WEEKLY PREP THREAD, April 1-7

Welcome to April! That first quarter of the year just blew by me.

The car is topped off (price holding at my station, but everyone else up to $3.95) and the laundry is finished. Because we are planning to be gone a large part of June and because we seem to have skipped spring and gone straight into summer (supposed to hit 90 this week-twice), I decided not to plant too much of a garden, but did get 7 tomato plants and got them in the raised beds on Friday afternoon, right in time for our two good rains yesterday. I want to get 2 more of the sweet cherry 100 plants and I'll plant some green beans, but that will be the extent of things. Also found out that the second rain barrel has a leak, so both are now bad. I'm thinking they are 3 years old at most, so I'm somewhat disappointed that they didn't last longer. Now 2 more rain barrels are on the "to get" list.

I ordered 30 boxes of canning jar lids off Ebay and they were delivered to my door Friday for cheaper than I can get them at the store. I still pick up a box or two every time I go to the store, but this was a nice boost to the supply. I also got another 48 rolls of tp at Walmart and picked up a couple more rolls of duct tape at Home Depot.

We are having the den and hallway of the house painted this Tuesday so the house is in a mess as things are moved to get ready for that process, but we did finally find the final fan for the house--one for the patio. That should be installed on Tuesday as well. Redoing the house a little at a time.

Publix has some good sales on our everyday use stuff this week and there are a few promising sales out there to pick up a few items to save a few $$$. Only Walgreens has eggs on sale this week. Used to be that all the stores would put them on sale as loss leaders for the week. Haven't seen that done in a few years now. I'll just pay my $1 a dozen and get some at Walgreens.

Nothing major on the horizon for the week, but I hope these good sales continue for a week or two. This is the first good sale week so far this year.


What is everyone else up to?

We got some more blackberry plants this week. As well as a couple of grape vines.
And HD had a sale on charcole so we got 8 bags of that as well.

We planted 75 strawberry plants, 3 blueberry plants, and 2 elderberry plants. I have Rutger, Arkansas Traveler, Roma, and Cherry tomatoes coming up in the greenhouse. The Arkansas Traveler and Cherry tomato seeds were saved from previous years and have been the freezer. I am anxious to see how this would work. It's still too early to tell for sure, but 50 to 80% success so far, with the 50% being the Arkansas Traveler and Roma. The bell peppers should start poking up this week. I also hatched out 65 baby chicks, Barred Rock.

A friend and I finished my 'wood shed' over the weekend. Holy smokes. It's more like a pole barn. I'll wrap it in lattice for now but with as well as he built it I think it'll become a nice small barn for goats or something eventually.

Home Depot had a four day sale on bags of red mulch ... 99 cents each for the big bags. I was able to squeeze 30 bags out of this week's budget. The reason I was having to squeeze is because our middle child - a girl - turned 16 years old and for her gift she wanted to have a party at the house ... she had about 20 friends over and they hung out in and around the pool, played volleyball, egg toss, and basically grazed for four hours straight. My word can some of them kids eat.

But I was also amazed at how every one of them volunteered to clean up something, even if it was just after themselves. And alot of them made my daughter homemade gifts or the gifts were well thought out ... like a book she was looking for or a CD of music (she like Cold Play, movie sound tracks from both current movies and old musicals, some made her jewelry) or something to do with Dr. Who (yeah, I've got a couple of those weird kids living in my house that love British humor). Those kids showed me that the next generation isn't completely lost ... there are some good kids that will turn into good adults if afforded the opportunity.

I woke up with some crappy viral thing ... very dizzy anytime I move and if I bend over I'll gack all over the place. I'm not sure if it is just my inner ear or what but this is pretty awful. I can't drive at all and I had a number of important errands I was supposed to do today and I spent the morning rescheduling.

The only thing I can say is that I now have no excuse not to get back to editing the excel spreadsheet that I use for my prep inventory. I also need to set up a database so that we can reinventory our house.

Taxes are almost finished but I have to tell you the 1099 mess is doing nothing but making filing your taxes more complicated.

Missed the doggone sale that Honeyville was having and now I'm going to have to wait for the next one. I want to add some freeze dried meats to what I already have set aside. I like to build in redundancy ... I have commercially canned and home processed meat in the jar. I've got homemade jerky. But I really would like to have some FD for super long term storage.

The house is an absolute mess due to the painting, but I guess it will be much cleaner when put back together. I really like the color we chose and it does look really nice.

The preps from Publix were 2 bottles of olive oil, 2 rolls of foil, and 10 lbs of bread flour. My ammo order came in from Cabelas, my Honeyville order is due to arrive tomorrow and I just place a couple of orders on ebay for some gauze rolls, something I always seem to be short on. A couple of cases will help fix that hole a bit (I hope).

Since I was stuck in my home office most of the day due to the painting, I did manage to get a lot of stuff done and sort of find the bottom of my desk, pay some bills, and start planning my parents 60th wedding anniversary party as well as making reservations for my summer vacation. It's amazing what you can do when there aren't many distractions around (all the kitties were hiding in the closets!).

I stopped by the salvage story yesterday. I got several things in the med. dept. to add to the preps. My med. preps. have been getting low. I still need to get more, but it is a start in building back up. \

I also went by my favorite charity resale shop. I got some sheets, 2 tops for my gdaughters, 3 dress shirts for the husband, and some sheer curtains to use to cover my corn as I plant it.

The crows pulled my corn up last year just as it broke the ground and ate the curnel. I hope to keep it covered untill it is big enough they won't bother it. I am also determined to learn to use the 22 that has a scope so these crows can be eliminated.

We got another tree and a half for spliting. There were 3 trees, but gave half to a neighbor as we already have atleast 4 cords. I know, you can never have anough. We are however thinking about moving. We will have to move it all, so decided to share the wood. Older man so I felt good about it =).

I didn't do much more this week as it is Easter and I had to get all the stuff for the baskets and egg hunts. Was really nice though to not have to purchase the whole meal at the grocery store. We had bought hams on super sales a couple of months back, so I just took one out of the freezer. Everything else for the meal is coming from prep supplies.