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Oct 10, 2022    |      0 comments

Watching my Garden Grow

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Vegetable garden with squash plants and sunflowers along a block wall by a paver path

I rented for a looooong time in life. I didn’t buy my first house until age 32, only to sell at age 34 when I went through a divorce. I then rented for another 2 years before buying the home where I currently reside.

From age 18 until 32 (and for the two years from 34-36), I was a renter. Most of that time, I moved every single year – rarely staying in the same place for more than 12-months. I kept moving as my income and life circumstances changed (sometimes moving “up” and other times moving “down” in home). One of the problems with that lifestyle is it meant I never really had a neighborhood community. I didn’t stay anywhere long enough! Everything I had felt impermanent.

Planting Roots

With the move to my current house, that all changed. I bought in a lovely suburban neighborhood where everyone knows everyone. It’s common to have neighborhood get-togethers and pot-lucks. The kids all play and go to school together and the adults all get along. It feels so good to be part of a community – to have neighbors who you can text if you need to borrow some milk or want to hang together on the weekend.

And another fun advantage of staying somewhere longer term is that it’s allowed us to plant roots. Both metaphorically and literally. My new husband is quite the gardener. It’s not easy to have a backyard garden in the harsh Arizona climate. But he makes it seem effortless.

You Reap What You Sew

This time of year we’ve been harvesting lots of squash plants, along with many jalapenos and a few tomatoes. We’ve got a pumpkin plant growing out-of-control and hoping to be able to harvest pumpkins by Thanksgiving.

My favorite is eating foods straight from our garden. A couple weeks ago I made stuffed acorn squash with squash from the garden (see pic below). And tonight I’m planning to make this butternut squash soup recipe with butternut squash from the garden.

Baked stuffed eggplant half topped with melted cheese on a glass plate

We’re a few weeks away from harvesting our luffa plants and we have several dozen pomegranates currently growing on our pomegranate tree (they tend to be ready closer to Christmas time).

It’s so rewarding to literally eat the fruits of our labor! It’s been so fun!

Are there any other gardeners in the group? What’s in your winter garden?

Oct 6, 2022    |      0 comments

Celebrating on a budget

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Our got to “celebration” has always been to go out to eat. It’s something that was done in my family growing up and it continued when I got married and began having kids. We celebrate birthdays with a meal out at the birthday day kid’s choice of restaurant. Great income month, let’s get steak. You get the point.

I don’t know if it’s this new stage in life where I love my home and my kitchen. (Your kitchen’s design and appliances really do make a difference in the joy it brings when cooking. I LOVE my gas stove!) Or if the continued loss of my hearing, makes being out more and more uncomfortable. Or maybe, it’s that I’m becoming such a good cook that I don’t want to eat others food…nope, it’s definitely not that. But I have been looking at other ways we could celebrate.

And the one I’ve landed on is making our meals together a bit more special…This lets us celebrate more often too.

Making meal times special on a budget

Here’s my on a budget ways I have upped the anty with our at home meals.

  1. Cloth napkins – they just feel luxurious. I have friends who use wash cloths to make them cost effective and be more green. When all the kids were at home, I would not have attempted to use cloth, paper towels or traditional napkins it was. But now that our full get togethers are few and far between, I love having a set of cloth napkins.
  2. Pour the wine & use wine glasses – nope, I still don’t drink. But Princess and I picked up some dollar store glass wine glasses and I keep a few bottles of sparkling juice on hand for those fun occasions when we can toast and celebrate together. Bottle of Welch's Sparkling Red Grape juice beside a wine glass on a table
  3. Dessert – yes, coming right up. Cakes and ice cream can add up quickly. I’ve started keeping some of the muffin mixes on hand. I can uplevel them with a few ingredients…extra egg, butter instead of oil, an extra dash of vanilla or cinnamon and then mix together some quick cream cheese frosting. I find the small muffin mix pouches on special 4 for $5. So I can literally whip up a yummy, cost effective dessert for a few people for just a few dollars and in less than 30 minutes.
  4. Mood lighting – there is nothing that sets a mood more than lighting. And we go both directions…when we are just having a chill night, a quiet celebration, I pull out of my candles and light them up all over the place. Since I don’t use them very often, candles literally last me a whole year. Since we are typically a loud, music blaring kind of crew, we have strung up the outdoor lights we invested in during quarantine (when we turned our carport into a hang out spot) around the back deck/hot tub area. We get Siri to play the music from someone’s phone, open both the back doors and have all the lights on. It makes it immediately festive around here.

We are on the cusp of a lot of loss around here. And I refuse to focus on it. So turning meal times into celebrations is one way I am coping. Cherishing every moment I get with the ones I love.

We couldn’t have a meal with my grandmother on her 95th birthday this week, but we did go visit her in her assisted living facility while Princess was home visiting from college.

Two smiling women posing with an older woman in a wheelchair in a lounge

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