Frugal Accomplishments This Week

My baby goats, frolicking in the morning sun with their mom!

Finally things are starting to warm up around here a little! Here are a few ways I saved money last week:

​1. Shopping: You can see my grocery shopping haul below, or with my other hauls on Youtube. Ham was on sale again! We also spent $5.00 on bread and lunch meat later in the week for a picnic lunch. I am going to call that a really cheap date instead of groceries.

2. Made sugar-free peanut butter cookies. For sweetener, I used honey and xylitol. At first taste, the cookies were very bland. After they had cooled down, though, they tasted better. I am going to try this recipe again with normal peanut butter (not the "natural" kind that separates) and see if it helps with the dryness. The cookies were pretty frugal because they didn't call for any butter.

3. Juiced and stored free limes. Remember my free limes from last week? I decided to juice half of the limes right away, and I put the other half in a sealed ziplock bag in the fridge. They are supposed to last for several weeks this way, and I enjoy using fresh lime juice on tacos, meat etc.

4. Dried celery leaves and ends to use in soup. I made a Youtube video about it here. I like drying celery because you don't have to use up more room in the fridge/freezer, plus the flavor holds very well.

​5. Line dried two loads of laundry.

6. Some flowers that I planted from seed last year are coming back up! I chose several different flower varieties to grow from seed last year, and most of them did poorly. I decided to not grow any flowers from seed this year because it was not worth my time. However, I didn't realize that my delphiniums were perennials!! Now I have seven big, healthy delphinium plants that will provide a whole passel of cut flowers this summer. 

First year delphiniums.

Second year delphiniums!

The picture above on the left shows what my plants looked like in mid-May of last year. The picture on the right shows what they look like now, in mid-April! Next year I want to grow the rest of the delphinium seeds I still have. In the future I will also try to purchase more seeds that are perennials. This will eliminate a lot of seed starting from year to year, but also help my build up my plant supply for pennies.

7. DIDN'T use some high-value coupons I had. Several months ago I received seven coupons for "free" items from a group of online stores. When I determined the cost of shipping though, at $13.00-$17.00 per item, the coupons weren't worth using. Most were for items that I can make myself or buy at garage sales for much less.

I think that's about it for this week! What were some of your frugal accomplishments?