June is an abundant month for fruit in the garden. This month, we’ll harvest Mission figs, Green Gage plums, Royal apricots, Dorsett Golden apples, white alpine (vesca) strawberries, and blackberries. I’ll pick tomatoes and cut herbs, green onions, and Swiss chard from the garden. If my zucchini plants decide to have open male and female flowers…
May is a wonderful month for harvesting from the garden. This month I’ll be picking blackberries, Swiss chard, beets, strawberries, chamomile, hibiscus flowers, lettuce, spinach, beets, turnips, Katy apricots (they didn’t ripen last month as I had expected, but should early this month), Desert Gold peaches, artichokes, and even a few tomatoes. I also have leeks,…
We’ve had an increase in income this year. While we don’t know how long it will continue (due to the nature of a job in sales), we have decided that for now, we will be increasing our grocery budget to allow us to buy more of the things we love. For April, our budget will…
I don’t feel like I need to buy much this month, but there are some holiday sales this month that are worth noticing. St. Patrick’s Day sales will include corned beef roasts, potatoes, and cabbage. Easter sales at the end of the month will include hams, possibly turkeys, and eggs, as well as Easter…
The garden is less productive than it usually is this month, but I’m hoping to have more to harvest towards the end of the month. I’ve cloched several lettuce seedlings to get them to grow faster. I have a few green onions (fewer than previous years, but we’ve also been using them more, so I…
I went to make lemonade the last week of the year only to discover that I was out of sugar. In general, I don’t run out of things–especially sugar! Staple items are things I always have on hand. I’ll be remedying that problem right away. I have 7 or 8 baskets of lemons on…
Last month I ended up straying from my planned list a little. I know there was a possibility of a .49 cent pasta sale, and I didn’t put it on my list, but when it did end up happening, we bought quite a bit. I also stocked up a fair amount on some items from…
November is the month of Thanksgiving in the U.S., and a lot of food sales revolve around this, starting at the beginning of the month and increasing as we get closer to the fourth Thursday of the month. Sales tend to revolve around holiday items: turkey; stuffing (and all ingredients, including canned creamed soups, chicken…
An Armenian cucumber from last year I’ve been writing this series on my blog for a just over a year now. Here is last October’s post. As you may have noticed, I shop first to fill gaps in my pantry and secondly for fresh items that the garden cannot provide. In October our temperatures start…
What are the holes in your pantry? If your circumstances were to change so that starting in October you would need to live on only what you had stored for the next 12-18 months, what items would you run out of? This month I would encourage you to strongly consider this question and figure out…
Last year’s Armenian cucumbers It’s the 11th of August and I still haven’t been to the grocery store. I have, however, finally written down my priorities for the month, which are all long-term pantry items. I never did make it to Walmart last month, instead choosing to buy multiples of some items at Sam’s…
I skipped my trip to Sam’s Club last month, since there was a .49 a pound pasta sale at Smith’s. That is a price that only comes around a couple of times a year, so I went there to buy that, milk (which was on sale for lower than Sam’s price), men’s deodorant, and…