Frugal Friday

It's been a couple of weeks, so I think I'm due another of these posts.  The last week of August was pretty frugal, as I didn't have any money left to spend, and in fact went overdrawn to be able to give LB her reward money for her GCSEs, which she needed to take to a festival with her last weekend. Thankfully, I got paid on Friday, so I was back in the black.

Anyway, here's a few frugal things I've been doing in the last few weeks.

1) Harvesting more vegetables and fruit from the allotment.  It's been a good year with regard to crops. In fact, we've had way too many tomatoes and cucumbers.  I've chopped up and frozen more tomatoes, as they get slightly over ripe, so as not to waste any. 

There's still half a dozen or more small cucumbers in the fridge to eat, but as OH has now taken the plants down, there won't be any more.  It sounds awful to say so, but it's a bit of a relief to be honest.  Luckily, they keep quite well in the fridge and we haven't wasted too many.

2) Once I got paid this month, I decided to splash out on a bulk supply of bio-degradable dog poo bags.  What a glamourous life I lead! I bought about 2000, which should keep us in dog bags for about 2 years.  They were very good quality and worked out at about 2 or 3 pence per bag, which was very reasonable.  It's about time I changed to degradable bags for this purpose, so it was a bit of an eco move too. 

If anyone has a dog, the website is muttbutts.com and the best thing is that for £1 you can order samples of the different thicknesses before you place a large order, which is what I did.  To be honest even the cheapest ones were better than what I'd been using for months, but I opted for ones on large rolls of 100, as these are more practical to store and use on a daily basis.

3) It's been a week of bulk purchases really, as I also placed an order with Approved Food, for the first time in many months.  I haven't used this website in a long time, but after an email pinged into my inbox, I just thought I'd have a look and ended up spending £60. Not very frugal you might think, but half of this was on Christmas presents for OH, as I managed to bag a very good bottle of single malt for £20 instead of the £40 I paid for the same brand for his 50th birthday. This made the whole order worthwhile and I threw in a few extra consumables for OH as stocking fillers, i.e. coffee, cycling snacks, etc. It actually felt good to start on the Christmas shopping, even in such a small way.

Most of the rest of the order was made up of things we use all the time. I didn't go for out of date items on this occasion. I just stuck to things that were still in date, but as a consequence we are well stocked up on certain things.  I got free delivery too, on account of spending over £55, so I was happy about that too. I did notice that they've reduced their delivery costs back to what they were originally, after raising them a while back, which was why I stopped shopping with them.

4) We had a very frugal weekend last weekend. LB was away all weekend at a family friendly festival, with her friend and her family, so we spent the weekend at home and in the garden taking down the greenhouse and moving the compost bins.  We used our own compost on the border I was refreshing, as well as a bit of bought compost and the cost of the plants I bought a while ago that we put in, totalled just £20, which is a pretty cheap makeover. They don't quite fill the space yet, but they will eventually.

5) We seem to have now got the hot compost bin working properly, so hopefully we will be producing lots more good home made compost for use around the garden, which should save us some money.

6) The only other frugal thing I've been doing is continuing to make my hexagonal quilt, the top of which is nearing completion now.  Just the edging hexagons to do and then I can fill and back it. I didn't need to buy anything for this as I have everything I need to complete it in my sewing room.

I hope you've all been having a frugal couple of weeks.