Grandma Mitchell: Retirement on a Budget

I truly did not realize it had been so long since I'd posted here. Wow! Where does the time go? So as most of you know Dad and I planted a garden out at Grandma Joyce's and Grandpa Dale's place. They have a huge amount of land and graciously shared since our neighbors were using Rondo's garden space. We planted onions, pumpkins, tomatoes, cukes and watermelons out there. The watermelons aren't looking too great but the pumpkins look huge! Hopefully we'll have cute pumpkins to share with the grandkids. We brought home some huge onions from the garden to use already! They are delicious! At home we have blueberries on one of our 3 bushes. Hooray! And the raspberry starts from Rondo's finally have started producing. They are great and I am enjoying them a lot.

Looks pretty good doesn't it?

My strawberries also are coming on great and Dad puts them in smoothies. He is an awesome smoothie maker. He uses bananas from the freezer, watermelon cubes that I froze last year and whatever other available fruit there is. You should ask him for his recipe. Trust me, they beat out any smoothie you could buy. We also planted lettuce and spinach which means we are eating a lot of salads and that is so great. I even made a strawberry, chicken, lettuce, spinach and homemade crouton salad for lunch! Fast food places can't beat that. And my flowers look amazing! I'll try to get pictures of the yard and garden soon.

So lastly, I had finally had had enough of the pantry. Why I didn't paint the inside of the pantry when I painted the kitchen, I'll never know. But Dad found a quart can of Antique white interior paint that was marked down to $4.00 at Wal-Mart and I started my latest project. I cleaned out the pantry and painted and rearranged the items in my kitchen. I also threw out a lot of old spices and put the keepers in quart jars in my baking cupboard.