Sealed Pot Challenge

Do you have a sealed pot?

We do....

We have two in fact, one for each of us. Amy had hers bought for a birthday present by her godmother, and I was so envious of the idea and concept that Amy bought me my own, and it looks just like the one above. It is a ceramic pot with a whole to put coins or notes in. You can't get them out unless you smash the pot so it is less tempting to take a few quid out here and there. I often empty the contents of my wallet's coin pouch in here to lessen the weight.

Thanks to the wonderful SFT, I have found out that many other bloggers have a similar sealed pot. So, a whole group of us have determined a date to smash our pots to pieces. The date set is the 3rd December. Would you like to join us?

The great thing about the 3rd December is that it is just in time for Christmas and when your nearest and dearest ask you what you want for Christmas just tell them you want a nice, fancy, new sealed pot.

We hope our savings can go towards a nice treat. Maybe towards a holiday or something we really need.

Check out SFT's blog by clicking here to read more about the sealed pot challenge.

The next context clue will be revealed tomorrow.

Thanks for stopping by!

Martin

Glamping

Glamping is camping for glamourous people. You get dressed up in your best frock, buy a pop up tent and set off for the campsite. Ok, we bought the pop up tent but the night's sleep was far from glamorous. I had Amy whining all night, that the tent was leaking and she was cold. It was only spitting, so I said she was being silly. (By the way, I was snuggled up nice and warm and was also completly dry). I can only appologise for dismissing her concerns during the night when I saw how waterlogged her half of the tent was this morning. We are in need of some waterproofing spray before we go again in a few weeks time. Not comfortable to  be sleeping in the wet. (Sorry!)

I don't have many memories of camping, other than in my back garden when I was a kid. So the whole experience on Wednesday and Thursday was very new and refreshing. All the simple things were such good fun.

We played games such as tennis, catch, football and boules..

What tremendous skill...

Getting back to the real basics regards eating and drinking was nice. Boiling the kettle on the gas cooker, and preparing dinner and breakfast in the same way too! The whistling of the kettle was lovely...

We had chilli con carne with pasta for tea and a fry up for breakfast. Divine!

The tent it self looked good, despite the rain problem later in the night.

The campsite was really cute. It was easy to find, and the location was stunning. The pitch was well shielded from the wind, we were surrounded by tall trees and bushes. The campsite was lovely and quiet. It was only us, an elderly couple and the members of staff on the whole site.

There were lots of walks to do. The majority of fields in the area were planted with either rape seed, poppies or broad beans. Some had a combination of all of them where seeds had obviously spread from previous or neighbouring crops...

We walked through a broad bean field which had a public footpath in the middle of it...

It looked like they were up for a good harvest anyway.

There was plenty of reading to do in the evening too. We bough almost every self-sufficient book/magazine we came across when we did a spot of shopping in Bourton itself...

We have definately extended our home library. We bought some great magazines, and some books about chickens, bees and home brew. We also bought some more books when we popped in to the town of Brodway on the way back home. Ooops!

There were no lights on the campsite so during the night it was nice and dark and you could see all of the stars. Due to the brillaint location and landscape we got a good view of the evening's sun set....

We've only been back a day, and we already can't wait to go back!

We'd like to reveal, that we will be running a blog contest from Monday, which will run for 3 weeks. If you would like to enter the competition for a chance to win a £20 'Our Good Life' hamper including seeds, tools and other great resources then please visit us soon. How to enter will be posted at 5.30pm on Monday!

Good Luck if you decide to enter!!

We hope you have had a good weekend.

Martin

Gardener's World Live Report - Best of the Rest

Welcome to the final installment of our 'Gardener's World Live Report'. Don't forget that the show highlights are aired on BBC2 tonight (Friday) at 8pm.

These are the final photos we took of the event including the bits and bobs that didn't really fit in the other parts of the report.

To start off, probably the weirdest of all the gardens was the 'Honey, I've shrunk the garden' which featured a giant sculpted worm, and a lego character gardener. Being the proud owners of a wormery and fully appreciating all worms in our garden for soil fertility and chicken snack food, we thought this garden should feature in the report somewhere. So here it is...

After we saw this garden we spotted the GW team doing a bit of filming for tonight's show.

Over on the edible patches were some tasty looking cucumbers....

 There was a big presence of the UK Cucumbers growers society (genuine society) who were on hand following the e-coli outbreak in mainland Europe. There was also the UK Tomato Growers association, who were running a competition to name a new variety of tomato which was shaped like a love heart. It was very cute. We tasted it and it was very sweet, just like the concept, and we entered the name 'Bingham' after Amy's surname. It's quite a bouncy name and sounds like a variety of tomato or soft fruit.

We are always trying to make the garden more approachable to living wildlife. This display by the RSPB showed how easy it was to make a multi-storey hedgehog/insect hide using everyday bits and bobs..

To finally conclude our whole report. We are going to revisit the show gardens where two more really caught our eye.

This hobbit hole style garden called 'Naturally Playful' was quite innovative and interesting...

This garden called 'Remember the Dream' by MacMillan Cancer Research was rather inspiring. It had beautiful pink obelisks which reminded us of Rapunzel's tower and a small pool too...

The garden was a real nice touch, and deserved it's high accolades. It wouldn't be fair not to include this garden following the support we got when Amy's mum was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago. Any mention, large or small will hopefully spread the underlining message...

Well, that pretty much rounds up our four part report. Remember, that parts 1, 2 and 3 can be found directly beneath this post on the homepage.

We had such a great time and we hope you enjoyed reading about it.

Martin and Amy

Gardener's World Live Report - Part 1

Last night, I couldn't sleep. I was like a child at Christmas. I just kept thinking 'I'm going to Gardener's World tomorrow, I'm going to Gardener's World tomorrow etc.' I think we were both so excited.

We were up early this morning and left home at about 7:45 am to make sure we were amongst the first throught the barrier and in to the event. I'm going to do this report in three parts. This one now is about all the amazing and fun things that we bought (because that's what yo uare all really interested in) and then tomorrow morning will be a feature on the show gardens (including our own rankings) and then finally tomorrow afternoon/evening you will get all of the rest!

There are so many problems with this event. The first problem is that you spend a lot of money on gardening products, and then secondly they add the Good Food Show to the event too. Therefore you spend a lot more money in the Good Food Show. The third problem, which is a genuine problem is that you buy so much stuff and then you soon realise that one more piece of straw will break the camel's (your) back, therefore everybody buys a £12 trolley and you are constantly getting hacked with it. (We bought 3 tubtrugs to carry things in, they will have a use after today!)

Well here is what we bought. Quite an array of useful bits and bobs...

I mentioned in a previous post about how we are rapidly preparing for winter. We scoured all of the great seed offers available and bought loads of seeds, you can just about see them laid down on the table above. When it come to seed buying, I have a real addiction and don't know when to stop. I think 'that one looks good, and that one, that'll do too', then you have more seeds than you realise to add to your already massive seed collection. Oh well. I love it. I discovered a few great varieties too which look like they are ideal for smaller plots and gardens. The whole list of seeds is as follows....

Vegetable and Fruit Seeds
Courgette - Zucchini
Cauliflower - Igloo
Kale - Dwarf Green Curled
Turnip - Oasis
Aubergine - Orlando F1 Hybrid
Strawberry - Woodland
Climing Bean - Blauhilde
Sweetcorn - Hark F1 Hybrid
Brussel Sprouts - Brilliant F1 Hybrid
Swiss Chard - Bright Lights
Swede - Brora
Broad Bean - Aqua Dulch Claudice
Courgette - Foleil F1 Hybrid
Tomato - Gardener's Light
Lettuce - Little Gem
Brocolli - Purple Sprouting

Flower seeds
Mixed Wildflowers
Dwarf Topalino

The ones that are in bold have already been sown in to pots! How good are we! We got home about 4:45pm and we were in the garden until about 7:30. So much to do today, and even more to do tomorrow.

We also bought a great book about allotments called 'The allotment source book' by Caroline Foley, but in general it looks like a great book about growing your own (more reading...)  for only £5 too. It was marked up at £20 originally. We both love an impulse buy and bargain!

In the photo you can see the lovely planter we bought. It was very 'rustique' and we have filled it with potting compost and scattered various herb seeds. It will look great as a mini herb garden.

Amy also bought a fat ball maker for making our own fatballs for the birds.

Here are the 'growing' things we bought...

You can just about recognise a few of the things we bought.

The last few years at Gardener's World they have had a 'plant swap' stall, where you take a plant you don't want or need and swap it for one of the others that somebody else has brought in. This time, they changed it a bit. So you donated your plants to Children in Need and then if you wanted one of the other plants you simply donated what you thought it was worth to charity. From this tent we bought three sweetcorn plants that are very well established. Remember our sweetcorn failure when we planted the seeds earlier in the year. We also got a butternut squash plant that was at the top of our shopping list before hand anyway.

Well. The sweetcorn have been transported in to their final growing position too...

......in the large yellow tubtrug next to the rhubarb. We have had such great success with growing the courgettes in a tubtrug that we had no hesitation putting the sweetcorn in one too. Well we did have 3 brand new tubtrugs to use up too...

One of my favourite buys was this georgeous 'Filius Blue' pepper plant. The plant is full of small sized chilli peppers with the most indulgent purple colour, however they apparently turn red as they finally turn ripe.

Amy is very busy in the background labelling all the plants. We bought some funky yellow plant labels and we have now labelled everything.. and have abruptly ran out of labels for future use.

Look at the purple flowers too. This is a really ornamental type, it certainly brings some lovely colour to the veg patch especially with new tubtrugs and the yellow labels...

Simply georgeous!

I mentioned earlier that we bought the butternut squash plant, well Amy was intrigued when she saw a Turk's Turban squash in the show gardens... so we bought one of those too! The area that used to be where the eglu sat has been raised up with some well rotted home made compost and some multi purpose compost from left over bits from one place and another. The two squash plants are planted here, and are waiting to be joined by the pumpkin plants which I am going to leave for a little bit longer in the greenhouse...

We can't wait for our own squash to grow.



We bought plenty of delicious food at the Good Food Show but I'll put that all in part 3.

We've had the most amazing day, and I hope you've enjoyed reading about what be bought!

Part 2 will be up at 9am tomorrow (sharp!).

Thanks for reading.

Martin

Growing your own is on the up...

I found this wonderful chart on Sue's blog. It is a fantastic illustration of the increase in the trend to grow your own fruit and vegetables. Some very interesting statistics too.

Martin

'The organic pedicure'

Well..

I had a go..

..and.....

it was strange..

..it tickled....

but I liked it...

.. and so did Amy (for the fourth time)

It was very fun indeed. How organic? Well, it's better than putting a load of gunky cream etc on your feet. Not that I normally pedicure of course (!!!), but I was interested to have my feet nibbled by fish. Once in a lifetime experience I think.

Would definately reccomend it to all you bloggers!

Martin

Something fishy going on :)

Hello everyone,

Hope you have had a lovely Thursday!

As Martin has promised, I will write about my fish pedicure I had on Wednesday afternoon. At frst, you want to resist putting you feet in, but after the first few minutes you get used to it. It starts of as a vibrating sensation and then it feels relazxing and you forget they are actually fish! The treatment lasted for 25 minutes and after you are given some lotion to put on and my feet do feel smoother. If you are too ticklish for you feet you can also get your hands done!

I love the way this treatment is relaxing, effective and an interesting experience and is eco friendly. It works well without all the chemicals and toxitants of other spa treatments.

I really would recommend it at least for a good giggle and for the experience!

Have a relaxing  night!

Amy

x



Paper Prom Dress

Hi,

This is my first post on our new blog.
This self sufficiency thing is really catching on to me. We thought it would be appropriate to share my A-Level Design and Technology project with you. The task was to create a bespoke, eyecatching piece of clothing for somebody to wear. I created a dress completly made from recycled PAPER for somebody to wear to an event such as last night of the proms.

Here are some pictures

Front

Back

Side

The bottom half is made from folded newspaper is stapled to the top half which is made from the pages of old music books which nicely ties in with the theme of last night of the proms.

I have also added the floral features made from scrap tissue paper. The flowers featured are poppies and daffodils. The poppy is a symbol of peace and remembrance whereas the daffodil shows new life and is generally a pretty flower.

We made bread today too and the chickens have been free ranging today too. I'll try and write another post soon if I can remember the login details this time.

Amy