Good Afternoon to my fine fellows, what a time we find ourselves in right now. I do understand that here in Canada, and i expect in many other counties that we are very much seeing the K economy happening in daily life. While those in the upper part of the K can afford their current lifestyle, they are not immune to inflation.
The Gal in the Garden Series is coming back in full force this year but it will also have a few different sub groups added to it, you will be able to tell in a glance which ones it is. so let me introduce
Gardening in Hard Times
Like so many people, we are currently waiting to see what and how the next round of layoff’s will or won’t effect Dear Hubby, what we do know is that with the new back to office mandate means that he will be needing to commute more days of the week. I would like to say that Dear Hubby had been working a hybrid home/office successfully for 15 plus years before it was made a “thing”
This does effect the bottom line in terms of direct costs and somewhere those costs need to be made up in terms of savings and lets face it straight up, when it comes to certain things you have little say or control on the costs of things, those bills are going to come in and they will need to be paid.
However there are ways to save money if you have the time and willingness to work on it, i am going to be coming at it from the homestead, garden, forage, local sourced and store sales (limited though they may be) Some of it will be old hat, others will be odd out of the box thinking!
I am gardening in a northern climate, zone 5a, which used to be a three season climate and is now a two season zone at best and with the past few years, its been as unpredictable as possible with flood years, drought years, wild weather events and more which has lead it to be a one harvest season on plantings that should be at least two per our frost free average dates.
There is a be as much focus on fodder for any and all household and homestead and farm animals, just like inflation is hitting us and what we put on our plates, so it is effecting feed costs and just like us, what we feed is reflected back in health and productivity
I will do my best to include a good amount of hard data for my local area, i am well aware that it will only be my part of canada, may places would have much higher prices and few might have lower, i would always be interested in hearing how it matches up in your own neck of the woods.
I have upgraded the website and that means i will be adding in video’s at times along with my photography and like always unless noted, all photography on the site is taken by me, its the real deal, not some random photo selected to match the subject matter.
For recipes, i will do my best to keep things short for those that just want the recipe and go, but you can expect a mix of longer, shorter and in some cases photo heavy posts, like always there is really no way to know what i will talk about!
Cheers to spring!
Just another Day on the Farm 
This year I am not able to garden as we are waiting for our little guy to get a liver transplant and thus don’t have the time. So I am trying to explore “easy” ways to access “inexpensive” veg for our family.
I do have a few things that we put in last year or are perennials that we will do our best to bring along through this. But it is going to be the first year we haven’t gardened since 2006…! Not a great time to be getting out of gardening…would rather be expanding it above and beyond previous years. But it is what it is and we will make it through. I will enjoy hearing about your gardening and living vicariously.
I send my best wishes on the liver transplant, and that healing goes well. No not a good time to get out of gardening in terms of what is happening globally and what it will do in regards to food costs and access. Can you find the time to cover/feed/keep your garden soil going well for next year, could you green cover crop them in a way that is a one and done? In terms of easy ways, do you have bulk sellers near you? Granted if you do not have time for the garden, the question is do you have time for the processing? While the bigger farmers are getting hit big time if they do not already have their fertilizer in place, the bigger issue will be that i expect many will be moving from corn to soy as its not as chemical fertilizer heavy but that means less corn, less wheat and a market flood of soy. those factors will not hit the rest of the market till fall harvest time and then it will really hit home for this coming winter. If we keep seeing the blockages and so on, we are already seeing different counties reducing or even stopping exports and I think we might see more of it, so make sure you have enough of the basic’s stored up if you can. Let me know how it goes, i will need to go over and read the blog but please do also share when you get good finds. What are prices like in your neck of the woods right now? What do you think you will be able to find?
Prices on food have definitely been on the rise. We have to eat gluten-free because of Celiac. I used to bake all our bread to save money, but over the years the store-bought gf bread has become more reasonable and my time has become less available so we switched. But in the last month the price for one loaf of gf bread jumped a full $2. So now I am back to baking it at home from ingredients bought in bulk. Definitely saving money on that, even with the extra time. I mix a big bucket of all my dry ingredients (except the yeast) and then it is much faster to make the bread as needed because all I have to do is mix in the wet ingredients and the yeast.
There is a co-op where we can get a big box of mixed fruit and veg for $35. Not sure the average weight of the box, and we don’t get to pick what we get, it is just whatever is available. We have used it in the past and are considering trying that again. The hang-ups would be that it has to be picked up on a certain day and with hospitals and doctor appts and all that can be somewhat tricky. But I think we will use it some. Also, we are limited on having time for processing it all. So, we will see how that goes.
We have good amounts of meat stored up from the farm last year, and are slowly-but-surely working on putting up a bunch of homemade freezer meals to get us through the worst 3 months (during and after the transplant).
We are hoping to cover the garden this weekend. The plan is to top dress it with compost (we make huge piles of compost from the animal pens/housing and have a lot available at several different stages of composting at any given time). Then put fabric over it so that it will still get moisture this year but not have weeds. We have really bad weeds all the time due to the wind blowing the seeds in. So I don’t want to leave it uncovered because the work to get it back next year would be immense.