My plant of the week: Ceanothus (Californian Lilac)

My absolute favourite shrub is Californian Lilac, with its mass of beautiful blue thimbles (much loved by bees) at this time of year. I particularly love the variety Concha, which becomes absolutely smothered in blue - some years you can scarcely see the leaves. However, I never seem to get it right with them - mine tend to grow too little or - as below - too much.


Here in Suffolk, they've failed to thrive here in our feeble, sandy soil. The ones I've planted into the ground have soon died; ones in big pots have lasted a few years max but then been hit by particularly hard winters.

My latest purchase is currently looking pretty and I'll plant it out soon. I had an unopened bag of top soil lined up to help create a nurturing new location, but found that the bag is currently home to a zillion ants so I'll need to get some more.


In contrast, the last pair I planted in London (Concha plus another whose name escapes me) grew far too fast, shooting up to more than 10 feet high in just a few years years. For a Ceonothus lover like me, it's hard to to make yourself prune them - every branch lopped off means hundreds of flowers that won't blossom! The two flowering periods were a few weeks apart, extending the 'blue season' for weeks.


I'm hoping that the new plant will manage something in between my two past extremes - healthy but not too rampant. I'm promising it that I'll do my best to tend it well and to give it the best start I can in the hope that it too will be smothered next year.

Back on 'normal' food after a week eating below the line

We kept our calculators to hand as we wandered the aisles of Tesco and Sainsbury's looking for five days' worth of food for two for £10 as part of our experiment in living below the line. We much prefer Sainsbury's normally, but were passing both so took advantage of the slight differences in their ranges - when you're watching every penny, you notice when one has a slightly bigger pack, pushing it beyond our budget. As we happened to be in Tesco first, most things that were priced the same came from there but I'm sure the Sainsbury's ones would have been just as good. We'd largely planned our purchases in advance - I don't think we'd have had a chance of sticking to the tenner otherwise.


This was our final tally of purchases, excluding potatoes (as we had an unopened 2.5kg bag in the pantry - we charged ourselves the Sainsbury's basics price of 97p) and salt (we charged ourselves 10p for a box in the pantry that had cost no more than that at Lidl).


You'll see lots of scribbles on the Sainsbury's receipt....


As luck would have it on a day when ever penny counted, something must have been sitting on the scales as our carrot (singular!), three mushrooms and extra onion each weighed 60g too much. Normally, we wouldn't even have noticed but that 27p was a vital part of our budget! We charged ourselves what they should have cost - our scales agreed exactly with Tesco's where we'd bought the other onions.


We contacted Sainsbury's in case the scales had a fault and got into a very friendly discussion with their customer services, who had the store's scales checked. We concluded that someone had perhaps left something like a pad of vouchers the scales. And Sainsbury's did reimburse us to our Nectar card, though we said they needn't have bothered.

The total came to £10.11 after adjusting for the overweighing, so we had to put an onion back in the pantry to bring it to under £10!

It was quite amusing in Tesco's when the checkout assistant began to give us a schools voucher - only to realise that our two big bags of food came to less than £8 and so we were some way off being eligible. This gave us the opportunity to explain the initiative to her too.

Breakfast each day was toast with marmalade (no spare budget for marg or butter but the marmalade was, at 27p, one of the outstanding bargains) plus 47p-a-jar coffee (we'd just got used to having an espresso machine so this was a particular ordeal!) with UHT milk (cheaper than proper milk).


Lunch was homemade bread (value flour didn't make great bread but it was edible) with an outstanding bargain - Tesco's sliced mild cheddar, 10 slices (240g) for 59p. Not a great deal of flavour but pleasant tasting and far cheaper than any other cheese available. It went well with the sweet pickle (great for 24p).


A bottle of orange squash for less than 30p proved very welcome and homemade potato soup rounded off some meals.

The five evening meals were:
- chili made with Sainsbury's basics mince plus baked beans, corn and onion and served with jacket potatoes. The investment in a bottle of chili sauce made this perfectly acceptable - his favourite meal of the week and my second.


- potato and pea curry, made with Sainsbury's 9p-a-jar curry sauce and served with rice. OK - the sauce was pleasant enough but the curry would have benefitted from more onions and no peas.


- meat and potato bake - mince cooked in 18p-a-jar pasta sauce, with the addition of some of our limited supply of veg; then baked in the oven with layers of thinly sliced potatoes. This was very tasty - my favourite meal of the week.


- 'rice and beans' - something we make regularly anyway - rice and kidney beans in a savoury sauce of passata and stock. It had onion and half our can of sweetcorn in it too, plus peas. Quite nice, if possibly less flavoursome than normal.


- pizza - almost to our regular recipe but we'd normally add olive oil to the dough and passata mix, and would have had more interesting toppings than the three mushrooms, half an onion and scattering of leftover mince. It was perfectly edible but rather reminiscent of cheap frozen pizza - strong bread flour and the oil really do make a difference.


The flour did do well in making some snacks - little dough balls flavoured with chili sauce, salt and chives ('foraged' from the garden)


and strips a bit like pitta, flavoured with the chili sauce. These in particular were rather good.


Had we continued for a second week, we'd have been a little better off, as we had a few things left over - yeast, chili sauce, coffee, salt, rice. That would have freed up just over £2, which would have been a great help.


I'm sure that we'll revisit some of the lessons learnt from the week in a similar - if less draconian exercise - in a future week. Of course it's a somewhat artificial exercise to do in a kitchen with a well-stocked pantry that would become available again five days later, but it did at least make us think.

You can sign up at Live below the Line and have a go yourself, choosing a charity to support. The site is primarily geared to encouraging people to seek sponsorship but you can just give a donation.

The extravagance of normal living was brought home on Saturday, the day after we finished, when we were out for the afternoon in Greenwich. Lunch and a soft drink each came to £19 for two, then a couple of pints in a pub came to £8 - equating to more than a week's food money just for the drinks.

A building society account just like my piggy bank

Well, more precisely like my little savings tin:



I've always liked to know which money is allocated for what task - I can never quite get the hang of having everything in one place and remembering or listing what's what. With my main bank, I get round this by having three current accounts, but savings have always been trickier, particularly for little sums that I want to tuck away for special reasons, treats etc.

So I was delighted to learn that the Principality has an online account that gives you five 'pots'. It's all treated as one account from their point of view, but you call apportion it between different savings. You can even add a target total with a target date.

As well as a general pot, I've set up two pots for me and two for joint money. Mine are "Piggy Bank" (eg proceeds of piggy bank emptying especially £2 coins, and used to save for non-essential treats like a new camera or PDA or - something I really fancy - a glass fusing kiln) and "Future Tax Bills" (being self-employed the bill comes twice a year, so it's better to set the money aside as I earn it). Ours are "New Barny" to tuck away money for our next car (our last two cars have been called Barny, so why break a tradition) and "Funny money", for odd little sums that would otherwise just disappear into a purse - winnings, car boot sale proceeds, joint piggy bank funds etc. The idea is that the funny money will pay for something slightly extravagent, like new patio doors that will look nicer and open easily instead of requiring a frustrating fight with awkward bolts.

The Technomage has pots for his own funny money, saving for new gadgets and some general savings. He also has two of our pots - one for the £19 a month we save by not subscribing to Sky and one for new gadgets. We try to allocate 20p whenever we use things like the Wii or the toasted sandwich machine. That way, if they break we can decide whether they've had enough use to justify a new one - and pay for it painlessly!

My 'plant of the week': Phlox - Emerald Cushion Blue

In fact, this lilac-flowered Phlox has really been my favourite plant of the last few weeks. Its reliable supply of pretty flowers starts early in the season and lasts for weeks on end.



I've had it several years and it's remained in a standard pot of 9" or so. I've become rather fond of it for its trouble-free nature. It doesn't get watered or fed very often and is one of the first plants to flower every year. I've promoted it to a slightly more prominent spot this year, and think that I should reward it for its efforts with some food later today.

I bought another Phlox (Phlox Subulata Millstream Daphne) last year as a very small plant. That one's pinky flowers are just starting to appear - only time will tell whether it will perform as well as Emerald Cushion Blue.