Food For Thought

Posted on April 26, 2015 by Sheila

Up until this Saturday, I had done no grocery shopping in the month of April. Matt actually ran to the store to pick up milk after we came home from the beach. Because of the limited shopping our budget has stayed very low for the month. My goal for the month was to keep our grocery budget low and to use up as much as possible from our stockpile so I had already decided that I did now want to spend a great deal and I am pleased to report that I was successful. Saturday turned out to be a very rainy and nasty day, Amanda had planned to spend the day with the kids so she offered to watch all three of the little one while Matt and I went to the grocery store. After ten years of marriage, this even is considered a date! Matt has a free drink from Starbucks so that was our first stop. Next we went to Harris Teeter, I saved around 50% and only used 3 coupons, $3 off a 12 pack of diet coke, $3 off 2 boxes of Starbucks K-cups and $5 off purchase of $50. This last coupon was after all other coupons as well. I did shop in the clearance buggy where I found 3 boxes of ant bait. We also purchased sausage, bacon and pepperoni with our total our of pocket being $47.67. Next we stopped at Food Lion where we purchased 10 boxes of fruit snacks, 5 boxes of pop tarts and a gallon of milk for $22. I was very pleased with our trip> I am actually still under $200 for the month so I may go to Food Lion for a couple more rounds of Fruit snacks.

After keeping our food budget extremely low for the month of April, I am already looking ahead to May, I know that we are going to need to make a Costco trip at the beginning of the month and it also appears as if we will be purchasing 40# of ground beef from Zaycon to last us through the summer. My goal is to stay under $600 for the month so between these two large purchase we most likely will continue to adapt and ate things that we have on hand. Otherwise if the budget goes extremely high it will negate our positive gains in April.

Next item on our food list is that our square foot garden is growing! I am so excited that not only did all the plants that I have initially planted survive but they are growing. Matt has also added a 2×6 box that we will be planting corn in. Depending how well the corn grows and if we really like it, we may add a third box just for corn.

Finally, meal planning for the week. This will be a special week as both girls have Field Day this week, several appointments on Thursday and we are headed to our last competition for Cheerleading next weekend.

Breakfast-French toast (leftovers) , Cereal, Poptarts, eggs and Baked oatmeal.

Lunch-Lunches are going to be packed later today(Sunday) and I will be taking either a salad or leftovers.

Dinner– Crazy evening schedule with several quick and easy meals thrown in.

Saturday- Lunch: new chicken recipe, Dinner- Homemade pizza with sourdough crust.
Sunday- Lunch- at my parents, Dinner- Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, veggie and fruit.
Monday- leftovers
Tuesday- Hamburger helper
Wednesday-Chicken pie and Squash casserole, I am taking the day off so I will be cooking!
Thursday- hot pockets or pizza roles
Friday- Pepper steak and rice.

Random Thoughts Thursday

Posted on April 23, 2015 by Sheila

It does not feel like just a week ago we were enjoying some fun at the beach!
Matt’s birthday was Tuesday but due to our schedule we decided to celebrate tonight. He wished for things to slow down and I just laughed!
I am amazed at the difference in the weather in different parts of the country. Today it was windy but 65* but in Michigan it snowed! I am also very thankful I don’t live where it snows in April!
I was able to plant most of my square foot garden today! The current plan is to finish it in two weeks and replace anything that does not survive. I thought I had checked the weather better but it turns out that we have a chance of going below freezing today so I hope everything survives. I am so excited to get things growing!
. We are doing really well on our budget for the month. I knew in advance that our beach trip would cost us extra and I am hoping to cover the additional repair to the van as well. As of today, we have spent only $121 of our $600 grocery budget and that includes not only the plants you see above but steaks for Matt’s birthday dinner! In gas, we have spent $309. This amount does include our gas for travel to and from the beach but not the repair that was made on the white van prior to going. I don’t see that we will be spending anything more in gas but do expect to end up spending around $150 on groceries by the end of the month.
Weird things excite me, as you can tell from the numbers above, we have not been grocery shopping this month. On Monday, we went down to our building where we have both our freezers. In the chest freezer is all veggies, it is starting to look a little low except for the zucchini which I froze over 2 years ago. The other freezer now only contains chicken and is less than half full. I am excited to finally be using and seeing a difference in our grocery budget. I definitely don’t want to use up all our stock pile but like the idea of starting fresh at the end of the summer and attempting to maintain the same $600 budget after cutting it down to a fourth for a couple of month.
Our next and final cheerleading competition is only two weeks away but it at Carowinds which is an amusement park. It will be very expensive but a fun trip. I am actually really looking forward to decreasing our schedule by at least one night a week for cheerleading! Swim team starts everyday in the month of June so I am not sure what we will do for the month of June this year. I would love to take a month off from cheering but just don’t see that happening!

Yard Work

Posted on April 12, 2015 by Sheila

I am not a person who enjoys working in the yard, well except for mowing. As a mom, who can say no to an hour of uninterrupted quiet time? I do however, want to have a yard that is pretty and looks like I care. I really enjoy flowers at least looking at them. We are finally at a season in our life when we have the money, time and energy to attempt to beautiful the yard. We are also focusing on making our square foot garden not only productive but at least not an eye sore. Yesterday, we spent most of the day working outside, the biggest project was adding a “platform” to the square foot garden as well as getting it ready to plant in a couple of weeks. I am so excited that it turned out this well.

Next after twenty years, I decide to replace the brick chip with mulch on both sides of the house.

We also ended up replanting some grass up front and I did some rearranging of the flowers in the front bed. Finally, I replanted tulips and love my flower pot in front of the house.

I am exhausted and sore but very pleased with the results.

Five Things Friday 4/10/2015

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Sheila

So glad that Carla did this post today! So I “borrowed” her cute picture and will share my five things!

The white van was treated to yet another set of repairs yesterday. A new heater hose and air conditioner compressor. This depleted our emergency fund by $450. I am hoping to be able to add a little bit back to the fund this month but even more so am praying that this is the end of repairs at least for a couple of months.
I was driving the van to cheerleading last night and on the way home suffered an allergy attack. After a little bit of thinking, realized that it was most likely due to “dust” that had accumulated in the air condition system. This morning, Matt spent another $10 to replace the cabin air filters. I am so frustrated with this van at the moment.
I did have a major success in saving for Groceries. Our menu plan called for Baked Potato on Thursday. I realized when getting out the potatoes that I still had about a fourth of bag of potatoes that were starting to spout. In order not to waste food, I filled the crockpot with potatoes, used the remaining ones after dinner to make mashed potatoes. One 2 cup set I will use for “shepherd pie” this weekend and the others (2) are frozen for later use. I also started a crock pot with “potato corn chowder” which will be a second meal for the weekend and then at least two additional meals in the future. So I have managed to cook a minimum of 5 meals in one day using crock pots and food on hand.
I am working toward a goal of significantly lowering our grocery cost for the month. To accomplish this I want to stick to shopping at CVS and Aldi, no Costco trips. So far for the month, we have spent $38 on groceries. The goal is to spend less than $50, purchase some landscape items and plants for the square foot garden with another $200 and use the remainder to now cover the unexpected van expense.
In NC on Saturday, the temperature is suppose to be in the low 70s and sunny so we are planning to spend the day working on the Square Foot Garden. I hope to post pictures of all the yard tomorrow.

Playing in Dirt

Posted on March 22, 2015 by Sheila

That is how we spent most of this beautiful Saturday! Playing in the dirt! The temperature was around 65 degrees and it was sunny! I would call it a perfect Spring day in North Carolina!!

I started the day with a long list of small projects that needed to completed to make our yard at least presentable.

.~~Mix new dirt into square foot garden.~~ (See above).
~~Weed all three flower beds and place new mulch.~~
~~Fix square foot garden where it was hit this winter.~~
~~Drill holes in large planter and re-plant.~~
Move and straighten playhouse.
~~Place lime over wet area of yard.~~
~~Mow and trim yard.~~
~~Fix Matt’s van, (small leak).~~
~~Fix cup holder in white van and add cup holder for Lily.~~
~~Wash and hang to dry all sheets.~~
~~Apply mulch to playground~~ and then Preen It (this will prevent weed growth).
~~Wash dog and all his bedding.~~

As you can tell we did accomplish a lot. The ground is simply too wet right now to get the playhouse adjusted, so hopefully in the next couple of week we can get this marked off the list. Applying the weed preventer, need to happen just prior to it raining so I am going to do this on Sunday in anticipation of rain late Sunday night or Monday.

This is one area that I will admit that I usually forget to budget for however this year, I did not. I had budgeted $100 for the yard, after using this I ended up pulling $25 from the yard sale profits to keep us even for this project. I am so excited to have this behind me and to not have to borrow money to complete. One of the ways that I ended up saving money was buying plants off the “clearance” shelves at Lowes. I ended up purchasing all but 2 of the plants from this area this year. I had great success with these last year as most of the time the plants are simply not blooming or missed getting water prior to being placed in this area.

Lily is a bit of a prissy girl and does not like playing in the dirt but because we were all outside, she was required to at least sit outside as well.

And finally a picture of the mulched beds and planter…

Wordless Wednesday- Sweet Potatoes

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Sheila

Our sweet potato harvest for 2014! Hope they are as good to eat as they were fun to harvest!

Saturday Yard Work

Posted on September 20, 2014 by Sheila

Today brought more beautiful weather to North Carolina. I had already decided that we needed to spend some time outside doing some yard work. I spent most of the day, trimming our iris and pulling weeds from the flower beds. However the yard work that was most exciting was the “reworking” of our square foot garden.

I was so excited to start this year as I had great plans to get the most use and some yummy veggies to use all year. That was a plan that did achieve it’s greatness. First of all the weather has been strange this summer. We have not had our typical hot (90plus) temperatures and also have lacked some in the rain department as well. We have been enjoying tomatoes all summer in addition to lots of green peppers the last couple of weeks. We discovered several nice size watermelons, however the last 3 have rotten before they ripen so I knew we needed to make some changes. First, was a new bed over to the right side in the picture. This will be for squash as they grow really large and take up a lot of sun! Next, Matt added another back stop to use with cherry tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes have been our best and most enjoyed treat this summer so I definitely want to have more of these next year. Finally after some discussion, we moved out watermelon and cantaloupe planters from the back of the deck to the front with the rest of the garden. We hope this will allow them to grow, spread and ripen in the future. I am so proud to say that with all these additions we have not spent any more instead we have used some recycled work. We will need to purchase or hopefully find a piece of wire to complete the backstop. So our only purchase next spring will be some additional dirt to replenish and fill the new and improved beds!

I will admit this was a lot of work so I plan to enjoy a restful day tomorrow.

Weekend Rambling

Posted on July 6, 2014 by Sheila

I have enjoyed 4 full days off work in a row! I am excited and feeling accomplished that I just had to share all that we have been up to.

Both Friday and Saturday, we spent over 5 hours enjoying the pool. I can finally say that I have a tan now!
The weather has been awesome, much cooler than in the past week and much cooler than I expected, temperatures have been in the mid 80s by day and even some 50s at night.
Because of the nice weather, I was able to spend several hours working not only in our square foot garden but also working in the flower beds around the house. I am very pleased with the results!
The square foot garden continues to provide us with fresh vegetables daily, our cherry tomatoes are awesome! Hopefully by the end of the week, we will have some full size tomatoes to go with our cucumbers and squash. Because of the really hot weather, I am not sure if we will be getting any more beans this year but the kids loved planting and picking so they will be repeated next week. My most exciting discovery this week has been that we have 4 watermelons and 2 cantaloupes growing! I can’t wait to eat these.
I have been grabbing some good deals at both CVS and Food Lion this week. I will say that I was most disappointed to find that Diet Coke was not on sale at Food Lion after being told it was by 2 different people.
Both the little girls are really enjoying swim team. Lily is now able to swim all 4 strokes but needs to work on her endurance. Kendall is able to swim the back stroke and freestyle without stopping. Kendall has also been working on the butterfly but I am not sure she will be able to compete in this stroke this year.
Our new dryer arrived on Saturday and we were able to dry a load of towels in less than an hour!
One of the best deals I got at Food Lion was ground chuck for $2.67 a pound, this afternoon in less than an hour, Matt and I put together 5 meals. We decided to combine the ground chuck with venison that we had previously purchased. All the meals were frozen because we are still eating leftovers from Kendall’s party. We packed 2 bags of cooked ground beef; these will be used for Hamburger Helper or other meals such as pizza that started with cooked meat. I made a meatloaf and cheeseburger pie and finally Matt made a container of Taco rice that we plan to take to the beach as a meal in August.
On Friday, which was the Fourth of July, Amanda came and took Kendall shopping for her birthday. She purchased a dress, 2 complete outfits, a pair of shorts and a couple of Disney shirts. Kendall is so excited to have new clothes to wear! Haley decided to spend time with us as well. She actually went to the pool. The little kids absolute LOVE when their big sister spend time with them!
Tonight, all three of the little ones are attending Vacation Bible School at my brother’s church. I am excited and surprised because Zach wanted to go and did not even get upset when we left him eating with his cousin. I hope they all have a great time. This is the first time that Zach has been able to stay somewhere without either of his parents. He will sometimes stay at the child watch center at the YMCA but other time he refuses so for him to want to stay is AWESOME! I hope the trend continues all week!

Square Foot Garden Update- June

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Sheila

I am so totally excited to be able to pick and enjoy vegetable from our garden. I can say without a doubt that this year, we are getting the most and best veggies that we have ever grown.

Yesterday we harvested our first major amounts. For the last several weeks, we have been picking squash and a few random cherry tomatoes. But yesterday we harvested 2 green peppers, squash, several cucumbers, several cherry tomatoes and enough green beans to cook and have as a side dish. So far I have frozen around 8 packets of squash for casseroles and given away at least that much. I can’t wait till we can restock our tomato sauce. I have not bought any tomato products in 2 years but my freezer is empty of these so I hope to get a huge harvest in by the middle of July.

We have decided to make one change for next year, I will be adding an additional bed on the side for just squash. This should allow us to have more cucumbers as these are our current favorites.