man, very polite and calm.

We ate at the pub for a treat.
Their fish and chips was nice but not the huge plateful you get down south.
The following day we tried a different pub.
This one took a whole hour to serve us and we had to reorder twice due to their having run out of various things. The eventual food was quite nice but it was so long in coming that the kitchen was closed before we could order dessert.

The return journey (by train) was long and a bit dull apart from the drunken revelers and the delays because of the floods which have been causing havoc apparently in the midlands .
We had almost no rain on the three days we were away an hadn't seen or heard any news or weather forecasts so we were quite surprised to hear about the delays.
Luckily,it was only an hour and a half longer to get to our destination than usual.

The garden is looking greener.
There are 4 new courgettes coming along.
Beans are reappearing on the French bean plants.
The Spinach is trying to bolt but I keep cutting off the flower heads as soon as they appear and so far the taste is still okay.

The Carrot bed is looking a bit more carroty and a bit less weedy.

I picked two punnets of ripe raspberries.

On Tuesday I made a rain pipe for the greenhouse.
I used an old rubber watering can hose minus the perforated part, as a hopper, then a piece of plastic tube for the down pipe and a little piece of copper pipe on the end of that to divert it into the bucket at the bottom.
There was a lid for this bucket so I cut a hole to take the piece of pipe.

It has about a 4" depth of water in there now.

Today I harvested the Japanese onions.
There are loads and they are big.
10 containers were chopped and frozen .
A big bag of onion tops was also frozen for use in stews.

Tomorrow if the weather allows, I must harvest the red onions and maybe the shallots.

The beds holding them will be green manured after I tidy them up with the Jalo.

Weeding with tweezers

2012-07-01T16:26:00.003+01:00

Yes really!
The raised carrot bed has loads of little carrot seedlings in rows but also about a million weed seedlings.
I have spent about 6 hours on it so far.

We are going to be absent for a few days so I have rigged up a drip feeding affair to add to the capillary matting.
DS will be here but he isn't very good with remembering to water plants.
The drip feeder is actually just two redundant bread maker tins with sponge cloth for drip wicks.
They last a few days.

I have a smaller version over the greenhouse carrots which is a washing up liquid bottle and the same foam.

Make simple drip irrigation for your greenhouse

Cut the bottom off a plastic bottle.
Using the lid with a hole in or a squirty top, thread some foam rubber (washing up cloth) through to use as a wick.
Fill with water and suspend over the plants.
I have two wire shelves set up in a tent shape over the plants and the bottle is sitting in one of the holes.
You could tie it or wire it to hang from something.
It will drip slower as it empties.
Yesterday it was dripping at about once every 8 seconds and today when it is about half empty,it is dripping at around once every 30 seconds.

The bigger tin drippers are hanging from two pieces of pipe threaded through the handle.

The garden is doing well.
Onions are big and fat.
Toms are getting taller and most have flowers.
Courgettes are appearing on the plants.
Peas have pods.
Runner beans have scarlet flowers.
French beans have pods.
Spinach is trying to bolt but I keep pinching out prospective flowers.
Brassicas are becoming taller and I have separated 16 plants of Kale and Broccoli and put them under cloches to keep the birds off.

The spuds were showing magnesium deficiency so have been watered with epsom salted water.
Runner beans have been soapy sprayed to remove aphids.

We have the usual cherries which look like most like Raniers variety than anything else.
The birds eat most of them as they are far too high up to reach.

Rasps are getting red and sweet.
Strawbs are nearing the end and have been abundant as usual.

We have had far more than the initial outlay in fruit over the years.
There must be pounds and pounds of the last two in the freezer .

I have bought several green manure seeds to sow after the spuds and onions are done.

In the later part of the year when the fruit is over, I will clear the area as it is becoming hard to keep under control and replant strawbs ,rasps etc.

Comfrey

I have 11 out of 12 comfrey plants showing!
The HDRA cuttings I bought some years ago were disappointing but these new ones bought from ebay have thrived all apart from one.
I am happy though because I only paid for 10 and the offer was for a minimum of 10 cuttings.