Monthly Archives: May 2023

Month in Review

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May is always one of the busiest month of the year. This year was no different!  The only weird thing has been the weather with only two days above 80 all month.  I did end up turning on my air conditioner much earlier than normal due to the high pollen counts. I can’t sleep if I can’t breathe and sleep is very important to me!  May was also as expensive as I thought!

Groceries- Budget = $975.  Goal Met! $815.14.  I am going to plan on the grocery budget being all spent the next couple of months as we stock up for the fall and winter!  My goal is to stay at budget while stocking up which is not always an easy thing to do!

Auto/ Gas. Goal -= $600.  Goal Met!  We have spent $445 this month. YAY!

Blogging- 15 post per month.  This is post number 17 WOOHOO I think this is the most post every!

Exercise- one official day and I am dealing with knee pain again. I have a shot the first of June so hopefully this will help!

Expenses:  YIKES!  Camp for Kendall and Zach as well as swim team . I had to dip into savings.

June is a month of catch up and reset for me as my summer break begins!

Menu Planning Monday

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12 days are all that I have left in this school year!  I am excited and ready for a break. Today was just a taste of how I want my summer to be. This week brings another change for us. We are starting swim team.  I think that all school related activities except for graduation are complete!  We are going to be on a different schedule for the next several weeks with dinner time moving between 4:30 and 5:30 in addition to a eat as you can method as well.  Today, Memorial Day, we spent quite a bit of time in the kitchen preparing for the week. We were able to get all meals for tomorrow ready and most of the meals for the week will be minimal preparation.

Breakfast- Saturday- Sausage cream cheese crescent rolls. Sunday-French toast leftovers.   Monday- Breakfast bowls with fresh sausage, Tuesday Wednesday and Friday- find it oatmeal, omelets cereal and milk, waffles, French toast sticks, bagels, sausage English muffins and I also have breakfast burritos, breakfast hot pockets.

Lunch- Saturday-Roasterie chicken from Costco and AU Grant potatoes.  Sunday Christos, Monday-left-overs or milk shakes Tuesday- salad    Wednesday-pasta salad Thursday – salad   Friday- eat out.

Dinner- Saturday-loose meat philly sandwiches, Sunday-Chicken and rice Monday-hamburgers and French fries   Tuesday- Stuffed green peppers (just need to be heated) Wednesday- gyros Thursday- fish tacos   Friday- Grilled chicken salad.

Only one more week of meal planning!

Garden Update

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I really had thought that I was not going to post a garden update this week due to the very limited progress that I was seeing on Friday due to the lack of rain for over a week.  However, after 2 days of steady beneficial rain things are definitely looking up! I can tell the biggest difference in the bed in front of my office window.  We have been getting a handful of sugar snap peas a couple of times this week but I was getting worried about my zucchini.  But now we will at least get a couple of zucchini from this bed! I am still a little concerned about the yellow plants on the end but progress is good!

The cucumbers are hanging on and the transplanted ones have grown another block!  I am disappointed that after planting 50 pea seeds. I have one plant.

I did purchase 6 green pepper plants and 3 squash plants from our local farm stand so now the beds look full for the short run!

The biggest changes are in the tomato beds. In the front bed we have 3 plants over the top! Sunflowers are in the front!

The longer tomato bed is catching up! It is about a foot deeper so I am glad to see the progress.

Finally the watermelon have made progress as well.

Now hopefully we get some good sun to jump start this growing!

Saving On Saturday

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The weather in North Carolina is rainy and chilly.  I am so glad that we are caught up with outside tasks.  Even better is the rain barrel that we put together last week (see the details) is currently filling and we can dump to make sure all the window cleaner is out of it before we use any water on the garden.

Today was spent trying to save money around food.  If you read even 3 or 4 post on this blog, you probably know that groceries are our third highest expense behind the mortgage and Tahoe payment.  I have been working on using up excess food for most of this year. One of the things I wanted to be able to do was condense our freezer food down.  This morning we were able to move around some meat and turn off our oldest freezer.  This will give the old freezer a chance to defrost and also save a small amount on our electric cost at least for the next month until I will restart it to store items from the garden and stock with easy to prepare meals for next school year!  While rearranging we found 4 packs of bacon, a unopened bag of frozen biscuits, an unopened bag of meatball as well as a coconut cake which was desert at dinner.    I spent some extra time this morning checking and making a Costco list. I am going to call it a success as spent $465 at Costco which included 2 prepared meals and a snack for Matt and Kendall.  We enjoyed the rotisserie chicken for lunch, I pulled enough meal off the bones for a chicken and rice soup for tomorrow’s dinner along with a couple of sandwiches as well. The crockpot is going with chicken broth that I will tomorrow.

I was also able to move some food around and now have all but the cereal in the kitchn area instead of spread all over the house!

I also already have a plan for both dinners and lunches next week with two days to continue preparing so that will make tomorrow much easier all the way around!

 

Monday Menu Plan

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I have seen where some people are comparing the month of May to December regarding things that need to be done. I absolutely agree. This week we have a baseball tournament, chorus concert, talent show and athletic banquet.  I am very proud of myself because I was very close to running to the store on Sunday to buy a couple of items to make meal prep easier for the week. I had even justified the expense because we are running under budget and I have a $5 credit. But I decided to try and stick it out and use the item we already had!  I have been changing things around the last couple of weeks but I am hoping this weeks plan works out!

Breakfast- Saturday- pancakes with strawberries and whip cream with bacon,
Sunday-biscuits   Monday, Tuesday Wednesday and Friday- find it oatmeal,
omelets cereal and milk,waffles, French toast sticks, bagels, and I also have breakfast burritos, breakfast hot pockets. We currently have an abundance of eggs so that should make most breakfast a no brainer!

Lunch- Saturday-Sandwiches  Sunday Local Pizza place  Monday- salad  Tuesday-left-overs  Wednesday- salad  Thursday-  leftovers   Friday- eat out..

Dinner- Saturday-Bacon Cheddar Burgers     Sunday-left-overs    Monday-CornDogs and French fries   Tuesday-KFC bowls using already prepared mashed potatoes.  Wednesday- broiled fish and green beans  Thursday-  Baked Ziti.  Friday-Chicken Cheesy Pasta.

Three weeks until the kids are out of school.  Which means less menu planning and more meal preparations!

Sunday Gardening Update

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We continue to have both success and failure in our garden.

So as usual let’s start on a positive note…the GreenStalk planters are almost completely full.  We are getting some nice color and strawberries to eat!

On a failure note, something is eating our strawberries. We actually moved a camera down low to figure out what is enjoying bites of strawberries.

We have 2 separate patches of green beans growing. I am amazed at how tall they are!

Even more cucumber seeds have germinated! We have a full row of cucumbers around 25 total plants!

In less than a month we should have at least one gallon of blueberries!  I am even more excited that we have three smaller starts growing as well. The ultimate plan is to transplant these to open spots in the bed so we will eventually have a wall of blueberries!

All 5 of the squash plants are growing but this is probably the most exciting thing I have seen all week…. tiny squash!

I don’t have any germination of the Cherokee purple tomatoes behind the house but the banana peppers and summer squash are growing!

Tiny snap peas are hanging on the pea plants, we will likely start eating this week!

Our first tomato has reached the top of the bed!

And several more are close behind!

Watermelon and cantaloupe are starting to spread!

Now to the biggest failure, we are now down to 7 green pepper plants from our original 14!  I did learn today that peppers do not like temperatures below 50 so this might have something to do with the problem. As a last ditch effort, I add some fertilizer to the plants tonight.  But the bell pepper plants we purchased as well as the one that we started that are in the vertical green stock planters are looking awesome!

Plans for the week
1. Purchase and transplant at least 3 if not 6 green peppers from the farm stand.
2. Sow at least one more packet of green beans.  This will be a month spacing between which should be perfect.
3. Thin out the basil seedlings putting some in the green stock planter as well as spacing those remaining in the bed out to allow for better growth and development.

The chickens deserve their own update this week so hopefully I can get that posted on Tuesday or Thursday!

Saving on Saturday

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A couple of weeks ago we realized that one of the rain barrels for the garden had a HUGE crack across the top.  We have used these for several years but I am still very disappointed.  Matt and I decided that we would find on Facebook market place a better water storage unit like the one we use for the chickens.

We were really lucky in that we did find a storage tank the same week for $40 which is $15 less than we paid for the chicken rain barrel!  Although it is not as big as the chicken one it would not fit where our current rain barrels are.

Here is where we are saving money!  We were able to place the new barrel further down the side yard at the point where the deck connects to the house. We reused the black tube and the gutter spout from the original rain barrel and tied that into the gutters on the back of the house.  To level we used cement blocks and post that we already had as well.  We purchased a faucet from Amazon ($24) to add to the front of the barrel. Total cost $64 which we should be able to save in water cost over the course of the summer! Definitely a savings!

Monday Menu Planning

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Summer is so close I can taste it!  We even survived what should be our busiest week of the school year last week!  We did not stick to the plan but we did manage to only eat out once!  I am continuing to work on clearing out space in our freezer, using things that are over a year old and preparing to fill the freezer over the summer.

Breakfast- Saturday- French toast with strawberries and whip cream with bacon,
Sunday-omelets   Monday, Tuesday Wednesday and Friday- find it oatmeal,
omelets cereal and milk, waffles, French toast sticks, bagels, and I also have breakfast burritos, breakfast hot pockets. We currently have an abundance of eggs so that should make most breakfast a no brainer!

Lunch- Saturday-French toast uncrustables  or ham and turkey sliders. Sunday hamburgers and a bag of chips, Monday-left-overs Tuesday-eat out   Wednesday- – leftovers   Friday- eat out.

Dinner- Saturday-Grilled chicken salad    Sunday-local Seafood place     Monday-Arby’s   Tuesday- Chicken casserole (new recipe) Wednesday- egg rolls and potstickers Thursday- Spaghetti and meatballs.  Friday- taco pasta using last frozen bag of taco meat and left-over queso.

Gardening Update

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What  a difference a week makes.  This week we have had more seasonable temperatures and I had lots of germination this week as well.  But on a sad note I also lost all three of the Cherokee purple tomatoes that I planted and at least 2 green pepper plants.   I decided to try something different and plant 4 more seeds for Cherokee purple tomatoes behind the greenhouse. I had the packet and seeds and empty slots so I have nothing to lose.

I have at least 10 cucumber plants that have germinated! The ones that I planted several weeks ago are starting to climb the wire as well.

I decided to try and utilize all my available space so I took a packet of pea seeds and plant those at the very front of this box all the way across.  I also planted one cantaloupe plant in the middle between the peas and the cucumbers.

Six of the eight zucchini seeds that I planted have germinated as well.  I also planted an additional four seeds to fill in the space where the tomato plants died and for hopefully a few next plants. You may also notice that the snap peas are starting to bloom.  I am hoping to enjoy at least a few dozen of these in the very near future.

The tomato have started to grow. Some are starting to touch the first ring of the cage!

And most of the green beans that I planted have germinated!

You may notice the spaghetti squash in the bottom picture. I decided to pick up a three pack which was actually 6 plants at the farm stand this week. I also purchased a three pack of watermelon and cantaloupe as none of those seeds germinated.

And the continued struggle of the week is basil. NONE of those basil seeds germinated so I planted both packets that I had in a bed on Thursday of this week. So this will be another week of waiting to see what happens.