Vegetables

On Saturday we dug up the potatoes and ate them (yum!). Today I picked my peas and broad beans and we ate them (also yum!). Neither crop may have been large, but I have a lot of pride in them all the same. I've taken photos, but since my camera is dead they're on my phone, so I need to work out how best to get them from that to the laptop.

So in this post I'll just have to describe the crop to you and you can use your imagination!

Potatoes - 12 pea sized, 12 grape sized, 5 ping-pong ball size, 3 golf ball size and one tennis ball size (total 33, which fed myself, Menard and Danielle for dinner with salad - inc homegrown lettuce, and sausages, and then one more serving which I ate for breakfast the next day).

Peas - 4 pods, which yielded 22 peas

Broad beans - 6 pods (is that what you call the casings?) which yielded 17 beans (2 of them were pretty tiny). We also discovered that you can eat the casings, if they're fresh, which they certainly are, so we cut them up and boiled them with the beans and peas too.

Little bean update

Pretty sure I felt little bean move for the first time today. Very excited :)

Shoppping lists

My freezer is getting emptier, my cupboards are a little less full and a little more random in their content, I think it's time to write a 'money no object' shopping list. By that I mean it's time to stock up on those things which have been in the back of my mind for weeks, maybe even months, but that haven't been purchased because they're not a priority - for example mixed herbs. I ran out of those a while ago, but instead of using those I've been throwing in a mix of thyme, basil and oregano cos I did still have those, now, however, the thyme is running out and the oregano is getting low, maybe I ought to just shell out and get some mixed herbs.

I'm not saying I'm going to go crazy in the supermarket, although sometimes, for me, I think going crazy is when I have say under five pounds left in my week's budget and I go round the whole store figuring out to the penny what I'm going to buy with it! I'm saying it might be time to buy some meat, even if it's not reduced, stock up my herb supply, and maybe even purchase a few things that would make menu planning out of my current stock cupboards a whole lot easier.

Gardening is Delicious!

One of the things that I'm really enjoying about living in a house with our own garden (rather than a flat in a block, with no garden area at all) is that I get to grow stuff.
(I know I've mentioned in the past how exciting it is to be able to dry my washing out on the line, so I won't bother to mention that again!)

Anyway, growing stuff, very cool! I'm not talking about any of your boring common or garden flowers, nope, I'm talking edible stuff all the way. So far I've got potatoes, flat leaf parsley, basil, lettuce/salad (I've got a couple of containers, one with little gem lettuce and the other with a mixture of different salad leaves, including rocket) and I've also got what started off as 'mystery veg' - I bought a box from a charity shop which basically promised that if you buried that, box and all in the garden, you'd get a variety of different stuff as a result. I think I thought that for a quid or two it was worth a shot. A few months on and I've got three bean plants (not sure what sort of beans though, possibly broad bean? I must pick one and take a look inside!) and a pea plant. Now I'm not expecting a large crop from these, but eating anything that you've grown yourself is exciting.

And I've certainly not spent a lot of money on my garden. The containers are all either troughs or buckets with the owner of the house had left in the garden. The mystery plants cost a couple of ponds max (I can't really remember), I got some of the salad seeds free from a tv series last year which encouraged folk to grow their own stuff (you could email and request a pack of seeds, which I did), and the little gems came from the 99p store. The potatoes were my mum's which had started sprouting in the cupboard so she said I could have them. The basil and parsley were seed packets which we received as part of a wedding present (over two years ago) and despite being out of date, have grown well!

I know it's maybe getting a bit late in the season for some of you to plant things, but I definitely encourage you to give it a go - next year if you think it's too late for this year (although actually, a bit of googling or swagging would probably show you that there's something you could plant today!

hello, it's me

Hey lovelies, it's me!

I'm now somewhere between almost 16 and 14 weeks pregnant (depending on if you believe dates or scan). I'm not actually being sick much now, but I'm still feeling pretty sick and tired most of the time, and my bladder still seems to be doing that first trimester thing of needing to be emptied all the time! Due date early December - possibly the 4th or the 13th, or something inbetween!

Sophia is getting so big and boy is she chatty! Almost every day she uses words that I never even knew she knew! Some of her latest include "towel" "bork-it" (broken) "mouse" "f-lore" (floor). Every so often I consider making a list of all the words she uses in the day, but I haven't got around to doing it yet!

Uh, what else? Life is mostly ticking along. I'll try to be back again soon.

(I tried to post this last week as dated, but for some reason I couldn't get it to publish from my computer, so I've put it up from my mum's instead on the 21st, sorry for any confusion!)