Signs of Spring Wordless Wednesday
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Category Archives: Square Food Garden
Saving on Saturday 3/19/2016
The weather has been warm and sunny the last week. This has made Saving a little bit easier for us. We decided to turn off the heat and air around 2 weeks ago and managed a solid 10 days without the use of either until today. I am hopefully that we can again turn it off next weekend. My goal is always to go an entire month without use either which will reduce our electric bill by approximately $100 for the month.
The warmer weather has also got me thinking about our garden. I purchased some new netting and some lawn fabric to use. The netting is specific to square foot garden but is also much cheaper than wire so I am hoping that it will last for several years. I am also trying something new this year. We still have sweet potatoes from our harvest in the fall, so I am trying to start a new crop from the ones we have. The kids enjoying helping with this project. I am not sure if this will give us enough but I am thinking that once I see it working I may start a second batch as well to equal the amount we planted last year.
I read last month that you could grow romaine lettuce using a similar water method. The red cup you see is out second head we have attempted. Last week, Zach and I planted the first one in the garden.
I realize that we may not be able to have a continual harvest and most like will only get a few extra leaves from this but as I have said before, every little bit helps.
Other areas of saving is our grocery budget, so far we have managed to spend $125 out of pocket for the month of March in addition to less than $1000 for the entire year so far. This has been the best and most controlled my grocery budget has ever been. I will admit that monthly meal planning helps but we also are buying on a rotating schedule. Our March spending should remain well below $200 however I will need to purchase meat in April so the budget will again be higher.
Finally, I am attempting to save money by using Swagbucks. My goal for each month is to earn one $25 gift card.
What are your saving secrets?
5 Things Friday-3/18/2016
- Amanda purchased a new to her car yesterday, so we should be able to stick to our gas budget for the next several months. Which means paying off the tires on my van and for the last couple repairs on her car that finally died.
- I splurged today and got a new color and haircut. I can’t post a picture because my allergies are going haywire and my eyes are swollen.
- Matt has made some progress on the kitchen this week, hopefully he will be able to finish up plumbing and we will have our new dishwasher next Friday. My plan is to wait and post pictures once the dishwasher is completely in place. I am also optimistic that with the purchase of the dishwasher and new upper cabinets, we will stop spending for the summer.
- I will be travelling to Raleigh tomorrow alone for a workshop on correct documentation. I am sad to be missing Zach’s soccer game but not sad to miss sitting in the rain to watch it.
- We will be starting gardening in the next couple of weeks. I have been growing lettuce from scraps and plan to start sweet potatoes from our leftovers on Sunday.
Saving on Saturday
I have mentioned before that this is really a “choice/lifestyle” more than just here is what I saved at x store today. To illustrate, I want to blog about my weekend. I ended up with a ton of pictures, and don’t want to distract at all from the cuteness of the kids so I will limit pictures and post links to the pictures.
The weather over the past week has been predicting the possibility of a “freeze/frost” which turns out happened Saturday night. Many of the activities this weekend directly or indirectly related to this. Friday evening, Matt and I decided to go ahead and harvest all the green peppers and basil that were of any size. I ended up freezing 4 bags (1 cup ) of these and chopping up the remained for salads and cooking this coming week.
For breakfast, Saturday morning, we decided on BLT. I have been making our own bread for the past 18 months, only buying hot dog or hamburger buns. I wanted to use up the loaf so I could make fresh this weekend. We used both fresh lettuce and tomato from the garden. Most of the morning was spent digging sweet potatoes. Around lunch we decided to venture out to a fall festival at my best friend’s church. They provided chicken stew, hot dogs, homemade ice cream and kettle corn in addition to candy that was given as prizes. We ended up enjoying this so much that we spent 4 hours. After getting home, we fixed an easy dinner of grilled tenderloin and baked sweet potatoes. Kendall said that this was an AWESOME day, one of the best ever! Total spent $0. I was concerned a little about the drop in temperature so we chose to clean the oven last night in addition to completing several loads of laundry. The temperature in the house did drop to 67* but this is only a degree below where we set the heat so not a big deal. Unfortunately, I did not move the rising bread dough from the top of the stove and it actually cooked during the oven cleaning. We used old milk containers to cover our lettuce and cabbage plants from the freeze and picked all the tomatoes that were eatable prior to the temperature drop which turned out to be our first freeze. This is what our kitchen window looks like currently.
Sunday morning, we made biscuits and gravy for breakfast, I did freeze half of the gravy to use one morning when we don’t have the time to make it. For lunch, we had bacon cheeseburger pizza, This afternoon, I am going to head to CVS to pick up Diet Coke, Matt is taking Zach to registers for indoor soccer and Kendall has a friend over to play. We are choosing to eat at home in order to keep our spending down for the month. I realized this morning that all three of the little kids are in need of winter clothes. This afternoon I have made a list and contact a friend from whom I have previously bought clothes for Zach from. I should be able to purchase enough from her to set him for the winter at about 1/4 the regular cost, I am going to check out ebay and a couple of other sites to purchase the girls clothes before we head out to Winston in a couple of weeks. I may even check out a couple of consignment store, I just have not had much luck finding clothes for Lily at these before. As you can tell, we are doing a lot to try and stay within our budget no matter to surprises/changes that happen.
Sweet Potatoes
We spent the first part of the morning digging up our sweet potatoes in anticipation of our first freeze/frost today. The kids had a blast and we really did find about 25 pounds of sweet potatoes.
Update of Square Foot Garden
This summer we have spent a lot of energy updating and expanding our square foot garden. I am excited that at the end of September we are still enjoying some of it’s benefits. Our large tomatoes have all died except for one plant that is actually laying on the ground, however the cherry and grape tomatoes are still going strong. We have plenty to snack on and I am still freezing some, usually once a week.
A couple of weeks ago, on a whim, I decided to try my hand at fall planting. I picked up 9 cabbage plants and 9 lettuce plants.
I was able to pull a couple of leaves last week to use on a salad last week and plan to use some for my lunch tomorrow.
Since I was not sure how these, the cabbage, would turn out, I decided to plant 4 in a bed with soil that I had purchased locally and 5 in a bed of “Mel’s Mix” which cost with shipping $18 a bag , but is recommended in “Square Foot Gardening.”
These are in “regular” soil.
Mel’s mix
As you can tell there is a huge difference. But does it justify over $10 a bag?? I should also clarify that these are located side by side so the only difference is soil.
After removing the corn stalks, we are suddenly growing peppers.
Finally, this is the part of the garden that I am most excited about….sweet potatoes.
The purple blooms have started this week and with hopefully a month left of growing. I can hardly wait to see what we harvest when it is time to dig up the potatoes.
Labor Day Project
The project for today was to finishing “reclaiming” the old deck wood at the edge of our yard, check out more of the story here.
Our square foot garden did not produce the corn we had hoped for this year and one of the reasons that we think may have been part of the problem was the amount of “shade” our bed was getting. So a perfect use of this wood was to make a separate “corn” bed in direct sunlight with no shade. Next up I really wanted to add a second layer to the beds we had previously built and ran out of wood. Matt and I spent all morning working on building the box, then after yet another trip to Lowes, it is finished. I am really pleased with the results and officially declare the square foot garden finished!
You can see how the shade is covering parts of the garden in the above pictures.
I did go ahead and purchase an additional 8 bags of dirt that I will use once we have harvested all the pepper, lettuce, cabbage, and tomatoes to make sure we have a good soil base. The dirt was on sale for half price at Lowes so I wanted to make sure I had enough. I also decided to purchase some mums to help with my fall flowers as well. I hope they will live a nice long time as it does not appear to be “fall” anywhere in the near future according to our weather forecast.
5 Things Friday
1. I decided to try my hand at fall gardening, so yesterday I purchased 9 lettuce plants and 9 cabbage plants. I decided to test my “Mel’s Mix” and regular soil with the cabbage plants. I planted 4 in regular soil that I purchased at Lowes, the remaining 5 are in the “Mel’s mix” that I have to have shipped at the cost of $18 a bag. Worst case scenario nothing grows and I just wasted $7.
2. We have been extremely busy this week. My work picked up as well. Tonight is actually the first night this week that we are home. I am so tired and just want to hide out all night.
3. We spent around 2 hours yesterday in Lowes, picking up items to finish up some projects around the house. I am always amazed at what we forget each time we go.
4.The kids are out of school on Monday for Labor Day. I am covering inpatients which means that we can sleep in for the next 3 days.
5.I am planning to spend at least an hour or more enjoying my garden tub tonight!
5 Things Friday
1. The kids start to school on Monday. We had a meet the teacher night last night and everyone is excited. In anticipation of this we are following the school night schedule around here including bedtimes! This also means that I am trying to get some filling/quick breakfast made over the next couple of morning to help in the mornings. Did I mention that Tuesday and Friday will be the first time in 10 years that ALL my children will be in school?
2. Yesterday, was a sad day. We spent most of the day outside working in the yard and square foot garden. The reason it was so sad is that I ended up pulling up and throwing in the compost pile, about half the corn, the cucumber plants and about half of the tomato plants. We have had such a dry summer and with us being out of town last week, so no extra watering, they were dead. It was bittersweet because I was able to harvest enough corn for dinner last night and 2 small watermelon that we used for dinner today. We should continue to get a couple of tomato in daily and maybe just maybe a green pepper or so.
3. I was able to leave work on or before 5:30 every day this week and even managed to get home by 5pm this evening! I know this is hard to understand but it is a HUGE deal for me and something I plan to continue.
4.I want to spend most of tomorrow at the pool as it will only be open for 3 more weekends. I have not checked the forecast but heard it included storms.
5. I was able to get an additional 2 GB of data and $20 knocked off my Verizon bill tonight just by asking!
Saving on Sunday
Opps! You are right today is Sunday. I did not get much saving done yesterday because we spent most of the day enjoying the pool. Kendall had a friend in addition to Lily having a friend spend the night so I got not a lot accomplished except for spending time with the kids. I am starting to realize and trying to enjoy more time just hanging out with the little kids, I know in a flash they will be too busy to hang out! Now back to saving. I did do some shopping today, even with all three little kids in tow. Matt is working for cheerleading so I decided the sales were good enough and we needed most items.
First stop today was CVS. It has been 3 weeks since I last went to CVS, I hope they will not be having another test market of no sales ad in the near future. Today I purchased 7 bottles of shampoo, a bottle of detangle, 2 bottles of Tide free and clear, 4 bottles of body wash,2 sticks of deodorant and a battery powered toothbrush for $36 with a 65% saving, I also have 10 ECB to use in the future.
We also stopped by Aldi to grab fresh produce including cantaloupe, watermelon, grapes and cottage cheese that I need for a recipe. Total spent at Aldi was 18.47
We are continuing to get lots of tomatoes from the garden. I have managed to replenish the shelf of stewed tomatoes and discovered an awesome recipe for spaghetti sauce. I adapted it to the crockpot and hopefully will make at least a batch a week for the month of August. Currently, I am freezing in containers to make Baked Ziti with. My plan is to make 12 of these and then just freeze spaghetti sauce, even the kids say this is the best sauce they have eaten.
How did you save this month?