Working to be self-sustaining

Today, I'm going to be talking a little more about our gardening plans and some of our goals with the garden. For us, part of saving money and becoming frugal, is becoming more self-sufficient. We want to not only have fresh veggies and fruits during the summer, but be able to preserve them for the winter as well. To this end, we are putting our large yard to use for us and planting as much as possible. Our big project this year is to expand the raised garden by 12 square feet. I know it sounds like a lot, but in order to make this feasible, we need the space.

Today, even though there is still quite a bit of snow, we set out our plans for this year.

Last year we planted 2 apple trees, we'll probably plant 1-2 more this year because we want to start being able to dry, can and freeze the apples. We're going to be trying to preserve as much as we can for use throughout the year. We'll be documenting everything as we do it, from the beginning.

We tried gardening last year, but with the pregnancy and my husband working extra hours, we weren't able to harvest and preserve a lot. This year I'm working from home, I won't be pregnant and my husband won't be working crazy hours, which will allow us time to make our gardens work for us. In addition to expanding our raised garden, we'll be re-arranging the flower garden to insert some herbs and veggies. I'll be adding tomatoes and peppers to the flower garden to maximize our growing space and potential.

We'll be planting a lot of herbs this year, we want to dry them for use throughout the year. Not only are herbs and spices expensive, but by growing them we can know where they came from, how they were handled and make our own spice blends.

We're using the same thought process for everything we'll be growing. We want to try to get a large yield of everything to get us through the as much of the winter as we can. The less we have to buy the less money we have to spend on food.

We're also going to be planting a large wildflower garden in a corner of the yard because we want to entice honey bees to come pollinate our gardens.

If we have any money left over, we'll be redoing our compost bin. Unfortunately, the one we inherited when we bought the house is not working out well. It's not large enough and it's not animal proof. We've had a few uninvited guests that helped themselves to it by ripping through the cloth sides. We'll be making one out of wood and chicken wire. We want to design it to have a small swinging door at the bottom to easily remove the lower layer of compost.

We're funding most of our projects by using the rewards points from our credit cards. We have credit cards that accumulate points that can be redeemed for gift cards and other items. So, we get gift cards to the hardware/gardening store, for us it's usually home depot, and voila! we have money to fund our garden projects. The points take a while to accumulate because we aren't (usually) high spenders. So, I've been planning this for a while. That's a key to being frugal, plan, wait and feel the rush of we did that.

Not planning is detrimental to being frugal, if you just wing your spending you'll never have enough and your budget will never balance. Well, I hope you enjoyed the photos of some of the wildlife near us, see you tomorrow.