LATEST MOAN FROM YOU AND ME 2017

I don't know of this rescue and I certainly don't want to impune their reputation, but there does appear to be a number of issues that they need to address. My first concern would, of course, be the welfare of the hogs and the treatments they receive at this place. Two hundred hedgehogs is a lot and I wonder if they might have been struggling with resources to manage them. Its a sad story you have to tell Kandy, both for you and the hedgehogs . I only take a few at a time and they can be very labour intensive, especially when sick.

I do hope you can have four hogs, even if not the ones you handed in. At least you will be giving them the best chance by releasing where you live

 

Did 2 shops this week, total cost about £10 and that's our average weekly spend on food + household stuff for the 2 of including Dog [1]. Our shop a couple of days ago included 5 free pizzas that also got us a further £2 off the rest of our shopping by carefully constructing a Tesco Brand Guarantee shop against Sainsburys where the free pizzas are cheaper. Also got 6 cartons of £1.17 NCG soups that only cost 17p after £1 coupons to help build up the requisite number of items to 10 (different size to everywhere else so great for not comparing).

Today took an hour off working at the plot to do the Sunday reductions, got cheese, quiches and meat from deli counter for Dog all reduced by 90%, and fruit, veg, salad stuff, pasta salads and coleslaw all reduced by 99%, for example £2 punnets of strawberries for 2p each (Dog loves strawberies). Got another yet another 6 cartons of soup as it goes up in price next week.

Couldn't be bothered waiting for the 99% off bakery products, but our freezers are full of the stuff.


[1] Buy torn sacks of 'working dog' food (even though our Working Cocker Spaniel is unemployed) reduced by 75%, so around £2.50 per sack and we try and keep about 9 months supply in hand. That's 8p/day without us using any ways of getting the cost down further

 

Weather guessers. Why don't they just say "There's 50/50 chance it will be ..." They continually get the timing wrong because they underestimate the wind speed. They somehow don't notice cloud cover moving into the area and they certainly like scaring the bejesus out of you by saying it's going to get colder than it does.

 

@luciusmaximus they actually had 213 hoglets in according to their Facebook page so I just don't know what the outside pen conditions were like,and whether they had large pens with boxes according to how many hoglets were in each pen.The conditions couldn't have been that good if one died and two others are now ill and are being treated back in the hospital part.I doubt very much if we would be allowed to go into that area but it looks like they were so overwhelmed last winter with babies that they hadn't got the facilities to look after them

The trouble is we can't complain as they would be saying they are doing a service by taking in these hoglets for the general public and as they do so much fund raising for the animals they rescue we would be made to look the baddies in this situation

We certainly won't be giving them any monetary donations in the future because the two we did give them was supposed to be used to meat and mealworms to help keep them going until the spring

In one way I feel like telling them where they can stick their hedgehogs as we now have between one and two adults visiting us every night that we are feeding so hopefully they will go on to have more babies this year and we will have to try and fatten them up before winter sets in

 

I'm impressed (and I don't say that often ).

In preparation for early retirement - we're restricting food shopping to £50 a week - and that's a struggle to keep to. £10 would feed Alfie for a week - £6 for the wet food and a couple of bags of 'treats' and it's gone.

 

Cor, that would buy 357 punnets of strawberries a day!





Or 2,143 apples a day!

 

What I really hate is having to pay full price for anything [1], especially gardening stuff and even more especially gardening stuff from Wikos.

I've been using fibre pots (inside plastic flexi-pots to keep them moist) for sowing seeds that need to be sown in short pots to benefit from propagator bottom heat, but produce deep roots so need potting up into deep rose pots with minimum root disturbance.

Today I ran out of reduced to 10p packs from B&M clearance, 75% off at Wilkos etc. B&M (free town centre parking) hadn't any left in stock, Wilkos were an outrageous 80p for 12, a massive 6.7p for a single use pot! Went to Poundland and they were £1 for 30, about 3p/pot, so reluctantly bought a couple of packs.

Next time I find them reduced I'll clear the shelves as, using them for sunflowers, sweetcorn, runner beans, etc., I'll need well over 100 p.a., and I try and keep at least one more year's stock in hand, plus when stuff's cheap enough you find all sorts of extra uses for it.


[1] Mrs Scrungee is even more mean careful with money than I, her mission is to return from shopping with more money than she went out with, and very often achieves it.

 

We collected many, many thousands of pots from a local NT property (from their mass bedding planting) and still have a few thousand left.

If you know their head gardener it's easy to get thousands of pots every year as they otherwise send then off for recycling.

 

.................just one @ARMANDII .......?

 

I like your thinking @ARMANDII

 

After *that* large glass, he isn't "thinking" ... he's merely ... "reacting"!