Tenner Week: Sunday

It’s the last day of Tenner Week and I’ve had to resort to digging out sample sachets of conditioner so that I can wash my hair. Will definitely be buying a proper bottle of the stuff tomorrow, it’s getting silly now.

The thrifty chore that needed doing most today was sorting out the kitchen garden, so I’ve ‘retired’ more wilted plants and rinsed out their containers. I’ve also chopped up old pea and bean plants and mixed them back into their compost, and sowed white mustard seeds on top to recycle everything for use in the Spring. The white mustard makes ‘green manure’: it adds fibre and other organic matter to the soil, keeps weeds down and stops the fixed nitrogen from the legume roots being leeched away.

We had lentil soup for lunch. Yes, that can of the stuff I didn’t fancy from the back of the cupboard. Except that I’d worked up a real appetite by then and was very glad of it.

The plan was to then go into town with The Beau and visit a gallery or museum for free, and use up our full coffee loyalty cards to get free coffee afterwards. Unfortunately there were no trains running and the replacement buses were a joke, so we just had a walk round the neighbourhood, recycled some cardboard and old clothes, and tried out a new cafe that’s recently opened to have a cuppa. Okay, not as exciting as we’d hoped, but we can make up for it next week.

When we came home I did some reading and listened to music, and we got the house ready before the working week started. Looking forward to getting all those book reviews finished soon. I also decided to spend whatever I had left at the end of the week, so I bought a few seeds on eBay to plant next year.

Running out of television time on a dark, drizzly Sunday is a bit of a pain, although I did work out that I was one minute under the allotted three hours since I’d watched everything as a recording and therefore avoided the ad breaks and end credits. Normally we’d settle down after dinner and watch a DVD or a Blu-ray, but one night out of the ordinary won’t hurt.

We’ve had a mini version of a Sunday roast this evening, with a chicken joint and a Quorn steak from the freezer with fresh thyme, and roast potatoes with fresh rosemary, and garden veggies. For dessert I baked the remaining apples, cutting a wide cone shape out of their tops and filling them with mixed dried fruit, chopped nuts, cinnamon, brown sugar and a little butter. Very, very tasty.

Today’s spend: £2.59

Total spent (weekly total): £9.62

It hasn’t been the easiest of weeks but I made it through without overspending, and we certainly didn’t starve. Apart from this evening, it’s been a nice break to get far, far away from the telly too, although I have missed films. The hardest thing has been the way it’s affected my social life, but people have been understanding and it’s only for a week after all.

If you’ve been doing a Tenner Week of your own, how did you get on?