Frugal Accomplishments This Week

Flowering tree branches I forced last week

Even though it's still cold out (in the 40's today), I'm getting so excited for spring.

1. Groceries: We didn't buy any groceries this week. As the warmer months draw near, I'll be shopping less and harvesting more. I'm hoping to add fruits and vegetables to the eggs I already collect from our homestead.

2. Cooking: I cooked and froze the beef I bought on sale last week. I also made cookies! Lately I've been working hard to do most of my cooking once a day. That means I'll look at the day's meals, and see if there is anything I can do to cook both meals at once. Then I try to do all of that within an hour. I set the timer and try to work like mad! Of course, I let Princess help me, so there are plenty of interruptions. Even with the interruptions, I've been keeping that batch-cooking time to around an hour. I still spend about 15 minutes per meal actually putting everything together, if it's not something I can prepare in advance.

I would say that I spent about an hour and 45 minutes, per day, this week on cooking. My goal is to get that number down to an hour (except on Wednesday, which is cooking day, and Friday afternoon, when I bake things for fun).

3. Homestead: I gathered plenty of eggs this week from our chickens. I also foraged some Kentucky Coffee Tree beans. I cleaned them, soaked them for 24 hours (this was because I tried planting some of them) and roasted the rest of the beans at 300 degrees F for three hours. I think most of the beans exploded, but only a few landed at the bottom of the oven. A majority stayed in the pan. Then I used our Vitamix dry container to grind the beans into a powder. It turned out great!

​I planted kale, radishes, spinach, lettuce and Swiss chard in one of our two greenhouse boxes. I'm using the square foot method for spacing. I'm super, super excited about this! In past years I haven't started planting until May, so this is a very early start for us. In retrospect, I probably could have started seeds in the greenhouse boxes sooner, but I didn't. One of our greenhouse lids broke several weeks ago in a strong wind. On Saturday I had planned to ask my husband to fix it, but he already had!! He's the best! I think I'll start beets and parsnips in the other greenhouse box next week.

Lastly, I moved the tomato plants into larger containers. They're thriving! When I planted the seeds, it seemed like a conservative number of plants. Now that they're getting bigger, I realized that I don't really have room for 24 full grown tomato plants. So I might have to give some away. LOL! I also noticed that one of the hot pepper seeds is starting to sprout, so that's a good thing.

4. Crafting: I finished the numbering on a growth chart we made for our daughter. It's made to look like a gigantic ruler, with marks for every inch and numbers at each foot. The ruler sat in our living room for SIX MONTHS before I finally got around to putting the numbers on! Yikes! I pulled up my favorite font on Microsoft Word (Modern No. 20, if you're wondering) and just free-handed the lettering. Most of the letters turned out well.

Lastly, I made a video update with some fun tidbits and happenings here:

I think that's all for now. How was your week?

Til next time,
-Bethany