Gardening leads to thoughts on saving money...

It has been kind of entertaining to read the headlines lately. There is almost always at least one blurb about how to save money. The best part is that it is usually directed at people that in all reality have a fair amount of money along with a job. Most of the suggestions are good ones, but really don't go far enough if you truly have little to no income.

A little background: I grew up in what would be called a poverty stricken family if you looked at the finances. We didn't feel like we were in poverty and yet our income level was well below the standard poverty level. Now, I am not saying we were poor. We weren't. We never really wanted for anything, other than maybe some more money. We always had enough to eat and we had clothes to wear. We had a roof over our head and as kids we got to do plenty of extracurricular activities.

But...Here is where we did things differently from other people. I very seldom remember having new clothes until I was paying for them myself. Everything you wanted you had to save up for. There were lots of times I wanted to do something or buy something that just wasn't possible at that time. If we didn't have the cash in hand it wasn't possible. There were no credit cards, no home equity loans, and no car loans. We didn't drive new cars. Quite the opposite in fact.

In order to make ends meet there were things like the fact we didn't have insurance unless we were in school. Then we had the coverage through the school disctrict. It didn't amount to much but it did help. Mom and Dad made almost all of our food from scratch. We shopped for almost everything second hand. When something was purchased that was new lots of research went into it. It had to be something that was going to last. There was no t.v., no dishwasher, no microwave, and lights were used as little as possible. This meant our utility bill stayed low. Wood heat ensured the power bill didn't spike in the winter. It couldn't, there was no other option.

We had a small garden too. My poor mom though. We lived at 6200 feet so not much more than peas, potatoes, and carrots would grow. We did harvest lots of berries from the wild and we went hunting every fall. I know, not an option for most city dwellers but we weren't living anywhere near a city.

So, I'm finally getting to my point. I now garden in order to save money on our food. Especially as we have children of our own. I haven't kept very detailed records, but in my estimation I probably only spend about $100 on the garden in a year. I know I get more than $100 worth of food from it. Especially when you start to consider things like the herbs I have. Even parsley that is an inexpensive thing to purchase fresh. I think it is about 80 cents for a bunch of fresh parsley. Now if I were to buy a jar of dried parsly from the spice aisle that price jumps to $4.00 or more. I think I bought my parsly plant for about $3.00 and I can get several fresh cuttings from that plant every year. Plus if I let it go to seed then I don't have to spend that $3.00 next year.

I'm doing the same sort of thing with our baby food this next round. Green beans from the store in a jar cost about 80 cents a jar. I have more green beans than we can eat right now so I'm steaming, pureeing, and freezing them for baby food. Besides reducing the cost I know what is in my baby food now. Sure my time should be figured in to the cost as well, but I'm preserving food anyway this time of year and it really doesn't take any more time to set aside an ice cube tray or two of baby veggies.

Well, now that I have run out of steam on this subject. I'm tired of sitting in front of the computer, it is a nice cool day, and I still have beans that need picked. I think I'll go play in the garden.

August 7th--Full blown summer

When did that happen. The peas, beets, carrots, and lettuce are done. The potatoes ended up with scab, and the green beans are going nuts. I have volunteer tomato plants again along with lots of squash that decided to grow. I'm finally starting to get a cucumber here and there and I harvested the first of the zuchinni today. Some of the roma tomatoes are starting to color too. Soon I will be extrememly busy in the garden.

The cherry butter ended up being frozen. That way of preserving isn't nearly as pretty as canning, but sure is faster. None of the pictures really warrented getting put up.

And one last thing...Onions are going crazy and corn is starting to tassle.