"Sorry, guys. We're having takeout, again. Mommy doesn't have time to cook. She spent all her spare time digging and planting .."
Or throw something in the crockpot before going outside.
This is my go to. I have two so one is always ready to go🤣
Excellent points!
And just like you can get into a grove with planning the calendar around your planting events, you can then also whip out the lowkey plans that revolve around garden heavy tasks.
I recommend making a short journal entry everyday and then compile that info for each upcoming year. It will get easier as you go.
What's an energy journal? Just what you did/spent energy on?
I’m so sorry! I fat fingered the text and meant the word ‘entry’ instead. But in general… now that I think about it, all of my calendars and systems I put into place are about conserving energy and trying to be as efficient as possible.
There are no hidden costs. My wallet gets demonstrably and completely emptied at the nursery…
I like gardening and I like boating - I never have money anymore. 😅
Garden and woodworking.
My wallet is sad
Expensive hobbies 😎
I feel that. I just dropped almost $80 at Home Depot. Most of it on organic insecticides/repellents. I'll be damned if I'll let those pill bugs eat any more of my almost-ripe strawberries! 😡
Gardening and sewing (clothes) here. Allll my extra money goes to those lol
Lol having pasta and sauce again!
I feel ya. At the end of a physical but emotionally wonderful gardening day, I'm definitely not interested in cooking! Although in a tradeoff of sorts, I still have about 6 quarts of homemade red sauce from last year's garden in the freezer, so that counts, right???? :D
One of my kids would LOVE that, lol. But yes, pasta and sauce is a popular backup in my house, too.
Ooh, garden made tomato sauce is definitely worth the trade-off. Unfortunately, I haven't managed to get a tomato garden going.
The trick is to give up on full size tomatoes and get yourself some cherry tomato plants, at least 2 but preferably 3. They are usually prolific and if you can find them, Super Sweet 100 will be an easy grow. From seed the SS100 are always my best and fastest growing tomato too, if you fuck with that ;)
You can look for varieties that are better for sauces specifically, the tags are usually pretty good.
I planted 1 cherry tomato 20 years ago and get volunteers every year. I bet I pull out 20 plus a year leaving 1 to continue the circle
Send a few my way?
“SuperOnes” are my favorite!!
The trick to tomatoes is to plant a bunch on accident, ignore them entirely, and the br surprised when your chickens are eating tomatoes in the back yard that you never gave them.
I had a volunteer cherry tomato growing through a crack in the pavement once 😂
My start to gardening in the first place was when I bought a basil plant to make my own sauce with 🤣
We spend the whole day outside and I just throw food on the grill at the end of the day after we rinsed off with the hose!
This is the way
We need a $2000 fence to protect our $50 plant because deer.
Ooh, that beats the cost of takeout, for sure 😂 ...But to be fair, if you have to replace that $50 plant every year...
Turn the deer into dinner its a win win. At least that's what I do.
Well there you go.
That’s what happened to us last weekend. But I planned ahead today and have some frozen pizza waiting. My little girl noticed how long we’d been outside today and asked when we were going to leave to get McDonald’s. Ha, nice try kiddo…
Saw this just as we’re leaving the house to get food because we spent all day putting in new beds for espalier Apple trees. Thanks for the laugh!
Apple trees then Applebees
Wow that’s something I’d love to do. Where did you get information on how to do it?
It’s been on my list for awhile, but I got lucky and found a 5 in 1 Apple at the nursery a couple weeks ago that was already trained with 3 branches one way and 2 the other so we had a good head start. For the wire system, we’re doing it similar to how the Garden Answer YouTube channel set up their raspberry beds with 4 x 4 posts and wire running between them, but just with one wire instead of two.
There’s also a YT channel called Visit Our Garden where the guy does some espalier apple trees on his fence. Looked way easier than I expected.
This post called me tf out
I just make simple meals that I can start then forget about, or I make large batches that are easily reheated. The best part was the salad made from all the thinned baby lettuces from the garden.
Mmmm... I'm still figuring out how to make my leafy-greens garden productive/efficient.
I'm just figuring it out this year thanks to YouTube videos. I do all of my gardening in containers since I have limited space. I just planted a ton of lettuce and arugula seeds and have been eating the thinned seedlings. You just have to plant those things in the cooler weather, barely cover the seeds with soil, and keep them moist until they germinate. If you live in the US you can look up the ideal planting dates in the farmers almanac. Most left greens do not like hot weather, they can be planted as soon as the soil is workable in the spring.
I’m too exhausted to cook after building my raised beds. And I haven’t even filled them with dirt yet.
My "big project" this year is digging and sifting out the landscaping rocks the original owners used everywhere. I lost count, but I think I've filled 7 or 8 5-gallon buckets already, and that's only in the spots I need to plant THIS season...
Oh man we did this like 10/11 years ago. Nightmare. You deserve ALL the takeout. We built a row of rose trellises yesterday so had planned on take out, but oldest child noticed deep freeze 'sounded weird' so we ended up having emergency crab legs haha
Yeah, we've been trying to make holes through the rocks up til now. Obviously some plants didn't like that so much. I recently got gifted big dirt sieve, so now I'm working on doing it right. Back breaking work!
It is. It was wonderful when done but the getting there is exhausting
Pizza today - gotta get those garden beds ready! No one complained
Haha, no, they don't actually complain. But it's a cost I hadn't considered when I started this adventure, lol.
That's exactly my situation tonight. No regrets.
Another summer day, another stir-fry....
You better help the mommy then :)
Alternatively: "We are having pasta with sauce again, because Mama needs to go through all the frozen tomatoes before the next batch comes in."
😂 Brilliant! BUT that is cost savings, certainly.
Don’t have those “issues” anymore: retired and kids in college OH YEAH!!!!!
Ah, dreaming of that freedom... At least mine are finally old enough for me to ignore them for a few hours.
Yeah! I used to have to hide in my closet if I wanted to use the phone.
Done that 😂 But I have boys, so all they want is their video games. So now I just pick and choose when to fight against that and when to take advantage of it.
Sounds like a plan.
I still have sauce from last year….boil some noodles
I built my wife a decent (not amazing, just pretty good) garden bed for $120 this year. Great price right? Nope, it cost another $200-$300 to fill the dam thing with good enough soil. Dozen bags of soil, whole bag of perlite, half a dozen bags of compost/manure, a big ass $25 brick of peatmoss. Top soil (the shitty kind) plus delivery would have been about the same as buying bulk bags, so I went with the better quality.
Got an amazing garden bed with tons of plants doing very well, but it cost a good $400 all together with the plants.
A little late to help now but several landscaping places in my area also had garden mix soil and it was only $2 more per yard than top soil.
Oh, yeah, my sister fell into that trap. She bought a metallic one online. When it arrived, they stared at it, and her husband asked her how much it would cost to fill it. ...She gave it away...
We basically went from a warm winter straight to summer here in Florida, skipping spring, so lots of people at my community garden are putting in summer tolerant plants right now. We pulled everything up yesterday… the heat with humidity was 104! Absolutely exhausting. I had to take a few breaks in the car AC to get it all done.
We came home, cleaned up, took a long nap, and ate left overs for dinner. Drank plenty of water and watched tv the rest of the evening.
Cooking was a hard no. 😂
Planting zinnias and cow peas tomorrow. We’ll do an hour a week tops during the summer… hits over 120 heat index. The humidity will literally kill you.
That. Sounds. Miserable.
If the kids are old enough to boil water, they can make their own dinner - pasta with butter and steamed broccoli is a great meal!
In theory, they are, but I have boys, with a non-cooking, dare-we-say-lazy father-role-model, so... sigh... BUT, fortunately, both my kids LOVE pasta and steamed broccoli 😂
I haven't had to cook for a family yet. I feel like all the practice in the world cooking for myself will only partially prepare me for cooking for a family with varied taste buds.
There are definitely different approaches to that. I generally veered toward the "you eat what I cooked or find your own food" direction 😂. Train them while they're tiny. But they get to voice their requests on occasion 😉. I did get lucky with the hubs in that he's one of the least picky eaters ever, but can still recognize quality.
I personally don't like that approach as that's the approach my single mother used. It ended with me just not eating sometimes as the path of least resistance. I think everyone has their own preferences on food and those can even change over time. No one should be forced to eat food they don't want to eat or accept the feelings of hunger pain as the alternative option. If it's working for you that's cool though, the part I didn't like is literally not eating.
It's "within reason". My kids aren't allowed to say they don't like something if they've never tried it, but I don't make them eat something they dislike. Mostly, I try to cook dishes everyone likes, and I keep healthy snacks around if I really want to make something one doesn't like but everyone else really likes. It's more to the point that I will not cook multiple meals to try to cater to everyone; I'm not a restaurant.
This is why 'if you don't like dinner, feel free to make yourself a sandwich' exists. Home isn't a restaurant
I dug one hole and now I'm too exhausted to actually exercise.
(not an exaggeration, that was yesterday)
You just need to get back into gardening shape 😉. Different muscles 😁
Sorry kids, I know we said pizza party with you friends this weekend, but your father can't get shit together & absolutely HAD to get that set of hostas that was on sale at the nursery, he absolutely did NOT need to stop at....
omg this is us right now hahaha..shit....gotta order something
Oh, and how convenient, the nursery is on the way to the restaurant. 🤣
😂 Yup, I was on the way HOME from the garden store (too close to meal time) yesterday... Gotta stop for food, then...
Pizza rolls and tater tots eat for the days I spent too much time outside.
Days of light gardening I make nice meals
Most of the days messy eggs my goto meal
They don’t do a good job hiding the costs.
That's a unique advantage of living far from the closest restaurant and being lazy/environmentally self-conscious about driving for no good reason: can't be tempted. It's going to be pasta in tomato/fresh basil sauce again!! Alternatively, a very rapid saltimbocca alla romana with veal from the village butcher, cured ham from our charcutier friend and fresh sage.
We kinda live far from stuff, too. We don't make a trip out for takeout just for takeout. ...I was already out...on the way home from errands...and the garden store 😂😂😂
Honestly, during the winter months (i.e., the non-gardening months), I make casseroles and stews and shepherds pies and put them in the freezer. So when I am crippled and decrepit, after gardening all day, we can still have nice meal. I put it in the oven while I go take a shower.
That's good planning! I didn't even manage to make freezer meals when I was pregnant with #2 and knew I wouldn't have help after the birth...
Why don’t you cook instead?
I'm bringing the frugal subreddit mindset to this:
You know you'll have days where you worked too hard in the garden to cook.
Plan that! Then it's not a fail and you don't overspend. Have a frozen pizza or frozen casserole in the house for this exact scenario.
You'll feel better about the time you spent gardening and you'll save money you can put toward plants.