Ugh! How did I overlook posting this before now??? It has no pictures to accompany it, so can't use that excuse (having probs with pictures lately, that is why there is no Knitting Update today. Hopefully tomorrow, fingers crossed!)
These are my notable frugal accomplishments for the month of May:
I cut DH's hair.
As always, we ate from our stash in the freezers, cellar, basement and pantry.
Speaking of freezers, I managed to neatly fit the remainder of the meat in the upright freezer into the chest freezer. So the upright has been defrosted and unplugged just in time for the summer electric rate hike on the first of June.
Mother-In-Law came down for a few days and brought with her a bunch of stuff leftover from that week's pop-up food pantry that she helps with: bacon, pork chops, grape tomatoes, cucumbers, and a half-sheet cake. The package of pork chops was huge, and had previously been frozen, and arrived to us completely thawed, so we called the kids and those who were available came over for an impromptu potluck dinner featuring grilled pork chops and white cake with bright pink frosting. The bacon, grape tomatoes and cucumbers were used multiple times in the next week.
I found the perfect chair for my tack room in the barn for just $5.29 at Goodwill. I'd had my eye out for a non-upholstered chair I could use in my tack room for resting and also for sitting in while changing into riding boots from work or waterproof boots. Pics of that perfect chair will be featured in June's Horse Update.
I decided to cull a rooster and seven hens from my flock. The hens were laying more eggs than we could use, I was having no luck selling eggs due to a dearth of local people now keeping backyard flocks and so I took them to the local auction the third Saturday of the month. You never know what prices you'll get there, but this was the best possible Saturday for me to have done that as after office fees and the sales commission, I received a check for $85! That will pay for feed for the remainder of my flock for several months.
I planted seed potatoes from the cellar as well as the tomato and pepper plants I'd started from seed indoors. So my potatoes were once again free (been saving my own seed potatoes for decades) and the 74 tomato plants and 46 pepper plants cost me maybe $20 in seed.
I received a flat of marigolds and 9 pepper plants (3 jalapeno and 6 California Wonder green bell, which had been crop failures in my own seeding) as a Mother's Day gift from my daughters. DD2 is one of the FFA Advisors at the school district they both teach in, and the FFA was having a plant sale where it was only $20 per flat, didn't matter what types of flowers or veggies you fit into the flat. So they got them there based on a hint I had given in late April. The hint being that they both love tomatoes I grow in my garden, tomatoes love marigolds planted with them to deter the tomato worms, so therefore my daughters giving me marigolds for Mother's Day would be a perfect symbiotic relationship. Plus it supported FFA.
I also got 1/2 off a flat of petunias and pansies plus a begonia and three geraniums thrown in at the discounted plant sale the FFA put on to disperse their unsold stock from their original sale.
DH and I ate asparagus from the garden several times. Unfortunately the asparagus was ready early here and by not checking the garden three weeks earlier than normal I missed out on about two dozen stalks before they got too mature to eat. But we enjoyed several dinners featuring steamed asparagus that was freshly harvested in the remaining couple of weeks of the short season.
Tractor Supply had a 10% off sale on stock tanks, so I bought a brand new Rubbermaid 100 gallon trough. Tractor Supply is about $30-40 cheaper on them normally than any of the other farm stores within an hour of me, and with this sale I knew it was time to grab one. I'd been trying to find a used and not leaking one for months, but even the abused/leaking ones people wanted only 20% less than a brand new one from TSC, so I went ahead and bought a nice shiny water-holding one. Just in time to fill it up for the hotter weather of the coming summer. Now I don't have to drag my original (leaky) one from pasture to pasture as I move horses to fresher grazing every couple of week.
I took advantage of a couple good sales and a 20% off coupon at Missouri Star Quilt Company to buy more batting, quilting thread, clips, and some more white on white fabric that perfectly matches what I'd used as the background in the blocks I started making for the Airplane Quilt. Now instead of doing an assortment of whites in the blocks and hope they all read the same degree of whiteness in the finished top, I have enough of one fabric to make every block's background the same.
I took advantage of a promo from Rada to get a free pie server with a $29 order (plus free shipping!). So I picked out a couple things I'd had my eye on for a while now, ordered them just barely hitting the $29 threshold, and got that pie server (and no shipping costs!). I all ready have a pie server from Rada that I love, but it's nice to not have to use the same server on three different flavor pies during family holiday gatherings. Now I have two Rada ones and the one my grandma gave me (so, sort of an heirloom as it had been hers, not brand new, when she gave it to me over 31 years ago) and we can serve three pies without flavor cross-contamination.
Whew! Listed out, that's a lot more frugal goodies than I'd thought we'd managed
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