However, the campaign has been pulled to make way for a new campaign which is currently running with David Jason (UK Comedy Actor) doing the voice over. As much as I love David Jason, the adverts are not good. I’ve seen them several times and it’s not appetising (true, there’s no chocolate cake with fondant oozing out!). You can’t listen and not see the advert, and realise it’s Marks and Spencer’s food until it’s mentioned at the end. The adverts have lost their style and their appeal.

Just bring Dervla and the music back!

I’ve got tri-colour courgette plants and so far had dark and pale green courgettes off them. Over the weekend we were visiting friends who were literally giving away most of their courgettes as they had so many, so we got a few yellow ones off them too. The yellow ones are much better than the dark green - a lot less bitter.

Courgettes are so versatile when it comes to eating them. You can add them to pretty much everything really. I’ll throw them in to risotto, soup, bolognaise, stir frys, I even added them in with beef stroganoff last night and fish pie tonight! You can also eat them raw, either sliced like a cucumber or sliced lengthways into sticks, great with carrot and cucumber sticks as crudites.

I don’t know how long the plants will continue to produce courgettes. At the moment they seem to thrive despite the lack of summer, so I’m hoping they continue to produce for a couple of months at least.

Tomatoes

Both tomato plants have fared a lot better in their greenhouse this year, although they’ve probably gone without water a bit more than they should have. The downside to having them covered is that they don’t get watered when it rains (besides through the 3 air holes at the top of the greenhouse). However we’ve had half a dozen juicy red tomatoes off them so far and about another dozen or so to come.

Lettuce

My attempts at lettuce so far haven’t been so great. Our first lettuce were seedlings from my Dad, and these grew great, however the next attempt started well but just died off. I’ve now bought some new seeds (as my others were a few years old) and currently have a tray of small seedlings, plus some slightly larger ones from my Dad again so these are already in the long window box.

Chillis

The most successful pot plant so far this year! We’ve got 6 Jalapeno plants and a Scotch Bonnet plant. All of the plants have chillis on, the Jalapeno plants are in full swing with over 50 chillis in total. A couple of the plants are about 2.5 feet tall!

Strawberries

The strawberries are over for another year but we had a great batch from the various plants we’ve got. Having them in pots kept them away from the slugs and woodlice, although my hanging basket seemed to suffer from the strawberry beetle and none of the strawberries in the basket were any good. Next year I’ll put in measures to protect against this.

Radish

The last crop I tried of Radish, some came up great, some just grew the leaves but no radish. Again, old seeds so maybe they need a lot more than a window box can give them. However Dave’s got plenty of radish now so I probably won’t grow any more of that this year anyway!

Romano Pepper

I had a sweet pepper plant in between the tomato plants in the grow bag, and whilst it started off great, it seems to have hit a wall in improving. I’ve now dug it out and put it into its own pot to see if it fares any better, however I’m not expecting much from it. None of my pepper plants have ever done too well, besides just the one pepper (almost black and tasted horrible!) from a plant that was in the ground a couple of years back.

Aubergine

My Dad’s given me another Aubergine plant, however a couple of years back I had one from him that just took up a lot of space and did nothing! He got a few off a couple of plants, but I think it’s too late in the year and it’s in too small a pot for it to really do much. Still, there’s no harm in trying!

Courgettes

I’ve never grown courgettes before, however after seeing Jem’s posts about how she’d got courgettes off her enormous plant, plus seeing that I could still sow the seeds at the end of May (when I was nosing around the garden centre and spotted a pack of seeds. So I planted 4 seeds and 3 grew to small plants in the tray they were in. I separated these into individual trays once I saw how big they may get, and they just carried on growing! So a couple of weeks ago I took two of them and put them in a grow bag, and took the other plant to my Dad (see I give him plants too!).

My two courgette plants are quite large now and covered in a few flowers and lots of tiny little courgettes. I certainly can’t wait to start getting courgettes off these plants, and it’ll certainly be a permanent fixture in my choice of plants in future years.

Other Salads

My attempts at other salads hasn’t gone so well this year. Whether it’s down to the age of the seeds, or just the lack of decent weather, who knows. My spring onions have never grown too well anyway (I blame that on the lack of sun).

So all in all, the garden’s done quite well for being in pots, and it certainly proves that it’s possible. However, I do still miss having my own garden. Maybe next year.

However a lot of people’s arguments were that free range chickens were not affordable to them. Personally I don’t really agree with this argument. A whole chicken in Sainsburys can cost around £4.50, and that would feed a family of 4 and leave the carcass for making at least 3 or 4 decent bowls of soup too. So for about £1.12 per person you’d get enough meat to go with your dinner, and a bowl of soup. From one of these chickens the 2 of us (who are big eaters) get our roast dinner and enough meat left over for risotto the next day plus a large bowl of soup each for lunch.

The trouble I’ve found is that buying free range chicken breasts is expensive, and not very affordable to us. Free range leg and thigh packs are not too badly priced, and we had a box of chicken wings for about £1.50 for 8 the other day, and I love chicken wings! However the chicken breasts are expensive, and whilst free range turkey is cheaper, it’s just not as good for fajitas or stirfry (seems to dry out quicker). I tend to find the breasts at about £3-4 for a pack, yet a whole chicken costs about £1 more!

We’re quite lucky in that we can go shopping to our local Costco, and they’ve started to sell free range whole chickens, typically in a large format (around 2.3kg per bird!), but at a cheaper per kg price than the supermarkets. So today I’ve spent the afternoon with 2 large chickens and have cut them up into 4 large breasts (1 breast is more than enough for the two of us, so that’s 8 dinners), 4 leg/thighs which will do for a roast dinner (so 4 more dinners) and 4 chicken wings, great for the BBQ. Plus I’ve taken both carcasses and am currently making soup with that, which I’ll freeze, ready for when I fancy something warm for lunch. I should get about 8 soups easily out of them. The cost of all this? £15 and less than an hour of my time. Now I’m no butcher but it’s relatively easy to cut up a chicken, and even if it’s a smaller one from a supermarket, it works out so much cheaper than buying things separately.

So in the future, if you want to save yourself some cash, buy the whole chickens and cut them up yourself. All you need is a good short but sharp knife to cut through the cartiladge (you can twist the leg and wings first to get the bone to pop out). From £15 we’ve got 8 dinners of fajitas, stirfry or risotto, 4 roast dinners, 4 wings and about 8 soups for lunch or a light dinner. I really don’t think you can complain with that return of investment! And, of course, it tastes so much better than indoor reared chickens

During the time between realising that standard mayonnaise used battery hen eggs and now, we’ve been trying out a few different types of mayonnaise, all organic as that was the only type that used free range eggs. SO Organic Mayonnaise from Sainsburys was the best option, although a little too creamy for my liking. The others were more like salad cream, and just as runny. I’m glad that Hellman’s have kept to their word and got the new free range version out as when it comes to mayonnaise, nothing beats hellman’s in my book.

Just make sure it’s stamped ‘Free Range Eggs’ on the side to be certain. Also remember, most premade coleslaw and potato salad will not have free range egg in the mayonnaise. To find free range eggs in various products you’ll need to at least look at the top of the range (Tesco Finest, Sainsburys Taste the Difference etc), unless you shop in Marks and Spencers or Waitrose (lucky people!). Even then, not all top of the range use free range eggs in their products. So there is still a need to check the ingredients if you want to be 100% sure.

I hope one day everything sold can be considered free range and we wouldn’t have to stand and check the labels, let’s hope that day comes soon!

My Salad garden is also bursting with seedlings. This is a metre long window box that I sowed various lines of seeds in. At the top is a mixed lettuce (most of which seems to be green and not the red variety!), then there’s rocket, a bit more lettuce and then radish at the bottom of the photo, which is going to need repotting soon. We’ve already had 6 lettuce out of the garden, all tasting so fresh and so much better than the shop bought stuff!

I’ve also bought some courgette seeds and have them in a tray in the greenhouse, although not much seems to be happening with them yet. According to the packet instructions I can plant them between April and July so hopefully they’ll catch on soon. I’ve never tried growing courgettes before but as we always have them in the fridge I figured it was worth a go.

My chilli plants are all doing well too. A couple of them are about a foot and a half high. A few little flowers have been appearing on them so hopefully we’ll start to see some fruit soon. Unfortunately they’re getting attacked by greenfly and my organic aphid and greenfly spray doesn’t seem to do much to deter them, so every morning it’s a case of check the plants over and kill off any greenfly that’s on there. The tomato plants are also growing fairly tall, the flowers are on there so again it’s a case of waiting for the fruit to appear.

Finally my Gooseberry plant is growing just a few gooseberries (about 3!). This time last year it was getting established in the garden and gave us a couple of dozen fruit, however when we had to move, I cut the bush back, uprooted it and dumped it into a pot. I’ve since replanted it into a nice large terracotta pot whilst finding the roots riddled with ants (I’d stood it on an ants nest without realising), so hopefully it’s in a better place now, and it makes a nice pot plant anyway!

So despite the unpredictable weather, the plants are still growing reasonably well. I’ll try and keep the updates a little more frequent in the future!

I’ve got another 4 lettuce ready for eating too, so I’m sure we’ll get through those over the next week or two, before they get past their best. I’ve also got about a metre long window box with the next lot of seeds in it, the radish have already popped through. The strawberries are starting to appear on the many plants we have, the chilli plants are growing healthily, and the tomato plants seem pretty happy in their new greenhouse.

All in all, the garden is doing well I’ll try and grab some up-to-date photos this week and post them up.

I’ve been very impressed with my strawberry plants as I didn’t expect much from them this year, or in fact in the future. When we moved last November the garden was left until the last minute and I simply dug up as many plants as I could, put them in my tray (non draining) and left them on the patio of the new house for about 3 months. I know, very poor showing, but we’d had so much going on! I’d tip the water out of the tray when I remembered but it wasn’t very often, so the plants were sitting in an inch or two of water with their roots either exposed or in a bit of earth. Anyway, I got them repotted into individual pots, a few in larger pots, plus a hanging basket, and besides one plant they’ve all got flowers on! I’m not sure which plants are the older ones and which are the runners from last year, so I’ll find out by the size of the fruit! However I’m pretty happy that we’ll still have a few fresh strawberries this year.

This year everything is in a pot, growbag or hanging basket. I’m not planting anything into the ground including salad. We’ve not got any gardening area and I decided I wasn’t going to start digging up the little amount of grass we have! So this is my first tray of lettuce. They seem to be doing quite well. I’ve got a deeper tray like a window box which I’ll be using too once I’ve got some more salad plants on the go. My seeds that I sowed about 6 weeks ago are going a bit slow so I think it’s time to do some more and hopefully they’ll react a bit quicker. However these lettuce should be ready for the pickings soon I hope

My new greenhouse! Just thought it was worth a mention. 4 tier greenhouse for around £18. Plenty of space to keep my pots, other seeds, little tools (trowel etc) and various other bits in, plus the top shelf for seedlings, and possibly I’ll use the second shelf down too.

This replaced my wrecked greenhouse from last month.

One of the 8 Jalapeno chilli plants we have on the go. After last year’s unsuccessful attempt at growing around 100 (ahem) I decided to just concentrate on a few this year instead. Actually I found the packet of seeds that I’d not sown last year (after buying some more this year!) and the packet had just a dozen in, 8 germinated. I’m planning to keep most of the chilli plants indoors this year as the climate isn’t right to put them outside really. We’ve also bought a Scotch Bonnet Chilli plant already grown (it’s not very big though!) so hopefully that will also do well for us. I may put a couple of plants outside if I run out of space on the windowsills.

My new addition to the garden is my portable tomato greenhouse. Last year I had 6 tomato plants on the go and they all suffered from blight due to the horrendous amount of rain we had. As this summer is predicted to be the same (but we all know predictions can be wrong!) I figured I’d rather control their water input. The greenhouse was about £17 from a local garden centre and can be found in most throughout the UK. It takes a growbag on the bottom (there’s a type of shelf under it) and there are also pegs on either side to hold it down too. I’ve got 2 tomato plants in this as you can see plus a Romano pepper plant (sweet pepper) that we also bought ready grown. I don’t tend to have much luck with sweet peppers but I still try each year! I’ve also used ring culture pots for the tomato plants to give them additional space for the roots. The greenhouse also has 2 holes at the top so it doesn’t get as hot and stuffy in there as it does in the other greenhouse, however I still ensure I open it up as the sun is coming round onto it and close it at night to keep the tomatoes at their best.

So there we are! That’s the garden so far. We’ve also got a gooseberry plant on the go. We’ve had it a couple of years now (again from my Dad, what would I do without him?!) and I pulled it up out of the ground when we moved last year and it’s been in a pot that’s not really big enough for it, however it’s still flourishing. I’ll probably try and get it into a bigger pot before the fruit start as I don’t think it’s in the right place at present. There’s a job to do this evening

The deal on this voucher however was to join the Virgin Wine Bank. This means you can choose to pay X amount per month (eg. £20) into your wine bank account. After 3 months of payment they’ll give you another X amount for free. So for the past three months I’ve had £20 go off my credit card and then once I had £60 in there they gave me another £20. So £80 to spend on wine (like a kid in a sweet shop!).

I ran through the wines available and chose 10 different cheap dry whites (no Chardonnay thanks!), oh and when I say cheap we’re taking £5-8. I duplicated one bottle as I liked the sound of it, and I also got a Rose to try. 12 bottles plus delivery came to just over £80. Can’t complain when it’s delivered to your door though!

However, while that’s all well and good here are the real facts.

1. I wouldn’t usually spend more than £3.50-4 on a bottle of wine. The cheapest on this deal has been £5 less 25% so £3.75.
2. I can’t really afford £20 a month to go out of my account/credit card.
3. I don’t drink enough to get through 12 bottles every three months.
4. I’ve now got over 20 bottles of wine and no space for half of them!

It’s a good deal if you want to go for slightly more expensive wines, or get a nice selection to keep for dinner parties or special times, but I tend to like light dry whites which are easy to drink without soda water and with or without food. Plus, these days you can pick up so many deals on wine in the local supermarkets or wine shops. Sure, you could sign up to just receive a mixed box of wine each quarter and you get to try new wines, but usually these are 50/50 red/white and by not drinking red I’d lose out, and most of their mixed boxes had 3 or 4 bottles of each, which means if you don’t like one particular wine you’re stuck with at least 2 more bottles! (I guess they’ll come in handy for presents!).

So Virgin Wines, a good idea, especially if you like both reds and whites and fancy saving up for a little splurge every quarter, or once a year (you don’t have to buy after each quarter, you could save up for Christmas), but if you’re a less serious wine drinker and just prefer a nice easy drink then stick with the offers in the supermarkets or Costco

On that note, I’m off to finish some Torres Vina Sol