Educating the Wheelers

One big major plus of living in MN vs. TX is that I can have a real garden here. Wasn’t much of an option in TX where we lived on a deer superhighway. (Our neighbor was a real trooper, with his 10 foot high fences, and they would still get in there somehow.)

Last year, my first garden was a hodgepodge of a bunch of different stuff, planted a month too late. We didn’t get much of a harvest, but it was a good trial run and a lot of fun.

This year, we had 4 8′x4′ boxes and a bunch of containers.

The good:

Strawberries and potatoes went gangbusters. The green beans were pretty good, as were the tomatoes. The peppers did well, though there weren’t very many of them. I have a big bag of celery tops to dry and use in soup all winter.

The turnips were ready before I could blink, and were totally awesome sliced very thin and roasted with olive oil, salt and pepper. Turnip chips! I love them! The parsnips appear to be doing well, but I’m not going to touch them for at least another month (or perhaps I might overwinter them), so who knows yet?

I only had one cabbage, which I nearly lost to …. something. Some kind of caterpillar, maybe? One morning, I went outside and the leaves were filled with these goopy green egg stuff. I cleaned it off with wet wipes and a solid hose down and was able to save it — and eat it a few days ago! Yum.

The bad to neutral:

I must have planted over 200 carrots. The neighbor kids ate most of them before they got particularly large. Must remember to plant more next year. The cukes were misshapen and small, but tasty. The peas were very low-yielding. The cauliflower germinated late, and just yesterday, I saw the little heads were less than quarter-sized so I pulled them. (We had our first frost 2 nights ago.) The broccoli had a similar fate. The onions didn’t get huge, but it was enough, when dried, to fill to large plastic containers.

The ugly:

Some sort of wilt got almost all of my winter squash. Didn’t plant enough corn for it to go very well, and with a cold and wet May, what I did plant didn’t get a good start. There are ears on the stalks, but now that we’re almost halfway through September, it’s obvious they won’t mature in time.

The dehydrator has been going almost constantly for a few weeks. I decided not to can anything this year because two little ones running underfoot seemed like a recipe for danger-disaster. But I have lots and lots of dehydrated veggies now. And lots to think about for next spring…

After last week’s rude surprise that the city would be repaving my mom’s street on garage sale day — with notice given at 4pm the night before — things were not look good for our heroes.

But, you know, some times things work out for the best. But it sure didn’t look like there was going to be a silver lining on Thursday. We decided to not bother putting everything out since we were told no one was allowed to park on the street all day. Well, wouldn’t you know, my mom’s neighbor had a garage sale … and they didn’t pave the road until around 3 or so. We could have went ahead and had the sale and not missed the prime hours.

Hey, water under the bridge. So we decided to put everything out on Friday, and ended up doing really well — about 175 dollars or so. And consider that we didn’t have any big ticket items, it was pretty much all children’s clothes and books. Huge volumes. So we decided to extend until Saturday, and that ended up being a good idea — we ended up around 330 total for the two days. We were originally only planning on going Thu-Fri to start with, since we had heard from neighbors that Saturdays were usually a bust. So, we lost out on Thursday, but Saturday ended up being just fine.

I deposited my haul at the bank this morning and we’ll be adding that to my “mad money” account. Woohoo!

I have long resisted transitioning to homemade bread. This has primarily been due to the fact that most of my attempts to do so have been pretty big failures. I’ve found that it’s pretty easy to make a bread that tastes great while warm with butter … it’s a little harder to make a bread that can be sliced thin enough for a sandwich that isn’t too unwieldy without crumbling apart.

Finding a bread machine at a garage sale for cheap wasn’t too hard. (Also how I found my dehydrator, but that’s another post.) There are a handful of items that people seem to buy — or receive as presents — with the best of intentions, but never actually get used. Never buy these new! You can almost always find them in “used once” or even “used never” at a good price.

Anywhoo. After much flailing around, I finally found the perfect bread for my family. I started with a Taste of Home recipe and modified it for whole grains and changed it from sunflower seeds to walnuts. Give it a try in your bread machine, let me know if you like it! I can report that, the day after making it, I can slice it quite thinly and successfully for sandwiches. And the kids love it.

Wheeler Bread

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons warmish water
1/4 cup honey
2 tablespoons butter, softened
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 cup quick-cooking oats
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1 1/2 cups white flour
4 tsp vital wheat gluten
2 tablespoon nonfat dry milk powder
2-1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast
1/2 cup chopped up walnuts

And I usually sprinkle some more extra wheat germ and some ground flax seed on top, on the sides away from the yeast (though I’m not sure if that matters), to boot. No more than about 1-2 tb of either, though.

I pick the 1.5lb wheat setting and let it fly. I realize it could be a little easier if I bought bread flour and didn’t muss with the vital wheat gluten, but I never seem to have bread flour, and this works for me.

My mom and I have been working hard on getting a garage sale together for several weeks now. She wants to clean out her house, and now that we’re on a pretty intense saving budget right now, it was a chance for me to earn some mad money for myself. So you could say I was motivated.

The ad ran in today’s paper, we had the signs, I was arranging things on tables, et cetera, all day today in my mom’s garage … until 10 minutes to 4, when a nice man in an official green vest came to the door to inform us that they were repaving mom’s street tomorrow, and no cars could park or drive on it from 7am until 7pm.

Oh. Thanks for the tip.

I guess we won’t be having a garage sale tomorrow.

The first couple of times that Andrew and I talked about hunkering down and saving more money were the easy times. But now that we’re even more serious — nearly the fabled “gazelle intensity” — it was a little more difficult to cut.

It’s sort of like when you read the article that tells you can lose 10 lbs in a year by stopping drinking soda, and you think, “But I already stopped drinking soda!” (And didn’t lose 10lbs!)

To continue the weight loss analogy, you could say we’d plateaued. So we took a closer look at where we could cut back. Now that Andrew works from home, we moved the car seats from the CRV into the Echo, almost doubling my around town gas mileage. We had already taken an axe to the grocery budget and almost completely stopped eating out, but I started looking at removing more convenience foods. I now bake our own bread, make our cereal, and I’m testing out various hamburger roll recipes. We signed up for Saver’s Switch with our electric company and got a 15% discount there. We are seriously considering getting rid of cable.

Another big thing is finding ways to not go to the store at all. For instance, if I’m just out of milk, I’ll pick it up at the gas station quikee mart (where it’s often a loss leader) or have my mom pick some up for us when she does her shopping. Thus I get to spend 3 bucks instead of the inevitable 75 or 100 dollars.

That goes double for Walmart or Target and the like. A trip for a 10 dollar pack of diapers never seems to be less than 100. Any time I can avoid walking into a store, I’ve dodged a bullet.

With both of us having a hand in finances now, just knowing that you’ll have to justify your expense to the other person raises the bar on what’s a want vs. a need.

I should probably mention why we made the switch from me handling all the finances to Andrew primarily doing it.

The underlying answer is that motherhood of little ones takes your little mind and scatters it to the four winds.

We have our primary checking account which is still with our bank in Texas, but they don’t have any branches in Minnesota. So we opened an account locally where we could deposit physical checks. We don’t have too many of those, so we made that my “grocery money” account. I hardly ever checked it online, there was rarely more than a few hundred dollars in there, though I’d open the envelope and peek at the balance — generally not bothering to pull the thing out and look at the whole thing. (This becomes important later.)

Now, occasionally I would get the little fleeting thought that it was lower than it should be, which was immediately replaced by the guilt and shame of figuring I must have spent too much money. Because that’s just the kind of girl I am — something’s awry, and I’m already berating myself for everything I must have done wrong.

Anywhoo, fast forward a few months and this time I know something’s wrong because I haven’t *used* that card for some time and there should be more money in there. Turns out we had a slow leak — an effective strategy, really. As my dad always says: the successful parasite knows not to kill the host. If they had been taking more money out, I would not have just felt shame and guilt and moved on. I would have looked into it sooner!

So that’s what brought us to Quicken and obsessively tracking every penny.

Hey, it’s embarrassing enough to have to admit it here. But you can be sure it will never happen again.

We’ve had one major and many minor changes in the last few months. The most major change is that my husband took over dealing with the finances. Frankly, I’m pretty happy about that because there have been some other changes that have naturally followed from that.

For one thing, I could always tell that he would bristle if I’d say that we were having a tight cash flow month, that we needed to be careful with spending. He knew that he made good money, and his wife was telling him he couldn’t spend it on himself.

Now, with him at the reins, not only does he have a new infinitely configurable geeky tool to play with — Hello, Quicken! — he also tracks every penny in and out and it’s a game to see how much we can save. Along the way, he also discovered Dave Ramsey. Now, admittedly, we don’t have any debt besides our mortgage — though our mortgage is larger than we’d like it to be — but it’s given him great motivation on the savings front. He’s retooled everything, and by golly, I think he’s having a good time. Our savings rate has gone way up, mostly because our spending rate has gone way down.