Bowing to Frugal Grandma

I was in sunny(ish) Essex this weekend, catching up with some of my nearest and dearest. I spent yesterday hanging out with my grandparents. Not for the first time, my grandma’s thrifty supremacy had me marvelling. 

“Have some jam, dear”, she said, throwing open a cupboard in the garage to reveal shelves stacked with jars of glinting jams and jellies. The jars have all been saved, and much of the fruit comes from her garden or her friends’ gardens. I came away with marmalade, yellow plum jam, bullus plum jam (never heard of this but apparently it is “nice and sharp”) and a good old-fashioned blackberry and apple.

My grandma then insisted on filling the trunk of my car with a horticultural smorgasbord. She takes so many cuttings of her plants, her garden often resembles a garden centre: laden with plants and pots of various sizes. In went a hundredweight of busy lizzies, geraniums, clematis, a disinterred gooseberry bush wrapped in a damp towel, and more. When I admired a high-climbing jasmine, she set about it with her secateurs and handed me some long leafy stems, telling me that if I set these in earth, they’ll take.

And so to lunch! We had a trout, freshly caught and donated by one of my grandad’s friends, with homemade chips and homegrown veg. Pudding was a homemade creme caramel: fnar.

My grandma has discovered that Snappy Snaps is offering 6″ x 4″ photo prints for just 10p apiece, so we spent the afternoon browsing through her latest stack of holiday pictures.

Frugal Grandma, I salute you.