Miss Thrifty

So what can you get with a £30 Morrisons voucher? The Sun newspaper’s social media agency got in touch to say that they would bestow a voucher for this very sum upon me, if I told y’all what I’d spend it on. I like a good challenge (and a good voucher!) and I said yes like a shot.

Now I do have a distinct advantage here, as right now I do our monthly shop at Morrisons. (I had been shopping at a big Asda, but the homeware aisles proved too distracting.) Right now I shop for two people on a budget of £80. I’ve posted before about how the best time to go shopping is during the hour before the store closes, when all the best bargains are to be found. Well, this is yet another example of what you can do with limited means, if you are prepared to trolley dash.

So here is how that £30 would fill a trolley, based on the latest offers on the Morrisons website and my most recent grocery receipt: (more…)

I must apologise for the extremely late running of Friday Bargains. This is because I was out on the razzle when I should have been posting. It’s all come good though: I was moping around Morrisons at the weekend and… Well, I say “moping”; I cleaned up!

Lots and lots and lots of £1 offers at the mo. Not the rubbish stuff, either: there are plenty of goodies to be had. I picked up everything from fish to potatoes.

Best of all there was a stand of summer bulbs and perennials, for £1 a bag. I picked up bags of lupins, red hot pokers, aquilegia and hollyhocks. I love me a good hollyhock!

Frugal Grandma is currently on a month’s sojourn in Egypt (and is apparently having a very nice time, down amongst the sun loungers) but when she returns I shall be asking her for planting tips.

I was in sunny(ish) Essex this weekend, catching up with some of my nearest and dearest. I spent yesterday hanging out with my grandparents. Not for the first time, my grandma’s thrifty supremacy had me marvelling. 

“Have some jam, dear”, she said, throwing open a cupboard in the garage to reveal shelves stacked with jars of glinting jams and jellies. The jars have all been saved, and much of the fruit comes from her garden or her friends’ gardens. I came away with marmalade, yellow plum jam, bullus plum jam (never heard of this but apparently it is “nice and sharp”) and a good old-fashioned blackberry and apple.

My grandma then insisted on filling the trunk of my car with a horticultural smorgasbord. She takes so many cuttings of her plants, her garden often resembles a garden centre: laden with plants and pots of various sizes. In went a hundredweight of busy lizzies, geraniums, clematis, a disinterred gooseberry bush wrapped in a damp towel, and more. When I admired a high-climbing jasmine, she set about it with her secateurs and handed me some long leafy stems, telling me that if I set these in earth, they’ll take.

And so to lunch! We had a trout, freshly caught and donated by one of my grandad’s friends, with homemade chips and homegrown veg. Pudding was a homemade creme caramel: fnar.

My grandma has discovered that Snappy Snaps is offering 6″ x 4″ photo prints for just 10p apiece, so we spent the afternoon browsing through her latest stack of holiday pictures.

Frugal Grandma, I salute you.

Do you have houseplants? Don’t bother buying those special leaf cleaning products, such as these £3.99 Leaf Shine Wipes from Betterware.

Just pop all your plants into the bathtub or shower, and spray them from above. It washes dust from leaves, freshens plants up, takes seconds and costs nothing.

Basil: Ants in the kitchen drove me mad last summer - until I discovered that basil is Ant Kryptonite. Buy a pot from the supermarket for £1.99 or thereabouts, put it in a bigger pot and (more…)