Peace and Plenty

Hello dear friends!  Well, I guess it is autumn now, although the temperatures would tell a different tale.  I was hopeful when we had that spate of cool weather in August, that this year summer wouldn't infringe upon fall too much, but nope, not going to happen.  Well, at least it is beginning to look like my beloved season.

This is a picture of our little dooryard garden, landscaping compliments of the birds.  The birds, bees and butterflies do a lot of landscaping in my yard and I am happy to let them do it.  The other day we watched a goldfinch scattering the seeds of milk thistle everywhere.  I wonder how many of those prickly plants I'l have next year.  And you should see all the wild roses I have thanks be to the birds!  They have such pretty rosehips.  It should be a very lovely sight against the snowy landscape this winter.  Little by little the birds are shaping our yard into their own little sanctuary.  

This little area used to be all white plants, now nary a white flower exists.  Oh well, I'm a firm believer in letting gardens be what they want to be. It's a lot less work that way. 

Speaking of gardens, we have been busy getting the last of it harvested and preserved.  All that is left in the plots now are some parsnips and the beans drying on the vines.  We picked a few of the beans to see what they looked like.

Aren't they pretty?  They are an heirloom variety called "Succotash" and I think they would make a lovely dish with some yellow corn in a traditional succotash.  Every year we plant some sort of dried bean.  As a lover of history, it excites me to grow a variety that people ate over two-hundred years ago.  One of the reasons we garden is so we can have the true flavor of vegetables.  It makes no sense to me to grow the same varieties of vegetables that you can purchase in the stores.  We gave our neighbor some of our extra German Strawberry tomato plants that we had started and she told us that she never realized how good a tomato could taste until she ate one of those.  Yep, there's a difference.  We grow antique apples in our little orchard, too.  It is so much fun to taste an apple the was Thomas Jefferson's favorite (Esopus Spitzenburg) as opposed to a Red Delicious that you  can buy at a store.

Anyway, enough of that prattle.  Someone once left a comment that they wished that I would write less about gardening and canning. Well, they landed upon the wrong blog, if that is what they were looking for, as gardening and canning consume most of the hours of my days from May until October. Ha! But I must remember that the name of my blog is Hope and Thrift and sometimes I neglect the thrift part.  After examing the statistics, I noticed that this old blog has been getting a lot of traffic on the posts about thrift lately.  It is so hard to write about thrift, I can give hints, but at the end of the day, everyone knows it is just a matter of cutting back on spending and making the most of what you have.

The other day I was in the grocery store and they had a display of Sander's Bumpy Cakes.  Now I adore those cakes, but it has been years since I've purchased one. maybe even decades.  I was astounded by the price, $15 for a little eight-inch square cake!  I said something to Ran about it and a lady nearby, that was looking at the cakes also, came up to me and said something about how unaffordable food was becoming and was almost in tears.  She kept saying "what's a person to do?".  Well, I didn't say it, but I was thinking, "You can start by not buying a fifteen dollar cake."  The store was having a sale on roasting chickens for ninety-nine cents a pound, which is what I came in after.  For four or five dollars, she could have gotten an entire week's worth of meals from one  of those chicken. And at that, price, she could have stocked her freezer for the same amount as that one little cake cost. 

The point I'm getting at, is people need to learn how to shop.  That means you have to actually go to the stores, look for the bargains, examine the fruit and vegetables and keep track of your budget.  The excuse I always get is that "I'm too busy to shop".  What could be more important than shopping for the food that nurtures your family?  The cost of food is right up there with mortgages and rent in a family's budget, so isn't it worthwhile to take your time and do it properly? Rather than having a "date night" Ran and I go grocery shopping twice a month.  We always have,from the beginning of our marriage.. We even get spiffed up for it.  Through observations we've learned that one of our local stores always mark down their meats early in the morning midweek.  Just yesterday, we bought three pound of steak for less than three dollars a pound and a pound of wagyu ground beef for $4.64.  We also bought a pint of buttermilk for twenty cents and  two packages of corn tortillas that had some broken tortillas for twenty cents each.  Do I care that the tortillas were broken?  No, because I was going to use them in King Ranch casserole anyway.  The meat was still fresh, you can tell by looking at it and smelling it.  And I froze it in vacuum sealed bags as soon as I got home, except for three of the steaks that are marinating in the fridge as I write this. The buttermilk was made into pancake batter that was then cooked into a large batch that went into the freezer for quick breakfasts for days when we tire of oatmeal.  And I know, I'll get those that will say "Eww, I'd never eat marked-down meat, etc.".  I always get those sort of comments.  I will tell you a favorite saying of one of my uncles, "you hold your nose, I'll hold my pocketbook".

And another comment I often get, is the old my-husband-won't-eat and my-husband-insists-on-meat-at-every-meal.  I get so tired of hearing those excuses.  How I really want to respond is "tell your husband to grow up", but of course that would be rude.  Some women treat their husband's as if he were child.  He should be an adult enough to understand what things cost and what your family can afford. I strongly suggest family's have a  family meeting once month where you discuss the costs of things, the expenditures for the month, and where cut-backs can be made.  I'd include older children in on the discussions too.  Run your family's finances like a good business.  

So what I'm getting at here, is part of being thrifty is take your responsibility for your actions.   Stop looking for someone to blame.  Benjamin Franklin said the kindest thing you can do for the poor is to make them uncomfortable in their poverty.  I see evidence of this every time I go to the grocery store.  People filling their carts with all sorts of junk and then paying with an EBT card.  People complaining about the quality of the food at free food pantries instead of being grateful.  People refusing the offer of free fruits and vegetables from the garden because it's too much work, while moments later complaining about the cost of food.  No matter how much you give, it is never enough or good enough, they always want more and better.  If they were truly improvished and starving (BTW, most of these people do not look like they are starving), they would be thankful for a bag of beans and rice. Well, I have to stop ranting here, or you will think I've gone completely mad. Ha!  I know that many come here for pleasant conversations.  It's been a trying month.

So on that note, one of the most pleasant things to me is take a fifty-cent skein of yarn from the thrift store and make it into a pretty and useful garment. Like these socks I recently finished:

I'm almost finished with a cardigan, that I will show you next month.  I'm quite pleased with it.  Recently, I discovered old knitting magazines from the 1980s. If you can look past the models with the frizzy hair, flippy bangs, hot pink and cobalt eyeshadow and the shoulder-padded color-blocked neon sweaters, they offer a lot of good basic patterns, written in a no-nonsense manner.  And for the price of a few dollars at an antique shop for a magazine  with a half a dozen or more usable patterns, it's a lot cheaper than paying $8 for just one pattern on Etsy or Ravelry.

For me, autumn is always a hopeful month.  I do not celebrate any holidays, Christian or pagan, but I can see some of the logic in the old pagan holidays; rejoicing when the last of the garden has been harvested, observing that the days are now getting shorter and preparing for the long winter ahead.  These things just make sense to me as a person that lives close to the land. After all isn't it God who has provided the bounty and hasn't He created the seasons?  Always have a grateful heart for what blessings He has bestowed upon you.  When a crop fails or doesn't yield as  much as we had hoped for, we always think,yes, but it is sufficient for our needs.  If we go through hardships, and we all do, we always think, yes, but He has brought us through it and now we are stronger because of it.  Life may get difficult, life may seem unfair at times, but He has promised to never forsake you.

Hugs

Jane