March Garden

Thank God, winter is over. I believe Spring-like weather has finally taken hold. This should allow for a major shift in my blogs away from long-winded opinionated soapbox oratory on various and sundry topics (yes, even I was getting annoyed and bored with myself… blame it on cabin fever.) I hope to now begin more realistically chronicling what I am doing out-of-doors.

February was unusually cold, but I did manage to get some brush cleared on our road bank and some trees cut down or pruned. Now the day lilies on the bank can come up unimpeded. I hauled all the brush and firewood to the section of the garden where I want to grow sweet corn and butternut squash. I built fires which I sat around and tended for a couple days. I was really surprised at my lassitude sitting by the flames, but hopefully my stamina and pep will improve as the warm weather progresses. Otherwise, I’ve just plain gotten old. Getting out of shape in winter is one of the downsides of being retired.

I’ve heard numerous people say that farming is gambling and I think gardening is too. My first two gardens after retirement were marginal successes at best, but like the gambler who steps up to the slot machine one more time, I’m convinced that this is my lucky year. I may be making a mistake by spreading the wood ash around my sweet corn patch but I am going mainly on what happened to another area of our sandy ground where we once burned a tree and the weeds grew twice as tall as those on the surrounding soil for a decade. It’s an experiment… but I feel lucky.

About a third of my compost piles are well-aged humus and ready to go. I rolled one compost pile forward and the soil underneath looked absolutely perfect, almost like peat. In this area of perfect tilth, I made a raised bed about 10’x4’ and planted my early salad garden of lettuce and spinach. The traditional day for planting early greens around here is St. Valentine’s Day, so I’m probably not too early seeding it in the beginning of March. If I were so tight for garden space that I could plant only one crop, it would be salad greens (along with a tomato plant.). Bagged salad greens are expensive in the grocery and tend to go bad and wilt quickly in the fridge. Salads are nutritious and one of the best foods for losing pounds. So I have the seed in the ground and watered and that’s a start.

I have put up a two-foot chicken wire fence around a 40'x25’ area to deter rabbits. I may have to go higher. I hope to grow everything within the fenced in plot. My idea is to have a small well kept garden rather than a sprawling one that I can’t keep up. I could plant edible pod peas this early in the year too, but we still have several bags of them in the freezer from last year. The cardinal rules of gardening seem to be: grow what you like to eat, grow what is expensive in the store, grow what is nutritious for your body, and grow the produce that does not keep fresh for long.

That’s enough for now; I will continue my garden journal on another day. It is nice to get out-of –doors, again. Hope really does spring eternal.

Market Epiphany

I had my eureka moment while grocery shopping last weekend. The sales flyer had advertised milk on sale for less than $2 a gallon. Skim milk is a staple in our diet and we drink about three gallons a week. When we arrived Saturday morning the dairy shelf was empty of the sale milk. We were assured that another truck was on the way and would arrive in about an hour. My first thought was that we would take a written “rain check” and break even over a two-week period. We would buy expensive non-sale milk this week and make up for the extra budget expense with rain-check milk the next week.

Then the light bulb went on in my brain. We would be going right passed a Walmart® on the way home and they advertised that they would match any competitors advertised price. We could buy cheap milk this week and next week just by grabbing three gallons and showing the cashier the competing sales flyer. The five minute stop saved us $5; as a wage that would translate to $60 an hour.

I realized that I could collect the mailed sales flyers of all three of Walmart’s local competitors plus a couple large chain drug stores which also advertise teaser food items to lure customers into their store and get the mega store to match all their sales. One store chain in our area was very bad about having small amounts of sale items, so that they could draw us into the store and then not lose money on their lose-leader sales items by being sold out. Their rain checks were pretty worthless too, because when we returned the following week they did not stock the rain-check item. It was a scam to keep us coming back for weeks to get our rain check. We stopped frequenting that chain, but we can still use their sales flyer at Walmart where the product will be in stock.

For those of you who are not big fans of Walmart (and there may be a few, even one at this typewriter) consider that you are not really doing the mega store any favors if you only buy their sales items and lose-leader draws from other stores. You are probably costing them profit on each item. I will continue shopping at the store where they were out of sales milk because I know this does not happen often or purposely and because their Kroger® store-brand products are many, of high quality and low price. I do want the mega store to have significant competition to force them to keep their prices low. But I expect to take the rip-off chain’s sales flyer, whose bait and switch teasers were always sold out, to wally world to see if they make good on their promise to match competitors advertised prices.

Actually, this is not my first shopping epiphany. Earlier I had realized that I could take aisle way canned soup coupons from a store where soup was not on sale and high priced and use them at another store which gave no coupons but had soup on sale. This strategy works well for many items other than soup. Another epiphany was when I realized I could buy whole wheat bread (a healthy staple in our diet) on Tuesdays at the bakery outlet store for 40 cents a loaf. We buy a month’s supply at a time and freeze it to keep it fresh. When there are good sales, we buy in bulk to stock our freezer and pantry so that we often eat out of the pantry and freezer rather than the grocery store. We make a lot of meals from scratch (not much “convenience food” on the table) and have simple menus based on what is on sale that week. We also have a lot of recipes based on inexpensive store-brand staples.

These are some of my strategies for “guerilla-warfare shopping.” If I come up with any new dirty tactics, you will be the first to know.