Frugal Friday - Week of June 7, 2020


Maltese Cross next to my kitchen window this week - so pretty!

We had humming birds visiting the Maltese Cross outside the kitchen window this week - what a treat!  I started feeding the humming birds that have been visiting our yard this year. They have stopped by in the past two years. That means there is other food in the area and I will not be disrupting their patterns or causing them hardship if we have to stop feeding them at some time in the future!  I love having humming birds in my garden!   

It has been a quiet and busy week here. We have all been working mostly from home this week - the person the children are working for is ill so they will not be working this week, everyone at church worked from home this week while the building is sanitized in preparation for limited re-opening for worship, and my students had an exam this week so I was able to proctor that from home and lead a couple of discussions from home as well.   

Our garden is growing and so are the weeds!  I spent quite a bit of time weeding this week, but it is also mosquito season here, and they are really bad this year.  The city did not spray for mosquitos earlier this year as they normally do, due to Covid-19 closures, so there are more this year than normal.  I am usually not someone who is bitten much and this year I am.  We do not have malaria or zika or any of the other mosquito borne illnesses here but I do end up uncomfortably itchy! 

Even with the quiet and work, here is what we did this week that was frugal:

  • We made grilled pork ribs with asparagus, grilled chicken with baked potatoes (on the grill), muffins, taco soup with cornbread, several salads, pasta with tomato sauce and a few things I'm not remembering at the moment.
  • We ate all meals at home or took them with us this week.
  • We harvested lettuce, radishes, and strawberries this week from the garden.
  • John and the children assembled one more new garden bed and filled it with dirt - some we had from our own yard and some we had purchased previously.  We will be putting the strawberry runners in this bed.  
  • We finished the first step in getting started on our long-awaited repairs/renovation project with our home.  We have lived in this home for 20 years and have worked hard to get to this point - it is very exciting!
  • I picked a large bouquet of peonies for the kitchen table. A heavy rain one night broke many of the stems so I used the broken stems for the bouquet.  It looked lovely.
  • I also picked roses to fill in the peony bouquet when they started to fade.  
  • Our daughter hemmed two pair of pants for my husband - he is between lengths so he always needs his pants hemmed up an inch when we purchase them.  We had taken advantage of an online 70% off sale with free shipping to purchase two new pairs of pants.  They were needed!
  • John and I went for a walk three times this week as a "date".
  • My Mother, at age 85, is staying home and offered to do some sewing for me.  She has already sewed 26 quilt tops for the church quilting group, cleaned her home top to bottom (including scrubbing all the places that do not normally get scrubbed), washed all the curtains, bedding, pillows and slipcovers that can be washed, read several books and watched many movies.  She needs something to do!  So, our daughter and I went through my fabric and patterns and we are sending material and patterns for two blouses, a dress, and a decorative Christmas tree skirt (tree stand covering). I would not have time to get to these until the end of July so it's perfect!
  • Our daughter started her own sewing project here at home.  She has also painted two paintings using supplies that she already owned.
I think that's it for this week!
What did you do that was frugal?

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