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Garden Season

June 22, 2022 We both consider ourselves to be foodies, and pre-COVID, we enjoyed going out to eat quite a bit. The pandemic changed our eating habits as we found ourselves eating at home for nearly all meals. As there were also fears of food shortages in 2020, we decided it would be a good idea to put in a garden that summer. While the fear of food shortages sparked the start of us putting in a garden, we also wanted to plant one in order to save money on items we could grow ourselves, and eat food made with less pesticides.   In 2020, we had a fairly simple garden with just tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, kale, basil, and mint. Then in 2021, we went a bit overboard and bought some new veggies to try like beets, carrots, broccoli, corn, garlic and cauliflower, but they just didn’t do well.  So, this year, we’re keeping it simple and going to go back to our ‘roots’ and mimic what we did in 2020. To prep for gardening this year, we bought seeds back in April and then life just got busy, and we never were able to start our seedlings indoors. (Hopefully we aren’t the only ones to do this!).  To ensure we still had plants growing this month, we decided we needed to buy some plants to get us started, and then we will plant the seeds to ensure we have plants to harvest through the fall.   To keep with our food budget, we’ll share a tip with you – you do not have to buy plants from a store! This week we were able to pick up eight tomato plants for free, as a woman in our neighborhood Facebook group had too many that grew from seed and was giving them away. Then at the Saturday West Allis Farmers Market, there were quite a few vendors that had many plants ready for the garden at such great prices. One vendor had a variety of peppers and tomato plants going for six plants for $5 and another had single plants and herbs going for $1.50 each. Had we bought them earlier in the week from a well-known store, the plants would have been $5 each.   We’ll keep you posted on how the gardening goes and spoiler alert – we do can most items in late summer and early fall. You might also be interested in Whew and wow! This has been quite a challenging and eye-opening process! It has been very hard to do this project as part of a couple when both of us appear... During the week of November 23, we wrote about how we were going to look into options for cost-saving measures. One of those measures was to analyze any... This past weekend, we took our annual trip down to Chicago, which was also paired with a trip to the theater. With being in Project Money, have been more... Something that stands out lately are the number of outlets competing for one’s time, attention, and especially our hard earned money. I don’t know about... If it wasn't so cold out right now, we might not believe that the end of the year is fast approaching, but alas – it is! With that, we have been starting... Initially, we weren’t sure exactly what to write about for this week’s blog post. However, the subject came to us this past weekend as we were reviewing... Many of us enjoy hosting parties with friends and family for seasonal activities and Holidays but don’t want to break the bank doing so! For me and Krystal... I don't know about you, but I, Krystal, grew up in a pretty cold house during winter. We lived in a rural-ish area where natural gas did not run, thus... One thing we’re still working through is being a bit more proactive about unexpected house costs. Sure, we have small savings account for house expenses...