J.O. 50 litre potato compost £1 @ Homebase

I have to accept what is on the price tags, (perhaps the stores are franchised ? or Scotland is a different catagory us all being mega rich etc)

Maybe that is why they have so many bags left

Anyway I have gone down the top soil delivery route

It is screened top soil, the unscreened was at £28 a tonne

It is free delivery, and in cubic meter bags on your property, their is a deposit on the bags paid back on return

Today I widened the border by 18" and replaced the stone edging,
Went to the farm and dug 8 bags of Horse Manure,, removed the Roses, snapped a spade and a fork handle, digging out a large bush
Then dark stopped play

Tomorrow I intend to turn over one border with added HM replant Roses
Then start on the bottom border, see how far I get

Oh I came across my Virgin media cable two inches down through the middle of the bed, which I have managed to route along the fence at the back of the border

Jack McHammocklashing

PS On reading the thread through, It appears I am casting Nastursiums at you Scrungee, I am certainly NOT, and that is NOT my intention, you are just one lucky Scrungee, do you want a lodger

 

Has anybody else found the other type of compost I found a pallet load of reduced in Homebase Homebase 50 litre Peat Free Compost that was also marked 'Discontinued, reduced to £1 but as on a 4 for 3 offer worked out at only 75p a bag? As it's such rubbish ground twiggy stuff I didn't bother but Mrs Scrungee bought 4 for £3 for the hens to dust bath in safe in the knowledge I wouldn't nick it for growing (I get it in the end with the chicken run compost):



The store I use most does at times seem rather generous on it's reductions though, not bad for a denty (full) bucket, or for a missing handle:

 

Whilst at my local Home Base (looking for jo pot) they do have a reduced garden section,
I was looking for containers, they had two zinc ones was £38 reduced £19.99, NOW £5
So I got the two only thing different from the full price ones, was a sort of salt on top of the zinc plating, this just brushed off RESULT

NON RESULT
Instead of taking plastic bags, to the farm for my HM Yesterday
(my plastic bags always leak and in the car) So I took the two zinc containers, and several of the old style flip lid kitchen pedal bins

Filled the zinc ones up then had to pick them up to place in the car
Fingers under the rims, heave The rims straightend out :DOH:
Ah use the corners where the seam is must be stronger, lift- seams split
ended up body hugging them to the car
Damaged sorted now though

Jack McHammocklashing (Paul Daniels finger style zinc tin is sharp)

 

Bloomin' Nora, I was in Homebase today and I didn't even notice the compost prices. I'm after stocking up on some potato compost too. Wish I'd seen this thread earlier. :DOH:

I always pop into Homebase to have a quick look round after doing the shop in Sainsburys next door. The other half was with me today, and he was keen to get home, so it was a flying visit to the outside garden section, just to see what was on offer, and to collect some base pots and saucers for my mosaics.

I must have timed it right today in the pot section. They must have just had a delivery, and the damaged ones were all there on offer.

I got a really nice, quite large, terracotta strawberry planter (one with the half cups that stick out, so it will hold the plants upright a bit) reduced from £14.99 to a fiver because one of the cups was half broken off, but once a plant is in there you wouldn't really notice, and I can always turn it to the back if it does show.

And I got a massive 48cm glazed pot which has got a hairline crack going from the rim down into the pot about 15cm, which is only about a third of a way down the pot. This one was reduced from £29.99 to £7.50. The crack is right through the pot so you can follow it on the unglazed interior too. But the glaze on the exterior isn't chipped, and it really is hairline, took me a while to find it when I was looking for why they had reduced the pot, so I thought I could do a DIY repair job on it.

My plan is I'm going to do what I do to help protect the pots that I mosaic onto. A solution of PVA and water brushed over the crack so it seeps in. And then maybe running a line of clear enamel varnish over the top, as a barrier. Does that sound enough?

 

It might be having another look for this compost if you're passing a Homebase.

As nobody else reported finding it reduced, I took some screen shots of stock levels for stores in my area, and I'm now noticing some of them suddenly going out of stock, or their stock level rapidly decreasing, and this could be due to other stores finally getting around to selling it off. I've been in 2 stores in the last week and their piles of the stuff had suddenly dissapeared, in one of them it was over 24 hrs.

Using the stockchecker you can check if there's any at a particular store, and if it suddenly starts to go fast it could well indicate it's been reduced.

https://www.homebase.co.uk/webapp/w...ay?langId=110&storeId=10151&partNumber=105939

 

But £2.99 has been the online reserve & collect price for the last couple of months (see stockchecker screenshot above), but numerous Homebase stores have been wrongly displaying a previously higher price for some time.

I'm beginning to think that their in store pricing/reductions have become a complete shambles, for example:

Early Bird 15kg chicken pellets - remember these were different prices in different stores? - I called in 2 Homebases today and one had them at half the price (£7.49) of the other store 16 miles away (£14.99), and that was a general offer, not locally reduced items. I suspect that when I stocked up on them last year @ £4.99 a sack somebody input the £14.99 into their pricing system incorrectly.

However, found a vast pile of their own brand peat free compost reduced to 50p/bag today, so got enough for the hens to dust bath in for the next 12 months - probably all it's fit for.

 

Does phoning to ask what the current price is work? Seems a bit counter productive to drive 10 miles to see if something is a quid off !! unless you happen to be passing their door, so-to-speak.

 

In the case of potting compost I would never imagine Homebase staff could be so obliging as to send somebody out into their garden centre section to check what compost has got orange reduced stickers on it, make notes of the reduced prices and how many bags have them on (they only sticker the outside ones in the pile and if somebody takes all those - like I did today, it might be another week before the others get stickered) and then telephone you back with the details.

With the pellated chicken manure it doesn't matter what the sign over them states, as various different prices have been charged at the till in different stores, so they would have to physically carry out a price check.

And as their stock control system is a shambles you may find they have far less than you expect, or even none at all in stock when you get there. They are 'supposed' to have the same 'infallible' system as their Home Retail Group partner, Argos, but after making an online reservation for 10 (seriously reduced) items at a local Argos last week, I got a call (luckily before heading off to collect them) from the store manager apologizing that they didn't actually have a single one in stock.

Which is why I suggested only checking if actually passing.

 

OK, not worth the 30 mile round trip then ... although it says they have 120 bags in stock, and if they were a quid-a-go I'd be ... errmmm ... quid's-in !!

 

But if the stock checker said 80 bags at the end of today and 50 at the end of tommorow it might indicate they'd been stickered, but even then you might turn up and somebody has had all the ones with orange labels on, leaving an untidy heap of those which weren't accesible from the outside, especially if they were situated between two other talls piles of different composts. I spent 10-15 mins yesterday dismembering a pile of Homebase's own peat free compost to extract those with the 50p labels on (don't want to risk get banned by simply re-arranging the stickets onto the top ones)

 

OK, plan B then ... I'll check eBay for a Homebase Orange Sticker machine ...

 

"Staff", "help", "unable" , "very strange"

There's an oxymoron buried in there!