Beside saving on gas by not going anywhere the other focus of saving lately has been with gardening. I am continuing to focus on using items in my freezer and pantry to help control my grocery bill but I also plan to do a lot of restocking this summer.  One of the things that I am hearing on repeat from the channels I watch on you tube as well as with most of the blogs that I follow is that we need to grow as much of our own food as possible.

Last year was a complete bust on growing food thanks to the awful soil that I ended up purchasing.  This year we have started with better soil so hopefully that is a better result.  My initial plan was to purchase most of the plants to start with as I think this is easier and have had better luck in the past. But as I started looking at my current selection of seeds I realized that I had lots of seed just sitting her. I also have containers and extra soil on hand.   To start plants from seed would save lots of money especially since the out of pocket cost was nothing.  I decided to go ahead and try and if I failed then I just wasted my time and effort. We started the seeds inside the house so that the temperature would be more consistent. The plan is to move these to the greenhouse next weekend.  Currently we have 27 pepper plants and 46 tomato plants!

In the red cups, I am trying to start our sweet potatoes!  I am very hopefully that after we return from Disney we will be able to move both the green pepper and the tomato plants out of the green house and into the beds.   I have WAY more tomatoes than I have need for or  have dedicated room for but will just plant what we have and use every spare pot and spot I can find in the mean time.

We have ended up with just a little bit of harvest from the greenhouse with some lettuce and spinach. I am not sure it will be worth using year round but it was a fun experiment. We also continue to have kale.