Berry nice savings to be had on blueberries!

I have found the answer to enjoying the health benefits of blueberries is in the freezer aisle! Blueberries are so good for you, but very expensive if you buy the punnets of fresh fruit. The regular price of fresh ones works out at well over $30 per kilo and while they look nice on a fruit platter, they don't have a lot of flavour. Instead, I now buy frozen blueberries at around $4 or $5 per 500g pack - less than a third the price! Simply throw a cupful in the microwave with a teaspoon of sugar and zap for a minute or two. Much tastier and are delicious with ice cream, natural yoghurt or just on their own!

Lose weight, save money and reduce waste with friends

Our group of friends have learned there are many more benefits to being health conscious than just losing weight! We first started getting together to try and lose weight after Christmas. My friends went with the keto diet and I chose intermittent fasting. Of course, everyone needs to make sure they are medically safe and that whatever you choose suits you, as well as being mindful that children have different needs.

Having company certainly helps with motivation as we meet for coffee most mornings and compare notes. A bonus from this however, aside from losing weight and feeling much better, is that our grocery bills are a fraction of the usual. I am so pleased to see money left in my account on pay day! One friend reported that for her and her husband the usual spend at Harris Farm was over $200. Now it is under $40. I am single so used to spend around $100 a week on groceries and another $100 plus going out. Now I am down to $60 a week all up!

The other issue for me was waste. I would regularly buy whatever took my eye and it would go off in the fridge. Now I make a list (amazing how that works) and only buy enough for my meals. For example, I buy one zucchini instead of a bag full. I find grating some colourful veggies such as carrot, zucchini, yellow squash and red capsicum makes the meal interesting and seems bigger somehow. I get the ALDI salmon OR the chicken thighs - not both like before! - and either of these will last me for over a week.

Buying fresh produce is much cheaper and better than packets. The diet has reduced my appetite, so I can afford to buy smaller pieces of meat of higher quality. It takes some organisation but is so worth it. Training yourself to eat less certainly helps the budget. There are some good resources on intermittent fasting on the Internet and Dr Michael Mosley's book. My friends are using The Power of Protein. I also found a guy who appeared on The Doctors, who has created the Snake Diet, although that's a little extreme for me!

Puzzling our way to a new house

My husband and I have finally found the key to successful saving! The two of us are dreadful savers; while we're good at putting spare change in a jar, we don't know what to do with it once the jar is full! We thought a saving thermometer would be helpful, but wanted something that wouldn't be so obvious when people came over to visit. So we came up with a more subtle brainwave - a jigsaw puzzle!

We bought a jigsaw of what we wanted (a house) and assigned a dollar amount to every piece. Now we 'buy' pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, the money goes in our jar and we bank the money once a month. We even set up challenges for ourselves, such as who 'buys' the most pieces in a month, and we never have to worry about what to buy each other for presents - we buy pieces of the puzzle of course! Once we've completed the puzzle we're going to hang it on the wall - of our new house!

Butterflies flutter by with this pest-control solution!

We have been growing our own vegies, with quite some success, however we had a problem with white butterflies laying their eggs and producing green caterpillars which would attack our precious crop! I had heard that these butterflies were territorial so I came up with a brilliant solution to our problem. I made replica white butterflies,(out of waterproof ice-cream container lids) that were the same size as the real ones I then skewered them onto bamboo sticks and placed them in amongst my vegetables. Result: No more butterflies! It really works- I've watched them whilst having my tea break. As they fly over our garden they see there are already several there in our veggie patch, so they fly on over to the neighbours gardens! It sure is a cheaper and more environmentally-friendly solution than any other pest control I've heard of!