Things I Found at Thrift Store - Useful in Gardening

In November I found these awesome metal trays at my favorite little thrift store- in the freebie box and shared about it here~ Freebie Friday

Well I wasn't sure what I was going to do with them but when I got home I figured it out! 

I have these 4 and I bought a hard plastic tray that is the same size as these. 

So in my growing area - I really need to have one more tray this size. I will continue to keep looking for one- but until then I found a great tray that is half the size as the trays above. Isn't it beautiful?! 

 

This is what I will be doing with them. The large ones will hold 4 packs and this small one will hold 2. 

These are the containers that I use to start my seeds. They came with a plastic dome that goes over the top to act as a greenhouse to keep heat in. 

Anyway as you are shopping at thrift stores be sure and keep your eyes on the look out for things that could be helpful in the garden! You might be surprised at what you find. :O) 

Oh - just in case you are interested I paid- $1.00 for the tray. 

My Best Deal

My Best Deal this week is this awesome cat bed!!! 

Within the first day I had every cat I have enjoy it for at least a bit.
It might have helped that I sprayed some catnip spray in it...lol 

Even our boy kitty loves it! 

 

I had seen something like this advertised at TSC and I had wanted to get it for my kitties, but it was sold out when I went and I have not seen since. It was going to be 16.97 or 19.97. 

I paid $3.00 for this one!!! 

Oh and even the next day when the catnip spray had dissipated - they were still loving it! 
What a good deal! 

CH 3 For Our Sake Also - LESSONS ON FAITH - Audiobook

Freebie Friday

This week my *FREE* stuff is this awesome shelf! 

It is a metal shelf and it is quite heavy! I am not quite sure where I will use it but it just seemed intriguing so I grabbed it up! 

Next up was this cute pencil holder?! I think. It is quite bit - so I will probably be using it for something else. I have not decided for sure! 

Not pictured is about 50 clear 12 oz solo cups! I will use these in gardening! They will be great to up pot my little plants into from the starter containers! And they were free - so why not!! 

I love it when this thrift store puts free stuff out. It makes me even happier to buy things there! :O) 

 

Gardening Notebook

 

There seem to be several groups of people when it comes to gardening: Some seem to think it isn't any where near time to begin gardening, some are in the planning phase now and have already planted things.  

I am in the group of planning my garden now. It is a fun time of year! And over the last few years I have found that having a Gardening Notebook - is very helpful in the planning phase. 

There are great websites that you can make copies of - so you too, can have great gardening information in your gardening notebook. 

One of my favorite pages in my notebook - is something I was able to copy from www.almanac.com 

I was able to go in and put my zip code and it brought up dates for things to be planted. It even goes deeper than that - it tells if you sow indoors or sow directly. That is very important information to know. So I have several pages of the list of vegetables and when to plant. It is so much nicer than the sheets of paper that I added to my notebook several years ago- that has plant this 4 weeks before/after that last freeze. When you have that - then you have to get a calendar out and do a lot of figuring for each thing you want to plant. 

So spend a little time to gather great information for your Gardening Notebook - this will require a good amount of time to begin with - but just remember that in the future this notebook will come in handy and will shorten the amount of time you have to spend planning your garden. 

In this notebook - I will store the templates of my garden that I created this year. So next year - I will just have to make copies of those pages and then I can get busy with my plans. I will also have the pages from this years plantings - and so I can use those pages to help me decided what to do next year. Each new thing that you come up with to help with gardening will help you not only this year -but also in the future. 

The pages I have shown above show - a list of veggies and tells what plants are allies and what are foes. And then I have one that tells what plants like full light and what plans can handle partial shade - these things are helpful as well. Since some of my yard has more shades than others.

Keep the important information in your gardening notebook - like last frost date/ first frost date and garden zone. 

So this is the best time to be planning your garden. And you might also find it is the best time to start some plants indoors. I live in zone 8a. and so for me it is the time to start eggplant seeds indoors. 

These are the 2 varieties that I will be planting this year. 

So I bought this Ammo Can ( I think is the name of it) from Harbor Freight- I think it was about 4.99) 

I used cardstock paper to make my dividers for the months - and so I placed the seeds behind the month that I will be planting. And then I will putting the seeds in order of when to plant them each month. Each of these organization projects - not only make things easier for this year - but also easier in the future. 

I hope that this information is helpful to you during this planning phase of gardening. :O) 

Finding Beauty

 

Garden Planning

When gardening it is a good idea to spend some time at the beginning of the season planning your garden space. I am sure there are some people who can just go out and plant willy nilly and be successful, but I am not that person. So I need to have a plan. I have a lot of want to plant- but I want to make sure I have room for everything. I don't want to end up with not enough plants for my area or WAY too many either. 

So there are several important questions to ask when planning your garden: 

• What do you want to plant? 
• Where will you plant it? 
• How many of each plant do you have room for?  

If possible make up a template of your garden space and then make copies of them. 

Here are my templates: 

 I used some paper that I had that had 1 inch squares on it - this made it easier for me to at least get the basic idea of what garden places I have. I glues the papers onto cardstock. I then made copies of them and I will keep these originals in my gardening notebook. The reason for this is that I need to be able to write what I am planting in the different areas- I will use a pencil so if as I am planning I realize that something wont work I will move it around. I am a visual person so I need to be able to see the spaces I have and write down what I am planning to do. 

I will label my papers for the year it was - and I will be keeping these sheets -so that I can keep track of what I have done and what was successful and what was not. It is important to keep a notebook of important information and I will be sharing about that hopefully in the next installment of our gardening series. 

If there are any other questions you think are important - please share in the comments. I am sure once I get this job taken care of I may come up with more questions. The ones above are just the questions that came to mind when writing up this post. And like I said - I am no expert. I am just sharing to encourage along the way. 

If you plan to have a garden - take some time to do some planning. There are many resources on the internet giving best times to plant different things and such. There are many different things to consider. You may be a person who can just go out and plant here and there and it all work out great- but I just can't do it that way. I need to have a plan. And these are just a few things to consider. Good luck! :O) 

My Best Deal

 My best deal this week actually comes to you from Walmart! Yep- that's right! Rarely I find awesome deals at Walmart - which I find hard to believe especially since I am guessing because they can by in bulk they get much better deals so it would be easy for them to run sales. So when I find a best deal there - it is really a big deal. 

So my son had found the deal first and thankfully I went to the same town to find the same deal. 

8 ounce cans of tomato sauce on sale for 10 cents!! What a deal!! That is 65% off! I bought a case of them - 24 cans! 

CH 2-3 Lessons on Faith LESSONS ON FAITH – Audiobook

Be Flexible

 Gardening....there are many different ways to do it! It depends on many different factors. You just have to do what works best with what you have. 

Where I live, we have rocky, hard clay soil. We have tired to till and plant a garden- not much success. We have tried to bring in some good would to mix with ours. We have spent lots of time pulling rocks out of the garden. It was so challenging that we didn't even bother with a garden for a year or so here and there. 

Then my husband built me several raised beds- 2 foot by 4 foot long. We found more success this way of gardening. And more boxes were built. The garden evolved. In order to make longer rows for some of our crops he built me some boxes using 2x12's. These boxes starting breaking down and falling apart so my husband has been changing them out- using sheets of tin - cutting them in half and framing with with 2x4's and making me 2 foot wide boxes and 8 feet long. We also bought some metal garden boxes - some from Amazon. And some from Home Depot.  These 2 are my favorites. 

A year or so ago we ended up realizing we needed to give our chickens more space. The 1/3 of the back yard that they were using had lost all the grass do to the drought. So we fenced out garden and gave the chickens 2/3rds of the yard. This gave my garden a more defined area. And I just love it! But because of this it has also called for a few changes to make the area work better. So I have had to shovel dirt out of the old boxes and replace the boxes and fill them up. I have had to move a few of our boxes. There has been a lot of work to be done but it will all be well worth it once it is all done. 

 

When you begin to create a garden space in your yard you have no idea what you are working with so you have to figure out what works best for your space. This means that you may have to change your plans up to make your space work better for you. Be flexible. All the work will be worth it in the end. 

*I will say to be aware - not all metal garden boxes are created equally. We bought one that I am not very happy with at all. It does not keep it's shape and had a metal bar going across it - under the soil - makes it hard to till it. And even with the bar - it lost it's shape. This is the reason I have shared the bought metal garden boxes we have been happy with. Thankfully I had won a Sunnydaze brand metal garden box from a gardening club nearby so I knew I liked their products. 

 a photo of the metal garden box that we bought off of Amazon before I found the brand name on the metal garden box that I won - that I knew was a good quality one. I was so disappointed in this one. I still use it but look at the shape of it...ugh... 

Successful or Not

 I have had gardens here and there through my adult life. Some years they were successful and some years not so much. There is something cool that happens whether you are successful or not and that is that you learn! 

In 2020 when I lost my volunteering job and mask mandates made it uncomfortable to get out and about. So I got a bit more serious about gardening. I had a lot more free time on my hands, so why not spend them in the garden. 

Another awesome thing that happened during this time, I finally got serious about checking out YouTube. And I found some channels that helped spark a passion for gardening! 

I am by far not an expert on the matter but I thought I would write out a few posts on things I have learned and what I am doing in the garden. I am hoping that by doing this that I will help others that are becoming more and more interested in gardening. 

When gardening you are not always successful, but there are so many benefits from the time spent in the garden. So many things to learn and they are not only things about gardening that you will learn. Just wait and see. 

I hope that you will stick around as I share my experiences with you as I go along this journey of gardening. :O) 

Best Deal

 This weeks best deal comes from Aldi's- one of my favorite little grocery stores. I sure hope you have one near where you live because there are some great deals to be found there every time you go. But this week - it was an even better deal than usual! 

So to start off I will say I do not like hamburger meat. I was raised vegetarian till I was about 11 years old or so. I ate hamburger meat for a while but after I had my first son - I just developed a distaste for it. But of course my husband and the rest of the family like it. It has been hard for me to pay the higher and higher prices for it lately. I could almost always get it for 1.99 a pound and then now I am lucky to find it for 2.99 a pound.

On Thursday my husband and I stopped by Aldis to get groceries. When we got to the meat section I was SO excited to see a 50% off sticker on the family packs of hamburger meat. There is a little over 5 pounds in those packages. These are not the tubes of meat- my husband does NOT like the hamburger meat in the tubes at all- no matter how cheap they might be. Anyway so it ended up costing me 1.50 per pound for hamburger meat! And I was able to get 10 pounds of it! This is a great deal!! I would have been so happy for this deal back in 2019 when I could find it for 1.99, but now that it is hard to find it for 2.99 I am even more happy!! What a deal!! 

CH 2-2 Lessons on Faith Part 2- LESSONS ON FAITH – Audiobook

Freebie Friday

So this week our youngest son dropped by. He had a bag in his hand and gently pulled this beauty out. He said his mother in law was at work and they were going through Christmas Decorations and getting rid of stuff and when they were getting rid of this - she thought of me. I love nativity scenes. I love smaller ones that are unique. 

This by its self was great and I thought it was so pretty. But then he said that is not all. And he opened it up and all these small pieces that go with the nativity scene were inside! How sweet is that!?! 

So the lady who runs my favorite little thrift store in a town nearby - has covid and so the thrift store has been closed for a couple of weeks. Hopefully they will be opened back up soon. I miss it. 

Thanks to the thoughtfulness of my son's mother-in-law - I have a beautiful gift to share for Freebie Friday!! 

Hope you all are staying well!! :O) 

In the Garden

 This week the sun came out and the temps made it back into the 60's and 70's and so I spent some great time in the garden. I also opened up the gates and let the chickens in for a day or 2. They loved the time they spent in my garden! I can't wait to share more of what is going on in my garden. 

Good Advice For Us ALL

We have actually had some winter weather this week. We had a couple of pretty cold days! I decided it was a good time to make myself some tea. I loved the message on my tea bag: 

"Let your energy be used to build, not destroy."

This is good advice for us all! Be kind, There is enough ugliness in our world these days. So let us use our energy to build. :O) 

My Best Deal

This week I ventured to a Goodwill further away that I have not been to for probably a year or more. It is a smaller store- but ever so often i find great things there. 

This week I was looking through baby clothes- since we have a new grandson and I found a great deal. 
Yes~ It will probably be 8 months or more before this will be used - but you just can't pass up a good deal when you come across it- even if it won't be used for a while. 

I have tried to look up what this retails for - but can't seem to find it. Don't have any other name for it other than it is Little Tyke. 

But no matter, I know that the $4.99 that I paid for it was an awesome deal! I can't wait for the little grandsons to be able to play on this!! 

Have you found any good deals lately? I would love to hear about it! :O) 

 

CH 2-1 Lessons on Faith Part 1 LESSONS ON FAITH – Audiobook

Freebie Friday

 So this week I tried to go to the favorite little thrift store nearby- however it was closed and would not open back up till Sunday - so sorry there is nothing to report on in my Freebie Friday. But I thought I would get on here and share a great deal I found this week  - just in case you have a Winco near your house - you could check it out. 

Winco is where I buy my olives from. My grandchildren love them and I try to open a can every time our family gets together. Winco is where I have found my best prices for them. 99 cents is the deal I usually get- which compared to other stores is an awesome deal! But a couple of days ago I went and found olives for 78 cent - I bought a whole box of 12 - now I am thinking I probably should have bought 2! Oh well. 

I also found 7.25oz cans of shaving cream - 98 cents and 1 pound blocks of yeast - $1.00.  Those are great deal!! 

Nothing free this week - but I did get some great deals - so it was still a great week. Plus the prices on their paper towels and toilet paper are great as well. I am so thankful that I have one within about a 30 minute drive or so!! :O) 

CH1 Living By Faith - LESSONS ON FAITH - Audiobook ....part one

First of all - Happy New Years to each one of you! May you draw closer to God through 2022! There is nothing more important in the days we are living in than to develop a deeper relationship with our Creator and Redeemer!! 

Today we being a great series.... it is audiobook of the most recent book I have read. this book has helped me understand the true meaning of faith. At the very beginning you will notice that some points are repeated- but just stick with it and you will be glad you did. Because you will come away from this series with a better understanding about many things!! May God bless the studying of His Word! :O)