My tips for #Saving a little Money in the home

 A few years ago on the radio they talked about making your own soups. There was actually a caller who called in and asked if they could repeat the recipe for the chicken soup. Come on, now! Chicken soup? The easiest soup to make. All it takes is water, pieces of chickens (with the bones), some vegetables and some spices. And a pot to cook everything. It seems so many women these days don’t know how to cook. It used to be the most important skill a girl needed if she wanted to get married. It was taught in schools, mothers taught their daughters (and sons if they were so inclined). There is nothing wrong with a man knowing how to cook, of course. It doesn’t make him any less mucho.

I love my soups. When time allows or if we feel like it we make our own soup. It doesn’t cost much and there is nothing better than homemade soup. We save the water when we boil broccoli and freeze it. We use that for soup. The vitamins are in the water everyone throws out. When we eat turkey or duck we save the wings, the neck, and the bones (we remove the meat first ☺). We add different vegetables and a couple of chicken thighs for the meat. We do the same with left over chicken. The bones from T-bone steaks in combination with pieces of meat are great for soups. When we eat ham we save the hambone and cook it with sauerkraut. It is best, though, with some ham on the bone. Soups are easy to make and don’t take much effort, either. We have a pressure cooker and you don’t have to let it simmer for hours.

When we decide to have ribs, my wife cooks them first and then she puts them into a plastic bag with bbq sauce (she uses the Chicken and Ribs variety). We let the ribs marinade for a bit in the fridge. Then we barbeque them for about 10 minutes. They are tender and taste great. We save the water from the cooked ribs, freeze it and use it for making Borscht in the Fall when the beets are harvested from our own garden.

A great way to save money is to have your own #garden. We grow our own peppers and tomatoes in the summer. I start my pepper seeds in the basement in March. Right now I have over one hundred small cups with 2 plants in each. Later I will cull them to one plant. Or maybe not. Only the Heirloom varieties produce good fruit, but the first generation from saved Hybrid seeds also work okay. Peppers are so versatile. You can use them on the barbeque, you can stuff them with hamburger meat and rice, you can make ‘Pfeffersauce’, you can make your own Salsa. And there are plenty of other uses. You can even eat them raw. A great source for natural vitamins.

Instead of Spinach I grow Swiss Chard. It doesn’t shoot out like Spinach. I grow the Rhubarb and the Bright Lights variety. They cost a bit more in seeds, but the plants taste better. It takes a lot of leaves for one meal. A whole plastic shopping bage full. My wife boils the leaves, but she removes the stem first. After they have been boiled she chops the leaves and we eat the whole thing with eggs and sausages. To give the Chard more taste we put on Maggi (a form of soya sauce). We’ve never tried it, but I heard the other day that you can use the stems like asparagus. We always discarded the stems. This year we will have to try it.

We grow different varieties of lettuce. I like the Mesclun mixtures. Then we grow plenty of beans (golden wax and the purple ones), cucumbers, zucchini (green and yellow), carrots, and a few others.

It is a lot of work to have a garden. One as large as mine requires a tiller. As soon as the weather allows, I till the soil, but only once. I till in clay buster, peat moss, leaves from last year, dried steer or sheep manure, and alfalfa pellets. Before I place my plants into the ground and put in my seeds, I make raised beds with narrow walkways in between them, careful not to destroy the integrity of the soil. With my tomato and pepper plants I also put in fertilizer into each hole I dig. After the season is over, in the fall, I dig in all left over plants, like lettuce, beans, and whatever is still growing. I also till in bags and bags of the leaves I collect from our yard. And the cycle begins anew.

To have a garden is a labour of love. You can’t keep track of the hours you spent working it, but for me it is a great way to relax (even with the pesky weeds ☺) and other pests that want to share the fruits of my labor. There is nothing more enjoyable than watching everything grow, and then picking your own tomatoes, beans, and peppers, digging up your own beets and carrots. Not only is it fun to grow your own vegetables, they taste so much better than bought ones, especially the tomatoes.

I can’t wait to get started. All we need is to have this darn snow gone and for the weather to turn warm.