Today I acquired a "Foodsaver V3840" and 7 rolls of Vacuum sealing plastic stuff. - all FREE of course. 
I'm hoping that some of you use a Vacuum sealer and can give me some hints on what to use it for. At the moment, all I can think of is dehydrated veg/fruit. Wondering whether fresh green beans and sliced courgettes would be better "vacuumed" before freezing as I'm not a fan of frozen beans & courgettes. 

All advice welcome. 

I live quite frugally and my annual gas & electricity costs are just over £!000.

What galls me is that my standing charges and VAT acccount for over 40% of my annual bill at over £400 and however frugal I try to be there is nothing I can do about them.

So basically I am paying British Gas over £400 per annum for me to read my own meters and for them to then bill me. No wonder their fat cats are coining it in with multi million pound profits for basically sitting on there arses!

Rant over!

I've been told that the land behind my house (and the neighbours) was planted with apple trees as part of the WW2 War effort. Unfortunately, most of these trees have died/fallen over and survive only as stumps. One of the trees is still alive and fruiting - not bad for an 80+ year old tree that receives no TLC whatsoever. 

This thread is not about that tree however - its about a stump that has a substantial side shoot. I thought this was a sucker off the root stock and have ignored it. This week, for the first time, it has flowered! In fact, these are the first apple flowers to open this year. 

All the trees that were here in 1980 were very tall,  so there doesn't seem to have been any attempt to graft them onto dwarfing rootstocks. 
Might they have been grafted for another reason? 

Needless to say that I shall be leaving it to see what happens. I like surprises. 

I bought this cheaply YS (£3.00) from Morries a while ago and the label says its a holly tree?

The leaves are black and it isn't as spiky as the hollies I see in the woods. I thought the colouration may have been because it was a young plant? but young hollies in the woods are green and spiky!
I love its colouration as it is so hopefully it won't grow into a boring green holly!

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A few years ago I planted tulips in a heavy stoneware pot. It was on top of an old tree stump, which, inevitably rotted. The pot ended up on the ground, upside down. It was too heavy for me to turn over so, being lazy, I left it where it fell. 
This year, the tulips have pushed themselves out of the drainage holes in the bottom of the pot - and are about to flower! They have changed direction completely in their search for the light. How clever is that?

Bright ideas needed please.
As you know, I don't have chickens now so their old run is looking for other uses. 
Its fenced on all sides but there is no roof. 
The sides are higher at the door end (about 7') but only a couple of feet high at the far end. The roof was removed so that I could stand up in it. Putting netting over it would not work.
Its in the shade most of the day but I may be able to  lower some of the nearby shrubs to give a bit more light. 
The floor has been lined with chicken wire to stop rats so its not suitable for root crops. 
The floor has been divided into two halves - the upper half (door end) had gravel on it and this is mixed with the soil now.
The other half has plenty of well manured  soil/compost over the wire. 

How would you use this space? I have some ideas but thought I'd see what you could suggest as two heads or twenty heads are better than one.

Can't tell your Seedlings from your Weedlings? 
Useful information from Real Seeds https://realseeds.co.uk/seedlinggallery.html

I like chickpea hummus - so versatile for spreading on toast, eating with salad or as a dip with vegetables.
The recipe usually requires Tahini but they didn't have any in Lidl so I asked the Duck for an alternative recipe. 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/easy_hummus_96922
This recipe uses smooth peanut butter instead of tahini and, as luck would have it, I was given a jar of that recently. I only buy Whole Earth Crunchy PB so the smooth stuff was going to be used for satay sauce and not eaten. 
Anyway, back to the recipe, which claims not to need a blender and can be made with a potato masher instead. Don't believe it! Either my tin of chickpeas were incredibly hard or my mashing power needed a bit more welly. I couldn't be faffed to resurrect the Kenwood from the top shelf so I used one of those stick blenders instead. Once I added the water and lemon juice, the chickpeas started to blend, before that they were flying everywhere and clogging the stick thingy. 
The verdict - looks and tastes good, not as gloopy as shop bought hummus but at least I know what's in it and, all the ingredients were FREE.

I've mentioned Dr Michael Greger before, when I was doing Veganuary in January. He's a nutritionist and has written several books that  intrigue me - although I'm too mean to buy them. There's "How Not to Die", "How Not to Diet" and "How Not to Age". Basically he recommends  "A Daily Dozen" of foods to be eaten to be healthy. https://veganuary.com/wp-content/uploads...t-2021.pdf Portion sizes at https://veganuary.com/dr-gregers-daily-dozen-checklist/
I've been dabbling with this list since January but I rarely manage to incorporate everything in my daily eating - because I forget something! 
My plan is to build a new habit every week, concentrating on just one item on the Daily Dozen List. Some are harder than others so I'm going to start with the simple ones, starting tomorrow. 

First challenge - to eat Berries every day. 

Berries are versatile foods you can enjoy fresh, frozen, blended, dried or straight from the pack.
They’re also the healthiest fruits. Colourful foods are often healthier because they contain antioxidant pigments. The colours are the antioxidants, which means red onions have more than white, red grapes have more than green, red apples have more than green, etc.
Include plenty of acai berries, barberries, blackberries, blueberries, cherries, cranberries, goji berries, raspberries and strawberries in your diet.
Serving sizes:

• 60g fresh or frozen – (3 tbsp)
  
  
• 40g dried – (1 generous handful)
  

My living room window faces Northeast. I need a couple of smallish plants for the windowsill. They could be either foliage or flowwring plants. I had a mother-in-laws-tongue whisch is supposd to be 'bombproof'..........and it died. Same with another foliage plant.

Any ideas folks?