Thursday 7 February 2013

Tomatoes galore

For the last two years, I've really wanted to grow the tomato 'Hundreds and Thousands'. They're relatively expensive at about £3.80 for eight seeds but each year they were always out of stock :-(.



Yesterday I placed my main orders for seeds for the year and happened to look on ebay for these tomato seeds - I was lucky enough to spot some, and at the great price of £3.24.......for SEVEN packs!!  So fifty six seeds for less than the price of eight.  This seed is slightly out of date, but whenever I've planted old seed before, it's just had a slightly lower germination rate.  I intend giving some to my Dad too, as he loves his gardening as much as I do.  I also got seven packs of Tumbler from the same seller.




The remainder of my seed shop went through MoreVeg and Premier Seeds Direct on Ebay.  Again fantastic prices compared to the main stream retailers.  MoreVeg do smaller amounts for on avaerage 50p a pack - some things I don't need 2000 seeds of !!  Premier Seeds Direct do normal size packs at about 99p, so I balanced my order between the two.  They're all on their way in the post now and I can't wait to see them.

One of the things I love about gardening is that it really is a year round hobby - there's always something to look forward to.  Either choosing seeds, waiting for them to arrive, sowing, waiting to see those first signs of life, through to the final harvest.  I'm hoping to have a better year in the garden than last year - fingers crossed!!

Tuesday 5 February 2013

Working so far :-)



I did a huge shop on pay day (25th Jan) over two shops - Asda and Tesco.  MySupermarket had worked out that it was cheaper to split it over the two, so I did  (clever website). Apart from the planned shop at Farmfoods to stock up on meat and fish I've only done a £15 shop so far to top up with milk, bread and eggs.  So - so far so good :-).



I've cooked some lovely meals, and even done a batch of baking.  I used the crown muffin moulds that I got from Silicone Moulds, which make muffins just like the huge ones in Costa and Starbucks only much cheaper!  A batter that makes 12 normal muffins makes six of these but they're gorgeous.  There's just no comparison with the shop bought ones.  I also made twelve apricot, coconut and dark choc ones.  I always like to have something home made to put in hubby's lunchbox.  Today's 'home made' was sandwiches made with foccacia - dough made in the bread machine then shaped on a baking tray, proved and baked in the oven.  It was gorgeous - a lovely texture made even better with the drizzle of oil and sprinkling of sea salt on top.  It's a lovely soft bread and hubby has had chunks of it filled with ham and tomato.

No wonder he gets so many nice comments about his lunchbox! ;-)