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 I was in the paddock the other day and, yet again, got annoyed that all of the massive apple trees in there are all the same variety of Bramley-type cooking apple. There are about six of these massive trees, and there's only so much I can do with a tiny fraction of them. The apples don't keep for very long so storing for longer than a couple months doesn't work. They are no good for making cider as they are too dry and sour. Apples for cider either need to be a combination of 90% eating/10% cooking or proper cider apples to give the right bittersweet taste.

 Then there's other fruit - a couple each of damsons and Mirabelle plum trees, two cherries, one very small normal plum and a huge conference pear that hardly produces much and what is there is so high we can't gather anything unless it drops to the ground. So I end up buying apples, pears and plums! Ridiculous!

 So, we have hatched a plan to plant more fruit trees.

 We don't want to plant proper standard trees because a) that will cut down the amount of available good grazing for the sheep due to the lack of light as the tree's leaves grow or b) the sheep will chew the new trees to nubbins, even with tree guards. So, we've decided to do cordons against the barn walls and then use electric fencing to keep the sheep off. It never dawned on me today just how much space we have against the barns.


Cordons are fruit trees that have been restricted to grow on a single stem so they can be grown against a wall or be trained into an edible hedge. The real beauty of them though is that the planting distance is 2.5ft between each one, which means you can get a lot of different varieties of fruit in a small space. In fact, you could probably get a different eating apple for a good six months of the year. We intend to grow them at a 45 degree angle so we can reach the top of the fruiting stem.


I started cutting back the nettles in the paddock (yet again!) the other day to begin prepping the area for the new plants and realised that I had never really noticed there were a few very thick wooden posts.


Closer inspection revealed these had previously had wires running across them, probably for soft fruit. A great find! All we need is the wires attached to them and we're pretty much good to go.

 I have three bare-rooted apple tree cordons to plant right now that I bought a while ago, but they are label-less and they could be anything so this morning I ordered new four fruit trees - three 1-year plants for training and one trained cordon - for delivery at the end of November:

 Apple: Scrumptious
Pear: Packham's Triumph
Gage: Oullins Golden (which is what we had at the old house)
Plum: Victoria

 At the same time I ordered the wire and fittings so by next weekend I'm aiming to have the wires in place ready to plant up the three mystery apples.

 Then every year from now on we will buy a couple of different varieties of fruit and expand the harvesting window.

 I'm getting quite excited by the new project!
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I used to enjoy baking and preserving, but for reasons I didn't fully understand until this weekend I haven't done them for a long time. I used to bake cakes, pies, and biscuits, and preserve all sorts of fruit and veg at our previous house but a combination of different factors has seen this drop off to almost nothing.

First, I find doing anything more complicated than a simple meal difficult with the lack of worksurface in the new house kitchen. The layout is not set up for smallholding tasks, a surprise given it used to run as a smallholding. I find pastry on any scale particularly difficult. I've had it in mind for a while now to change the layout of the kitchen to give me more dedicated space to prep more than just basic meals and store much more than the pantry will allow. That's a post for another day though. I tried to make do for a while but because it wasn't an enjoyable experience my enthusiasm petered out.

Second, I realised lately I've been spending too long on basic household tasks and less time doing what I actually enjoy, which is smallholding tasks. Should I do the hoovering or try making soap? Prep those tomatoes for drying or change the bed? Mow the lawn or bake a cake for the week? Because I work full-time it was all too easy to narrow my sights on chores and keep things ticking over. Then I thought, what about dropping the ball a bit more? Nothing stops just because the hoovering doesn't get done. The world doesn't tilt on its axis because the grass grows a fraction longer and the bed is a little more wrinkled.

So, Bank Holiday Monday I decided to do something about it.

I walked past the bed's weekly change and the lawn mowing in favour of collecting fruit from around the property and whipping up eight jars of jam with a little left over.


I also tried something new - not using cellophane and bands etc to seal the jars. I struggle with this every year as the quality of cellophane has decreased over the years; it often tears or doesn't seal properly. This time I simply washed and soaked the jars and lids in boiling water, poured in the jam and screwed down the lid tight. As the jam cooled, the central safety button on every single jar was successfully sealed as the vacuum sucked down each one. That saved me so much faffing around.

I cooked up some Bramley apples and combined them with blackberries to make some slices with puff pastry (the picture at the top of the post). I also cooked up a gingerbread tray bake, cut it into quarters and topped some with lemon icing and wrapped up the rest for later in the week.


As for the chores? I can confirm the world didn't stop.

I did the mowing yesterday evening and later today I will change the bed.
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Being frugal doesn't mean never spending any money. I do spend money, but I spend it consciously on things that matter the most to me and I try and find ways to get those things for as little money as possible. I've spent years adjusting my focus to spending money on - for the majority of the time - needs not wants.

In many respects I was already ahead of the game before I started this journey. I was different as a child because of the way I was brought up so I didn't value the same things my peers did as a teenager. I was brought up by parents who got what they wanted by buying secondhand, and if they couldn't they went without, and who valued careful frugal accumulation of assets, not debt. This was very different from my peers and their families so I stuck out like a sore thumb and became a target. I have a been a target for other's derision all of my life because I chose the path less travelled (good old Robert Frost!) but that has taught me mental toughness. Interestingly, I've never felt I should change to fit in - I could have done and maybe my life would have been easier - but something in me wouldn't allow me to change who I was for others. I think as a child I sensed that people who cared for me would not make me do something I didn't want to do, they wouldn't try and shame me or force me to do something that fitted their idea of me or made them feel less insecure about themselves.

I look around me and see people really suffering because they are incredibly bound up in the idea that their stuff defines who they are. The label on their wine or jeans, the type of car they drive, their brand of sunglasses, they are caught up in peer pressure and feel inadequate if they don't have things they think they need to have or face being seen as different and lose others' approval. They're great people but won't let anyone past 'the mask'.

One of my work colleagues recently 'needed' a £3,000 carbon fibre racing bike because without it he felt he wouldn't fit in with his other colleagues who biked together. Buying it left him so strapped for cash he couldn't afford to insure it separately, as requested by his home insurance company. It was stolen from his shed recently. The pain I saw on that man's face was very real and it wasn't just down to the feeling of violation that comes being the victim of a burglary. That bike, that object, defined who he thought he was and displayed to the world. Who was he without it? Someone he didn't like very much, I suspect, and felt others wouldn't either. 

Anyway, years ago when I first started down this path I was searching for a way to help me distinguish between needs and wants as I struggled with frugality. I still had debt left over from six years at University - student loans and credit cards - and I wanted them gone because the payments were preventing me from being able to save a decent amount for a deposit on a house. I came across Maslow's hierarchy of needs in the course of my work at a marketing agency and realised I could use it to craft a personal policy rather than an arbitrary list that might fail if I came across something that wasn't on it.

According to Abraham Maslow's theory of human motivation there are six different levels of needs: physiological, security, social belonging, esteem, self-actualisation and self-transcendence. You start at the bottom and move up through the levels as you master each each one. I realised that the first two levels could be adapted to define a pathway and help me navigate my way to financial comfort, maybe even independence. 

Starting at the first or bottom level, Maslow's physiological needs are:
  • Breathing
  • Water
  • Food
  • Sleep
  • Clothing
  • Shelter

If you think about it, even animals need these six things (obviously not clothing but they need a covering on their body to help keep them warm). They are common to all life. 



In terms of frugality, I adapted them and placed them in order of what I considered important:
  • Breathing - No smoking! I didn't smoke a lot (maybe five a day) but I was still spending money on a bad habit that could make me ill one day.
  • Shelter - making sure I always had the rent or mortgage no matter what happened
  • Water (utilities) - the most efficient use of all of the utilities for the best price
  • Food - from scratch as far as possible, and in bulk to reduce costs
  • Clothing - secondhand, and new stuff for Christmas and birthdays

Once I had those in place, I found that the majority of my daily decisions fell somewhere into those five. In time, I was able to turn to security needs:
  • Personal
  • Financial
  • Emotional 
  • Health and wellbeing

Adapted and placed in order of importance to me:
  • Financial (savings) - because without a money stash I would make poor decisions, and this would affect every one of the other needs below. I worked two jobs for years to lay down enough money to feel secure. 
  • Emotional/health and wellbeing - in the words of Les Brown "you have to get the losers out of your life". For me, that was people who made me feel bad, the doubters and the haters, which in turn affected my heath and wellbeing. It also meant getting out there and finding people who I connected with and who made me feel emotionally secure, who understood why I was embracing frugality and would embrace it with me (e.g. Martin!)
  • Personal - for me, this was securing enough time and space to down tools and take as much time as i need to feel rested and recharged by reading and crafting. No interruptions. The doubters and the haters had a real problem with me doing this. They wanted to know where I was all the time, what I was doing, why I was not spending money, why I was not considering them and why I was not doing 'cool' stuff. Didn't I know I needed their approval? Some actually took personal offence. Once people like that had gone, life got much easier. You know someone shouldn't be in your life any more when your heart sinks when you hear from them.

I won't go into the other Maslow levels, as they don't necessarily have frugality at their heart, but you can read about them more here. 



So, fast forward to today. We're still frugal - it's second nature now - and many things we do are on auto-pilot, which has freed us up to pursue other things. On Maslow's path I'm switching up and down between social belonging and esteem and moving towards self-actualisation. I have reached a point where I want to fill the gaps, the deficiencies, in myself and stretch and grow. 

I'm joining new groups and cultivating new friendships, as well as planning travel to unusual and interesting places around the world. I'm reading more material that stretches me and helps me understand the world through others eyes. I'm going back and watching all those films and reading those books I bypassed because I knew they would make me feel uncomfortable. I wasn't ready for them. Now I am and I'm embracing the discomfort.

We've got the basics down and that is allowing us to do more and learn more about ourselves. 
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It was dark at 9pm last night. Ridiculous. Where has the summer gone?

I'm starting to freeze and dehydrate a few bits out of the garden now to enjoy the harvest for a bit longer. I've rediscovered tzatziki after circumstance dictated I find a home for six huge cucumbers, some from the neighbours and some from a kind farmer on Martin's delivery. I used my own home grown garlic and dried mint, which I was quite chuffed about, and that made a few nice lunches.


The farmer also gave us 18 courgettes which, while it sounds lovely, simply transferred the problem of courgette gluts onto someone else. Unsurprisingly, after ploughing through that lot I'm not so keen on courgettes any more and unlike her I couldn't give any away. We're also producing pounds of tomatoes but the aforementioned farmer has also supplied us with loads as well, so I am currently part way through loading a full five layer stack on the dehydrator to preserve a few.


I realised last night that we only have about two weeks before it is Autumn, and I'm just about keeping up with my chores to get ready for winter. The biggest one is getting the new boiler fitted and that is bang on schedule. It's due to happen on 3/4th September, and we're just preparing the site now. We're moving from an indoor to an outdoor boiler, as there is no possible way we can fit a new oil boiler indoors that will abide by current regulations. I ordered the new boiler at the end of last month for delivery in time for the heating engineer's inspection last week. I chose to research and buy a system myself, as I know he marks up any products he buys. In this case, that would have been several hundred pounds on top of the usual trade discount I'm sure he gets.


Then an electrician came in yesterday morning to move some electrics out from where the boiler will sit, which the former owner had put in for outdoor lighting. It used to be a seating area that we kept our gardening paraphernalia on as we didn't like sitting there. Now all we need to do is buy and lay two large concrete paving slabs on a dry sand/cement mix and our part in this will be complete.

In the end I did buy 500 litres of heating oil, which is galling as last year the sum I just paid covered the majority of a 1000 litre order. I'll wait to see if the prices come down in the autumn; they can't keep on rising - sooner or later they'll come down.  I've ordered 10 bags of solid fuel and rang our local wood supplier, who owns an ash forest, to ask for a delivery of two cubic metres of wood. Next year we're hoping to build up enough wood that we don't need to buy any in, as a poorly apple tree in the back of the paddock has to come down and I want to get that cut up and under cover to dry out and season properly.

Two things I won't be doing this year is having someone in to sweep the chimney or empty the septic tank, which together usually cost me about £170. We have our own rods now to do the chimney and with so much heat this year the septic tank will be lower than normal so can keep going for a bit longer. I might get some beneficial bacteria to empty down there and keep things ticking over, and then inspect over the winter.

So that's the big stuff being sorted. Just got to write a list of all of the little stuff.


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Something happened on Friday and I'm still steaming about it.

I get health insurance through my employer from a company called Vitality Life. I pay quite a lot for it - £76 a month - but it is an all singing and dancing policy that requires no medical, allows all pre-existing conditions, and the slate is wiped clean every year. It is taken out of my salary at source.

I decided to take it out 3.5 years ago for several reasons.

1) I only get 10 days full sick pay and 10 days half, so the longer I have to wait for medical treatment the less money I will earn.

2) I don't like the postcode treatment lottery, where I may not get the best drug to treat my condition because my local NHS primary care trust won't pay for it. With many private health insurers there are no limits like this.

3) At the time I had a very poor rural GP practice run by men in their mid-60s who thought the solution to all women's problems were antidepressants or having a baby. As these old fools owned all of the local practices and took turns in staffing them, I could tell anything serious would mean me contacting a private GP if necessary to proper medical care.

Vitality Life has a type of scheme where you earn points for exercising and you can exchange those points for discounts on goods and services. I never bothered because the discounts were for goods and services I never used or had no access to, and to track my exercise I would have to buy a special branded 'tracker' from one of their partners (how convenient) or use an iPhone app. As I had no desire to buy a useless gadget or expensive phone just to record I went for an hour's walk or did some weights I never bothered. And workouts like yoga or Pilates don't even register on the approved list of activities.

Then late on Friday a sneaky email went out to all staff to announce that all staff that had not engaged with the scheme would be subjected to an annual excess on claims of £250, so effectively a) calling them lazy because obviously anyone who hadn't engaged must be still sat on their bums and should be penalised and b) pushing them into either accepting this excess or buying a tracker from one of Vitality's partners to track their exercise to avoid it.

I'm afraid I saw red. This was no choice at all. Someone on a low income who wanted access to good quality fast medical treatment and not spend money they don't have on gym memberships or heart rate trackers would have to stick the excess on a credit card or, if they really couldn't afford, go through the NHS waiting times.

Then after some thought at the weekend I realised I'd made a bit of a mistake. What I haven't done, and should have, is revisited this policy to decide if it is still worth it.

I've had the 'security' of private health insurance with pretty much every office/lab job I've ever had, although this is the first one I've actually paid for myself. I say 'security' because lately I've started to wonder if it isn't some great con.

First, as far as cancer and heart disease are concerned, the NHS is just as fast and responsive as the private sector. In fact, chances are whether you are NHS or private the same consultant will treat you in the same time frame. Not for every condition but the vast majority of conditions and certainly the ones that are life-threatening.

Second, Martin and I both agree that is there is anything that we need urgently we will use our emergency fund to pay for it. So if one of us needs a drug or procedure that is 90% effective and three times the price of an NHS drug or procedure that is 70% effective, we'll pay the money for it. For us the extra 20% is worth paying for. In some instances that's the difference between life or no life at all.

Third, I now have a fantastic GP surgery that is fast, highly responsive and has a wide range of staff, including four paramedics, four physios, phlebotomists, and a range of very experienced male and female health nurses as well as umpteen GPs. In fact, our GP surgery is astonishingly quick when it comes to minor conditions. Martin's torn calf muscle was assessed by a surgery paramedic within 24 hours. He saw a physio within three days, had a further physio appt three days later, and then had a physio appt every week thereafter for six weeks unless healed. The physio sent a request to the surgery for sick notes and these were completed ready for pick up in three hours. I know some people who wait for weeks for just a physio appt.

Fourth, given how competitive the private health insurance industry is, it is getting harder and harder to make successful claims as there are a large number of exclusions and hoops to jump through. Whose to say if I ever made a claim it would be paid? Imagine paying all that money in premiums over years and your insurer refusing to pay due to a technicality.

So given all of that, why do I still have this all singing, all dancing policy?

I've missed a trick there haven't I?

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Our house is not on mains gas, so we use kerosene to fuel our (ancient) boiler backed up with log burners.

I quickly realised when we moved here that the price of heating oil fluctuates depending on the season, and when you need it the most it will be the most expensive. Generally, winter prices can be 10-15p more expensive than summer so it pays to buy as much as possible in the summer.



Our tank takes, when full, 2500 litres and I have a monthly saving plan with a heating oil brokerage called Boilerjuice. Whenever I want a quote, I plug in the figures into its online calculator and it collects prices from local suppliers. Generally, I find the quotes are pretty competitive when compared to ringing round the suppliers and the longer you can leave it before needing the oil the cheaper it is.

So, this year as usual I waited until August to get my quotes for 2000 litres delivered ready for winter, only to find that the heating oil prices have gone barmy. Last year at this time I paid 33p per litre. This year I am being quoted 49p per litre. I paid £660 last year and this year it will cost £1050 for the same amount of oil. That's a whopping 60% increase.

So, I got up at 5:30 am this morning to do the figures and come up with a different strategy.

First, I'm going to get a list of suppliers and go direct to see if I can get a few pennies off a litre. I can also get the money in my Boilerjuice plan account refunded back to my bank account if I need to pay for fuel elsewhere.

Second, depending on what prices I can get direct, rather than fill the tank up I'm going to get the minimum order quantity of 500 litres and watch the prices like a hawk to see if they come down. My research this morning tells me that in three of the last five years October-December has had lower prices than the summer.

Third, we're having a new boiler fitted in September, which should be a lot more economical with fuel consumption than the current 23 year old one so hopefully what we do have will last longer. I'm also having new accurate digital thermostats put in so combined with the new system pump I had fitted in January, our consumption should be lower.



Fourth, I'm going to add to our stockpile of wood and order some smokeless fuel so we can delay putting the heating system on for a bit longer this autumn.

Fifth, I'm going to thoroughly prep this house for winter. I'm going over to Moneysavingexpert forum to have a read of their Preparing for Winter thread to pick up some ideas. Every week I can keep this house warm and delay putting the heating on is money in our pocket.

Finally, I'm going to pray that this heatwave continues well into the Autumn!
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