5 Things Friday - My Dream garden

I am joining Amy this week for five on Friday. Thanks Amy!

I am sorry to say that apart from admiring the beautiful autumn trees on a misty, early 2hr drive through the Cotswolds one morning with a colleague, I have failed to be present and enjoy or even find, the beauty in this busy, busy week.  Must try harder!

But I have been having very strong yearnings for a garden of my own this week. I have studied with the RHS and in the past have had and adored my own garden, even being self-sufficient for a time in veg and soft fruit. But life takes various turns, and although my professional career is in a good place (finally!) I don't have the time or money (yet!) for a garden of my own. I have had an allotment recently, but gave it up to study. Although this was a wrench, there is nothing sadder than a neglected allotment. I miss the rolling of the seasons and the connection to the earth so much.

So, my 5 this week are the 5 things I would be doing in the garden of my dreams this week, if I had one!

1. Composting!

My heart breaks to be throwing away veggie peelings. I know how amazing homemade compost can be for a garden and I love the concept of recycling in your back garden.

One day I will have a set of huge compost bins so that I can turn the compost regularly and get the mix between woody and nitrogenous grass clippings just right.

2. Leaf Mould

I can't walk past all of these lovely fibrous leaves without fighting the urge to rake them all up, store them in net sacks or a chicken-wire bin and turn them into precious leaf-mould! It can be sieved with topsoil to form potting compost, added as a mulch to enrich the soil...so many uses, and here these leaves are, just turning to mush in the rain!

 

3. Flicking through the Seed Catalogue

Not spending, obviously as it is No-Spend November! But that lovely winter job of circling what you want to grow next year and dreaming about fragrant tomatoes warmed by the sun and nice fat cabbage heads. I almost always used to grow more than I could possibly fit in, and have to re-home all of the refugees with neighbouring plot-holders and on Freecycle. I must still be on the mailing list, so will have a wistful flick through one evening soon.

4. The Autumn Tidy Up - Or Not

It is really satisfying having a good chop back of dead seed heads - although not in this garden - my parents', down the road. They let me take up the turf last summer and re-plant in the style of dutch designer Piet Oudolf. It is 'naturalistic' - that is, perennials and grasses crowded together and intermingled and because varieties are selected which look good when they are dead, you just leave them over the winter. They are all quite architectural seed-heads and stand up well to wind and rain. The idea is that it looks just as nice in the winter, covered in frost, as it does in the late summer.

5. Chooks

This time of year is usually a great time to give the henhouse a clean out ready for winter. I always kept chickens when I had my smallholding and one day I would love to again.

Is it Friday yet?

This whole week has been a total blur. Today was fairly typical and went something like this:

1. Wake up, shower, blow dry, make-up, out the door (I live 3 minutes away from work - although I am still late most days);

2. Work like stink catching up all morning having spent two days out of the office at a conference. Dash home to walk dog, notice the torrential rain and so change bed sheets and put a load of washing on instead;

3. Work like stink all afternoon, fuelled by serious amounts of coffee;

4. Return home, work like stink on university work from 6.30-9.00 with 30 minutes to gobble down a jacket potato in the middle. It turns out I have two important deadlines at work and one important deadline at university all due in the week of the 25th November. that is going to be a good day - not;

5. Keep body and soul together by going for a run in the dark at 9.30pm. I drove 5 minutes into our local town to run around the pavements, as our village is not lit. It was actually quite therapeutic - I tried to be as mindful as possible rather than thinking about work.

It is a meditation of sorts, although I am SO unfit. I ran a measly 2 miles in 23 minutes - very slow, but I am easing myself back in. It felt really good to be doing some exercise after what has been weeks. I don't know why I left it so long.

6. Drive home and get the slow cookers fired up. Thank goodness for slow cookers!

It took me six minutes to chop a leek, potatoes and an onion, cut a sprig of thyme from the garden and crumble a stock cube and some boiling water into the pot - worth it for our lunch tomorrow, blended, loosened with a little milk and with a bit of stilton crumbled in. I would have tried something a bit more exotic, but time was short and I couldn't be bothered to find a recipe.

7. Chuck 1 cup of porridge oats and 2 cups of water into slow cooker 2 ready for breakfast tomorrow morning. This will go down a treat after what looks to be a wet dog walk - it is lovely to have your hot breakfast waiting for you.

8. Blog! I realise that the trivia of my daily life probably isn't the most riveting stuff for anyone else. Especially as life is basically eat, sleep, work, repeat at the moment. But it really helps me to gather my thoughts and keep on track, as well as being nice to look back on.

And now it is time for a quick shower and to disappear to bed with a Stephen King - I really can't bring myself to read anything remotely intellectual tonight!

Roll on the weekend...hope you have a good Friday.

Waste and a Conference

Did you see lovely Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's documentary about Britain's waste problem?

 

It made my heart break to see how wasteful we have become as a society. 

As a household we are pretty good at using everything up rather than wasting it - and I don't think I will ever see the day that a pot of hummus lasts long enough to expire! If it smells ok, we eat it and largely ignore best-before dates.

I can't bear to bin anything, so usable items go on ebay,  Snaply, Freegle or the charity shop. Our waste clothes that are worn out go in a bag which gets handed to the charity shop as 'rag bag' - they get it collected and recycled for sofa stuffing.

The subject of waste was on my mind today as I stood for hours at an industry conference, on our exhibition stand. 

Professionally, it was a good day. But what a waste! Metres and metres of carpet was laid on the floor of the enormous exhibition hall just for the event.

I naively assumed that it was permanent, or at least stored and re-used. But unbelievably it isn't- it gets 'recycled'. 

After two days it is hardly dirty. Next week there will be another conference, and every week after that for years to come - what amazing waste of resources to use fresh new carpet every time.  Every stall has pens, stuffed toys, stress balls and brochures, USB sticks, diaries and desk tidies - all will one day end up in the bin- and all so that various companies can sell each other software. 

Makes me even more determined to live a simple life. I hate 'stuff!'

On the plus side, I haven't spent a penny today (that wasn't on the company credit card) and have eaten very well, so no-spend November is still going strong.

Christmas Cake

 

(Written on Sunday):

 

This years' Christmas cake is in the oven and the kitchen smells divine.

 

I was in two minds this year whether or not to make one. If I am being frugal, the most sensible decision would be whether I could make one for less than I could buy it.

 

Here is what I was up against:

 

 



 

Aldi do a 'Rich Round Fruit Cake' of a comparable size for £4.99.

 

I used this recipe with a bit of a tweak to use up what I had, rather than buy lots of expensive ingredients.

 



 

Here's what it cost:

225g/8oz plain flour 27p

¼ tsp salt 2p

½ tsp mixed spice 3p

½ tsp ground cinnamon 3p

200g/7oz butter 75p

200g/7oz dark brown sugar 25p

2 tbsp black treacle 50p

1 tbsp marmalade 10p

4 free-range eggs, lightly beaten 1.75

1050g/1¾lb mixed dried fruits £1.69

100g/3½oz blanched almonds, chopped £1.10

brandy - gift

Total: £6.46

 

This was included in my monthly shopping budget - but is way over the Aldi own version. Not a particularly frugal choice then - especially as there were a few items that I had to buy a whole packet of (black treacle for one!) which I wouldn't otherwise have bought.

I suppose I will know for next time. However, making a Christmas cake is a lovely British autumn ritual which feels like the right thing to be doing this misty, chilly November night. 

I will be feeding it copiously with Brandy between now and Christmas.

No-Spend November Kicks Off

Well, No Spend November Starts Here!

I spent yesterday preparing to get off to a good start.

First off - before I did anything else, I made sure I paid off as much debt as I could possibly afford this month. Getting rid of my disposable income to pay off my debts means I will have no chance to spend it!

Here was the debt situation before:

Littlewoods	109
Family Loan	350
Credit Card 1	451
Lovely Boyf	960
Credit Card 2	728
La Redoute	28
Total Debts	£2626

And very gratifyingly, here is the situation after:

Littlewoods	109
Family Loan
Credit Card 1
Lovely Boyf	960
Credit Card 2	728
La Redoute
Total Debts	£1797

I have gone down into the 1000's at least! The Lovely Boyf is thankfully a very patient creditor  - I owe him for a last minute holiday earlier this year (stupid!). He has insisted I pay off the credit cards with the horrific interest rate first, as his loan is interest free.

I paid all of my rent and bills. I got my hair cut at a Supercuts salon, having a dry trim for just £22. They have done a really good job and although would be nice to have the full 'salon' experience and not to have to dye it myself (which I will do this weekend), I can do without the £83 bill for my usual treatment.

This means that I now have my modest budget for food, £20 pocket money and vets budget left for the rest of the month.

After a bit of a stocktake of the freezer, I recon we have more than enough meat and fish to see us through the month, so no need to buy any more. I went to Aldi and did a big food shop, which came to just £54.98. This included a lot of items which were to feed our two sets of guests this weekend, which also came out of our budget, and included a bottle of wine.

I had to top this up at Morrisons with another £22 shop for eggs, milk and dogfood as Aldi doesn't do organic and I find Morrisons dogfood is better quality and still reasonably priced. I have spent more than our £50 per week budget, but I think this shop will see us through for two weeks at a push.

Then, I set about making a meal plan that we can follow this coming week to make sure nothing at all goes to waste:

We may chop and change the order a little depending on the weather and what comes up during the week. I am at a conference for two days and so will be late home and eating lunch out (on expenses, of course!) so it is going to be a busy one.

So come on No-Spend November, lets do this!

Halloween

 

 

 Happy Halloween everybody!

 

I do try and remember the roots of Halloween, or Samhein as it is known to Pagans. Samhein is a festival that celebrates this time of ethereal beauty and apparent decay and death, where the 'veil between the worlds' is at its thinnest.

 

It is a time to remember loved ones and some Pagans set a place at their dining tables on Samhein for those they have lost recently. I think this is a beautiful and really poignant gesture - quite at odds to the commercial horror/gore/Disney appropriation of this ancient festival.

 

That said, this evening we have a good friend coming over to watch a scary film, so a spot on the sofa with pizza reserved for my dearly departed Grandmother might not go down so well! I may light a candle for her though and leave it in the window.

 

I do recognise that children enjoy the festivities, so as our office had a carving competition and provided us with pumpkins, we are prepared for any trick-or-treaters:

 

 

We have also averted the risk of any 'tricks' without breaking the bank. These sweets were from Aldi at just 27p per bag, a grand total of £1.09 (the bucket is recycled from last year).

 

 

 



 

 

Last night we had another good friend over for dinner and looking for a cheap dinner idea but one that felt like we were making an effort, I dug out the fondue set we bought on a holiday to Switzerland years ago.

 

What a winner! We added two packets of Aldi Gouda/Emmental cheese (£2.28) to half a pint of ale (£1.25) and a garlic clove (6p) to make the fondue, melting it on the hob then adding it to the basin within the set.

 

To dip we went authentic Swiss, with various pickles (£1.87); a bag of baby potatoes (£1.49) and a loaf of nice crusty bread, cut into cubes (£2).

 

 

 

At £2.98 per head this was more expensive than a meal we would usually cook for ourselves, but it was a really delicious and different dinner - our guest (who also bought hummus and asparagus) loved it!

 

 



Five on Friday 30/10/2015

Joining in with Amy again this week for Five on Friday - thanks Amy.

Here are five things that made my week:

1. Plant Skeletons

Walking the dog last weekend, I picked a couple of dry stalks of cow parsley from the hedgerow. I just adore the delicate form of dry cow parsley - umbelliferous is the term, I think. So fragile and elegant.

 

 

2. Country Living Christmas Mag

 

 

Squee it's here! I LOVE the Christmas edition of this lifestyle magazine. It is full of pictures of delicious food, lovely cosy cottages, snow and frost (even though it is a balmy 17 degrees here at the moment) and general rustic loveliness. I am watching the pennies in November and at £4.10 it isn't cheap for what is essentially a lot of lovely pictures I could find on Pinterest for nothing.

 

 

 

But it is such a pleasure to savour, flicking through it with a hot coffee and daydreaming about living in a beautifully decorated house and spending my time eating artisan bread and on rustic country pursuits. One day, sigh....

3. My Coffee Mug

Talk about the simple things...well this is one that has given me a lot of pleasure this week.

 

It was a birthday present from LB's mum and I hadn't taken it out of its box until now. You can't tell from the photo, but it is HUGE - she knows me so well. I feel like I am in a coffee shop drinking out of it - and like a proper grown-up.

 

 

4. The Moon

 

I have tried several times in vain this week to capture the beauty of the moon - there have been some gorgeous, fat, pink, eerie, bright moons. Each time, my camera has let me down - even my digital SLR camera, which can't cope with such a long exposure, left me with a blurry mess.  This is the best I have managed, from the pub window on Wednesday when we popped in for a drink:

 



 

So instead of trying to take any more photos, I have just been standing at the window in awe.



 

 

5. Warm and Wet Weather = Grass!

 

Although the evenings and mornings have been chilly (to a human being- not if you are a germinating grass seed), we are yet to have any frost here in Wiltshire. I am glad about this as they are the perfect growing conditions for my new grass. I blogged about my distinctly pedestrian garden overhaul back in October, and since then the grass has been growing away nicely.

 



It's difficult to tell from these photos, but what once was barren earth, now has a bristle of tiny green shoots coming through.

I literally squeal with delight as I walk up the garden path every day and every raincloud is welcome as it means I don't have to be out there with a hose. It's so important not to let immature grass dry out, and thankfully I recon this lot will have a chance to establish before the cold weather. I WILL have a lush green lawn in the spring!

Although not if this little schnauzer has anything to do with it - she loves digging holes!

Wishing you a good week ahead, enjoying the last flush of Autumn.