- Part 82

Homemade dog treats: drying offal in a dehydrator

Posted by louisa on Thursday 15 July 2010 in frugal | 1 comment

In the supermarket a couple of months ago, John noticed that the dog treats we were buying our old springer spaniel Lily cost £11 a kilogram. The prepackaged lumps of cereals, additives and mechanically recovered meat were more expensive gram for gram than cheese, steak or a nice roast. That didn’t seem quite right to us.

We swapped to using cheese for a while – mostly because it kept longer than meat – but Lily wasn’t that keen so we decided to try making some homemade dog treats by dehydrating some meat instead: it would last longer than cheese and wouldn’t need refrigeration.

Bad Buys: the garden swing

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 13 July 2010 in bad buys, frugal | 0 comments

This will be an occasional series of posts documenting my worst buys over the years and why they were a mistake. I hope it’ll help me – and other people – learn from my mistakes.

When we moved into our new house last autumn, there was an old garden swing cemented into the patio in the garden. My mum and dad had a similar swing for a few years when I was a kid – a white metal tube frame with big puffy plastic-coated cushions – and according to our photo albums, our family lived on it in the summer. John wasn’t keen on the swing here though because it looked rickety, somewhat knackered and in white, stood out against the natural colours of our garden – but I thought we might as well use it since it was there. Maybe play up the retro – brighten up the white & cover the dated floral cushions with a red polka dot design. It was put on the list for “things to do over the summer” and forgotten about.

Then a (used) swing popped up on my “around here and cheap” eBay search. In a mushroom-y beige colour, it wouldn’t stand out so much, it looked more solid and best of all, it was more practical because the seats were the plastic mesh, meaning we could use it without having to climb two flights of stairs to get the cushions. It was £30 and only a short drive away. We ‘bought it then’. At no point did we ask ourselves whether we actually wanted a swing – we were just hell-bent on replacing the old one with a better one than the one we had.

Charity shop bargains from Shipley

Posted by louisa on Monday 12 July 2010 in charity shopping | 0 comments

I did a little impromptu charity shop-shopping in Shipley on Saturday.

For the size of the town centre, Shipley has a good number of charity shops but I didn’t make a mammoth haul because like in most poor-er areas, the general stock tends to be lower quality – discount shop/supermarket clothes, and trashy books I’ve either read, got or wouldn’t touch with a second-hand bargepole. That’s not to say that bargains and/or super-cheap expensive goods aren’t ever spotted, it’s just less likely. In my experience in Shipley, the BHF has slightly better quality items than the others, while the Age Concern Community Action shop & JOY have the most random stuff. (JOY, the only shop away from the main market square, on the other side of the market itself, is stuffed full of stuff and definitely one for rummagers.)

Anyway, on Saturday I bought:

a 100% cotton stripey cardigan. It’s a man’s one but fits me. It cost £3.45 (it should have been £3.50 but the woman was really low on change – I could offer a £10 note or £3.45 in change, using every last penny in my purse – she accepted the latter.)
a basket for £3. I’ve wanted a few baskets for a while – for foraging, for craft stuff, for kindling. This one, which only arrived in the shop while I was in there, is more of a traditional shopper type — I used it for my shopping while I was in Shipley and it was great — and will be perfect for kindling as it is, or I can line it with pretty fabric if I want to use it for yarn. Or I could keep it as a shopping basket. Decisions, decisions.
A giant measuring jug for 50p (not pictured), which was a great spot as I was on my way to buy a normal sized one for using as a chicken food scoop. (Up until now, we’ve just been using an old plastic tub but I thought we’d get a measuring jug to keep a better eye on how much food we’re putting in every day.) This bigger one means less trips between the feeder and the foodstore – great for lazy people like us.

Not a huge haul but the basket was a bargain – cheaper than the ones I’d seen on eBay and without having to pay for p&p, the cardigan will be useful for layering in the autumn and the jug is already in use.

Using the last of everything: how do you do it?

Posted by louisa on Thursday 8 July 2010 in frugal | 2 comments

This is cross-posted to my reusing & recycling blog, Recycle This, in its ‘Reduce This‘ category.

I’ve reached the end … of my shampoo bottle and our mayonnaise jar. And it made me wonder…

Every vaguely-frugal family has their own tricks for getting those last bits of gloop, sauce, oil or whatever out of jars and bottles – but what are your top tips?

Most bottles – from condiments to shampoo – are easily emptied by standing them upside down for a few hours.

Cooking sauces – jars/cans of tomatoes – are easy too: a little squish of water around to pull off the last of the sauce/juice then into the pan it goes to be reduced off.

Cooking oils bottles and jams & honey jars get left in a bowl of hot water to make the remaining contents a little runny and easier to pour out.

Metal squeezy tubes – like tomato puree and old school toothpaste – can be rolled up and squeezed, but the new plastic toothpaste tubes aren’t so rollable – cutting them open seems the only option.

What other methods do you use?

Chicken update: one week on

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 7 July 2010 in chickens, growing | 1 comment

I’m not going go on and on and on about the chickens but I thought I’d just do a quick update because it’s a week now since we got them – and we had a good bonding day yesterday.

The as-yet-still-unnamed girls seem to have settled in well. The first couple of nights, they needed a little encouragement to go to bed but now they go of their own accord. They were also sleeping in one of the nestbox in a big heap too but now they seem to be using the perches more.

Diet wise, they’ve shunned some of the scraps I’ve taken down – the bolted lettuce has been mostly rejected – but they like leftover pasta and nettles (which is good because there are *loads* in the field next to our house but I’m going to get better gardening gloves before I pick any more as the ones I had one yesterday weren’t good enough and ow-ee, stings all over). They’re eating borage leaves in this picture, which were also popular – handy since we’ve got a healthy patch of them in the herb bed.