iPod fun

Yes, we have a geek in the family. She cannot help but fiddle with all things, seeking and finding menu item after menu item and changing every setting along the way. Faces anyone...?

Tip to save money

We have lived for years on an income that is below the minimum wage. Recently living has become significantly more difficult as prices have continued to rise while our income has remained essentially the same as it was 12 years ago. At the same time the children have grown into eating machines, devouring everything in sight, then requiring new shoes to fit their expanded feet.

Do you want to know some tips to save you dollars and cents? Here goes:

1. Light bulbs: Change the light bulbs you use a lot to flouro bulbs. These bulbs are a lot more expensive than the old-style incandescents but will cut your electricity bill over time.
2. Petrol vouchers: Collect Pak’n Save and Countdown petrol vouchers and use them to fill your car, and the extra tanks you have bought. We save about $17 every time we fill the car and the tanks.
3. Bread: Make your own bread. This is a lot cheaper than buying bread and there are a few great simple recipes.
4. Buy your fruit and veges at the local market rather than at the supermarket. The goodies may not look as perfect but are significantly cheaper.
5. Stop using your car, and if you are driving then keep your speed down. Fuel usage us roughly proportional to v-squared where v is the speed you are travelling at. 90km/h will be easier of the fuel bill than 100km/h.
6. Get you mortgage down as quickly as possible so that your dollars are not gobbled up in bank interest.
7. Don’t waste your dollars on coffees and eating out. It may only be a few dollars but over a year this adds up to a lot of money.
8. Use the library. Book in New Zealand are really expensive.
9. Don’t feed yourself of TV advertisements or you will be tempted to do what the advertisers want. Surprised? Or you could get rid of the idiot box altogether.
10. Don’t buy newspapers. Use the internet for news.
11. If possible, get a Vodafone wireless landline. $25 per month is a lot less that $40-$40 for a copper wire landline. The problem is that internet (ADSL) generally requires copper line. We have wireless internet so do not require a phone line.
12. Do not pay monthly mobile phone charges AND landline charges. What a waste of money. And join www.2degreesmobile.co.nz instead of the overpriced Telecom and Vodafone.
13. Get a big deep freezer and buy frozens on special and in bulk.
14. Buy glasses online rather than at the optometrists. They are much cheaper even importing them from the USA (e.g. about $40 NZD).

Do they know its Christmas

Christmas got off to slow start here, but the girls made up for it.

Christmas tree. (Disclaimer: I had no hand what so ever in the decoration of this tree, nor am I responsible for its lean)

Homemade advent calendar. Those who have visited my house may recognise it. I actually hadn’t got around to putting it away from last Christmas, so its been hanging there. All year. Made putting it up really easy.

Christmas mice mince pies – yum!

Christmas lilies. In the North Hemisphere these are called June lilies, because they flower in June. I find this weird.

Presents! Mostly for the children.

Our nativity scene. Yes the people are made from toilet rolls.

The nativity scene is a good reminder that Christmas has nothing to do with any of the previous pictures, no matter how much we many enjoy those other aspects.

Christmas is about remembering that God sent his only son to earth. It is the beginning of God’s plan, his way of making it possible for us to reconciled to him. Our culture has largely discarded the real meaning of Christmas, probably because they don’t want to be confronted with the person of Jesus. So once you’ve filled your tummies with food and opened your presents, it would be a good time to reflect on the actual meaning of CHRISTmas.

Eating this week - 19 December

I realised when looking at the calendar that this will be my last vege post before Christmas. I think we will have to have a special mid-week version, as I plan to do the shopping a bit earlier this week so I’m not in a supermarket on Christmas Eve.

After complaining about the dry weather we have had enough rain this week to float Noah’s boat. Our tank has gone from 1/2 empty to full in a week. Despite the wet it has been warm, which has benefited the garden.

The good news is that there is now plenty to eat. All I spent this week was $2.50 on mushrooms and $1.95 on tomatoes.

This week we will eat 4 lettuces, spring onions, zucchini, strawberries, raspberries and potatoes. We will eat the first of the beans and the last of the peas. The peas have not coped well with the heat.

I have also grown a very this very large broccoli, by far the biggest I have ever grown. With all this abundance I think we saved about $20.00.

I haven’t been reporting on fruit but this week will eat the first plums of our faithful tree.

I didn’t plant it so I’m not 100% sure what type it is,but I think it is Duff’s Early Jewel. Every year, for the past three years, it has had a wonderful crop of red skinned, yellow fleshed plums starting the week before Christmas. Da Man and I shared this plum, and it tasted very good!

Flower power

I meant to post this last week, better late than never.

Every year we make a present for the girls music teachers. After so many years it can be hard to think of something original. This year I knit them reverse-bloom face cloths.

I used dishcloth cotton, which I bought from Skeinz. We packaged them up with some very nice soap and they looked great.

The cloths took about two days each to knit, so they were a quick present and I have heard from G1’s teacher that she really liked it.

Eating this week - 12 December

I know, this is a bit late. The merriness of the season has left the homely household a bit overwhelmed.

Despite the extreme rounds ‘bring a plates’, including a BBQ where we were actually supposed to bring a plate to eat off, (I missed that part -we were loaned some plates) we are still eating our veges.

We picked about 500g of strawberries and 250g of raspberries in one go on Sunday. I meant to take a photo of the bowlful, but anyway you know what a strawberry looks like. The other things we have been eating include lettuces, spring onions, peas, and zucchini. If I include the berries I think we saved about $12.00.

I had to buy carrots, for some reason I never grow very good carrots, onions, cucumber, tomatoes and peppers. All that cost about $14.00.

On the bright side our cucumbers are flowering and there is fruit set on both the peppers and the tomatoes. Another boost, particularly to cucumbers, is that our weather has finally turned in to a typical December pattern, humid. Cucumbers love it warm and damp and so do melons. Maybe this year I will bet my record of two watermelons!

Eating this week - 5 December

This week we’re eating berries and rhubarb.

This is what I picked from our plants, it filled the sink. I froze most of it, but we are also eating it stewed.

We have eaten about three punnets of raspberries and two of strawberries. We still have more to come, but I think that the raspberries will be a bit slower this week, maybe one punnets worth. We are still eat the salad ingredients, lettuce, spring onions, radishes and peas. This week we will pick our first zucchini. This is the earliest we have eat them since we moved to Palmerston North. There are two reasons for this, starting the seedling in the tunnel house and a sunny November.

This week I think we will save about $13, which is great because I only spent $7.00. I bought a 3kg bag of carrots and some tomatoes. This is partly because I did buy quite a bit last week, but also the garden is coming in to full production.

We still have much to look forward to, fresh beans!

Peppers, in December!

Eating this week - 28 November

We are running late this week. I wrote most of this on Monday but I couldn’t find the camera cable.I located it on Tuesday, but got too busy to work photo magic, so read on…

This week has been about heat. It was 26 degrees at 5pm on Sunday. The Manawatu is usually damp, but we have little rain in November, maybe 3 days.

This hot, dry weather is not good for peas. I’m hoping to start eating our peas this week, raw of course! Why cook fresh peas when you can eat them frozen ones hot at any time. But I don’t think our crop is going to be great, the plants are not really flowering anymore.

But the heat lovers are growing well.

We will eat zucchini before Christmas and we ate 2 deserts with raspberries last week.

We also ate our first new potatoes.

There was 1kg. I decided not to work out how much this kg of yummy potatoes actually cost. I planted 3 kg of seed potatoes so the yield was negative. I think these potatoes suffered from the wet weather we had in September and early October. The potatoes I planted in mid-October have huge tops, that are starting to flower. This is not the first time that my early potatoes have had a poor yield. I think I should learn that our wet springs mean that I should stick to later cropping potatoes.

We are still eating lettuces, spring onions and radishes. Our berries are starting to crop well. I think we will pick about one punnet of raspberries and the same in strawberries. I have also sprouted some more lentils.

It is hard to price raspberries and peas. They are very expensive in shops. The price of lettuces has come down, so maybe we will save about $15.00.

On Saturday the girls and I went to Otaki for a diabetes family camp. On the way we were able to stop at a road side vege shop. They had a lot of beautiful, fresh veges, which we indulged in. I began to type a list but we bought a lot, so much that  I’m hoping that it will last us 2 weeks.

Book review - Diabetes Rising

I almost didn’t pick this book up. I saw it when I was browsing through the ‘Health and Wellness’ section of our public library. I was actually looking for a book on treating back pain with Pilates.

My initial thought, when I read the title, was that I didn’t need another person telling me that my daughter has diabetes because of what she ate, or didn’t eat, or because she wasn’t breastfeed for long enough. Also ‘the what to do about’ tag line rubbed me up the wrong way. I get people asking me we have tried herbal treatments and low or (much worse) no carb diets.

I was curious enough to begin reading the prologue, which starts with a story about a small, wealthy, town in Massachusetts that experienced a steep rise in the number of children diagnosed with type one. Dan Hurley is a good writer, I was hooked, enough to get the book out, just so I could finish reading the story.

Well I read the whole book and really enjoyed it. It has three sections, in section one Hurley outlines the history of both type one and type two diabetes, and how the current treatments were arrived at. In section two he looks at the causes of type one and type two diabetes and in section three the possible cures.

As a parent of a type one I learned a lot from section one.Section two made me think, but I found this section the hardest to read. There was too much speculation about what is causing the rise in type one, and he didn’t address the theory that there actually no rise but a drop in age diagnosed, which is causing a statistical blip.

Section three was exciting to read. Hurley writes about the cutting edge research in type one diabetes.The development that gave me the most hope was a closed loop insulin pump or artificial pancreas. This pump would take blood sugars and dispense insulin based on these readings, so functioning like a normal pancreas.

Hurley is a type one and I really appreciated that he injected his own experiences. This helped me to understand what it could be like for daughter.

So, if you are a diabetic (type one or type two), live with a diabetic or know a diabetic, I would recommend you read this book.

Eating this week - 21 November

We are back!

This weekend we went away to Napier for a short camping trip that we had been planning for about 3 months. I forgot to take the camera, so no pictures of the hotsprings, or the road we took to get to them.

On the way home I was able to stop at a roadside vege shop. I spent $18 and brought a broccoli, 1/2 cabbage, a cucumber, 1 kg of tomatoes, 3 peppers, 2 avocados and 3 punnets of strawberries.

The garden is slowly coming into production. We are still eating lettuces, but also mesclun and radishes. These will be complimented by spring onions, salad anyone? The broccoli I planted in August produced small heads, but they now have side shoots. While I was picking one of these I had a nasty fright.

Can you see a caterpillar? I have never seen them in November before. This has sent me scrabbling for the the derris dust. I am also considering buying a length of biomesh. Despite the extra protein I don’t think it increased the value of our home grown veges, I think they saved us about $8.00.

I hope that soon our garden will be producing all that we eat. Here is some of the potential.

Peas, the pods are slowly filling out. Our snowpeas have also had 3 pods, but they disappeared before the photo shoot.

The raspberries are ripening, I’ve ordered some bird netting so that we will actually get to eat these.

The cherry tomatoes are flowering, I’m hoping for tomatoes by Christmas.

By the way you may notice that the broad beans have dropped off the list. The thought of shelling them has lead me to ignore them, but there are so many out there now I having nightmares about the work involved