Frugal Pie Making

Life on the 'feed me for a fiver' challenge is interesting, especially when you look closely at fitting in the recommended minimum 5-a-day fruit and vegetables, discounting potatoes, while trying to make affordable, wholesome meals from scratch. That's why we love pies!

The kitchen is one of the easiest places to start money saving, especially if your budget is tight or if you are taking part in our 'feed me for a fiver' challenge in the forums. Your kitchen, regardless of size, shape or design, is also the hub of most frugal homes. In many cases, it is also the gateway to your frugal kingdom - the kitchen garden. Even at this time of year, here in Scotland, we can find some winter greens by way of leeks and kale. It is like finding free food and everything counts when it comes to feeding the household and zero waste. I'm told some places already have wild garlic appearing but I haven't seen any signs of it here yet, just rain, hail, sleet and more high winds. Anyhow, let's get back to pie-making.

Pies are the frugalers' best friends during lean times, especially when made for specific meals. I prefer to use self-raising flour for most things, so this is what gets used for my pastry, along with cheap lard and margarine. Lard is about one third the price of margarine while margarine is about a third less than the cheapest butter, so I tend to do a 2 parts lard to 1 part margarine for pastry making. It makes for a very short and tasty crust on any type of pie and I think it tastes much nicer with that little bit extra lift from self-raising flour. It also helps that SR flour is still only 45p per 1.5kg pack from supermarkets.

The pie above was made from a single chicken breast fillet weighing about 100g. I chopped the garden leeks and added 2 portions of frozen mixed vegetables (77p per kilo) to a frying pan and stir fried the finely chopped chicken with the veg for a few minutes before adding instant gravy and pouring it all into the pie dish to be baked in the mini oven for half an hour. Served with kale, shredded cabbage and an onion, again all cooked in the frying pan on the hot plate, this pie is sufficient to feed four adults without a problem.

Blackcurrants! These are so easy to grow once you get the bushes established and they just keep on reproducing! Every year, I cut back the bushes and stick the prunings into pots or buckets until I can plant them into the ground and every year, more blackcurrant bushes grow! These are now being introduced to the Frugaldom Project as part of our edible hedgerow, as they are such prolific fruiting bushes. Most are of the Ben Connan type, so are quite winter hardy and produce large berries. Blackcurrants are packed with vitamin C and have plenty of pectin, so make ideal jams and jellies, but we are now sampling them as fruit portions for breakfast, served with the porridge, and in pies, ice cream, cheesecake and yoghurt. They need to be soaked in sugar overnight to make them less tart and for today's blackcurrant pie, I used vanilla sugar. (My vanilla sugar is homemade, I just keep topping up my sealed jar containing 2 vanilla pods and they keep doing their job.)

This is the pie ready to go into the mini oven - painted with milk, sprinkled with sugar and the pastry trim made into a little decoration for the centre. I baked it for 35 minutes at 200C, but it should be noted that the top element of my mini oven has blown, so only the bottom one is heating it, meaning everything is taking a bit longer.

Freshly baked blackcurrant pie, just out the mini-oven. It really does smell delicious! As usual, I was impatient to cut into the pie - it just looked too tempting, so I cut a slice while still hot and ran some of the juices into the bowl.

This will be served with custard after tonight's dinner. I'm tempted to cook an early dinner just to get at the frugal pudding quicker! As the pie cools, the juice will set a little but we prefer our fruit pies hot and juicy, served with either homemade ice cream or ordinary pouring custard.

This pie can be made using any fruit or berries you have available, just sweeten them to your own taste. I've left another serving of the blackcurrants in the fridge for having with tomorrow's porridge.

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Frugal Pie Making

Growing Blackcurrants

Welcome to July and the second half of 2014. Here in Frugaldom, we are about to make some major changes and want you all to be a part of them. First, I need to harvest this year's blackcurrants and it's looking like a bumper crop!

The blackcurrant is a woody shrub grown for its berries. It is a hardy species, well-suited to Frugaldom and, indeed, any frugal garden, as it is fairly fast growing, prolific and easy to cultivate from cuttings. This is my blackcurrant patch in the Thrift Cottage garden - all grown from my original Connan bushes.

With a brand new project about to be launched, growing blackcurrants is looking even more exciting than previous years.

Growing Blackcurrants, continues here…

Day 2 of Making it in March - Frugal Room Fragrance

Day 2 of 31 Days of Making in in March

All Natural Air Freshener / Room Scent

 

Dismal day of rain and fog

My plan to make the effort to get out and walk more has ground to a temporary halt today, owing to the ferocity of the torrential rain and my fair-weather attitude to exercise. I ventured no further than a neighbour's house to hand in a cheesecake. Today was definitely an indoors type of day!

 

Where should I start? I made my bed and made it downstairs - that should count for something on a day like this, shouldn't it? I lit the fire, chatted with a couple of neighbours who arrived and then it turned into a bit of a swapathon - I love a bit of bartering! I now have onions, bacon and hash browns that I didn't have when I woke this morning, not to mention what I've made since then.

 

Making Mango Cookies

 

Mango, apricot & pistachio with fig and almond

As many of you will know, I love experimenting with biscuit baking and sweet making, so today became a biscuit day. I'm still using up the first tin of mango pulp that I bought (4 tins for £1) and I have about a dozen blocks each of the fruit paste that's meant for serving with cheese - another bulk buy for pennies. I couldn't spare any eggs today; neither the hens nor the ducks are laying, so the mango pulp and fruit paste got added to the cookie dough. I didn't weigh or measure anything - I had the last of a bag of wholemeal self-raising flour to be used up, I melted some cheap margarine along with the two fruit blocks, added a spoonful of sugar and then started mixing in the flour, using the mango pulp where I'd normally use eggs. I split the mix, as I have only enough space for one tray in my mini oven, and the remainder of the cookie dough is in the fridge for another day. Next time, I'll omit the sugar.

 

Making Cheesecake

 

Blackcurrant cheesecake

While the biscuits were baking, I made two of the packet cheesecakes (4 packs for £1 from Approved Food*) and left them to set in the fridge while making the blackcurrant topping. It's just a tablespoon of homemade blackcurrant jelly mixed with a couple of handfuls of blackcurrants. I still have about 5kg of garden grown berries in the freezer, so no shortage of these here. One cheesecake went to the neighbours and one we have kept.

 

Making Knitted Blankets

 

The long-awaited pink blanket

Owing to the awful weather, I decided to spend this afternoon finishing off the long-awaited, pink, fluffy blanket. This is the third blanket I have knitted over the past year and this one is for youngest grand daughter, as she loves pink and lilac. I really do hope she likes it - it is so warm and fluffy, but a bit of a nightmare sewing the strips together after having knitted them on large needles! I am pleased with the finished result and equally pleased that it's completed.

 

Making Frugal Fragrance Air Fresheners

 

Citrus fruit, cloves and cinnamon stick

I first saw this 'recipe' on a site called 'The Yummy Life' when it was shared on Facebook. This is my 'frugalised' version, as I used what was to hand rather than wandering outside to rummage in the rain-battered herb garden. I had 3 limes waiting to be sliced and frozen, so I used half and froze the other half. From my baking cupboard, I found cloves (I use these mainly for marzipan fruit making) and a small cinnamon stick.

 

Recycling another jar

Find yourself an empty jar and a piece of something bright - I found this lovely little piece of ribbon among my crafting stash, just long enough to go around the neck of my jar. Warm the jar slightly by swirling some hot water around in it, then place all your ingredients into the jar and cover them with boiling water.

 

 

 

That's it, a simple case of infusing whatever scents you like in a jar of hot water. In the original instructions, which can be found here, the infusion gets simmered and can be used in place of oil in a burner, but I found my combination a strong enough fragrance vaporising from the jar cooling in a safe corner of the room. 

 

I now can't wait to experiment with other scents that look this pretty. Many years ago (about 40!), as a child, my friends and I would do this with rose petals, lavender or mint in jam jars of rain water, shaking them every day and making our own perfume. Today's make reminds me of those days, so let's think of today's scented make as the 'grown up' version. Come summer, of course, I love nothing more than the heady aroma of sweet pea blossoms, which I try to have in all the downstairs rooms.

 

Confession Time

 

I tasted my room fragrance! All the ingredients were food quality from my kitchen and this smelled so good that I had to taste it once it had cooled... and yes, it could easily make a lovely twist for a wee dram of whisky or even as an addition to cheap lemonade. In fact,. with a bit of sweetening - honey, perhaps - it could make a refreshing drink all on it's own! I reckon the liquid would make far better ice cubes than plain water, too. :)

 

That's it, day 2 of March done and dusted and tomorrow there will be something new to write about in the Frugaldom household. Then, it will almost be time to make pancakes!

 

NYK, Frugaldom

 

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Day 18 of Extremely Frugal February - Cheesecake!

Day 18 of 28, Time for Frugal Cheesecake!

You all get the gist of the basic routine here in Frugaldom now, don't you?

 

It's mainly porridge for breakfast, pot of tea on the stove, homemade soup and bread for lunch and then dinner is usually based loosely around the premise of meat and two veg surrounded by something like pastry, pasta, rice, potatoes or herby dumplings (doughballs)! Tonight, it will be herby dumplings.

 

We enjoy dessert or pudding of some description almost every day and this normally includes a portion of fruit, hopefully home grown, depending on what's in season or in the freezer.

 

This meal combination takes care of the majority of the winter months and, us being in Scotland, chilly winter months far outweigh the hot summer months.

 

Today, my order from Approved Food* arrived. It costs me less to pay £5.25 delivery than it does to get into town for shopping, so that part of my budget has its own category, or column, within my spreadsheet so I can easily compare the year's delivery charges and transport or travel costs with what it used to cost to keep a car on the road. I am far better off without the car, even if I factor in the cost of hiring a car for a week during holidays! But I digress!

 

My order arrived and it had to be made up to a minimum of £15, so I added in 4 packs of cheesecake mix (£1) along with some other non-essentials to make it worth my while buying the ice cream mix, tinned mango and the 9kg of pasta! I could hardly believe my luck when I saw it listed at 99p for 3 kilos, as it's closer to that for 500g in our local store! I love pasta, it is almost as versatile as potatoes for bulking out the basics and all those carbohydrates help H make it through another day of log-splitting! :) But tonight isn't about pasta, it's about CHEESECAKE! :)

 

This is the first time I have tried packet cheesecake mix and it was so simple that I was quite amazed! Cheesecake is something that falls outside of the frugal budget of 'homemade' luxuries owing to the lack of access to the rather expensive ingredients, so 25p for a pack just seems awesome to me!

 

Defrosting home-grown blackcurrants for the cheesecake

As expected, I didn't use 'real' butter, I used the 25p/400g tinned margarine to melt into the biscuit base, so that added a whole 2.5p to the price.

Base made, 'creamy' top whipped

 The mix needed 300ml of milk - I used semi-skimmed - so that added 24p to the overall price. I could have used UHT to knock a couple of pennies off the cost and I'm sure even the cheap powdered milk may have worked, but today I am using 'real' milk, albeit semi-skimmed.
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Cheesecake taking shape!

 I don't have any tin foil pie trays left, so I'm using a round sponge tray lined with tin foil.

Making the fruit topping

The pack is for a plain cheesecake - vanilla flavoured - but my all time favourite is blackcurrant, so I defrosted some home grown ones and mixed these with a big spoonful of homemade blackcurrant jelly. I probably should add on the cost of that, as I need to buy sugar for making it, so I'll allow 5p, as a jar of jam or jelly costs very little to make when using free fruit.

Homemade blackcurrant cheesecake

This is how my cheesecake is looking now - it is in the fridge setting and will be sliced after dinner. It SHOULD serve 6, lasting us 3 days, but seriously folks, I reckon we'll demolish it over two days by scoffing a quarter pie each in one sitting! Total cost for making it - 57p

Edited in - Here's how it looked served and it WILL serve 6, so will last the Frugaldom household 3 days.

Cost per serving - 9.5p

 

 

NYK, Frugaldom

 

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Foraging for Frugal Food

  
Foraging for Frugal Food

Colourful, nutritious, tasty and free!

Foraged fruit and berries are brilliant. I had vowed that I wouldn't do any foraging this year, as I still have a shelf filled with assorted jams and jellies to use, plus tubs of garden-grown fruit in the freezer, but today's walk proved to be too tempting. Read more

 

NYK, Frugaldom

How to Make Frugal Fruit Fizz

Simple, Delicious and Ever so Slightly Alcoholic

It's the time of year when we find fruit and berries aplenty. The orchard fruits may not quite be ready for harvesting but many of us have accumulated a glut of rhubarb, raspberries, currants and even strawberries so we need to preserve what we can for the winter months.

My poor gooseberry bushes succumbed to the nasty little Sawfly caterpillars, so the berries I did have were added to blackcurrants to make jam. All of the above can be used to make jam and jelly but it's nice to bottle up something with a bit of fizz for the festive season.

 

WHAT WE NEED

• A clean bucket
• 1kg berries or fruit
• 1kg sugar
• Lemon (or lemon juice)
• Small cup of vinegar
• 5 litres of water
• Suitable bottles - screw top fizzy drinks bottles work fine

Sterilise the bucket as best you can - I rinse everything with boiling water before using it. Rinse the fruit and place all of it in the bucket along with the lemon (washed and sliced, not peeled) or lemon juice, sugar and vinegar.

I prefer to boil my water before adding it, but many people don't bother doing this. Pour the water over the fruit and stir until all of the sugar has dissolved. You'll find that most of the fruit floats but it doesn't take long for the colour to begin flowing. This one looks a rich red, as it's made up of rhubarb, blackcurrants and raspberries.

My bucket of choice this year is one that came with a resealable lid and originally contained 50 seed/fat balls for the wild birds. (These are also ideal for holding laundry 'gloop'.)

Cover your bucket with a tea towel or similar to protect the contents from flies, dust etc and then sit it aside for a few days to infuse. I give mine a stir each morning. The resulting liquid can be bottled from as early as day three.

 

Sterilise your bottles as you would jam jars, I like to rinse mine out with boiling water then dry them in the oven - a job best done after having finished cooking dinner so you don't need to go to the expense of heating the oven specially.

Again I use the boiling water method to clean a large jug, sieve and funnel, then decant the fruit mix from the bucket through the sieve and into the jug. From here, it gets poured into the bottles via the funnel lined with a coffee filter, before sealing the bottles. These should then be sat somewhere cool and safe, where the process of natural fermentation can work its magic.

 

Your fizz should be good to drink after as little as ten days but it keeps much longer, in my experience, as we have only just finished last year's batch. You do need to keep releasing excess pressure from bottles if you want to ferment this to a more potent alcoholic beverage and please do remember that it is mildly alcoholic and not a soft drink for children, despite how the final product tastes.

 

This time around, I am reusing my recycled clip-top bottles, of which I now have five, and screw top fizzy drinks bottles for any surplus.

 

You can also make this drink using elderflowers, red clover, honeysuckle blossom or virtually any other fruit or edible flowers, just adapt the amounts accordingly. For example, only use about a dozen strongly scented elderflower heads or quarter of a bucket of red clover heads. (I have never actually weighed flowers when using them.)

You can also use a mixture of elderflower and red clover or any combination of mixed fruit and flowers you prefer. Having tried several different combination, There still hasn't been one that wasn't agreeable - they all tasted lovely, especially chilled and shared with friends.

 

I shall update this post as my champagne-style fizz gets fizzing.

 

Frugaldom.

We Love Frugal Food! From 5p Soup to Mixed Fruit Crumble

It's Time for the Game to Begin!

Tomato and Pheasant Make a Good Game Soup

 

This is a homemade soup I first blogged about in 2011, so you may already have a similar recipe. However, it's getting to 'that' time of year again, so I thought I would make myself a big pot of this over the weekend; there's a pheasant in the freezer needing used up before the new game season is upon us. This also gives me the chance to compare prices between now and 2011.

 

I normally slow cook meat so all of the juices remain in the crock pot. Any oil, fat or grease can be skimmed off once it's cold. Everything remaining goes back into the slow cooker along with any leftover vegetables you may need to use up rather than send them to the compost or wormery. I like to simmer my stock on a low heat for a few hours overnight, so it's best to use a timer.

Rinse a 500g pack of broth mix and a cupful of butter beans, then you can also leave them soaking in cold water overnight. I notice that the broth mix has increased in price to 75p/500g but there are still offers around where you can stock up at £1 per kilo.
 

In the morning, the stock gets strained and then returned to the slow cooker, along with a couple of diced onions and carrots, the broth mix, butter beans and a tin of chopped tomatoes or equivalent - passata, home grown tomatoes or tomato paste. This time, I am using 100% tomato paste!

This is the 4.5kg tin of tomato paste I bought from Approved Food for just £1.99! It also works well as a base for turning the end slices of homemade bread into frugal, speedy pizzas and for making up the likes of Bolognese, lasagne or chilli. It can even be used to make tomato ketchup.

Season your soup with salt and pepper then leave to simmer until all the beans, peas, lentils and barley are tender. That's it, that's the frugal game soup of the day and it works equally well using a shin of beef, although this would add to your costs, as there's no main meal beforehand from a shin of beef.

• The pheasant cost me nothing, as I had traded other home produce for it, so any stock from leftovers is an extra bonus after having the roast dinner.
• Broth mix and pulses are always bought on special offer, when it's best to stock up on them for the winter months. I reckon they cost me no more than 50p in total. Butter beans, however can be swapped for something else, as these have gone over £3 per kilo. I'll be using a tin of kidney beans added in the later stages of cooking.
• Store's basic passata costing 23p in 2011 is now 29p, but you only need half a carton so you can use the other half for frugal pizzas.
• Onions, carrots and potatoes would normally be home-grown, but if you need to buy them then they'll probably cost less than 50p in total for what you'll use

At a rough estimate, 4.5 litres of soup will cost around £2.00 including the cooking time if you are buying all the ingredients, or around £1 if you are using home grown and bulk bought bargains. 

 

Regardless of how you choose to source your ingredients, 20 portions of soup for £2.00 makes for a fairly frugal and nutritious meal. 10p per portion can be halved to 5p if you are of the frugal living ilk. This soup freezes well and makes for ideal soup and pudding lunches.

 

Speaking of pudding, the blackcurrants are still going strong and I am still using up rhubarb, so I stewed these two together today and turned one lot into crumble and the rest went into the freezer.

 

Quite a bit of sugar gad to be added to this, so it will be much more frugal to stew once the apples are ready for picking - they add some natural sweetness to the mix.

 

Raspberries are growing in abundance now, so I have several tubs of those already frozen and we are gathering about 250g per day from the bushes in the garden. These are being frozen as they get picked, apart from the ones that get eaten as a cold dessert or else lightly stewed into sauce for having over ice cream.

 

It has definitely been a foody sort of a day today! 

 

The cooked mince with tomatoes got made into four lots of double-portion lasagnes. These will go into the freezer later tonight and they'll do for speedy meals or else for H having when I'm away on my next jaunt. More on that soon.

 

Finally, I may or may not have already mentioned that I have acquired a small ice-cream maker, so this is going to be experimented with over the weekend. I'm not sure where doing work on the bedroom makeover is going to fit into the equation but for now it's fairly presentable, so no need to worry about that. I want to make ice cream!

 

The results of the #BudgetBucketList blogging competition got announced this afternoon and, although Frugaldom didn't feature in the final line up, it was lovely reading the winner's blog post and her plans for how to spend the £2,000.00 she won. You can read the winning blog here.

 

The bucket list has spurred me on to complete my next affordable item this year, so I am now planning my trip and will, hopefully, walk across the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge before my next birthday. After that, I'm on my way to the big 50!

 

Still debt free and living this good life, so never give up on your dreams. Most things are achievable on a smaller budget than many would believe possible.

 

Frugaldom 

Pink 'Champagne' Style Fizz of a VERY Frugal Variety.

Champagne, Perry or Bubbly - Frugal Pink for Me!

 

With such a busy start to the month, I thought it best to get the frugal 'champers' on the go so we had some ready in time for Christmas.

 

I've no rhubarb left (other than frozen, pre-stewed for pies), so I'm using a mixture of fruits, meaning my 'pink champagne' may turn out to be a slightly darker shade of pink, verging on something resembling sparkling 'Ribena'.

 

Never mind, as long as it goes with a pop, fizzes and tastes nice, that is all that matters. I know there'll be Vitamin C in it, but not too much by way of alcohol. It's being started off as we speak!

 

CHRISTMAS 2012 LAST MINUTE 'CHAMPERS'

About half a kilo of mixed fruit (Free)

About half a kilo of sugar (50p)

1 sliced lemon (20p)

Splash of cider vinegar (1p)

3 litres water

 

I tipped three cartons of frozen fruit into my bucket - one each of blueberries, raspberries and blackcurrants - but didn't bother weighing the quantities.

 

To this, I added about half a bag of sugar, then a sliced lemon. I'm not a stickler for waxed or unwaxed as it seems to make no difference at all, from my limited understanding. In fact, a recent report actually suggested that the standard waxed lemons provide better flavour, so no point wasting money trying to source unwaxed varieties. Hopefully the lemon tree will grow and begin producing fruit over the next year or two, that would be handy!

 

Next was the water. I boiled the first litre and poured that over the top of the fruit and sugar, then added the next two litres, unboiled. It's warm enough to dissolve the sugar quite quickly. About a tablespoonful of vinegar was added and I used what I had available - cider vinegar. (The hens like it in their water.)

 

Job done! It's all been covered and is now sitting in the livingroom in its little bucket, infusing with flavour and alreay turning a pretty shade of pink. It will be left to soak until the weekend, but I'll give it a stir each day between now and then.

 

Come the weekend, the liquid will be strained, fruit set aside for some sort of pie filling or sponge topping and the resulting juice filtered off into my clip top bottles. I have three of those, recycled, of course, plus there are a couple of screw cap glass bottles that can be used. If my estimates are correct, I reckon it will cost 15p per bottle, including the electricity needed to boil the kettle.

 

I realise that this won't be particularly strong in the alcohol stakes, but a fortnight is sufficient time for the sugars to start fermenting and it does seem to work with almost every type of berry, edible flower or fruit I have tried.

 

Have fun if you try this at home, but don't forget to check the bottles for any signs of over-fizz, s pink isn't the easiest colour to get out of anything that happens to be in the way.

 

Until later,

 

Frugaldom.

Sunshine, 26C, Harvesting and my Saffron Crocus Project

Another Frugaldom Microholding Update

The weatherman said showery, so we weren't expecting sunshine and the temperature soaring to 26C - but that's what we got! This was a great bonus, as my Saffron Crocus bulbs arrived yesterday.

With nowhere organised for planting the new bulbs, today's sunshine was an open invite to get out into the garden and get some work done.

The first job of the day was clearing a space. We're making this raised bed close to the house so that I can nip out first thing in the morning to collect all the lovely saffron that I'm hoping to grow. This will make a great addition to the 'Frugal Gourmet' range, as it can accompany the quail eggs.

I had 7' of space between the patio peas and the start of the herb garden, so that's where the bed has been built. It's 30" wide and about 12" deep. After clearing the gravel down to soil level, I lined the bed with weed supressant, added some rubble and then a layer of mixed sand and soil to help provide extra drainage.

Meanwhile, H began digging soil from the hill at the foot of the garden, which is gradually being excavated as the future site of a summerhouse. Each barrow load of soil was riddled to ensure all the stones and weeds were removed before it gets tipped into the bed. As you can imagine, this is taking quite some time to do, so the bulbs won't be getting planted tonight; maybe tomorrow, if the dry weather stays with us.

Another job that was desperately needing done was that of harvesting the carrots. These have grown exceptionally well here. I'm sure that it's because I sowed the seeds in a 50:50 soil and sand mix.

We've been eating carrots for several weeks now, plus there are quite a few already blanched, bagged and frozen. Today, I lifted what was left of them and filled a bucket! These now all need to be washed, blanched and frozen for using through autumn and winter.

Once I'd emptid the carrot bed, it was weeded, dug, raked and then resown with an early variety of carrot seed that should grow over the winter. I'll feed this bed with either nettle or comfrey fertiliser, depending on what's available first.

Some weeding gets done almost every day here, it has to, otherwise the place would soon be overrun. Today, I weeded around the snowball turnips and french beans, managing to pick a few for dinner while there. There were also another couple more courgettes and patty pan squash, so it made for an excellent day's harvesting. There were even a couple of the outside tomatoes needing picked, so I'll cut more lettuce for sandwiches at lunchtime tomorrow. I might even splash out and make another quail egg salad.

A few posts back, I mentioned that I had extended the pumpkin bed by doubling it in size. I'm really glad that I took the time to do this, as the plants are growing at a rate that makes me think of Jack and the giant. The pumpkin foliage has already spread out to the edge of the larger bed and there are several melon-sized fruits hiding beneath the leaves and tendrils. There's also the occasional munching crittur!

I read an article that suggested slitting the stalks on the top of the pumpkins to ensure enough water is absorbed, but I have not attempted this. Nor have I cut out any of the extra pumpkins, as recommended, to enable only the best two or three to develop. I'll leave them another couple of weeks to see how they grow, then I'll decide from there. The biggest and best will have tiles sat under them to prevent their sinking into the soil and, hopefully, help prevent them from rotting.

Across from the pumpkin bed I have raised beds with brussel sprouts, leeks, cabbage and broccoli. This is the first year that I have grown the sprouting variety, but it seems to be coming along quite well, despite my continual war against the dreaded cabbage white butterflies. The caterpillars have hatched in several places, but I simply didn't get around to sourcing enough netting to cover them all. I'm trying my best to keep on top of the problem and the hens are helping by enjoying pecking their way through all the leaves I keep removing in a bid to rid the plants of their pests. 

The first lot of quail chicks that hatched out in the incubator are now ust over 3-weeks-old. They are already feathered up, out of their brooder and into a large cage, wher they have fun running in and out of their little wooden 'houses'. It's still very difficult to tell the sexes, as most are colour variations, but the speckles have appeared on one of the normal coloured chicks, so we do know that it's a female. This first lot of hatchlings are due to be sold with the first prospective buyer expected tomorrow.

Moving further down the garden, we arrive at the micro-orchard. This is where all the ducklings are now happily out and about with Phoebe and Joey, the adult pair of white ducks.

We're still not 100% sure how many ducks and how many drakes hatched, but there is definite quacking coming from at least half of them.

These youngsters are now 6-weeks-old, are almost fully feathered and aren't much smaller than the adults. (That's Joey preening himself by the side of the pond.)

To the rear of the ducklings photos you can make out the row of late potatoes that I planted. I can hardly believe how quickly these have grown! H has had to earth them up several times already, yet they've been in the ground for less than a month.

Here's how they are looking as of this afternoon, their stalks and leaves reaching almost a metre high! Hopefully there'll be some potatoes forming beneath all that foliage, otherwise we're going to be really short of potatoes this year.

At the bottom of the micro-orchard is an old Victoria plum tree. This has served us rather well, as I've already had about 5kg of plums from it, most traded out through the local LETS group, plus others eaten or stewed down and made into crumbles. As you can see by the photo, the bulk of the fruit has still to be picked.

Many thanks to Nicky for collecting me an extra 6kg of sugar while she was in Stranraer. This means that the next lot of plums can be picked here and made into jam without worrying about having to pay £1.15 per kilo for sugar. The Tesco offer works out at about 57p per kilo, so it's a huge saving for the likes of us, at less than half the price of the local store!

Jean, if you happen to read this, I got the new blackcurrant bushes planted this afternoon and also managed to make space for the turnips.

Tomorrow, weather permitting, we might be able to get the rest of the crocus bed filled with soil and get the bulbs planted. Can you tell that I'm looking forward to growing these? Let's hope that by planting Crocus Sativas bulbs, they lead to crocus satisfaction here in Frugaldom.  :)