Enjoying Spring outside in the garden.

A lovely bunch of crocuses.

I got outside again today for a little over an hour.  I did not rake leaves as there is quite a bit of green coming up through the ground and I did not want to disturb. Besides the daffodils, tulips, and grape hyacinth  which will be flowering in no time, I see that my Pasque flower, lupines, campanula, primrose.......just about all my spring flowers are up above the ground a couple of inches or more. So what I did was  cut the dead vegetation from around the green shoots and move it to the compost heap. This will give the plants a little more room to grow and it tidies up the beds a little. I have temporarily misplaced my pruners, so I was not able to remove the really thick or woody stems (eg. my lavender plant and my pink spirea. I am definitely not used to all the bending over, so I will have to increase my endurance. So after I cleaned up two of the front garden beds, I called it quits outside for the day. 

Inside, I defrosted 4 pounds of ground beef. I bulked up two pounds with onion, carrot, celery and green pepper. I froze half  for a future casserole and I added the other half to a homemade tomato based sauce. I left the meaty sauce unseasoned so that I can make future meals of spaghetti, lasagna, pizza sauce, chili or enchiladas. At that point I will season appropriately. The other two pounds were mixed with egg, oatmeal, ketchup, and my homemade onion soup mix to make into meatballs for more freezer meals. I got the ground meat yesterday at Giant Tiger. They sold these 4 lb. packages for $10 earlier in the year. Now they are charging $13. I still buy it though because it still is the cheapest ground beef I can find. Fortunately, Food Basics is still selling ground chicken and ground turkey at $10 for a package of four. But for how long???  For someone who didn't have to buy groceries when she first got back, I splurged yesterday. I spent almost $100 on grocery and pet items just in GT. Parkay margarine was only $1 a tub (limit of 3). Betty Crocker cake mixes were only 88 cents a box (nice to keep squirreled away). Maple Leaf hotdogs were just $2.47 again. I bought 2 English cukes for $1.50  and a package of Sugardale bacon for only $2.50  Campbells cream of chicken and cream of celery soups were only $1 a tin and Black Diamond cheese was less than $5.00 This is GT's 54th birthday, so there were a lot of grocery store bargains. I really stocked up on some items. Since I did mention cheese and bacon, have you noticed how the packages have shrunk majorly this year?  Cheese is now sold as 375-400 gm down from 500 gm. And bacon packages now only contain 375 gm of bacon. It makes it a little more difficult to buy food with my budget, but it only makes me more creative. My flyers arrived in the driveway this afternoon, so I will be checking through them this evening. I know I have already spent over my $75/wk  but it is my first shop of this month. I will only be buying the deals. Bye for now. Talk later.