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Posts tagged with: gas prices

How to Teach Your Kids About Gardening This Spring

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No matter how you become a parent, whether by natural birth, adoption, or with the help of one of the thousands of women who apply to serve as a surrogate mother each year, you want to parent well. As your children grow, it may seem that every hobby available costs a small fortune, but gardening offers a low-cost hobby that children of preschool age and older can enjoy. Let’s consider how to teach your kids how to garden this spring, enhancing your home’s curb appeal and easing your food budget at the same time, thus saving you money.

Make Shopping for the Right Materials Fun

Most gardening tools last for a few years. For example, purchasing a well-made garden hose costs less than $20 and typically lasts between five and 10 years. A shovel, rake, and hoe set costs between $30 and $50. Buy one adult-sized set and a child-sized one, too. Instead of ordering online, plan a “field trip” to your local Ace Hardware, Lowe’s, or Home Depot store, so you can find all the equipment you need in one spot.

Order print seed catalogs, so you and your children can look through them together. Choose some flowers for the front of your home and fruit and vegetable seeds for the backyard. Some catalogs sell seedlings and plants, so you can purchase a starter garden outright.

Planning Your Garden Together

Plan your garden on paper with your children’s input. Before you start planting, check with your local code enforcement office for rules about gardens, garden fence heights, easement requirements, and much more. Construction of 92% of U.S. homes occurred before 2000, so the rules for older properties may differ from newly constructed homes.

Document Your Garden in a Notebook Diary

Help your child create a notebook of their future garden, clipping out pictures and plant information from the printed catalogs, and then pasting it into the notebook. The notebook, a sturdy pen with non-bleeding ink, and glue cost less than $5 altogether. Purchase a small thermal printer and sticker paper for about $20, so you can print photo stickers of the plants as they grow, documenting them in the notebook. Although websites might seem the modern choice, web hosts go in and out of business, and kids can work on a paper project during electrical and Internet outages.

Sprouting Seedlings

Spring brings rain showers, so use your indoor time wisely by planting seeds in small started cups or trays. This only requires seeds, trays or cups, and some potting soil. Place them on a window sill in a low-traffic area that receives lots of sunlight to help them germinate.

Tilling the Soil

On a sunny day, get your garden spaces ready for planting. Children can help till the soil and build garden beds. Have small children gather rocks to create bed borders. To make the garden more colorful, consider painting the rocks bright colors with waterproof paint, but allowing them to fully dry before placing them as borders.

Preschoolers and kindergartners typically enjoy working the dirt with their hands. Put them to work because their favorite play helps your soil’s health. Have them help water the soil using a hose and a watering can. Explain that some plants need a lot of water, while others require only a little, so getting the soil ready in one bed differs from the soil of another bed.

Planting Time

Once your seeds germinate or your seedlings arrive, plant them on a sunny day. Older kids can help dig the plant holes, while younger kids can help push the dirt into place and pat it down with their hands. Help them water the plantings after placing every seedling.

Gardening with Your Children

Growing a garden with your kids can provide enhanced home beauty and delicious food to eat. Your children learn how to cultivate plants and benefit from responsibilities throughout their youth. Gardening provides them with tangible benefits that hard work pays off because they can help you cook the results of their labor, providing them with some of their favorite meals.

More Money, More Problems

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First a quick update from my last blog post. Thanks for the kind words and well wishes regarding my Dengue Fever (a pandemic currently in South America!). I’m fully better now and have opted not to pursue any Workman’s Comp claims. I ended up not incurring any additional medical expenses after writing my blog post and decided it would be more trouble than it was worth to try to recoup funds (and no guarantee it would even be approved since I’d have a burden of proof to show the mosquito bite occurred while I was on the work portion of my trip and not the “fun” portion).

But speaking of work, that’s the subject of today’s post too….

More Money, More Problems

I recently won two separate (but complimentary) faculty fellowships.  This is a good thing, as they both come with merit-based financial awards that lasts for a period of time. However, even though it’s an honor to be named as a fellow (two times over!), the award comes with the “promise” of additional work.  It’s work that I’m excited about and eager to pursue, but it’s more hours of the day.

In my case, both fellowships last one fiscal year (summer to summer), but I’ve already started investing time into the projects, at least in terms of brainstorming, planning, prepping, and timelining everything.

Busy Spring = Hiring Help

Time is finite and this Spring semester at work has been extraordinarily nuts. Two international trips (my work trip to Peru and my upcoming trip with my husband to Italy), plus kids’ breaks from school, plus a full-time job, and now this extra work on top of everything. I’ve considered hiring out tasks I have never hired out before, but to still do so in a way that saves me some money.

For instance, Spring time is the time our trees bloom and pollen and flowers end up scattered all over the yard. I usually take a day sometime this season to spend several hours in the yard getting everything cleaned up. But I literally don’t have the time this season. I’ve looked at my calendar and every weekend is full until we leave for Italy, and then we won’t be back until May! I don’t want to wait that long to get our yard in order.

So I got an estimate from a landscape service to do our front yard. And then before I’d pulled the trigger with scheduling, a friend posted on Facebook that her teenage son is trying to make extra money by doing things like yard work, moving furniture, etc. etc. Score!

Cleaning the yard is a chore we’ve always handled ourselves. But paying a teen to help us out is a win-win. It saves me a bit of money over what I’d pay to professionals, but still frees me up of the time that would have been needed if I were to do it myself (not to mention the aftermath allergy flair-up I routinely deal with).

Saving Time = Saving Money 

When I was in graduate school I had this saying, “I’ve got more time than money!” I would do things like clip coupons and grocery shop every week at 3 different stores because I would ONLY buy the sale items at each store and I’d save more doing things that way. I think I’ve officially tipped over onto the opposite “I’ve got more money than time” side of the spectrum. By hiring out certain tasks, I’m able to free myself up of the time I really need to do work and, essentially, make more money.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a free-for-all! Sure, I’d love a personal chef and a laundry service, but that’s not reality. We’re still handling the vast majority of tasks ourselves. But paying a kid to clean up the yard is so worth it to me. I’m wondering if the readers here hire out for any specific tasks? And if so, what tasks do you find to be most helpful to hire out?