Autumn jobs

It's been a nice but tiring and busy day today. Will has been off sick with a bug which isn't great, but did mean that I occasionally had an extra pair of hands to keep at least one child busy while I cracked on with a few winter jobs, and I'm feeling quite proud of how much I've ticked off.
I have cleared our little patio area to the side of the house. All pots with annuals emptied, compost reused elsewhere, shrubs put in the greenhouse for winter. Hanging baskets emptied and everywhere swept.in the garden I have picked the first crate of apples that I will store in the shed, mowed the lawn, planted Christmas potatoes in the greenhouse, potted on my herb cuttings and a few strawberry runners that had found their way out of the bed and into the lawn, cut the sunflower heads for drying, hard pruned the mint and lemon balm and cut back some of the woody herbs and hung to dry in the greenhouse. Collected more marigold and chamomile flowers to dry for tea, and started pulling up some of the annuals in the garden (well, just borage so far), and a tarp over the biggest veg patch. Phew! Now a well earned cuppa before falling into bed to start it all again tomorrow.

Stew and pumpkins

A day of not too much going on today. I had to drop the car off at the garage this morning after the hand brake went ducky and the back of the car started to make an unsettling clanking noise. After that new and the girls marched off to the village to the macmillan coffee morning. A girl turn out with lots of coffee, cake and Welsh speaking.
Ivy got a bit too tired out on the mile - walk home. Bad planning on my part, I had hoped that I could carry Hazel in the wrap home and ivy could just her pushchair, but ivy was adamant that it was hazels pushchair, not hers, so wouldn't get into it. We had a long lunchtime of tantrums before ivy had a good nap and came up smiling in the afternoon.
My lovely neighbours watched the girls while I went to pick up the car. Apparently a bit had dropped off it  Luckily the damage was only about £75. We could do without it, but it could be much worse!
A big pot of veg stew for dinner with beans from the garden this summer that u had frozen and homemade caraway bread. Mmm!
The main excitement of the day has been popping out into the garden this evening to have a look at my pumpkin patch. Five good sized pumpkins coming, three larger than footballs, but all still green. Come on babies! The spinach and chard patch is coming on licentiate and we should have plenty for winter.

Rearranging

That is what we seem to have spent the whole weekend doing. For ages will has wanted to take down a big wooden unit that we had in the lounge for our hi - fi and records etc. He built it years ago for another room in another house (scroll back far enough in this blog and you'll find it!) and he has never quite liked it in this house. A bit of jiggling and one wall - mounted shelf later and it was down. At the same time we also reorganised the big built in cupboards as the records had to go in there, and that had improved the room greatly. And finally wet have Will's church pew in here so when people visit we all have somewhere to sit !

I made a final batch of chutney yesterday; 15 jars of green tomato and apple, using up the last of the garden veg we had knocking around the kitchen  It's with some relief I call it a day on making jams and pickles for the year now,  we definitely have as much and more than we need. The jars can go back into the garage until next year.

It has been a busy morning today starting to pick up the fall out from our busy weekend, and baking cakes for the macmillan coffee morning at the library tomorrow. I believe they have made it Tuesday rather than last Friday as it will coincided the caffi cymraeg that they already run on a Tuesday. My mum is a cancer survivor and macmillan have given her incredible support over the last five years . They are one of few charities I can really get behind. I am baking vanilla cupcakes with a few different frosting. Hopefully there will be someone who is pleasantly surprised to find a vegan option, I know it always makes me do a happy dance!
That's all for now.

Hello!

Is this writing really big? 

I am going to really really try to update this blog now! I have found how to do it on my phone (I think) which realistically is the only way I am ever going to manage it as my laptop died some time ago. 

We are a family of four now, woohoo!! We welcomed another little girl, Hazel, in July. All goes well now settling into our new life and finding new routines. Will has also started a new job which is local and not based at home, yay! But it is also a couple less hours a week which amounts to about £200 less a month, so some economising is called for. Hopefully that is where this blog comes in. 

At the moment I'm just trying to spend as little as possible and find areas, particularly food shopping that we can just cut out. We have bought a breadmaker (£10 from bhf) and are baking all of our bread now. All of our jams and pickles are made for the year, from our own garden and the local hedgerows, so the plan is to stop buying any spreads, condiments, pickles etc. We also bought a blender from bhf as ours died last year so can make houmous from dried beans and peas for our lunches  Thankfully autumn and winter are seasons for one pot meals so there are a lot of soups, stews and caseroles on the horizon. Lately the garden has been our biggest expense as we are still getting set up for growing our own, though this year we managed to live off our own veg exclusively for two months over the summer. We have dug two more very large beds and will be buying a polytunnel in spring, so a large and expensive order of manure will be necessary before the end of the year  

Day to day we all live fairly cheaply. To be honest during the week me and the girls rarely leave the village, and at the weekend we prefer pottering about to spending money going places. We will just have to see how things go this month and will know by the end whether we need to come up with a more detailed plan of where to cut back.  

For the mean time, hello, happy to be back! 

These sunflowers were in our garden, casualties of the recent storms.