Things from the last week

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 13 July 2011 in eating, growing | 6 comments

Last week was our “summer showcase” production week at drama, meaning I was there every night, and most afternoons, for either rehearsals or shows. Compared to how unprepared everyone was at the start of the week, they pulled off some great performances on the night/s. I’ve also learnt a lot about what to do, and what not to do, for future years.

That took up a lot of my time – free or otherwise – so I didn’t have time to do much else. I did though have to do some crafty stuff for the show – making props/costumes, including most notably some six-fingered gloves (they looked rather weird!). Drama productions really do draw on a lot of different skills – we didn’t have a lot of costumes/set for these ones but our big shows in April draw on lots of people’s craft skills. If you like sewing or building/painting stuff, and want a new outlet, I’d definitely recommend joining an am dram group.

John did some fab cooking for us to keep me well fed last week, including a lovely lasagne, layered with our homegrown courgettes. Last year showcase-week was the week when all my courgettes grew into marrows without me noticing – this year, I made sure to pick them. We now have a shelf in the fridge full of courgettes and I know there are at least two in the garden that needed picking yesterday. I must make them into ratatouille for the freezer.

After the show finished on Sunday night, I gave myself some playtime on Monday. I made a big batch of pizza base dough – which grew into an insanely big batch in the perfect-rising-temperature porch! – and made lots of bases. As I said on Twitter, my pizza bases don’t usually qualify to be euphemised as even “rustic” in shape so I wanted to try a lot in one go to figure out the best way to do it. By the end of Monday afternoon, I hadn’t perfected it but I feel a lot more confident about shaping them than I did before. I also part-baked all the bases, which seemed to result in a stable-but-very-thin pizza, which made me happy. And we’ve got four part-baked bases (and a couple of batches of dough balls) in the freezer for super quick homemade meals in the future.

On Monday, I also ate some out of date (cured) sausages. I’ve had a long time love of sausages and I thought the feeling was mutual. It was not. Yesterday was a slumped-on-the-sofa and bland food day as a result.

I’m still not feeling perfect today but I thought I should check in. How’ve you been?

75% off seeds at Wilkinsons

Posted by louisa on Thursday 7 July 2011 in frugal, growing | 10 comments

It feels a bit early (in general and earlier than last year) but various shops have started selling off their sow-by-2012 seeds cheaply.

I was near a Wilkinsons yesterday (I heart Wilkinsons – I nearly wet my pants when they opened a big store down the road from our old house in Leeds and it’s one of the things I miss most about living in Leeds. #sadconfession) and popped in to peruse their packets — all 75% off in store (they seem to be 3 for 2 on the website). I went a bit mad at first and ended up putting about a dozen of them back but I did buy…

That’s:

2 x dwarf french beans (Canadian wonder – 120 seeds per pack) = £0.25 a pack
2 x runner bean (white emergo – 40 seeds per pack) = £0.32 a pack
1* x broad beans (Bunyards exhibition – 50 seeds) = £0.56 a pack
3 x nasturiums (trailing single mixed – 35 seeds per pack) = £0.49 a pack
1 x onions (bunching ishikura – 375 seeds) = £0.32 a pack
1 x pepper (“sweet” mini red – 50 seeds) = £0.32 a pack
1 x beetroot (boltardy – 275 seeds) = £0.37 a pack
3 x cucumber (telepathy F1 – 5 seeds per pack) = £0.39 a pack
1 x phlox night scented (200 seeds) = £0.32 a pack
2 x sweet pea (mixed – 25 seeds per pack) = £0.56 a pack

So 17 packs of seed for £7.35, rather than nearly £30 – I’m quite happy with that.

* I would have bought more of these even though they’re branded so more expensive, but this is all they had

Combined with the (18) free packets I’ve collected one way or another this year, and what I’ve haven’t used this year and the seeds I’ll save from my Real Seeds purchases this year (achocha, special peppers etc), I think I’m about all set on the seeds front for next year already – perhaps some more broad beans (as they’ve been fab this year), some courgettes (as I don’t have much luck saving seeds due to being hybrids/cross-pollination, and we heart courgettes) and some basil, but that’ll be it. Hurrah! :)

Apparently Dobbies and the super cheap supermarkets (Aldi/Lidl etc) are heavily discounting their seeds at the moment too.

Have you started buying seeds for next year too? Have you spotted any other seed bargains out there?

Plants & pots & seeds

Posted by louisa on Monday 4 July 2011 in growing | 5 comments

Thanks for all your batch cooking and what-to-grow-in-my-empty-spots suggestions! I’ll reply to the comments as soon as I can but I’m feeling very inspired by both! :)

I mentioned on the empty-spots-in-the-garden post that I was visiting my mum & dad on Saturday and my dad might have some spare plants for me – well, he certainly did. He gave me:

Six lavender plants – he was offering more (he’s gone a little lavender crazy this year) but I don’t have room for them. As it is, a couple of these will go to our neighbour who loves lavender.

Three (admittedly slightly pot-bound) chillis and eight (capsicums) pepper plants. These will need potting on immediately and I’m not convinced we’ll have quite a long enough season to really benefit from them – but I’ve got others of both so these will just be bonuses (and I’m going to try overwintering all my chillis this year too). They will, of course, have to stay in the greenhouse rather than filling up my currently empty containers/bed – and last week that would have worried me because I’m running low on decent sized pots … which I mentioned to my dad and lo & behold:

40+ decent sized pots. (Leaves in the photo for scale and not just because we’ve not swept the porch recently ;) ) He has hundreds stashed near his old greenhouses (from when he knew a landscape gardener and saved them from landfill) — I only took 40 this time but could have taken ten times that. I feel confident I might never need to buy a medium size plant pot again ;)

My mum also had a box of goodies for me – old jars, egg boxes and whatnot – and included in that were some seeds that they’d got free but wouldn’t use: packets of peas, coriander, tomatoes, land cress, rocket and all year round lettuce. I’m going to use a couple of my foot-square scrap wood planters for the rocket & land cress, and the rest can join my seed stash for use next year. (At last count, I’ve got about 18 packets of seeds free this year from one source or another – about half flowers, the rest veg – so hopefully next year will be a cheap year!)

So not only did we get to introduce Lily-dog to the sea (funny!), have pink-and-white ice creams and a visit to Broadhursts – oh, and see my mum & dad, my garden is a little fuller now too :)

What did you get up to this weekend? Did you get to enjoy the sun?

Falling short – empty spaces in the garden, boo

Posted by louisa on Friday 1 July 2011 in growing | 9 comments

I’ve spent most of this afternoon pottering in the garden and as time went on, I had a strange realisation: I’ve actually fallen short in what I’ve sown this year.

I have everything planted in final positions now and I’ve still got a bed, two wooden troughs and some containers empty. Well, the bed’s not empty, it’s full of self-seeded borage (pictured above – which I was happy to let grow until I needed the space for something else) but the wooden troughs are empty-empty — and annoyingly, it’s the nice ones I made at the start of the year. I’ve been using them as extra temporary staging in the greenhouse so all the others were filled up first, and here I am now with nothing to put in them. Boo.

I had problems with damping off at the start of the year and some stuff went to seed because I didn’t pot it on soon enough during the warm (and chaotic here) spring – if those problems hadn’t happened, I’d probably have actually sown about the right amount of stuff this year (amazingly!) but since they did, I’m left with some empty spots. Shockingly bad behaviour, isn’t it?

So now I’m wondering what, if anything, I could put in them. Any suggestions?

I’m going to see my mum & dad tomorrow* so my dad might have some spare things he could give me in exchange for the eggs and courgettes I’ll be taking. (*Mum, if I haven’t called you by the time you’re reading this, we’re coming tomorrow. Hope you’re not working all day or out. Also if you’ve been shopping today, I hope you didn’t buy lots of eggs and courgettes. ;) )

My beloved Hessayon book tells me I could plant some late peas for autumn sowing — and actually I’ve already got some seedlings that we were going to eat as pea shoots. I do though have issues with growing peas so maybe we should just eat them in their childhood form as planned.

I think we’ve got just about enough salad leaves in containers dotted around the place – although if I can’t think about anything else, I’ll grow some more lettuce.

I *could* just leave them empty, but where would the fun be in that? ;)

Have you got any empty spots this year or are you filled to the proverbial rafters? What would you plant if you had an empty bed/some empty containers at this time of year?

And it comes back around again…

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 29 June 2011 in growing | 6 comments

I know it’s pretty obvious but it’s still nice to see it in practise.

Yesterday we had broad beans as part of our dinner, and a few minutes later, the chickens got the pods to snack on (they LOVE them); tomorrow we shall have manure (in the garden, not for dinner), and next year we’ll have more broad beans.

We should also get eggs out of the system too but it was too complicated to add that into my diagram ;)

Payment for eggs? Or homegrown veg / homemade crafts?

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 21 June 2011 in chickens, growing | 12 comments

Last week when John’s mum was visiting, she mentioned that she had been wondering about paying us for the eggs we give the family. I think we gave her/John’s dad effectively three half-dozens last week – which would cost about £5 in the shops, but cost us just under £2*. She tried to give us some money but John refused to accept it on principle, and bundled her out of the door before she could argue — it did lead us to talk about it afterwards though.

When we got the extra girls last year and it made it easier for us to regularly give away boxes of eggs, John & I talked about taking a nominal charge for them to pay for the extra feed and that sort of thing – but never actually got around to doing it. With the six girls now, we are really just giving away our spares; I think if we had enough chickens to warrant doing a “garden gate” stand to sell them (or sold them at our workplaces), we’d be more inclined to take money from friends but for us right now, while we’re ok for money and it’s just a casual thing, it feels a bit petty to ask good friends and family for £1 here and there.

Even if we were selling them though, John said he wouldn’t accept any money from his mum and dad because they’ve given, and continue to give, us so much – over the last fortnight, John’s dad has put up a fence for us, supplying all the wood (some free; some paid for) as well as labour — that is surely worth a few eggs!

Expanding from that, we realised that at least half of the people we regularly give eggs to frequently give us they’ve made/do something for us in return – and we like that idea of unofficial/unspoken bartering because it stops it being just about money and becomes about time/effort instead. There are a few people to whom we regularly give eggs that don’t really give us anything in return – and we’re not bothered about that (if we cared, we wouldn’t give them eggs so often!), but if they ask to give money towards feed now, we’re more likely to say “bake us a cake sometime instead”.

Something related: last year or so, I realised that I’m always more inclined to give produce or crafty things to other growers & crafters etc. Perhaps I wouldn’t be so bothered if I had a mega glut of things – but at the moment while my output is more limited, if I have to choice between giving stuff to a grower/maker or a non-grower, I’d almost always lean towards the grower. They realise that homegrown/homemade things aren’t necessarily always aesthetically perfect and they know the effort that goes into producing the finished fruit or project.

Someone who doesn’t grow their own veg may see as courgette as something worth (say) 60p, which may be a few minutes of their working time, the same price as a Mars bar or can of Coke, but a grower (or someone who has grown in the past) sees the ongoing care and attention that went into growing it, and that’s far more valuable. (I think that’s why people who grow/cook/make etc are generally less wasteful too – it’s easier for them to see/imagine the effort.)

What do you think? Do you sell your surplus at a “garden gate” or to friends and family? Or do you give everything away for free? How does it work for you?

* our per egg cost is usually around 9p, so £1.62, but has been a little more lately because of expenses to do with the red mite infestation last month; I’m putting it at around 11p or 12p an egg at the moment.