Next year’s growing plans

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 16 November 2010 in frugal, growing | 2 comments

I think this time of year may be favourite part of gardening – when I get to start making exciting plans for next year from the comfort of the sofa. Mmm, sofa.

So far, I’m planning the following – and thankfully, it doesn’t look like I’ve have to spend too much more on new seeds.

Old faithfuls:

• All sorts of lettuce including winter gem & spicy leaves – all leftover seed & seeds bought in a 75% sale off
• Broad beans – some saved seed, some leftover seed
• French beans – some saved seeds, some sale seeds
• Pumpkins a go go – I seem to have four different types of pumpkin seeds, bought in various mega-discount sales – not sure I’ll grow them all
• Courgettes & marrow – some saved seed and some new
• Chillis – super hot birds eye ones and cooler jalapeno types – leftover and sale seeds
• Carrots – sale seed, bought 75% off
• Misc brassicas – try broccoli, kale & cabbage again, maybe not cauliflower. Got leftover seed for all
• Leeks & onions – leftover seeds
• Tomatoes – some saved seeds, some new sale seeds
• Swiss chard – leftover seeds
• Potatoes – will have to buy some new seed potatoes, probably go for salad ones

Herbs – old and new:

• Borage – leftover seed and I suspect we might get a few plants from self-seeding too
• Tarragon & Oregano – might be able to coax a couple of plants through winter…
• Mint, Rosemary and Lavender – existing plants should survive
• Sage – new seeds bought in 50% off sale
• Meadow-sweet – new seeds, tempted to try use them, and some other wild flowers, for a bit of guerilla gardening in the local environs…
• Basil – need new seeds by the look of it
• Comfrey – a little amount for green manuring, sale seeds
• Cat nip – existing seeds, existing cats

New exciting things!

• Cucumber – not sure why I didn’t do them this year, seed bought on sale will be grown next year!
• Apples & pears – trees en route, might get a little fruit next year
• Strawberries – since I don’t do fruit, I’ve not grown any but John is interested in strawberries and mmm, strawberry jam. Need to buy seeds/plants.
• Scotch Bonnet peppers – more hot hot chillis. Need to buy seeds.

Extra exciting maybes!

• Achocha – if I get organised enough to buy some seeds
• Asparagus – ditto substituting “seeds” for “crowns”
• Some sort of berry thing to grow in a planter – maybe cranberry or lingonberry – need to decide & buy
• Mushrooms – we’ve got the space, shade and wood, so we might as well try to grow some deliberately rather than just letting nature take its course. I’m thinking maybe oyster mushrooms.

What are you planning to grow next year? Anything new?

Is there something I’ve missed off my list that you think I should definitely try?

A rubbish swap

Posted by louisa on Sunday 14 November 2010 in charity shopping, frugal | 0 comments

We went to Southport yesterday to see my mum & dad.

We returned with:

• 8 empty egg boxes
• a 2ltr ice cream tub of baked & crushed egg shells
• 4 20 year old gallon demi johns
• several small glass jars for preserving
• 5 or 6 children’s DVDs (newspaper freebies)

We should have also brought back some logs & some kindling but it was too dark/wet to get them from the garden, so we’re leaving them there to season instead. They’ve also been collecting screw top wine bottles for our home brewing escapades but we forgot to collect them.

We took them surplus rather than “rubbish”. I forgot to take any jam for my part of the swap but took them fresh eggs from our hens and some of my leftover/spare veg seeds for my dad — I gave him some carrot, cucumber, cabbage, leek, salad onion, cat nip and cat grass.

As well as the swapping, we also got to have a run around on the sand dunes behind my old school and went charity shopping/second-hand book shopping. We got six books: two fiction ones, one social theory book on how mothers are scapegoated in contemporary society, Graham Chapman’s biography, one of Steven Pinker’s books & a book on the history of Bradford (irony!) – so later today I’ll have to find 3 of ours to get rid of now, as per my recent book limiting policy.

A distinct lack of seaside rock & candy floss but otherwise a good “rubbish” swap – lots of items set for landfill/recycling, will be put to good use!

An expensive week at the vets

Posted by louisa on Friday 12 November 2010 in frugal | 1 comment

We’ve had an expensive week at the vets this week.

Our old cat Boron has always been more prone to dental problems than the others: he had to have his top fangs (amongst others) out a few years ago, giving him a wonderful gurning grin, then on Monday, he had to have pretty much the rest of his teeth out. He’s now just got one left, a molar or premolar I forget which.

At £240, it was an expensive day out for the little chap but he should be happier now – I suspect his gums were hurting a lot before.

But there’s more. As part of the pre-op blood tests, they found he had slightly higher than normal T4, which means he’s got hyperthyroidism. Hyperthyroidism is apparently an increasingly common condition in older cats – although according to some sources, it’s probably not actually increasing in frequency, it probably just increasing in diagnosis. Just about every very old (14+) cat I’ve ever known has been a bit too skinny and not as rigorous about keeping their fur as immaculate as they used to be – I always assumed that was an old cat thing but it seems like it’s probably hyperthyroidism.

There are apparently three ways to treat hyperthyroidism – an operation, radiotherapy (which gives them radioactive poo for 3-5 weeks!) or ongoing medication every day for the rest of their lives. The radiotherapy thing isn’t an option – it costs over £1500 and the cat has to live in a special cattery for it’s glowing poop period – and our vet kinda glossed over the operation option (telling me about how they’re reluctant to operate on hyperthyroid cats because the common hyperthyroidism symptoms – such as increased heart rate, high blood pressure or damage to other organs – make it a danger to operate — but Boron had an operation on Monday…). So it’s pills every day for the rest of his life.

If we buy them monthly from the vet, it’ll cost £28 a month (93p a day). If we buy a full tub from the vet – 100 tablets – it’ll be £71 (71p a day). I can get them cheaper online – £41 for the 100 tablets, although I’ll need a prescription from the vets for £10 – but still 51p a day in total. There will also be ongoing monitoring blood tests (one after a month, then hopefully just every six months) which are about £40 a pop.

Boron’s a marvellous, loving cat and in the ten years we’ve been together, he’s never been an expensive high maintenance cat so he’s worth it. Knowing about it now, there is no way we can not treat it but it’s another thing to add into the budget…

Why I’m trying to stop making comparisons

Posted by louisa on Thursday 11 November 2010 in anti-consumerism, frugal, meta | 12 comments

Last week, I wrote about how I cut our gas bill in half with just one phone call. Immediately after my phone call, I told a friend about the experience and he expressed surprise about how little gas we use – compared to him (he keeps records like I do) and compared to the national average, a figure he knew off the top of his head. Intrigued, I started looking up more and more information about average consumption figures – the boards at MoneySavingExpert are full of people talking about how much they pay, for what size of a house, and I also found a website which lets you compare your consumption with others locally and nationally, IN GRAPH FORM. (I like graphs.)

But then I stopped. I realised what I was doing. If I’d been doing it a year earlier when we first moved into our new house, I could have pretended I was looking up the info to get an idea how much I’d be paying over the year. But I knew exactly how much I should be paying. I was just doing it to gloat. To feel good about how frugal we are, how green we are, compared to the rest of Mr & Ms UK resident.

I’m terrible at making comparisons to make myself feel better about things. I think it’s partly (mostly?) to do with being insecure and generally having low-self esteem, but another part of it is wanting to proof my deliberately lifestyle decisions are making a difference.

I want to know that someone else spends three, four, five times as much as me on their weekly shop because I grow my own and spend time cooking from scratch to justify my time and energy. I want to hear the person who bought the 42″ plasma tv or the new BMW complain about not having any money at the end of the month, because it justifies my sensible attitude in not buying those things. I want to hear that the person who lives in t-shirt and shorts in the middle of winter is paying multiple-multiple times the amount for heating than woolly-clad me, because it means I can look down on them, on their wastefulness and how they’re SINGLE-HANDEDLY DESTROYING THE PLANET.

I’m not that bad really. But it’s there and it’s destructive.

How I cut our gas bill in half with one phone call

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 3 November 2010 in frugal | 3 comments

Recently, we got a letter from our utility company.

As a result of your latest annual review, it said, your monthly payments will increase to by £5 to £70 a month. I gasped – £70 a month!?

I realise an increase by a fiver isn’t much in this day and age – but the original £65 was higher than it should have been (we’d underpaid when we first moved in so overpaid over the summer to make up for it). I’d been hoping for it to drop when everything levelled out, not raise further.

John and I were in disbelief about it. We didn’t think we used that much gas. Sure, it powers our heating, our hot water and our cooker hob, but the oven is electric and so is the shower. We mostly shower rather than have baths so don’t use much gas-heated hot water at all. Even though we work from home and have a high-ceilinged draughty house, we hardly over-use the central heating – we prefer to use our woodburning stoves for heat when we’re in the living room or office, and only used the central heating last year when we were in other parts of the house – with the thermostat at 15C/60F and only programmed to come on at certain times of day (and certainly never at night). We wear layers and use animals as hot water bottles.

We weren’t sure how much we could cut back – maybe rely on the stoves more (although we’d obviously need more wood than we’d planned for to do that), wear more layers, get more animals… John accepted that his nasty habit of turning on the hot tap to rinse things (but turning it off again before the hot water started) needed to stop and I worried how much energy we’d used cooking jams and long-time-on-the-hob stews, curries and pasta sauces. Even with my recent drop in income, we weren’t particularly concerned about the extra fiver – we wouldn’t have to be selling any kidneys to cover it – but we were worried about how much it was costing compared to how little we were using. What if we did need to start using the heating more? How much would it cost us then? And what’s the going rate for a one-careful-owner kidney these days?

Then I decided to do some maths. I collected together all the year’s bills and counted up how many units of gas we’d actually used. I also made sure that our bills were being worked out on actual meter readings and not estimates – they were. Then I made the phone call I mention in the title.

I explained the situation to the woman on the end of the phone. I explained that I was happy to accept that I’d done something wrong in my calculations but according to my figures, we should be paying substantially less than the £70 they’d proposed. With a bit of rounding up, I thought it should be closer to £40 a month.

She put me on hold and did the maths herself. Then she put me on hold again and got her manager to do the maths. They both worked out it should have been £32 a month. We settled on £35 a month to give us a bit of leeway in case it’s a cold winter and the dog doesn’t perform her feet heating task as well as desired.

She said she couldn’t understand where the £70 a month had come from – it just didn’t make any sense when you looked at the figures.

I suspect the power company don’t actually do any counting during the automated “annual review” process and just put everyone’s bill up a little bit – an amount not many people will notice – because every extra pound that our accounts are in credit will be money in their bank account making interest for them. Sure, that money is still technically mine and I’d be able to use it against future power purchasing, but I’d much rather it was earning interest for me, not them!

The episode has made me more keen than ever to get our paperwork in better order and to keep taking monthly meter readings for my own interest – if we suddenly start using more of something, it will be nicer to be able to spot it earlier rather than waiting for the quarter-and-then-some bills. I’m also definitely going to be checking all future bills incredibly carefully.

Upcycle an old duvet cover into a frugal bean bag

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 2 November 2010 in frugal, making | 4 comments

(Is it just me or does “frugal bean bag” sound like a filthy euphemism? … It’s just me, isn’t it?)

As I mentioned in passing last week during my quick week-off updates, I made a bean bag from some old bedding.

We wanted a fairly sizeable beanbag for the animals to sit on in front of the stove in the office. We wanted one that could be a flat mattress (since that would suit the dog best) but also be pulled up on its side to be a taller seat for us when we needed extra seating. I also wanted one that had an inner liner and a washable cover because, well, everything has to be machine washable in this house.

Perhaps I was looking in the wrong places but my my, big beanbags with liners are expensive! In shops, they were either tiny, unlined or unwashable pleather/suede, or all three. On one website, which was recommended by a friend, it was looking like I’d have to pay about £80 for a beanbag to match my wants – £80! For a bean bag!! GAH!!! So I decided to make my own.

It’s essentially a giant square cushion covered with a removable pillow slip case – but I’ve explained how I made it below.