Random things

This blog seems to be either feast or famine. Today its feast!
Lately I have been outdoors alot. The weather has been so beautiful! With the Spring weather comes garage sales. I've been to quite a few already. This area has lots of community sales in the April and May. I always buy enough to dress my daughter for a year at these sales. So far, the deals have been mediocre. Seems everybody is out to make an extra buck this year and the prices are much higher than in the past. This is frustrating. Last year I spent $40-50 dollars to clothe my daughter for an entire year and I got her birthday and Christmas presents too. I don't know if I will be able to copy that this year. I am being frugal though, and not buying those high priced items. I WILL find pricing like last year!
Speaking of my daughter, she is blossoming. She is not quite 20 months old right now. Her vocabulary is increasing every day. She wants to help me so much right now. Like today, at the grocery, she was trying to put items on the conveyor belt. Then she tried to lift bags out of the cart to give to me! She has been telling me when she has soiled her diaper and wanting to sit on the toilet. However, no luck in using the toilet yet. She loves the outdoors and the dog. She would play in a pile of dirt all day if I let her! She does not care if she is black with dirt from head to toe! Sound like a true farm girl to me!

Here is a beautiful picture I tooks from the last spell of rain we had. There are two partial rainbows. The one on the left is very hard to see.


Here is another pic of just the one rainbow.


Have a good week!

Grocery shopping

In the past couple months, I have reduced my shopping trips. I was going once a week. I hate shopping, so I decided it was high time to quit going so often. I grow food and cook from scratch,so this was the next most logical step to take towards my quest for food self-reliance. So I figured out to shop only once every two weeks. That went real easy. So easy in fact, I probably could have gone 3 weeks on my last grocery trip if I had planned a couple of items better. So I had my shopping trip to Kroger today. I planned on enough to last 3 weeks. In reality, it should last an entire month. I will need to make a trip to town later this week, and there I will pick up my remaining 3 week supplies at Aldi. (My local Kroger and Aldi are not in the same town, and I really wish they were!)
My biggest challenge so far has been having enough dairy products. We currently use about 4 gallons of milk a week and use lots of cheese. So in order to have a months supply of milk, I have been freezing it. Kroger has had some fabulous deals on milk lately and I have been getting it for $1.76-2.00/gallon. That is dirt cheap around here!
Milk in the freezer.

At this point, it makes monetary(and health) sense to be producing our own dairy. However, I have a toddler and my dh is away from home often. We want to have more children (God willing) and I need to keep in mind that pregnancy and breastfeeding and diapering, etc, etc all take alot of time when I have to do alot of it by myself. So I have to pick and choose until I have children old enough to help me more. I would really love to be able to raise all of our animals products and entirely quit going to the grocery! Did I ever mention I hate shopping?

Note: I wanted to add a note just to clarify my shopping habits. We NEVER just keep a week or two worth of food at our house. I feel that would be irresponsible of me. I always have canned foods and meat in my pantry and freezer. If I don't go to the grocery one week, we won't starve. When I talk about grocery shopping, I'm talking about things like dairy products, fresh fruit and veggies (when we aren't growing them), toilet paper, soaps, juice, crackers, cereal, etc. It also includes restocking the pantry/freezer as needed. These would include(but not exclusively) beef, chicken, pork, canned fruit/veggies, flour, yeast, sugar, etc. My ultimate grocery goal is to be able to shop for 6 months at a time, or even better, one year!

Weekend Gardening

We had a beautiful weekend despite the wind. I got another box planted, this time with carrots. I planted an entire 4x8 box, so that makes approximately 512 carrots. I say "approximately" because for one thing those seeds are so tiny, it's hard to just drop one at a time. And also it was quite windy, so some may have blown away or extras blown where I didn't intend for them to be. All in all, I think the box will be ok.
The peas are coming up nicely, here they are:


The onions look marvelous, although windblown:



The potato tires are looking good:






The strawberries are filling out nicely. I bought 4 plants to fill in some empty spots.


I also bought some berries to plant. I got grapes, raspberries and blueberries. Can't wait until those are producing well in a few years! We all love berries.
In a large container, I also planted some mixed lettuce and radish.
It feels so good to grow my own food!

Wood Burner Progress

Yard before the burner.


The trench has been dug and stone laid in it. The wiring and the water tubing is laid in the trench and is buried.


The hole has been dug, stone laid and concrete poured for the wood burner to sit on.


The front pad (were you would stand to load the burner) is poured. Now we wait for the burner to be here on Memorial Day weekend.

The garden is growing

The gardening is underway here! Despite the sleet, wind and cold of yesterday, there are veggies popping up in the garden. The onion tops are about 3" tall, the peas are just breaking through the soil and the potato leaves are making their appearance also! Indoors, the tomatoes are setting their third set of leaves and a watermelon seedling decided to show up. None of the other watermelon, squash or herbs germinated. Time to replant those. As soon as the ground dries some, we will be planting carrots and tilling the new garden plot. In about a week or two, I will start the bush beans. Hopefully this weekend I will make it to the nursery to get my berries and fruit. It is supposed to get into the lower 80's this weekend - good time to garden! The ground should be ready for the carrots then too! Spring gardening is always exciting for me!

Bulk Canning Lids

Wanted to share a wonderful place to buy bulk canning lids!!
I found this place by way of the food storage group at yahoo. Its called Dutchman's Store. They have no website (pretty sure they are Amish). They sell 345 regular canning lids for $34.95 and 288 wide mouth lids for $35.95. Plus shipping. My shipping charge was $15.00 (west central Ohio). That's better priced than what I can buy them for locally. This is the first place I have come across that sells them in bulk. I can't verify the quality(haven't used them yet), but plenty of the gals on the food storage group like them.
They take phone orders and can take credit cards or they will wait for your check to clear. I sent a check and they were here quickly.
Here is their info for anyone interested:

Dutchman's Store
103 Division St.
Cantril, IA 52542

phone 319-397-2322
fax 319-397-2370
dutchman@netins.net

Better Times Living link and other links

Here is a very useful website I found years ago when I was living by myself and didn't have a penny to spare. I have come across it again and felt that it's worthwhile passing on to those who may find it useful also.
It will be added in the right column with the other websites that I visit.
http://www.bettertimesinfo.org/2004index.htm

Also added some other new links to the side bar.

Wrap Skirt Tutorial

Had a tutorial here. I just don't feel right having it here and not being able to give the appropriate person their due credit. Sorry if anyone wanted to copy it before I took it off!

Wrap Skirt

Finished making my wrap skirt! This is the first garment I have ever made for myself. I am very pleased with how it turned out. I would give a tutorial, but I cannot take credit for this design. I THINK I got the idea from craftster.org, only I can't find it on the site now! I will make a new post for the tutorial someone else wrote (I wish I could give credit to them, I copied and pasted it and there is no site addy). Here are pictures of my skirt that I made all by myself!




Picture of it laid out on the floor:



Fabric patterns up close (sorry about the shadow!):

Getting ready for spring gardening

Past several days have felt like winter is back. The few weeks preceding winters return, it was beautiful and we took advantage of it.
Got 2 tater tires started...



Moved the garden boxes and marked off an area for the corn, tomatoes and vining plants...



Started seeds indoors (sorry no pics yet), burned garden waste that couldn't be composted due to disease, pruning and just general cleaning up of the garden/herb/flower beds.
Here are some signs of spring around our farm...







Last 4 pictures from top to bottom: garlic, oregano, daffodils, hyacinth.

Making Fruit Leather

I've been making fruit leather again. This time its apple-strawberry. I puree a gallon bag of my home-grown strawberries (thawed from the freezer) and add a little (home canned)applesauce to help thicken it a bit. I then add about a 1/4 cup of sugar. Not absolutely neccesary, but it does help reduce the tartness. Pour onto the trays and dry!
I only have one fruit leather tray that came with the dehydrator. So what I did to be able to make more than one at a time is use wax paper cut to fit the trays. Works really well! I tried using plastic wrap, but didn't really like it. With the wax paper, it's easier to wash it and re-use. I'm all for reusing and eliminating waste and cutting costs! Plus, the wax paper I have is the wax bags from boxes of cereal. I always save those bags, they are so handy! I can't tell you the last time I bought wax paper! On that note, I also haven't bought foil, plastic wrap or plastic baggies in several years. I always wash and air dry what I use and reuse, reuse, reuse! Sounds like a good start to another installment of Disposing of Disposables!

Reality Report

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XzKLzzl6SA

A little Thomas Jefferson

In a letter to James Madison on January 30, 1787, Jefferson wrote, "A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical…It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government."