It is raining! I know most people don't get very excited about this, but we have had so little rain lately that the garden is starting to crack and planting anything without putting the sprinkler on full time has been basically impossible. Of course my husband's family are not so excited about the rain as they are in the middle of rice harvesting (hopefully a blog about that a little later on...), but I am more than impressed. I'm hoping it will continue all night and till about lunch time tomorrow so the garden gets a real watering and I get to stay inside tomorrow morning. I have spent most of my free time lately trying to get the vegetable garden under control and so far it seems to be working. If it does stop raining tomorrow I might even get around to taking a few photos.
Now that the garden is starting to produce well I am going to challenge our family to two weeks of no food shopping. Well we will "allow" ourselves to buy milk, flour, butter and bananas, but apart from that I think we can probably use this chance to clean out the fridge, freezer and cupboards. I haven't done a proper shop for quite a long time, so there is not an excess of meat etc. in the house, but I'm sure we can survive on what we have quite easily - we don't usually eat very much anyway. I find it really rewarding to be able to sit down to meals and think that basically all the things on the table were grown by me. The kids are pretty sick of me telling them about when I picked each vegetable, but are good at praising me and my son even takes a token mouthful of each vegetable to show his appreciation.
At the moment the garden is producing lots of spinach, silverbeet, radishes, cucumbers, mini tomatoes, mixed lettuce, green beans, basil, etc. and there are plenty of butternut pumpkins, potatoes, garlic and of course sweet potatoes in storage. Add our eggs to the mix and there is not too much that we are missing. We usually make all our own bread, yoghurt, cereal and most of the kids "snacks" etc. so hopefully it shouldn't be too hard to go for 2 weeks without going shopping. I would probably extend the challenge for longer, but there are junior high school students due to come in 2 weeks time....
Now that the garden is starting to produce well I am going to challenge our family to two weeks of no food shopping. Well we will "allow" ourselves to buy milk, flour, butter and bananas, but apart from that I think we can probably use this chance to clean out the fridge, freezer and cupboards. I haven't done a proper shop for quite a long time, so there is not an excess of meat etc. in the house, but I'm sure we can survive on what we have quite easily - we don't usually eat very much anyway. I find it really rewarding to be able to sit down to meals and think that basically all the things on the table were grown by me. The kids are pretty sick of me telling them about when I picked each vegetable, but are good at praising me and my son even takes a token mouthful of each vegetable to show his appreciation.
At the moment the garden is producing lots of spinach, silverbeet, radishes, cucumbers, mini tomatoes, mixed lettuce, green beans, basil, etc. and there are plenty of butternut pumpkins, potatoes, garlic and of course sweet potatoes in storage. Add our eggs to the mix and there is not too much that we are missing. We usually make all our own bread, yoghurt, cereal and most of the kids "snacks" etc. so hopefully it shouldn't be too hard to go for 2 weeks without going shopping. I would probably extend the challenge for longer, but there are junior high school students due to come in 2 weeks time....
power to you!
ReplyDeleteIt's so satisfying and as a bonus you get to see the bottom of the freezer for the first time in...?
Are you going to tell your family what you're doing? I did it without saying anything and waited to see if anyone would comment and nada. Even on day four of variations on the tomato/ eggplant/ peppers/ beans theme....