frugal bugle

Money savers so far this week:


We were in town after work planning to pick up a few things, plant our community garden plot and then go fly kites at the park. Things took longer than we though and we were getting hangry (that grumpy that happens when we are hungry). We decided on the supermarket for a quick fix. We ended up getting some cold roast chicken which was very cheap. The whole roast chickens that loblaws has are $7.98 for one, which they claim is 1000g. The cold roast chickens are the unsold hot ones, clearly, quartered (you get all the good meat…in this case over 500g worth with none of the extra moisture and weight of meatless bones) and selling for less than $3. This is an excellent deal for on-the-go chicken, and if we ever decide to buy fast chicken again, we’ll get the cold stuff.

We planted our community garden! I’m hoping for big things, but it’s our first season so it’s hard to know what will happen. It’s nice to have master gardeners around to help us. My goal is to get a small chest freezer full for the winter, though that may be optimistic. Either way, we’re enjoying it and free food is good food.


This week we got free Ziggy’s fresh tortellini (1kg) and 2 free cans of tuna due to mis-pricing. Earned me about $9 back, putting us back on food budget after the expense of setting up the laundry detergent experiment (which is a huge success and we’re going homemade forever). I think we should be better about returning to the store to keep getting free food until they fix the pricing, but we have been a little lazy about it. Next time, may as well fill the freezer I guess!

I looked into homemade dishwasher detergent and the verdict is NO GO. There is no recipe that is mostly effective and it depends on what kind of machine you have. Also, if it mucks up it’s apparently very difficult to un-muck and can damage your machine. You can stretch your current powder detergent, but you can’t replace it. I’m still waiting for something better to come along.

I finally broke down and bought new jeans. My old pairs were ratty, especially for work, and worn out. I went to a shop having a sale (40% off last year’s styles). I found 5 potential pairs and picked out my top three, making sure to choose a pair missing a button. I negotiated extra discount on the buttonless pair. They were zippered with a good solid zipper, I just sewed on a big button I had at home and they are perfect. The cashier inexplicably ended up giving me 65% off two of the pairs and the regular 40% on the third, with a total savings of over $150, since clothes aren’t cheap up here. I got all three pairs for $140.My first genuinely new jeans in many, many years. Now I’m wondering if maybe I should have bought all five pairs!