Evenings Out for Free

With next years penny pinching, frugal minded, cost cutting living in mind I recently re-read this book.  In it Kath lives for a year on just one pound a day ... as the title suggests ... she does it to save for a wedding present for her brother, we however, are cutting costs back to the bone to try and pay off our small mortgage taken out after paying off our main mortgage and still secured on this house.

One of the things she does ... apart from yellow stickered shopping and gathering in freebies ... is to look for events offering an evening or day out, where drinks or free food are available and a fun time can be had for absolutely nothing.

So when this invite popped into my emails instead of doing what I would normally do and simply deleting it, because we won't be ordering any Christmas food from Bodnant I made a note of the date and we went.

We really did get a warm welcome, the fizz was delicious and the mince pies equally so.  We had a pleasant mooch about the shop sipping on our fizz, oohhd and ahhd over delicious gift ideas, picked up the offered food order form and left feeling very festive.

Also on the email was this offer for the next evening. 

So we paid our donation to a very deserving charity and had another pleasant evening, this time sampling wines and ports.  I think we more than got our moneys worth and learnt a little bit more about some of our favourite wines in the process.  

During the day we had also called back up to Bodnant to try and have a word with the technical Aga people about something Alan wanted to check out to do with the power of the Aga and our solar energy system. 

There were even freebies on offer here ... I was offered a slice of ginger cake but on enquiring it had butter and eggs in it, so I said thank you but no thanks as I'm a vegan,  'ooh said the lady would you like some chips instead then .... they are really tasty they're cooked in goose fat' 

Haha, she saw the funny side almost as soon as the words had left her lips.

Our next 'evening out' is to the showrooms of the people who supplied the windows for the workshop.  We don't need any windows at the moment .... but Mulled Wine, a mince pie and some Christmas carols will go down very nicely thank you  :-)

We're treating it all as good practice for next year,  if celebrities can turn up to the  'opening of an envelope' to get their faces in the magazines we can turn up for free drinks and food and an interesting couple of hours out.

Have you ever done something similar?

Sue xx

Seeds, Seeds and Then Some More Seeds

The ladies who lunch at Wyevale struck gold again last week, well this year I think I would call it bronze!  The sale is nowhere near as good this year as it was last, remember the 30p fireguards I managed to get, the net wigwams for my cabbages at 70% off their true cost ... well there's none of that this year, and the crafty folk there have even packed away most of the seeds instead of just putting them all in the '50p a pack' sale as they used to do.

Now the ex-retail manager in me says at last they are learning stock management and buying only what sells at full price instead of stuff they have to give away.  But the bargain hunter in me says boohoo and stamps her feet and slams out in a huff.

I did have a good look through the seeds that were there though and managed to spend £7 on seeds that I needed, Little Gem lettuce, Dwarf Beans, Cauliflower, Carrots and Spring Onions .... I can never have enough Spring Onions :-)

The other things were Rosemary, I have never grown it from seed before and was interested to try ... and well for 50p it's worth a go isn't it.

The Chives and Basil caught my eye because the seeds are impregnated onto little mats and you just pop them onto the top of a plant pot full of compost, water it well and you should have a well filled pot of Chives.  I was intrigued by this so I got a pack of Basil too.  There are five mats in each pack and they normally retail at £2.99 which I wouldn't pay, but for 50p I thought it would be a simple and quick way of growing pots of herbs to sell on at the farm gate and at next years car boot sales.  So five packs with five mats in each should give me 25 pots of herbs, that I will probably sell at £1 each.  Not a bad return £25 for an outlay of just £2.50.

I don't normally buy 'seed tapes' either as they are an expensive way to purchase seeds, but I thought the carrot tapes at just 50p would be good. My downfall with carrots is always planting them far too close together and then forgetting to thin them.

So at 50p a packet my 14 packs came to just £7, when I got home I couldn't resist adding up the full retail value of my little haul and I was pleasantly surprised to find it came to £36.27.  So only a small sale splurge this year but I think a worthwhile one.  Maybe I'll upgrade my medal from bronze to silver.

And talking of seeds .....

... do you remember THIS post?

I bought this magazine from Tesco ....

... it came with £24 worth of free seeds and a Dvd.

And the chance to buy three more issues of the magazine for £5 with even more free seeds.

Did you think I could resist this?

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Nope .... you know me so well   :-)

The seeds arrived on Saturday along with the details of my 'new' subscription. now I just have to remember to cancel the subscription before they take out the £20 for the next six months in three months time.  These seeds had a total retail value of £39.94 ... of course I just had to add it up to see!!

Now you understand the title of this post  :-)

Sue xx

Bargains, Coupons and Plans

I splurged the other week when I was in Tesco, they had the latest edition of Gardeners World in a bargain bag with gardening gloves, six packets of seeds and a year long '2 for 1 entry' card to gardens all over the UK.  As we are going to the Eden Project soon and this was included as one of the 'gardens' it really did make sense to have this particular splurge.  It's £25 to get into the Eden Project for an adult, so my £6.75 purchase price of this special edition was well worth it.

And of course I have now have some more vegetable seeds to add to my ever growing stash, the flower seeds have already been sown, as this year we are working on expanding our planting to attract bees, ready for next years bee keeping plan.

We spent Monday morning planting shrubs in Nut Wood and already this is having the desired effect, the place is suddenly alive with bees, other insects and of course this in turn has meant that more small insect eating birds are to be seen flitting in and out of the nut trees.

It's nice when a plan starts to come together  :-)

Of course, as I used to blog about on a regular basis, we still get our money off vouchers from both Tesco ....

... and M&S for using our credit cards.

(We still pay the amount owed off in full every month to avoid interest payments.)

Obviously the amount we are getting has gone down significantly and will be going down even more from now on, but a couple of months ago I did persuade Lovely Hubby to make a large company purchase on the M&S card and then pay it off with company money hence the large amount of M&S vouchers this time ... every little helps ... to quote the other supermarket   ;-)

In our push for self sufficiency we have done brilliantly with vegetables and not too bad at all with fruit but obviously there will always be things we can't produce ourselves, so we have decided that coupons, vouchers and all the money from the sale of vegetable plants and surplus vegetables will form our money pot to buy the things that we can't produce ourselves.  Just things like various flours, brown and basmati rices, pastas, olive oil etc.   In that way hopefully we will be self sufficient with food, because the foods we can grow ourselves will finance the foods that we can't grow ourselves.

Anyway enough for now, time to get on with some chores in any shade that I can find.

Sue xx

Still They Keep Coming

I've come to the conclusion that I must have paid for a two year subscription for Kitchen Garden magazine as the copies still keep landing on my door mat with the free seeds attached.  This months, or should I say Novembers edition, also has a free 'seasonal harvest and cooking' booklet with it.

I've not even read last months yet ... which is really this months as it's the October edition ..... are you keeping up, so this one will be adding to my ever growing reading pile.  I don't like it that magazines publish so far in advance and it gets even worse at this time of year when they are all gearing up to a Christmas holiday and have to get their January editions in the shops as early in December as they possibly can so that the magazine staff can get some sort of holiday at the end of the month.

Hopefully though as the harvesting slowly winds down a few gears there will be more time for cosy nights in reading and I'll begin to catch up a bit.  It's already dark by 7.30pm here at the moment, and the nights are drawing in even more with each passing week.  The clocks will be going back an hour at the end of this month and then it's the time of year I love, with the curtains shut and the log burner and candles lit the evenings and time to sit down are much longer and it doesn't feel as though I'm working right up until bedtime.

Is your routine changing with the ever decreasing daylight and the changing weather?

Sue xx

Chippings ... and Shorts

 

The dogs love to explore each new delivery of chippings that we get, they must smell wonderful to them.  I can just smell the gorgeous freshness of pine and the sap scented wood and leaves, but to a dogs even more sensitive nose there must be a myriad of different scents from all the places these chippings have come from. 

 

They circle the mound then walk all over it, before doing what all dogs do best .... squatting down and adding their own unique scent.

 

This last delivery came with a free pair of wooden shorts .... well that's what they look like to me  ;-)

 

Sue xx

Sheep, Chippings and Scaredy Cats and Dogs

Another load of chippings was dropped off  by the tree surgeons the other day and straight away the sheep were all over the pile.  Picking out tasty titbits and enjoying the warmth that generates from it as it quickly starts to rot down.  

Rosy is standing well back from the sheep and just watching them while I take the photo, because like the other dogs she has been 'told off' by the head sheep just once too often and has now developed an aversion to all woolly white things that live with us.

They are a lovely friendly bunch to me and come over for a head scratch when they see me but they don't like the dogs, and I think they quickly realised that if they got the upper hand early they would be left in peace.  They have told both Rosy and Mavis off in no uncertain terms, and little Suky who was desperate to make friends and stood staring at them for a long time, was head butted and flipped over ... she hasn't gone anywhere near them since.

I was walking with the dogs at one end of the paddock the other day and all the sheep took off towards the gate near the polytunnel at great speed, I wondered what on earth they were up to and then I spotted Ginger sat just inside the gate .... he was very soon sat on top of the gate post with a fearful expression on his face!!  All the sheep could do was to sniff at his twitching tale dangling down.  They were very interested to meet him but he wanted none of it ... well I suppose there is quite a size and number differential!!

Each new delivery keeps the sheep entertained for a while, and then the dogs get to have a good sniffing session, it also means that there is more for us to put around the place, I think making paths through the woodland will be one of our next jobs with these chippings as Nut Wood and the front flower bed are now full to capacity.

Sue xx

More Free Seeds

Two mornings this week I heard the happy thudding of my magazines falling onto the doormat, it creates a frenzy of barking from the dogs and a smile for my face.

They both come in polythene bags containing the magazine and my free seeds. The Kitchen Garden magazine had £9.15 worth of free seeds and ...

... my Grow Your Own magazine had £6.67 worth of free seeds.

And of course they both gave me yet another elastic band for my collection.

Sue xx

Freebies for the Weekend

Both of my subscription magazines arrived this morning, this one with £8.18 worth of seeds in the packet it came in ....

... and this one with £2.65 worth.

They are proving to be a really good subscriptions, the initial offer of freebies more than covered the cost of the year long subscription to both of them, and the free seeds just keep on rolling in.  I intend to have a sort of of all my seeds this coming week and decide which I will keep for planting and which will go into a box to be sold a our first car boot sale of the season.  Any money made from the sale of the seeds will go into a 'growing fund' to purchase anything I need for growing more food for us.

Also last night on our first visit to the cinema of the weekend, we did what we nearly always do and came home with some popcorn for the chickens.  We don't buy any for ourselves, we take drinks in with us and rarely buy anything on offer at the snack counters to eat, unlike some folk who seem to think they are in imminent danger of starvation during the course of a two hour film and buy drinks, crisps, sweets and icecreams.  I know it can be a treat to visit the cinema but do you really need to munch your way noisily through a three course 'meal' while you watch your chosen film!!

And don't get me started on the rubbish they leave  strewn on the floor when they leave ...... and this is where our bags of popcorn for the chickens come from.  We stay in our seats reading the credits until the cinema is almost empty and then as we walk down the steps glance down the lines of seats, nine times out of ten there will be at least one almost full bag of popcorn.

Better in our chicken tummies as a little weekend treat than in the bin and on the way to landfill.

Final freebie of the weekend ..... another elastic band that came holding the packets of seeds together .... every little helps  :-)

Have a good weekend.

Sue xx

More Free Seeds

I only posted here the other day about my subscription magazine arriving and the free seeds attached to it ... and of course my free elastic band.    And now look .... deja vu ... just a different magazine, my new Christmas present subscription.  This time there are £9.95 worth of free seeds, four different kinds of Tomato seeds and one pack of Basil seeds 

... AND another free elastic band!!

My seeds tin is now bulging at the seams with enough seeds to last us for another few years.  I am carefully putting the 'use by' date on the front of each pack before filing them away in the tin, not that I stick to these but I do try to use them in date order whenever possible.

One things for sure we won't be short of tomatoes this year, as long as the sun comes out and growing conditions improve.  Although it's hard to imagine the sun ever coming out again at the moment, we have had virtually non stop rain for months now, it's depressing, demoralising and downright dangerous.  Lovely Hubby has slipped in the mud quite a few times in the last few weeks, meaning lots of loads of washing and a few aches and pains .... not to mention a cracked rib ... ouch!!

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The only reason I haven't gone over is that I mince about the place as though I'm walking on ice, it's the only way to get around Chicken World and some other parts of the fields, it makes things safer but must look very funny to the people driving past.  Oh well better to be a laughing stock than up to my thigh in plaster!!

Sue xx

A Free Elastic Band

The postman delivered lots of freebies yesterday, there were the coupons talked about on my other blog HERE and my Kitchen Garden magazine for March with it's free elastic band .... which was wrapped around three packets of seeds to the value of £5.35!!

I'm keeping tabs on all the free seeds I have had over the course of this subscription and it will be interesting to see what the value adds up to at the end.  I'm not sure if this is the last copy or if there is another couple still to come, as I have not had a letter begging me to continue with the subscription I'm guessing there is at least one more still to come.

 I called in the polytunnel on the way back from walking the dogs around the paddock this morning, and for a change I decided to go for a carrot based soup for this weeks lunchtime soup.  I usually make it on Monday but this week I still had a large portion left from last weeks soup pot so I decided to wait until today to make a fresh batch.  I was going to get a handful of carrots .... but after pulling the first two out and finding they were whoppers I decided that two would be enough.  

If only I had had such big carrots for the two vegetable shows I entered last year.  I think I will have to grow some special 'show carrots' this year starting them off a little bit earlier and planting them in a tall container to get them nice and long and straight ... and of course they are so much easier to chop or peel if you want to when they are like this instead of having 'twisted legs' or 'Siamese twins'.  There's something very satisfying about still eating last years homegrown carrots and having free seeds arrive for some more carrots for later on this year.

And these free elastic bands really are adding up, I shouldn't have to buy any for quite a while  ;-)

Sue xx

Finished Chair and More Freebies

I finally got my little green bedroom chair finished the other day.  

It was a relief to get it done, I felt like I was going round in circles, so many 'sides' to it and three coats of green paint on each one, but it was worth it, and as Ginger is currently sleeping on the table on his new favourite cushion I think he's glad to see the back of it too and have Mother, the Christmas cacti back for company.  He's fickle that cat, the wigwam on the freezer is now deserted and he loves the table ... he moves from pillar to post and of course because he's just so gorgeous we let him  :-)

This chair has history.  It's one of a pair that was my Nana's (my Dad's Mum) wedding present off her Dad.  He also made her and three of her five sisters a full suite of bedroom furniture as the rest of the gift.  He was a Master Cabinet Maker but as he didn't make chairs he bought my Nana two pairs of bedroom chairs.  You can see from the seat that it has been replaced, many years ago the fancy rattan that made up the seat fell to bits and was replaced with a punched out piece of plywood.

Great Grandad had his workshop above a couple of blokes starting out in the motor car trade, whenever he made a large piece of furniture he would lower it through a trapdoor into their garage space rather than struggle down the stairs and they would help him move it out.  The guys were called Mr Rolls and Mr Royce, they got a little bit more famous than my Great Grandad ever did .... but back in the day they all shared a building and no doubt a lot of laughs.

I used this chair to stand on while I did all the painting when we first moved into this house, I don't do ladders and find a chair a much sturdier and safer option.  I'm sure it's not the use my Great Grandad had in mind for it when it was bought, but I'm also sure that he would have approved of it still being used and loved to this day.

More freebies arrived the other day.  A copy of a sister magazine to the one I got as a subscription to for Christmas and ten packets of seeds to add to my free seed stash tin.

I'm not taking them up on the other 'free' offers as each one only comes free if you pay rather a lot of postage!!

But not a bad little haul.  

A folder to keep the magazines in, a free magazine, a wall chart of when to plant what and £19.28 worth of seeds.  Of course all through the year the magazine will also come with free gifts so it will be interesting to see what it all adds up to over the course of the year. 

 I have kept a record of my Kitchen Garden freebies all through last year, that subscription runs out with the March issue so I will be seeing what that total adds up with that one as well.

Sue xx

Excess - No Excess

I had a coupon for £5 off a £50 shop at M&S the other day, not a huge amount but worth having if you do need something, and as we needed meat for the freezer and that being the most expensive part of any food I buy, I decided to stock up on things that would make lots of meals.

I was also lucky enough to get a couple of 'yellow stickered' bargain items that fell neatly into my 'many meals for one packet' train of thought.

Of course I didn't just come home and pop all the purchases straight into the freezer.  I unpacked everything that could be portioned up, individually wrapped things and then put them into labelled boxes.  The little chicken things were open frozen first so they wouldn't stick together and then packed into a box.

The only thing I hate after doing this is the excess of packaging ... but as we were having a bonfire after tidying outside I just chucked them on there ... lazy me, you don't have to wash them out if you do that.  They did start the fire well meaning that the damp newspaper from the henhouse burnt much better and quicker.

Out shopping with Mum yesterday in Sainsbugs I treated myself to the latest magazine, don't you love that they have altered the publication month so now the October magazine actually reflects things in season and available in October and is not a whole month ahead of itself.

Anyway I didn't notice at first but it came with a free silicone pastry brush, as soon as I did notice I swapped the magazine with the pink brush on it for one with a green brush :-)

Inside there were also a free drink and a body scrub, nice to get something for nothing and I will most likely be happy to use these.

What I don't like however, is the amount of leaflets that fall out of every magazine you buy in a shop and even those that come through the post as a subscription purchase.  In a shop if the magazine is unwrapped I take the leaflets straight out and leave them in the shop, but this edition with it's freebies was in a polythene bag so I couldn't do it.  So once home they joined the other annoying pamphlets and leaflets in the recycling bin.

More and more magazines are also sticking leaflets inside with that clear snot like glue (yes I love to peel it off ... but there my fun ends), or even including them in the staples ... The Radio Times is a big culprit of this, and this weeks edition even had the leaflet for something I never look what these are for, stapled in between pages rather than being in the centre, making it even more awkward to get rid of.

How much paper, ink and electricity are wasted in the manufacture of all these, not to mention the amount of trees cut down purely to end up in landfill or recycling boxes.  A whole industry built on something we neither need nor want.

Arrgghh ... they are all driving me mad!!

I'm jumping off my soapbox now and looking instead at something with no excess ,,,, a perfectly formed miniature Cauliflower.  

I had to harvest it as the slugs were devouring all it's brothers and sisters.  There's absolutely no excess here, even with the full sized version you can simply cut off the very end and then use every little bit of your purchase or picking.

Phew ...... the world is not completely mad ....YET!!

Sue xx

Oooh ... New Books and Free Seeds

Two new books made their way into the house last month.  I meant to blog about them as they arrived, but harvesting and jam making got me distracted  :-)

The first book is by Blogging Buddy Suzy Bowler of Sudden Lunch fame.  It's full of amazing recipes and ideas for that old favourite the Scone, and believe me it is a favourite in this house.  Sweet scones, savoury scones, no matter how you say it whether it rhymes with stone or gone they taste delicious.  I like a good old cheese scone (we say it to rhyme with gone), so does Lovely Hubby sometimes but he likes a cheese scone with jam, I prefer it simply with lots of lovely Lurpak butter.

This book is just what I had been looking for to give me more inspiration to try other flavours.

I really recommend this one  :-)

In the same parcel came this book, written by Sophie Thompson who won last years Celebrity Masterchef.  

This is not just the usual 'churn a book out quickly and make some money' type of book that normally follows this kind of programme, it is a delightful glimpse into her own unique kitchen and has lots of firm family recipes spanning four generations of her family.

The illustrations are brilliant ....

... but it's the recipes with their family anecdotes that are the main, and best part of the book.

I'm about halfway through this one at the moment, it's my 'upstairs' book, downstairs I have Alys Fowler's 'Abundance' on the go.  It's getting confusing and I am trying not to dip into a third book although I am sorely tempted by my new Jamie Oliver book.

This excess of new  books will be grinding to a halt in a couple of months with the start of my 'no new purchases' year, can I really do it I'm asking myself at the moment ... a whole year of not buying a single book!!

Last month I also bought this magazine with it's packet of free seeds.

 I very nearly didn't buy it as I hadn't completely read through my subscription magazine Kitchen Garden, and with only one free packet of seeds on the cover thought perhaps I should just save my money, but I'm so glad I did.  I read this one from cover to cover and it had so much useful to me at the time information in it, it was worth every penny .... and I've got a packet of Swede seeds to add to my collection for next year.

Sue xx

Even more free seeds ......

My monthly subscription to Kitchen Garden arrived the other day and with it .... even more free seeds, another £7.18 worth to be exact.

My little seed tin of all the freebies is now almost full to bursting point and in total I have £85.49 worth of free seeds collected over the last couple of months from this magazine and a few from Grow Your Own magazine, which I pick up when I'm out and about shopping.  With all these packets of seeds it should see us pretty well fed for next year .... and most likely the year after that too.

This could possibly be my best purchase of this year.

Sue xx