Sometimes you CAN get something for nothing!

As the summer gets underway, our garden has been providing many delicious harvests. For our meal planning this week we challenged ourselves to build each of our meals around something that we grow in our garden. Some highlights of this include:

• Kale, pepper, tomato and cucumber salad with toasted pecans and rotisserie chicken. The veggies all came from the garden!
• Broccoli quinoa pesto with chicken (One of our favorites - make a pesto using the broccoli stems, walnuts, nutritional yeast, olive oil and lemon juice; mix pesto with cooked quinoa and toss in sauteed chicken and broccoli florets). The broccoli is from the garden!
• Cabbage and kielbasa using cabbage from the garden.

In addition to eating from our garden, we have also been challenging ourselves to find unexpected or overlooked free entertainment and services that we may have simply skipped over previously out of convenience. Below is a list of some of those simple things that have helped us cut down our budget - what are some of your favorite free things to do?

1. Free or inexpensive tire repair at a local tire shop. This one we discovered by accident when we found a bolt in our tire one morning. If a tire can be repaired, some shops will do it for free!
2. The library is such an important resource in our community. Before doing Project Money, we would often buy books online out of habit. The library has pretty much every book we've wanted to read. Sometimes, it can take a few days or weeks to receive it if it's in high demand, but we have changed our mindset to be okay with waiting a little and not always expecting 2-day shipping for every item we want. We've also enjoyed the free story times for kids on the weekends and playing in the amazing children's room at the local branch.
3. Splash pads! 
4. Local summer concerts, like Concert on the Square for those in the Madison area.
5. Using our Soda Stream. We are big fans of sparkling water and even though we have a Soda Stream to be able to make it at home, we often buy cans of water out of convenience. We dusted off the soda stream and have been putting it to good use. It's fun to think up new flavors to add as well! A couple favorites are cucumber mint and cherry.