The Great 2014 Kew Gardens 50p Rush.....

Must be a very slow news day today....

A couple of the mainstream media sites are running a story about a limited-edition fifty-pence piece from 2009 commemorating Kew Gardens that might be worth a good few quid to collectors.

So, it was time for exploratory abdominal surgery on poor old Perky, and to take a good look around inside her - just in case...

Unfortunately, despite retrieving exactly seventy of the little blighters, not a Kew Gardens type in sight.  There's 58 of the usual Britannia, 6 more which I think might simply be Welsh, and only 6 commemorative types, two of which are the same.  Click on the photo for a larger image if you're even remotely interested.

Five of these commemoratives are only a few years old, but there's one there from 2000 with the legend '...Public Libraries...' if anyone wants to make me an offer....

And don't worry, Perky is fine !

A good big'un beats a good little'un ... Growing Big Vegetables in 2014

We've decided this year to try to grow larger varieties of a few vegetables :-

• Onions - Kelsae
• Leeks - Exhibition Pot Leeks
• Tomatoes - Beefeater
• Carrots - Sweet Candle

In mid January, we sowed 120 onion seeds and 60 leeks.  We started them off indoors in covered cells.  By indoors, I mean on the various south-facing window cills in the house, particularly the kitchen window which is 2.4 m (8') long.

To give us even more growing space within this large window, I've built a rough-and-ready free-standing shelf from white MDF furniture boards, and this now sits on the cill.   It's very much a temporary addition, for the winter months only, and it'll be dismantled and removed to the shed as soon as we can get the plants out into the greenhouse when it warms up a little outside.

six seed trays in the kitchen window...

Living on £10k pa in the UK ?

I spotted this posting on the Firestarter's blog, one of the many fine FI blogs I visit occasionally....

http://thefirestarter.co.uk/is-it-possible-to-live-on-10000-a-year-in-the-uk/

.... and so I thought I'd carry out a similar exercise myself.  Click on the Table for an enlarged view. 

Long live the North-South divide.....

I stumbled across a TV show tonight, which was called '...Location, Location, Location...'.

I watched almost disbelievingly as the presenters tried to convince a pair of hapless buyers that a flat for £600,000 in a post-modern Stalinist block in Holloway, North London, was actually a good buy.... I'll spell it out - six hundred thousand pounds for a god-awful two-and-a half bedroom flat, FFS !

And believe me, I know all about Stalinist flats, having lived in several during my times working throughout Russia.

Here '...up north...', we own a three-bedroomed house on a 600 square-metre plot, with only three near neighbours, open southern and western farmland aspects and a protected woodland to the north, for which we paid around a quarter of that sum, including the recent garden extension purchase.

And lest you think we're severely disadvantaged and remote from any trappings of so-called civilisation, within a mile or so from us we have a 24-hour Tesco Extra, an ALDI, a Boots, several health centres and dental practices, plus an array of small & specialist high-street shops and banks.  Within five miles in another direction, we have another 24-hour Tesco Extra, a Sainsburys Superstore, a Morrisons Superstore, another ALDI, a Lidl and an M&S Food store, and a small town centre hosting many of the national high street favourites.

I'm a 20-minute taxi ride and then a two-and-half-hour train journey away from central London (or around four to five hours by car), for the very occasional visits I need to make to the Metropolis.  I'm half-an-hour from an airport from which I can reach, via empty roads and a short hop to Amsterdam Schiphol, just about any major city in the world.

And before anyone tries to justify the ridiculous London house prices by talking of the higher wages available, I know I'm not alone in the North in being able to charge my clients London rates for the services I provide, without all the cost disadvantages of having to live there.  I can also say that in the past I've turned down six-figure offers of full-time employment in London. 

I've got no beef at all against the very fine people of London, many of my friends live in the wealthier suburbs and I also worked there myself many moons ago, for several years via the weekly-commute routine.  

However, to paraphrase an old Victoria Wood comedy sketch, "...I'd like to apologise to those readers living in the South - it must be terrible for you..."

Weed Control for our New Hedgerow....

Our new hedgerow has been in the ground for almost exactly one year now, but it seems that one particular area has grown noticeably better than the others.  This is where we created our  'cherry-tree island' by putting down a weed control membrane and then covering with plum-coloured shale.  The new growth on this three-or-four metre stretch outperformed the rest of the hedge last year by a wide margin.

We're assuming the better growth in this area was because these hedge plants didn't have to compete with weeds and grass for nutrients in the soil throughout the growing season, and so we've decided to put down a weed membrane along the whole length of the hedge.   Now is an ideal time with everything dormant in the garden.  We want more cover from the hedge this year to screen off the new garden - overall, last year's growth was quite disappointing despite the decent weather we had in the summer.  

Annual Spending Review - 2013

At the start of 2013, I decided to categorise my spending throughout this year, so I could see exactly where all the money goes.  

This included all payments made directly from the bank or on debit cards, those made on the credit cards (always paid off in full every month) and also any cash payments, as far as was possible.  Cash payments were particularly difficult to track since they tended to be rather small and easily forgettable - at the end of each month, I could never fully reconcile the cash left in my wallet against the ATM withdrawals I'd made !

So, with today being the penultimate day of the year, and I'm confident that I won't spend any more money in 2013, here's a breakdown by percentage of my total annual expenditure.  Click on the chart for a larger image.

Monitoring Electrical Energy Use / Consumption in the Home....

With electricity prices becoming increasingly expensive, and likely to continue to rise way above inflation, we recently concluded a seven-week long experiment to monitor the energy consumption of most of the electrical appliances in our home.    

The plan was to identify those energy consumers for which there may be scope for a saving, by either changing their pattern of usage or replacing older appliances with more modern and efficient units.  

However, replacing any items would only make economic sense if their total capital costs could be recouped from the predicted savings in their currently-measured operating costs within a period of say five years maximum, or if they should become faulty or breakdown in the future.  We don't intend to discard otherwise serviceable appliances simply because they may not be quite as efficient as the very latest designs on the market.

The five years is actually slightly longer than the period in which I'd normally expect a payback against any such renewal purchase - three years would be nearer the mark.  However, with energy price inflation over the past five years running at around say 8% compared to more 'general' inflation at around 4%, i.e. twice the rate (and no signs of this trend ever coming to an end - see my previous post), then every £1 worth of electricity energy today will actually cost £1.48 in five years time, whereas that unit £1 cost of appliances today will be just £1.22 at the end of the same period.  

To put it another way, cash in the bank in today's money to be spent on future appliances would have been devalued by 18% but cash kept aside for future energy bills will devalue by a whopping 32% after five years.   Therefore, it may make economic sense to bring forward certain renewal purchases because the time they will spend consuming less energy in the future will produce exponentially greater annual savings.

Anyway, back to the testing.  We already had a couple of simple plug-in energy monitors that we'd bought for our micro-generation experiments, and we first established there would be three categories of consumer in the house to be monitored during the experiment :-