Emptying the Sealed Pot

It's that time of the year ... when the Sealed Pot spews forth it's undigested coins and the occasional bit of paper.

Filmed for posterity.

And then carefully counted.  

We had a grand total of £325.96, as you can see from Alan's workings out here.

Most definitely not for us the paying of a machine in the supermarket to count our hard fought for pennies and deduct ten percent for the privilege, although at this time of year you see loads of people doing just that.   I have heard that some banks have cash counting machines ... but unfortunately ours is not one of them so we did it  the old fashioned way  :-(

After counting the money, double checking it all and then bagging into the banks acceptable amounts for paying into our account ...

... we decided to put the odds and sods back into the tin to see if we can add any extra to round things up before we visit the bank.  You never know a little bit more would be very handy in time for next years Challenge   :-)

Sue xx

Shopping From the Freezer

It's been a busy few days.  On Friday we drove up to Scotland ready for a family wedding on the Saturday, Sunday saw us hitting the road for home after having a brilliant time celebrating with the happy couple and lots of our other family members from North of the border.

  Yesterday we dashed round like blue arsed flies catching up with things at home, before taking the hire kilt back into Llandudno, doing lots of other  little errands and arranging to donate one of our sofas to the British Heart Foundation in readiness for redecorating the living room later this month (or early next if we run out of time ....which is more than likely).  On our way home we picked the dogs up from the kennels.  So now it's all back to normal at home ... well as normal as it ever gets here that is  😉

One thing I'm determined not to do much of for the rest of this month is shop.   After the last couple of weeks spent filling the chest freezer with homegrown vegetables, fruit and sauces,  and filling the cupboards with jams and marmalades, trailing round supermarkets or shops is the last thing on my agenda.  So to help with this, as you can see from the top photo, I have decided to get back to weekly menu planning.

Fifteen or so minutes spent with pencil and paper on Monday morning means that our evening meals for the whole week are sorted out, so no more standing staring into the fridge hoping desperately for inspiration to strike after a hard couple of hours in the polytunnel.

It also means that after a couple of weeks I should be able to 'shop' once a week from the chest freezer in the workshop and put everything we are going to be using jnto the smaller freezer in the house saving me dashing backwards and forwards looking for things .... well that's the plan anyway 😊

To make space, this week and for however long supplies last, we are eating down the contents of this freezer.   It's a bit like the Challenges I used to do really, and I'm already enjoying myself!!

Sue xx

A One Day Challenge - Updated and Complete

I'm having a 'spur of the moment' One Day Challenge  :-)

We're hoping to do a Car Boot Sale on Saturday weather permitting, so my Challenge to myself today is to declutter from the house ten items every hour on the hour until 5pm tonight. 

By the end of this mini declutter-athon there should be seventy more items to add to my car boot sale boxes, more space in the house ... and hopefully at the end of the sale on Saturday more cash in my purse.

I will take a photo of every hourly ten and try and get back on here to upload .... just to keep myself on track. 

I better go now it's almost 12 noon and time for my second ten of the day.

12 noon

1pm

2pm

3pm

4pm

Yep. I finished early ..... 5pm's little collection.

Has anybody else, when decluttering, had an overwhelming urge just to get rid of everything.  Sorting through my wardrobe I just wanted to lift the lot out and price it up .... and start from scratch with a minimal collection.

I'm fighting the urge .... I'll go and put the kettle on instead  ;-)

Sue xx

Project 333 - Four Years On

Back in December of 2012 I joined in with Project 333 for the first time, so although I've recently been doing some posts about it over on this years challenge blog  'Living Without ...'  I thought I would do my main post about this seasons P333 selection on here, so I have it recorded for posterity.

You can go way back to my original post HERE, if you want to read about the rules etc.  But basically you choose 33 items of clothing and accessories to wear for the next 3 months hence P333.  You don't include underwear, sleepwear, specific work wear or workout clothes, but should include accessories and usually jewellery.

Anyway this is the selection of things that I have chosen to see me through the next three months.  The hanging things in my half of the wardrobe, the accessories on top of the box underneath them and in close up above.  (Also on the box is a stack of vest tops that I wear under the shirts that are hanging, but as they are never worn on their own they do not have to be counted.)

In my drawer are my long sleeved t shirts, cardigan and jumpers.  And looking back at the old P333 posts this cardigan has been in my Winter collection every year since the beginning .... I think I have had my moneys worth here :-)

My waterproof jacket. 

I had to hang it on the mirror to photograph it as the colour wasn't true when I hung it on the door!!

And my footwear selection.

I was going to count my jewellery as one item but I reached thirty three items before I could add it and I honestly do not want to put anything that I have chosen back, so I have decided to be lenient with myself and just not count it.  After all it's a challenge, not a punishment.

How many of you have counted and gotten to 34?  Sorry to confuse you .... one of the tops that is hanging in the top photo was folded and put into the drawer (front right) in between the photos being taken!!

And now I've done my usual trick of turning all the hangers round to the way I don't usually have them, as things are worm washed and returned to the wardrobe the hangers will be hung the right way, and this way I will be able to monitor which clothes get worn and which are not earning their space in the collection.

Are any of you doing either P333 or something similar, to keep your clothes to a manageable level?  I would be interested in finding other blogs and bloggers that do this as I'm in a real 'getting rid of clutter' frame of mind again at the moment.

Sue xx

Seven Years of Blogging

Make yourself a drink and pull up your chair this is a long one ...... because today is this blogs anniversary, seven years of posts.  Seven years of ups and downs but best of all seven years of sharing our lives with you .... our blogging buddies, friends, followers and readers.

In October of 2008 when we first placed this advert in the Farmers Guardian newspaper ... we had no idea of the adventure we were starting on.

Resourceful sea-dog (Engineer) and hard working city chick (Retail Manager) (Married) wishing a radical life style change, seek 3 bed property with space to live the ‘good life’ (veggies and chickens), ideally in a rural setting or on a farm in the Oxford, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Hampshire area. 

Willing to upgrade and refurb property in return for a realistic rent. Contact the old sea-dog (Alan) on -----------

or e-mail -----------

This blog that has charted virtually our every move, escapade and family event since then, has been the backbone of all that we have done.  Keeping us accountable and being a permanent record of our wonderful adventure.

 Expecting this search to take six months at the very least we were shocked to be contacted within days of the advert going out and offered the chance to rent a farm, complete with it's own farmhouse, barn, derelict orchard and six acre paddock. We spent the next two months closing down my sweet little lavender shop, handing the notice in on our rented house, saying goodbye to family and friends and generally just packing up our lives. Over Christmas of 2008 we moved in and a month later this blog was born.  Each year has had a subtitle and 2009's was 'From Townies to Country Folk' as the pair of us swapped smart clothes and shiny shoes for mud splattered jeans and big comfy wellies ... 

...and kitted ourselves and the farm out with what we thought we needed.  

2010 was the year of 'Pigs and Chickens' and our initial flock of ten rescued free range White Stars was added to over the course of the year.  The pigs came in small and grew and grew, providing us with meat, piglets, a small income and lots of entertainment and hard work.

2011 was 'Our Year of Living Simply' and we knuckled down to building on all we had learnt.  Reining in the spending and learning to live as simply as we could.  Growing, storing and preserving our own food, reusing, recycling and mending what we had.

But we showed our soft side when we re-homed another big batch of rescue birds, doubling our flock of the time to over 50 birds.  As our three year lease was coming to an end we sat and discussed the future, did we want to go for this lifestyle full time or revert to our townie lives.

We decided to not just carry on but to invest in our own future and buy our own land.  No matter how much we loved the area we lived in we knew we couldn't afford to buy in Oxfordshire, but we knew we had to grow our savings as quickly as we could, so we ended the lease on our lovely farm and looked for somewhere over the border in Berkshire, near to Lovely Hubby's work to rent while we saved.

  So 2012 was the year we went further, with the subtitle 'From Simple to Frugal - and Beyond'. 

We found  a ramshackle little bungalow in it's last years of life, waiting to be demolished to make room for the owners to build their dream home.  In the meantime they were heading overseas and needed someone to rent their property ...

... and look after their cat.

The pigs were gone due to family circumstances, and we were not allowed to have any on the land we rented, so we decided to downsize and buckle down and save.  So it was just us the dogs, the cats, and the chickens ... and then we went to a farm sale and fell in love with a Hyline hen and her three fluffy babies.  The geese had arrived.

Harry, Larry and Mo .... the three Chinese Grey geese replaced the pigs in our affections and made wonderful 'guard dogs' keeping our chickens safe from predators and making us laugh with their antics.

It turned out that we had two girls and one gander.  Harry swiftly decided that I was the love of his life and whenever I was in Chicken World would follow me round fawning at my feet demanding cuddles and attention.  

Then it was 2013 and we decided it was to be our 'Year of Less'.  Our little two bedroom bungalow seemed overcrowded with the contents of our four bedroom farmhouse shoehorned in, even though we had sorted out and moved with less ...so we started to declutter.  We car booted, we donated, we gave away and if all that failed we threw away.  The surfaces became clear and the bank account grew.  We worked hard, saved hard and started to dream.  We started to look for our own place ... 

and we found it.

I teased you all with a snippet of a photo while the final details were sorted out by solicitors and then it was ours on 13th September 2013.  Our forever home.  We commuted weekly and started the decorating and preparing the house, and moved in for good on 21 December...

... and on 31st Mavis joined us.

The year of 2014 was our 'Back to Basics' year and  saw us starting the long but rewarding task of setting up our smallholding, we are too small to be a farm, with around 5 acres so this is how we think of ourselves.  We (this is of course being the Royal we) dug out the hillside to mark out the bare bones of the Veggie Patch, and I learnt how different it was to grow on the poor soil of this Welsh hillside compared to the soft growing conditions of Southern England.

We also found out the difference in the temperatures and kept our log burner in action much more regularly to keep the house warm.

Then 2015 was with us and the year of 'Needs Not Wants'.  We kept our spending in the house to the minimum and gritted our teeth and invested in the infrastructure of our future.  The polytunnel was up and I could once again get down to the serious job of growing our own food ....

... while I tried to ignore what was going on nearer the house!!

A full year of building, mess, muck and chaos, I never want to live through that again.  Now of course I think that it as worth it, but at the time I hated every single minute.  But it means that we now have garage space, workshop space and most importantly a safer and more usable access and exit to the property.  

Beneath all this we put in water drains to make our land and the road beyond it safer.  We put in a water harvesting system to catch the deluge of rainwater that falls in this Welsh valley which will cut our future water bills.  Above the garage and workshop we put a huge bank of solar panels to capture the energy of the daylight and this means we are self sufficient in electricity and it will also earn us an income during the longer, lighter days of Summer.

And now we are here 2016 and 'A Year Without ...', a year that we are using as our practice year to see how self-sufficient we can be ready for next year when Lovely Hubby makes the final leap and gives up the day job.  It's been a long time in the planning and you our lovely band of regular and newer readers have been on the journey with us, some of you since the very beginning.  

Some of you have taken the massive step of reading back, seven full years of blog posts charting our successes, our failures, our experiments, our triumphs and our sad times and I guess for you they are fresher in your minds at the moment, than they currently are in mine.

Each time I look out of the window and see this glorious view I know we were right to make this little patch of Welsh hillside our own.  We drink in the view whether it be clear and filled with sunshine, or more recently with the cottages on the hillside opposite shrouded in cloud, mist or heavy rain but we drink it in, breathe in the fresh air as we walk our dogs round our own paddock and look down and across at all that we have accomplished on our land.  We know that a lot of the dreams that we dared to dream really have come true since we found our very own place to put down roots.

So I would like to take the opportunity on this anniversary post to thank everyone for reading this blog,  and to say I hope you will continue to join us on this Our New Life in the Country.  There are even more adventures ahead.

Sue xx 

Random Harvesting, Bowls and Stocktaking the Freezer

A random harvest, that's what I call the things I bring back into the house after cleaning out the henhouse each morning.

There is usually at least one egg there already when I go to clean out the house, we have had three a day for the last two weeks, I'm more than happy with that it means we have a plentiful supply for the kitchen and the occasional half dozen for Mum.  Yesterday I brought a handful of Kale back from the polytunnel on the way back from the morning doggy walk around the paddock, and since the weather has taken a turn for the chilly I bring at least one bowl full of wood into the house.  

I like my big old handled bowl, we picked up a couple of these from a farm auction we went to years ago and they have proved useful for all sort of things.

The best ever use of this larger one was as the 'day bath' for the geese, Harry, Larry and Mo.  We sat it in a tyre so it didn't tip and they had lots of fun washing, preening and generally playing with the water.

Of course all the chickens, including their Mum, the Hyline hen Mother Goose (hence her name), thought this bathing in water malarky was totally ridiculous and would have nothing to do with it.  But the geese would happily take it in turns to bath or just sit there watching the world go by.

Today it's been raining virtually all day ... yet again, so I finally got round to a bit of freezer stocktaking.  The small freezer half of the fridge/freezer in the kitchen is all done now and a list of the contents has been scribbled down on to waste sheets of A4 paper (we use the back of printed out things that we have no further use for) and will be typed up neatly once I get round to stocktaking the big chest freezer.  I'm not doing it yet in case I can combine any duplicated items.  I was amazed at how much this freezer had in it.

I virtually got frostbite while going through it ,and had to make a coffee to warm my hands around after spending five minutes separating slices of lemon that had stuck together.  I found two boxes, both half full and decided to combine them into one for ease of use and stacking.  The slices were pretty stuck together but I persevered and now they are free flowing again.I think a pair of gloves will be used once I bring myself to tackle the big chest freezer.

Time to feed the dogs now and take them for a wet and muddy walk round the paddock, the chickens will be closed up for the night as we get back to the house and then the fire will be lit.  The only good thing about these short dark, wet days is the long, cosy evenings cuddled up in front of the television with snoozing dogs and the flicker of the candles on the mantlepiece.

Have a good evening.

Sue xx

Saving and Splurging

I got these through the post the week before last, usually they would have been put into my purse and stayed in there briefly, tempting me to go to Tesco to stock up on things we perhaps didn't really need.  Not this time.  At the moment we are busy stockpiling, coupons, vouchers and Nectar points ready for next year ... because we've decided on our Challenge!!

We're doing 'A Year Without ....', a few of you might have noticed a new blog appear on my list of blogs, there's nothing to read over there yet, but I wanted to secure the name before someone else snaffled it.  We are planning a real push into paying off the mortgage and have decided a whole year of minimal spending will be the best way to do this and will also allow us to have a trial of living on a limited income, which of course we will be doing for good once Lovely Hubby gives up the day job.

It will hopefully, also be a way for us to see what our strengths and successes are, as well as seeing what else we need to do to get ourselves as self sufficient as possible for the years ahead.

I'm hoping to run the blog alongside this one and along the lines of last years additional blog which was '365 Days - £365'.  This link takes you right back to the start of that challenge and it's been where I started reading from over the last few days, trying to garner a bit of inspiration for next year.

One thing I most definitely will not be doing next year is spending .....

... £9.99 on a jar of pickles.

I couldn't resist these when I was out with Mum last week, and at first I thought I had really spent over the odds, but out shopping over the weekend I spied a less than half sized jar for £4  so not too bad really.  My main reason for buying them, apart from the fact that we love giant 'chip shop style' pickles, is that I will be able to use the jar over and over again in the future and pickle some our own larger onions.  

So not so much a splurge as an investment in our future ...

... well that's my excuse anyway and I'm sticking to it  ;-)

Sue xx

Chopping and Freezing

I've been busy this week pulling off the huge courgettes that are trying to pass themselves off as marrows.  Simply chopping them up and open freezing them means I can preserve their goodness for adding to soups and stews all through the depths of Winter.

Making the most of what we have, preserving it for leaner times ahead feels so right at the moment.  As the growing season winds down a notch and plants ripen their last few fruits I feel duty bound to make the most of what I find each day.

And the thought of luscious bowls of homemade soup fills the growing need in me for simple food, grown well, cooked well and eaten when needed.  

With our Challenge looming only four months away, the fuller I can get the freezer with all the homegrown goodies from the tunnels and the veggie patch the easier things will be through the lean hungry gap of January to May next year, and the more money I will be able to save for later in the year when bought in stores start to run down.  

I still need to think of a name for this Challenge, I tried to think about it the other night lying in bed, but as usual I fell asleep much too quickly, this squirreling away and preserving is pretty tiring work  :-)

Sue xx

Shucks .... and Possibilities

In the comments on yesterday's blog post Barbara asked ' ...  what was the judging criteria for the hard boiled egg?!' 

It's the strangest  thing I've ever done, hard boil an egg lay it on a plate of shredded lettuce and leave it for someone to judge.  I don't know the criteria for sure, maybe John can comment with some more information, but I'm guessing a good quality egg, cooked to perfection, with the yolk dead central in the white.  That would be what I would look for anyway.

Mine wasn't quite there, once it was cut open by the judge, the yolk was almost at the bottom of the egg .... I've a thought on how to rectify that for next year :-)

But it's weird, the night before the flower show I suddenly woke up, I don't know what time it was but it was still dark, and thought to myself 'what a shame we haven't had a double yolker for ages'.  Then  I went straight back to sleep.

And yes, you guessed it ...... this morning I went over to the henhouse and there lying in amongst the other eggs was the one on the right, a guaranteed double yolker .... shucks!!

Then later on this morning these arrived .... my next set of Tesco money off coupons.  I noticed the date on using them up by isn't until the end of August 2017.  It's got me thinking again, well the coupons and something Lovely Hubby said to me the other day about us 'eating for free' next year.  

I have all the free seeds that have been accumulating this year through my magazine subscription.  This months magazine arrived the other day with three more packets of free seeds, three kinds of herbs this time.

So with free food to grow, maybe I should save up any usable vouchers and coupons for next year and see if Lovely Hubby's challenge to me of us eating for free would be possible.  I'll dwell on it for a while.

It's a Challenge that needs thinking about .... I've loads of time anyway, there's no need to rush into anything  ;-)

Sue xx