Savings and Goals Journal #40

The lilacs are beginning to bloom. It’s a sure sign of spring, and I’ll be cutting some blooms to bring inside to enjoy! I hope to eventually have something blooming all spring, summer and fall so that I can cut flowers for the house.

Here’s what’s been happening at our house this week:

In the Kitchen

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want to organize the pantry when I redo that area of the kitchen. It tends to get messy so quickly. Right now it’s just open shelves. We always meant to make doors for it, and finally we’re going to! The pantry is about 5 feet wide, 18 inches deep and 7.5 feet tall. That is a lot of storage space if used properly. The shelves are not adjustable. I have lots of storage containers I use to keep like items together. One thing I will be doing is labelling the shelves and containers. I hope this will help keep things better organized. I’ll be painting the edges of the shelves with chalkboard paint and I may also put a count of how many of things I have (“Tomato sauce-6”, and so on) to help with my pantry inventory which is always out of date.

I’m excited about this project, but a little apprehensive. Taking all that stuff out of the pantry and sorting it seems overwhelming. But I know it will be worth it to make the pantry work more efficiently for our family, saving us time and money.

This week’s meal plan:

• Sunday: Taco Salad
• Monday: Leftovers
• Tuesday: Ham and Green Chile Breakfast Casserole
• Wednesday: Leftovers
• Thursday: Turkey Pot Pie
• Friday: Leftovers
• Saturday: Birthday meal: Street tacos, corn, Spanish rice, birthday cake and ice cream

A fairly low-cost meal plan this week. I did purchase some produce and frozen veggies. We have everything on hand for my daughter’s birthday except for tortillas and ice cream.

In the Garden

Grampy started seeds for Ajvarski peppers and some other little peppers we don’t know the name of. He likes to use the little red spicy peppers to make hot sauce. We are very late getting the seeds started, but we should still be able to harvest peppers as our growing season goes to near the end of October. Sometimes we can gain even a few more weeks by covering plants with sheets. We may try moving a pepper plant or two into the greenhouse in the fall and see if that will extend our growing time.

We’re pre-sprouting the seeds in damp paper towels inside sandwich bags on a heat mat. This has given me fairly good results in previous years. When they’ve sprouted we’ll put them into soil to continue growing.

I have a couple of tiny sprouts in the raised bed garden I planted last week. I’m hoping they are lettuce. Grampy and I have been discussing growing a slightly larger garden than we’d planned, due to the continuing rise in food prices.

We visited our favorite little greenhouse and purchased our last four chile pepper plants. They didn’t have the “Big Jim” variety out when we were last there. I also purchased four “Lady Bell” bell pepper plants. All of the plant starts are doing well, spending their days outside and being put in at night. I don’t want to risk them being damaged from cold or frost so I’ll tuck them in at night for a while yet.

Home and Family

Grampy and I went on a mini-date to a lavender farm that is near where we live. We will go back when the lavender is in bloom. I’ll bet it is beautiful then! There is a gift shop on the farm, so I purchased small bottles of lavender-vanilla lotion for Mother’s Day gifts. It smells wonderful. The lotion is scented with lavender oil that is distilled from the lavender flowers grown right there on the farm.

Grampy is working on putting a rail on our back porch. We’ve lived here all this time with no porch rail, but with the grandbabies, it’s necessary. I don’t want them falling off!

My kitchen makeover has somewhat stalled due to the nice weather we’ve been having. 🙂 Outdoor projects are going great. I did tackle the cabinet above the coffee bar. It had become a horrible catch-all, and there were far too many duplicate items. I did a good purge and spent an afternoon happily organizing and labelling everything. Now instead of dreading opening the cabinet to look for something, it makes me happy.

I used only things I already had on hand to organize. I am very happy with how it turned out.

Next, I’ll paint the cabinet and put in my new favorite shelf paper and this part will be done! I’m having so much fun making our home better–on a budget! 🙂

Have a wonderful week!