Sunday, March 21, 2010

giving it a go with the garden

Before I had children, and my own business, and a husband who coaches 2 baseball teams, and a dog to tear up the yard... I had a garden. Once my boys both started playing baseball every spring, I have really not been able to keep up with the garden and we've really let it go. So this year I am probably being ambitious in thinking we will do better, but we've got the seeds planted (indoors) already.

We're going to try the Square Foot Gardening method. I'm hoping for it to be a family project that we will all work on. But it is also a way to celebrate our own real organic foods grown the old fashioned way on our own dirt. I think it will be fun for the kids to be involved in growing their own food. They are already excited about the possibility of growing our own broccoli, spinach, peas, peppers, etc. Yes, my kids really eat those foods willingly. It's amazing what happens when you keep the junk out of your diet.

I was inspired by a local mom who has a blog called The 5 dollar dinner blog.
She has some awesome dinner ideas and uses lots of foods she grows in her garden. I enjoyed her posts last summer and thought I should give it a try. I also wanted to suggest her blog because when you start going dye free and finding you may need to pay a little more for candy or other things, it's nice to have a way to save money. She also mentions organizing her coupons in a binder. I thought it was a good idea so I tried it in January. I'm not sure how she does it since I haven't got her book yet, but I took plastic pages used to hold baseball cards and picked a page for each category. I organized the pages by the way I go through the store. I'm averaging more than $10.00 in extra coupon savings every week now. It's great so I can use some of that extra money to stock up on our favorites that don't usually go on sale like Yummy Earth Lollipops.

Happy Spring!

1 comment:

daisydilly (vicki) said...

Wow I am sooo very glad I came across this blog. We have a 6 yr old GD who has serious reactions from the dyes in foods, etc. But as I read your blog post I am beginning to see there may be much more that I am over looking . We are going crazy trying to figure out why the child can be sweet as honey then eat and turn into a monster. We are getting ready to ban all sugars from our home but I never gave hot cocoa a thought. Going to add you to my faves list and hoping I can find some answers along the way and also that I know I'm not all alone with this.