Three Months Into the Non-Challenge Challenge

 

Well it's three months into my limited spending challenge and I thought that was a good time to do a few sums and see exactly how I'm doing?

If you remember back at the very beginning of January this year on THIS post, I set off to try and live for as long as I could on the money I had saved up from last year.  I had made the cash by selling my excess belongings on FB Marketplace and at the two table top sales we did.  It was to be used for anything that I needed or wanted.  

There were no real restrictions and the only thing I really wanted to do was to bring down the food stash.  I have quite successfully done this, well to a level where nothing jumps out at me when I open the food cupboard door now and I can easily slide out the freezer drawers without things being jammed in.

 My grand cash total was £ 592.20 ... was there any left?

Yesterday I went carefully through my diary and added all the purchases up, over the first three months of 2023 I have spent:

Food = £340.66

Haircuts - 3 x £23 = £69.00

Car MOT = £45.00

Non-Food Items = £78.20

A total of £532.86 in cash spent.

(And one £10 Booths Voucher)

Leaving me with £65.61 in cash, a new £10 Booths voucher, £21 in M&S vouchers and around £15 in Nectar points.  I think I will be using all my vouchers and points over the coming month in a bid to hang on to as much cash as I can.  Even though I have averaged £175.67 a month for the last three months, April should be a much cheaper month for me, the only family birthday is mine, so no cards or presents to buy.  My next hair appointment is not until May and obviously the car is now MOT'd.

So I have my fingers crossed that I can get at least one more month out of my little non-Challenge cash pot.  What I really need to do is to try harder not to shop, to eat more from the foods that I have already got in the cupboards. I am so easily tempted when Alan says those eight little words ... 'Do you want to come shopping with me?'

Confession time, I have to admit that £37.70 of the 'non-food item' spending was spent on books.  I clearly remember saying that I wouldn't buy any books this year ... oh well I guess most of you realised that that wouldn't happen even if I rather madly thought it would!!

Well the wine might be all gone ... but the books remain.  😄

Sue xx

Round the Corner, Fig Tree ... and No Wages

 

I was asked about my shed and where was it in my little garden ... well it's round the corner.  So I thought I would show you it as it is now.

Also around the corner of the annexe, next to the shed is the first raised bed that we put in place.   Last year I had salad crops and courgettes in there, oh and two cucumber plants too that didn't do that well, but we got a few fruits each from them, so it was good to experiment.  Later in the Summer I put the leeks in there and we used them one by one over winter as and when we needed them.  I was supposed to be putting some garlic in the left-hand side last October ... but I forgot!!

So it has just had bamboo canes scattered willy-nilly over the top to discourage Ginger from landing on the soil.  I wouldn't mind while it was empty but he carries on doing it with plants in place if I let him over winter.

Anyway he has his own pussycat shelf to make getting up to and off the fence a much easier and less thudding experience for his old bones.  The gloriously shaggy greenery in the little plant pot next to the planter is what's left of the snowdrops.  Once they have chance to dry out a bit and the leaves dry off, they will go back into the shed to over-Summer ready for next year.

Something that we moved for this year is the Fig tree.

It used to be sat on a paving stone on the corner of the pebbly area of the garden where it annoyingly intersected the washing line, and as it got so big last year it was taking up quite a bit of drying space we decided on Sunday to relocate it to the white wall of the main house.  

Hopefully this will also mean that the lovely morning sun we get in this corner of the garden will aid in us actually getting some ripe figs ... well for Alan to get some ripe figs, I really do not like figs at all, although I love the leaves of the fig tree and the mass of greenery it brings to the garden.

I was reading Sooze's blog post yesterday morning where she was talking about the financial things she had to do, and it reminded me that I had yet to pay my Council Tax.  So before it went out of my head again I went online and paid it in full for the year.  I had forgotten that you could pay it with your credit card, it was only when the options popped up that I remembered that this is how I did it last year.  It means some more M&S vouchers, not many but enough to make it worth me paying it this way ... and then of course I pay off the credit card bill in full as soon as it lands in my inbox.

I do like to pay as many things up front for the year as I can, I just hate having direct debits etc, drip feeding out of my bank account, although of course I can see that it does work for some people. This one off style of payment just works better for me.  The first year you do it is obviously very hard but then you are on a roll and get used to having the money in your savings until it is needed.  

Which reminds me I need to have a word with the accounts department and see why I haven't received my wages yet ... and until I do they will not be getting a cup of tea!!  

The accounts department of our company (along with many other tasks) = Alan.  😄 

Sue xx

Ch, ch, ch, Changes ... Our Garden, Then and Now

 

This photo popped up on my Facebook Memories on Saturday.  

Yes, it's two years now since this property became ours, and the work began over the course of the following three months to fix up the house and the annexe, and to completely redesign the garden to something that suited us and our furry friends.  While the work went on we lived at the flat in town and project managed the re-plastering, fitting kitchens, re-decorating and all that goes with homes that need starting from scratch.

Of course for me the garden was important and as soon as we could, while the builders were working away inside the house, we had a brilliant handyman who worked outside day in day out, taking down all the fences, lifting and relaying the flagstones and following the plan that I had drawn up.

This was how our garden looked on the day we bought the house.

With a long fence separating the annexe from the main house and cutting the garden into two unequal halves.

And this was how it looked a couple of weeks later.

With the dividing fence down and a large area of the flags lifted, with hardcore down ready to be edged with sleepers and for smaller and smaller stones to be poured on top.

We decided to not have grass in such a small space but instead went for stones on one side of the dividing sleeper and a square 'wood chippings bed' in the corner.  Then the first plants went in.  We put in a bottomless barrel and planted it with an apple tree and a few bulbs and small plants.  We planted a few perennial shrubs and sunk the stainless steel sink taken from my original kitchen as a small garden pond.  This is the one thing that really did not work out.

 We didn't really think things through when we first moved in, we are so close to a large amount of water ... the canal ... and with the other bird drinkers that we have in the garden the water in the 'sink pond' just sat there covered in plants, or exposed and turning green.  In fact the only things that went in it were my foot once and Suky, when she reversed away from something and found herself thigh deep in green water.

So this year in our first gardening weekend of the season, after checking for any wildlife ... sadly none ...  Alan dug out the sink and I planted a Rhubarb plant in the space that it vacated.  A much more useful addition to the garden and tasty too. 

The birds can continue to drink from my little antique drinker that is under the bird table.

And also drink and splash in the clasped hands drinker that sits in the righthand corner of the pebbly area.

This weekend Alan pressure washed everything in the garden, I weeded and tidied and we generally got everything ready for the coming growing season.  The long raised bed that we added late last year and the other one near the shed, will soon have all the wooden bits and bobs coverings taken off.  I put them there to keep cats off and it has worked a treat, but looked so messy all through Winter, and has been driving me nuts!!  I think that we will chop and burn all the wood in the chimenea over the coming Summer evenings, and then next Winter cover the beds with something else, I am already saving any nice cardboard boxes that arrive in preparation.

Oh and it's a good job it's nearly the end of the month, as I think that I have just bust my budget treating myself to something that will help me to grow more food from my tiny space this year.

A metal framed, plastic covered greenhouse to start my seedlings off in and then put my tomato plants into ... they didn't do that well completely outside last year.  It's described on the B&Q website as a 'walk-in greenhouse' ... well maybe if I was eight inches tall.  😂😄

Anyway, as we creep towards the end of March it's time to add up my spending for this month, cry over my lack of cash and then cheer myself up by getting some seeds sown, so that eventually I will have some homegrown food to eat once again.

Sue xx

Of Narrowboats, Seeds and YouTube

 

It may look a bit gloomy, but it's just early in the morning, the world is barely awake but it's nice to be out walking the tow path with only the sounds of the birds singing as my soundtrack.  The crunch of my feet on the soggy gravel barely disturbing anyone.

I love narrowboats and we always get a few different ones to wander past.  It's hard not to look into the windows as you pass, but you can look in the direction of the boats when the curtains are closed without feeling too guilty.

I was desperate to plant some seeds the other day, although I know it's still a smidge too early for me here in Lancashire.  So I quieted the urge by planting two Courgette seeds in a pot.  They sit on my windowsill with their plant pot encased in a reused polythene bag.  Their own tiny greenhouse.

The hope of things to come. 💚

Some Weekend Watching, just a few of my favourites from this week.

https://youtu.be/OfJv1A-CBI0

Freakin Frugal.   Frugal Daddy in the dumpster again.  I find it so sad that supermarkets throw so much perfectly good food away, and even more sad that animals have lost their lives only for their flesh to end up in landfill.  Happily they rescue a tiny portion of it, and share it with neighbours and others. 

https://youtu.be/xfXMoGmb74w

Never Too Small.  An apartment with the same square footage as my little lodge.  It's always interesting to see such different layouts to mine and what people have done with them.

https://youtu.be/u9R0IFJaqF4

Gittemary Johansen.  Zero waste shopping in Denmark with the original sustainable badass vegan.

And finally:

https://youtu.be/HKNIm4ZxLk4

What's for Tea.  Meals of the week from Cheryl in Scotland ... why are other people meals so much more interesting to look at than your own?

  If the rain stays away today I'll be sorting out my tiny garden ready for a Summer of food growing.  Just a little bit in the raised beds and lots of pots, but just a little bit is better than none.

Hope you have a great weekend.

Sue xx

Lockdown Anniversary, Paintings and Green Soup

 

Angela over on Tracing Rainbows mentioned on her post this morning about it being the anniversary of the first lockdown here in England.  So I thought I would look back at a few of my blog posts around that time and see what I was up to when the world ground to a halt, and we were all sent to our rooms armed with toilet rolls and bags of pasta.  

And as usual, I fell down a rabbit-hole of my own making and had a good read of quite a few old posts.  What I did come across was the original post that showed the picture that I fell in love with.  

I had found the image online, used it for that post and then sent it to my son and asked if he would paint it for me for my 60th birthday, of course never realising at that time that it would be over two years until it actually came into my possession.  Yes, thanks to Covid I never got a sixtieth celebration and my older son missed out on his fortieth, but then we all had far more serious things on our minds.

A couple of days after that blog post, on the 24th March, I had to quickly pack up what I could fit into my car and head back to Wales with Suky as the caravan park closed it's gates for the duration and it made more sense for me to be back on the old homestead and us all to be in the same country.

How things changed, and how much we have all come through in the years since then.

Thanks for all the interest in my £3.50 challenge week on Tuesday's post.  Don't worry I will be posting all about it as soon as I do it, I  just need a couple of days to eat up some of the fresh things that I have in the fridge at the moment.

Lots of green things got made into a pan of soup  yesterday.

And it gave me a cup full of soup for my lunch and three more tubs to go into the freezer.

That should be nice and healthy after a week of limited food groups, and we all know just how precious our health is these days don't we.

Sue xx

Three Lots of Shopping ... and Hundreds of Missing Photos

 

Yet again Alan asked if I wanted to go shopping, and even though I didn't actually need anything except some hairspray ... I said yes.

At least I remembered to get the bloody hairspray!!

£36.78 spent.

50p spent

After spending the grand total of 50p for a days food the other day, my mind was wandering over what could be bought if you shopped for a week's worth of food in one trip with the same budget, and what meals you would make with what you bought.

So I went back to Sainsbury's the following day and did it.

This is what I came up with.

£3.47 spent.

The idea is that the weekly meal plan includes toast and marmalade for breakfast most days, and virtually all other meals consisting of something with potatoes and carrots and a smattering of onion.

It will be good to see how interesting I can make it with such limited supplies, although this time I have allowed myself a very basic store-cupboard, from my cupboard ... after all I am supposed to be eating my way through my food stash and streamlining my food supplies.

No wonder my head's in a whirl and I have accidentally moved all my photos from 2005-2010 to somewhere on my computer ... and I know not where!!

Sue xx

Just Words and Pictures

 

William K Blacklock - The Morning Post

Disclaimer -  She is a real person.  She struggles and she sparkles.

She is no longer afraid to say what makes her angry, sad or what she thinks is unfair.

She's not afraid to admit that at times she feels worthless, lost, or not enough.

She's refusing to hide from love, beauty, aliveness, magic and abundance.

She won't edit the sad or messed up parts of her story, or the magnitude of her triumphs, to make anyone comfortable.  She is a real person.

She struggles and she sparkles, she is a real person.

Tanya Markhul

Have a great weekend, whatever you have planned to do.

Sue xx