Yard Sale Season Begins

It's officially yard sale season! Memorial Day week marks it for me, since that's when the sale that I look forward to every year is held. There's a certain one I've been going to for 7 years now that I mark on my calendar as soon as the new year begins.

These past few weeks I have had so much stuff coming and going from my house! Not only bags of nice, heavily discounted yard sale items, but also bags of children's clothing that friends have been giving me to sort through! I have been extra blessed to be the recipient of such goods, as not only does it save us money, but I have been running out of clothing that fits my kids since they keep growing. I was hoping to hold out until yard sale season to have to go shopping for them (since that's when I can get good stuff cheap), and now that said season has arrived, my stock of clothing is growing again! I just need to buy more storage totes now. I have piles of clothing in several rooms that are waiting to be tucked away for future use. I'm sure my poor husband is as ready to have his studio back as I am my dining and living rooms. 

I pictured a few of my more exciting bargains in the photo above:

A 50c watering can. I have had one on my wish list for two years now! It sure makes watering my seedlings more convenient. I had been using a drinking glass, but by only being able to dump water over top of the plants I felt like I was harming them with the extra weight on their fragile leaves. Now I can water at the base of the plant with the nice, long spout. 

A nice salad dressing jar for 50c. This one has recipes along the side of the jar for 8 different salad dressings. Instead of measuring ingredients of bigger quantity, like oil or vinegar, it has fill lines. So you measure your spices/herbs, and add oil until you reach the fill line for that particular dressing. I'm excited about this one because we eat a lot of salads in the summertime and this way I won't have to resort to Pinterest every time I want to try making a new dressing. 

A new, unopened package of herbal tea bags for 50c. I like to have several varieties of tea around for company and cool evenings, and what's better than finding a brand new box for 50 cents!? 

An office organizer @ 50c. We've been working on reducing clutter around our place, and one area that seems to collect stuff is a dresser we have in our dining room. I dedicated the top drawer to office supplies, and purchased a drawer organizer awhile back to hold miscellaneous items like scissors, tape, sticky notes, and pens. Only I happened to use the pen compartment for Sharpies and dry erase markers, leaving our pencil and pen collection... still on top of the dresser. So I got this handy, dandy organizer to give those pens a place to call home, all tucked away out of sight.  

A 50c light timer. Not sure what its official name is, but I have been wanting one of these, too. Especially since we killed a couple pumpkin plants because we forgot to turn the heater off in our greenhouse during the day a couple weeks ago. All you do is plug the timer into your outlet and plug your appliance, lights, or whatever desired device into the side of the timer. It has a 24-hour clock on it that you can set when you want it to go on or off, and you can even set it to have several on/off cycles in a day! It was brand new too, so that's an extra bonus!

Several packs of stickers @ 25c each. Aaron and I are starting a choir with all the young kids in our church group, and we want to make it fun by having a reward chart where they can earn stickers by doing good deeds such as perfect attendance, bringing their book every week, helping set up/clean up at practice, etc., and bigger prizes will be awarded when we reach so many stickers on the chart. I was able to get 5 baggies full of sticker books and sheets that will be perfect for that. This was a huge savings, and probably about my best deal at this yard sale. 

A muslin swaddle blanket for $1. Now that it's summertime and the weather is warmer, I have been needing lightweight blankets so I don't have to resort to my flannel receiving blankets and baby quilt. I still swaddle Jewel at night, so this will be nice to keep her cool while feeling secure and safe. Plus it will double as a nursing cover!

A bundle of skirt/pant hangers for 50c. I seem to break several of them a year, and since I don't do a whole lot of retail shopping, I don't get a whole lot of purchases that come with hangers. These ones are made of harder plastic, so they aren't the super cheap ones that don't last! 

Winter clothing. Now that I have a girl to dress, I need to be thinking ahead and plan for her. This warm, fluffy coat was $3 and looks practically brand new. Three dollars might sound like a lot to spend on one piece of clothing, but I find people tend to mark their winter stuff up quite a bit when it comes to kids boots and coats. Probably because they cost so much new and they only get one seasons' use out of it per kid. This was an excellent deal for a coat, especially with as good of condition it was in. The boots were $2, which is also an amazing price considering what it is and the fact that they barely show signs of wear! They won't fit Jewel for another year and a half or two, but one must act when good deals are found. A lot of the baby/kids stuff was priced pretty high for yard sales (yes, $1 is high. And yes, I did purchase some anyway), but these two items were exceptions. 

So there's a peek into some of my yard sale finds! Have you come across any good deals this summer yet?

More Seed Starting

Well a lot has happened in the gardening area these last two weeks. The weather has been warming up, sun has been shining, and the last frost date is approaching. Our garden plot is borderline dry but enough where Aaron could take the tractor and discs out to turn up some dirt this week. The area is big enough we get to prepare it like real farmers! We'll use the walk-behind tiller right before planting. I'm itching to get my spinach and lettuce in. It's kind of annoying that our garden stays wet so long with it being as low as it is (but somehow is bone dry in the summer), because technically early seeds could've been planted already. But I do have my little seedlings to watch, so I guess they will have to hold me over until next week when I can plant seeds in the actual garden. 

This week I did something new that I had been wanting to try. I started pumpkins indoors! Since they need warm soil in order to germinate, we can't plant them outside until the beginning of June. We've had a rough time starting some of our squashes in the past and I think it may be because of trying to get them in too early, even though it was always after the last spring frost date. By starting them in pots, they have an extra month growing time before the garden and weather is ready for them. Plus, most growers in our area don't have pumpkins ready until early-mid October, but the demand for them begins in September. I'm hoping that by starting them early I can have an earlier harvest and make sales before our area has an influx of them.

We've been trying to look for ways I can make extra income while also caring for our children. Options seem kind of limited unless I build a fence or cage for the toddler, but one thing I can do is expand our garden some and try putting a stand out by our decently-busy road. That's another thing I've wanted to do for awhile, but the past two summers we have been super busy, we've needed lots of produce for our own canning and eating, and I was pregnant both years, so we never got around to selling any "extra". This year however, we decided to cut way back on our garden size since we have a nice amount of canned goods left from previous years, and also because Aaron decided it was more profitable for him to spend the time he would've been helping me weed and use that time to work one of his various money-making jobs instead, since that would put more money in the bank than trying to save a few dollars by growing our own produce (as much as it sounds like trying to get out of weeding). We prefer not buying grocery-store produce if we don't have to, and still hope to have enough home-grown vegetables to feed us through this next year, but this year our goal is to save money to put toward buying a house, so it seemed like a good idea to cut back and spend more time on money-making stuff. By having a smaller garden area, I'll be able to weed it myself during the day while the kids get some fresh air. But if you know us, we don't really know how to downsize. You'll have to watch and see if we're able to leave some of the garden area unplanted! 

After moving my tomato seedlings to larger pots, I was having a rough time figuring out the right amount to water the plants. I ended up killing one of our paste/sauce tomatoes, and this poor plant was all wilted. I was expecting it to wither up and die as well, but looking closer, I saw it was all still green and healthy looking aside from the fact that it looked blown over. I gave this one a little extra water than the rest and the picture below is how it looks just a few days later! I'm still trying to get the hang of water in the different soil, but at least it's standing upright again!

When I started my seeds in the little starter pellets I put two seeds in each, so if one never came up I wouldn't have to worry about replanting and losing a week or so of growing time. My seeds were a few years old, and a large percentage of the pellets only grew one seedling. I've never had so few seeds not come up, but I was going to weed the extra one out anyway, so it worked out fine. I had seeds come up in all (maybe all but one? I can't remember) the little pellets. When I transplanted them a couple weeks ago, I weeded out the weakest from the ones that grew more than seed. I gave the extras to Adam so he could feel like he was planting too, but then decided to try putting some in a pot with soil anyway just to see what would happen. I salvaged two of those extras and put them in the same pot, marking it so I could watch and see how it did. One of them withered and died, but I still have this one growing just as strong as some of my other tomato plants! I wasn't expecting it to do much since I had disturbed its little roots, but seeing it thriving now makes me glad I rescued it. I just wished I would've thought to do it with the other ones I pulled. If nothing else I could've put the extra fruit out at a little garden stand!

Sad Season for Poinsettia

It was doing so good.

But then something happened, and I have no idea what.

My poinsettia is losing its leaves.

It looks so sad! Looking back in my archives, I see it dropped the green leaves last spring too, so this must be normal, unless I'm consistently doing something wrong. I wish there was a way to prevent it because the plant had been looking really nice! The red leaves are all still intact and there has been quite a few more new ones growing since I last updated you all. You can see in the picture above that there are three groups of red leaves. I hope they keep on growing to become full flowers and don't end up falling off like the rest of them. I was getting rather excited to see the new growth! I wish I was able to take a picture right before it started shedding to show you how full it was looking. Oh well. It happened. We'll see what this summer brings. Do you think it will keep growing or fall apart completely?

This is what it looked like last April (2016).