Trevor @ TheYoungPages.com

Firstly, some of my seeds have germinated.  Mostly tomato seeds, which started to sprout about five days after I sowed them.  They are still coming up.  They seem to be doing fairly well so far.  A couple of aubergine seeds also started to grow (no peppers yet).  I’ve been putting the seeds under a lamp during the day, which I hope will provide enough light for them (it has been rather gloomy here the last couple of days), and back into the slightly warmer boiler cupboard overnight.

Also, my gardening preparation activities moved outside over the weekend.  Probably a mistake, as the ground was completely sodden and I must have completely ruined any soil structure that I had.  But I wanted to make a start, and avoided walking on any flower beds, so I just destroyed the lawn, which is a disaster anyway.  So, what I did was put ‘compost’ from my compost heap onto the ‘raised vegetable beds’ and cover it with a layer of proper compost from the township’s pile.  My main gardening belief is that the crucial element in gardening is the quality of the soil.  Unfortunately another of my main philosophies is to not spend any money, so I have to improve my soil without spending any money at all.  Having a huge maple tree in my backyard helps considerably – the fallen leaves I collected and shredded in the autumn formed the basis of my compost.  The ‘compost’ was basically still just these leaves, although when I dug into the pile, it was warm, so some decomposition was occurring.  I had also added other household materials, such as grapefruit skins and banana peels (together these seem to be the entirety of our kitchen waste) over the winter, and these had started to break down nicely.

Anyway, it is a start, and I’m hoping that by the time I come to plant anything in the soil (I’m aiming for the first weekend in May), the leaf mulch will have broken down further and the soil will be just right.  Before then, I’ll continue to add more compost on top, and dig it in a bit too. Fun times!

You might think that having had four “major snow-storms” this winter, that I would have had my fill of snow for a while. But I haven’t. The winter of 2009/10 had by far the most snow I have ever seen, and I believe the most snow in one winter for this area. And now it is over. Will I ever see that much snow again? Silly as it seems, I do wish that every winter could have that much snow. I really enjoyed it, and don’t feel that I really got to make as much of it as I could have. Now we’re into March, and although there have been very significant snowfalls in Marchs past, the temperature this week is expected to reach the high 60s. So no snow. And we just had about four inches of rain over the past four days, which was just not fun at all, especially as many other Marchs it could have been another foot of snow.
Anyway, here are a few pictures to remember it by:

Hurry up Winter 2010/11!

Does this thing still work?

Anyway, I started my gardening for the year.  There is still snow on the ground, which has put me off starting my seeds for a couple of weeks (I meant to start around Valentine’s Day), but I realised today that I was running out of time to get my tomato and pepper plants growing.  So I sowed 24 tomato seeds, a couple of aubergine seeds and some peppers (Hungarian wax and pimento).  The tomato seeds that I sowed were mostly plum tomatoes (Roma), cherry (Black Cherry) and Yellow Pear, with a few “normal” Golden Jubilees thrown in for good measure.

We’ll see how they do.  I seem to remember our house being too cold for quick germination last year, and we’re certainly no warmer this year, but I’ve put the seeds next to our water heater which helped before.  Well, there’s nothing I can do to make them grow.

Just in case I ever want to know when the first frost was in 2009 – it was today, October 19th.

I guess I could stop wearing shorts to cycle…

As things have really slowed down in the garden over the past month, I thought that it is a good time to summarize how our garden fared this year.

The big success story of the year was definitely the green beans.  We had about a dozen plants growing up bamboo canes and they have been giving us reliable crops all summer long.  I just harvested the final stragglers yesterday.  We didn’t get hundreds of beans, but they provided the vegetable for many meals.

Then, the tomato plants.  They were interesting this year.  For the first part of the year, people were complaining that they were slow to start, but then it seems that the tomato season picked up for the second half, and it turned out to be a good (or at least average) year in the end.  At least that is what other people found.  Our cherry tomatoes (Sweet Baby Girls) did very well in the first part of the year – until we left for Scotland pretty much.  They never really got back up to full production afterwards, but seemed rather burnt-out.  But even so, we have had  a good number in September and even October.  I also grew Yellow Pear tomatoes.  They did surprisingly well, although only until our Scotland trip.  The plant reached five feet or so, but was then badly damaged by some winds fairly early in the season, but still fruited well.  I’ll definitely do these again next year.  And of course the girls *love* both cherry tomatoes and the yellow pear ones.  They will eat them in preference to just about anything.

I also grew a couple of other varieties of tomato – plum tomatoes and a normal variety, called Golden Jubilee.  Neither did spectacularly.  We didn’t get a single Golden Jubilee (there were a few fruits, but I missed their optimal time and they went funny).  We had quite a few plum tomatoes, but not enough to make a whole meal of (i.e. we always had to supplement with a tin, or store-bought fresh tomatoes).  For some reason, many of the plum tomatoes dropped from the plant before they were ripe.  There are still quite a few green plum tomatoes out there now.  I will have to gather them all to ripen inside before the weather gets really cold (I think that the coldest it has reached so far is about 45F).

Oh, I forgot all about our zucchini / courgettes.  They did well for a while too.  They seem to crop well and then they just die.  Which I’ve heard from other people too.  Anyway, they did well, and the girls enjoyed fried zucchini very much – it was Pippa’s favourite vegetable for a while (maybe still is).  Jodi was pretty impressed with my zucchini until I brought home some that someone else had grown.  Oh well.  Mine tasted better.

I also grew some cucumbers this year.  They did ok.  I got three or four small cucumbers from them.  They might have done better if I hadn’t waited so long to harvest the ones that grew – I was expecting long cucumbers and instead they stuck at something that resembled a tennis ball.  They were still tasty though (actually I think that I was the only person who enjoyed them).

Radishes did ok.  As always.  Not great.  I think that they were too shaded by the tomato plants and rose plants.  The beet-roots which were next to them did nothing.  But the carrots which were next to them grew eventually.  I need to pull them soon.  I chose a variety which looks like a radish (our soil isn’t great for long carrots).  The melon plants were extremely disappointing.  They did absolutely nothing.  The peas which I planted didn’t even germinate.  Although the sugar-snap peas which I sowed did do well.  They gave us a handful of sugar-snap peas.  Never enough to actually cook with, but enough for a nice snack.

And finally, raspberries.  Jodi and the girls (two, at the time) gave me some raspberry canes when we first moved here.  I foolishly planted them under the huge tree in our back-yard.  I moved some of them when I saw that it wasn’t a bright idea.  But this year they all seemed to do well.  The ones I transplanted and the ones under the big tree.  Most times when we go into the garden now there are a few raspberries to share around.  Again, not enough to do anything with, but enough to enjoy.  Nothing from our fruit trees (plum and quince).  Hopefully I just need to be patient.

And that is the sum-up.  It was a rather wet summer without much heat (we didn’t put our window A/C in until mid-August and only used it a couple of times), so the plants didn’t know what to do.  But it was definitely still worth it.  Now if only someone would help me with this raised bed for next year, things would be looking great…

When we moved to America three years ago, we were given a crock-pot as a gift.  For a while it sat unused in a kitchen cupboard, being used only to heat meatballs at a birthday party.  But then I became frugal and read somewhere the benefits of using a crock-pot.  I don’t remember when we started using the crock-pot regularly, but we have used it almost every week for a while.  By the way, crock-pots are frugal because they use less energy than heating a large oven (which also, in the summer, avoids heating up the whole kitchen).  They also allow several meals worth of food to be prepared at once.  I am hopeless at guessing the price of a meal, but I estimate that our typical crock-pot is $10 and feeds five of us twice.  So basically a dollar per person per meal.

We typically prepare our crock-pot on Saturday evening after the girls are in bed, so that the food is ready for us for Sunday lunch.  Before we started using the crock-pot after church, we got into a routine of macaroni-cheese or similar, because they were fast to get ready for the hungry girls.  The crock-pot allows us to be rather more flexible in what we prepare.  By the way, Jodi (correctly, I am sure) says that it takes us far longer to prepare one crock-pot meal than it takes her to prepare a normal meal (or even the two / three that the crock-pot replaces).  That is basically because we have to prepare all of the meat and vegetables before we can use them (e.g. brown the beef, dice the vegetables).  We would rather spend an hour preparing Sunday lunch on Saturday evening than after church on a Sunday.  I think that we tend to have more vegetables in crock-pot meals than in others, but I have read that there isn’t a whole lot of goodness left in them after they have been cooking for 8 hours.  Better than not having any at all though, I’m sure.

So, what do we do?  Our main crock-pot meal is basically ground (minced) beef and tomatoes, with a starch (typically pasta) and then flavoured with whatever culture we want that weekend (e.g. Mexican, Italian, even Indian).  They look rather like a lasagne.  We have done many other crock-pots as well, of course, including chicken based ones, eggplant based ones, etc.  A favourite of mine is roast chicken.  We roast (or more like boil) the chicken with potatoes, carrots and onions all in the pot.  The vegetables and half the chicken are for Sunday lunch.  Then we have more chicken (with fresh vegetables) on Monday.  And there is still more chicken left for the basis of another meal later in the week.  Then we boil the bones (in the crock-pot) and get some chicken stock.  And I take the non-bone remnants and give them to Gulliver.

Jodi’s favourite ‘meal’ is baked beans.  Which doesn’t sound like much, but is very good.  Hopefully she will mention it in her HSSSS, where you can read some of her thoughts about crock-pots.

I realised this morning that around now is the 3rd anniversary of our move to America. I thought to myself, ‘that would be a great topic to blog about.’ Then I remembered that I wrote about the same event last year, after two years in America. Oh well.

I re-read what I wrote, and it is mostly still true. Except now we don’t have cable tv any more. And we aren’t locking into any cell phone plans, but “pay-as-we-go”. And we’ve not really moved away from any of our ‘goals’. So we are better than before. It was nice to go back to our old church in Scotland a couple of weeks ago and for a couple of people to comment on how we haven’t been too Americanized – meaning that we haven’t gained a lot of weight since we left.

Anyway, the three year anniversary is significant because it means that I am now able to apply for citizenship, if I so desire. We’ll see. I certainly don’t have the forms yet.

It is great to look back over the past three years and see all the great stuff that has happened. We only had two daughters when we came over for one. We’ve doubled that in three years.  I think that means that by 2018 we’ll be at 32 kids! Or something. Maybe my maths is wrong.

It’s nice to remember arriving with nothing but the clothes on our backs and now look where we are! For how smoothly everything has gone for us, it is amazing that we didn’t have much of a plan for when we got here. I’m just glad that Someone knew what He was doing.

I’m beginning to see the first-fruits of my garden labours now.  We have harvested around half-a-dozen zucchini, or courgettes, which were very good – the girls loved them.  We’ve also had a few sugar-snap peas and radishes, which Romilly and I enjoyed (no one else seems to like the kick they have).

But most exciting of all is that our summer harvest is beginning to come in.  Last weekend we had our first cherry tomato!  It was delicious, although divided between four of us didn’t go very far, but of course no one wanted to miss out on the first tomato of the year.  We’ve had some since then as well – I got four today, so we had one each!  But they are really starting to come in now, and will be at the stage where we are all eating four each every day.  The tomato plants are about five foot tall now and are doing really well.  Only the cherry tomatoes are showing any sign of ripening, I’m still waiting for the plum tomatoes and pear tomatoes to begin to change colour.

First Tomato of 2009

Today we also had a good number of raspberries, which were very unexpected and welcome.  I was looking at something in the garden and saw some berries growing and wondering what they were.  Turns out they were raspberries!

We also had a few strawberries this year, but to be honest, we did lose a lot of the crop because of all the rain we had in May.  But that’s ok.  I don’t put much into the strawberries, so anything we get is a bonus.

Finally, on a harvest theme, last week we all went peach-picking at a ‘nearby’ pick-your-own farm.  They were delicious as well.  Nothing quite like a tree-ripened peach straight from the tree into one’s mouth.  We finished off the last of the peaches we brought home today – a sad day, although of course peaches don’t last that long.

It has been a good start to the harvest season this year and I look forward to the rest of it.  I think that we just need some more sun and things will really start to grow – we’ve certainly had the rain!

I don’t think that frugal was a word in my vocabulary until some time in 2007.

Before Pippa was born, Jodi and I both worked for a couple of years, and we had built up some small savings, simply because we were not spending money as fast as we were earning it (in other words, saving was not at all intentional). When Jodi left her job in order to have Pippa, things instantly became much tighter. Our income halved and we made few changes to accommodate that. I didn’t know what sort of things I could do. So we gradually depleted our savings.

I think that I calculated that we would run out of money by September 2006 or so.  And we didn’t know what we could do.  We knew that we didn’t want Jodi to go back to work, but we knew that we weren’t surviving on my income alone.  We were planning on moving to America, however, and we knew that by selling our flat we would make some money, and give us a nice lump sum.

So in August 2006, we moved from Scotland (not just for financial reasons).  Our flat in Scotland sold shortly after that and we got the expected little windfall from that. The majority of that money became the down-payment on our current house. We were left with some cash-in-hand however, which we frittered away. I just had the money sitting in our no-interest-paying current account (oh, if I knew then what I know now) and each month our account balance dropped, until finally, in the summer of 2007, we hit zero. We couldn’t afford an essential car repair payment.  That was a wake-up call for us.  I would now say that “Money that comes easily disappears quickly”.

So, like the prodigal son, we quickly squandered all of our money. I was going to send Jodi to work on a local pig farm (maybe it was just the local grocery store, I don’t remember), but she wasn’t too keen on it. Instead we started selling stuff on eBay, which supplemented our income a little. That was the beginning of our financial turn-around.

At some point around this time I discovered PF blogs (Personal Finance blogs). It was my first introduction to blogs, and I found them by mistake. I was looking to confirm my suspicions about a “pink slip”, and came across a blog post about what to do after getting one. I started reading other pages on that blog and clicked on the RSS feed icon and started my feed collection (now at over 30 blogs). Anyway, the original blog was a PF blog and opened my eyes to the world of personal finance, and thence frugality. Not all PF blogs are frugal minded, by the way.  There are other ways of looking after one’s money carefully.  Frugality is just one tool to use.

Frugality is a method of making the pennies last longer.

And that really sums it up. If the pennies last longer, then one has more options of how to spend them, or, even better, of saving them up for the future.  To me, frugal decisions tend to be those which save small amounts of money, or have a larger initial outlay, but then are cheaper in the long run.  Examples might be cloth napkins over paper towels, or CFL light-bulbs instead of traditional filament bulbs.  They all add up over time.  If I save just a dollar every time I do something, but repeat that thing every day, at the end of a year I will have an extra $365 to spend or save which I would not have had otherwise.

How frugal are we in our household? I suppose most people looking in would say that we are very frugal. But we are by no means extreme. I don’t wash baggies (but I do re-use them, dirty). We don’t make our own laundry detergent (although it might not be far off). Ok, I guess we are pretty extreme.

I think that we are just trying to be sensible with our spending and save pennies whenever possible. Frugality has been a useful factor in turning our finances around, but I think that other factors have contributed more. Such as selling on eBay, refinancing our mortgage, getting rid of our cell phones and cable tv (I guess these were frugal). Speaking of which, this very afternoon I called our internet provider and asked for a discount. He gave us $20 off for the next six months, just for asking. That’s $120 for a ten-minute phone call. That’s $720 per hour. Not a bad hourly rate. If only I could keep it up for more than ten minutes.

Frugality is really a means to an end. It started off for us as an essential – how are we going to make ends meet? But then, as we saw the results and saw our savings start to grow and things become *more* comfortable, we became more and more frugal. Now it has become a kind of game (to me at least). I am amazed at how, on a flat salary, we are saving more and giving away more now, two years and two kids later than we were when we moved here. And it does seem as though every month our financial situation improves. That has never been the case before and I am very grateful to God for His faithfulness and for introducing us to frugality and providing ways for us to cut back on our expenses.

My biggest problem with frugality and personal finances is getting carried away.   I forget the purpose of our money – it isn’t for us to grow wealthy with, but for us to use wisely and to be generous with.  It isn’t worth doing some things to save a few cents.  And the money we have been given is for us to share and use for the glory of God.

You can read Jodi’s thoughts on frugality on her blog, Jodilightful.

It’s been a while.  A long long while, but we (Jodi) decided that it is ready to start HSSSS back up again.  To start us back again, a nice easy topic – Facebook!

I assume that everyone in the world has heard of Facebook, so I’m not going to describe it for you.  I understand that it is some kind of “web 2.0″ – a social network.  I think that a blog is a “web 2.0″ thing as well, in that it is not static, but updated, at least on a semi-regular basis.  I don’t think that there is really much comparison between my blog and Facebook however.  Ok, so I need a slightly more technical description of my understanding of web 2.0.  Basically, in web 1.0, every webpage corresponded to one file on a server somewhere.  That file may have had links to other files on a(nother) server, but essentially every webpage was a file.  With web 2.0, there is no single file containing all the information of a page, instead the information is collated from multiple sources as it is required.  On my blog this is pretty simple – all of my posts are stored somewhere and whenever someone wants to read it the relevant posts are pulled up and shown on the ‘template’ of my blog.  Or something like that.

Facebook is rather more complicated.  But the same principle holds.  All of the pages are being updated all the time.  The newest updates start at the top and move down the page as more updates are added.  If you wait too long, you’ll miss something and it will drop off the bottom of the screen and you may never see it.

I’m not actually signed up to FB (aren’t I cool?), although I daresay it is inevitable and I will therefore refrain from saying anything I might regret later.  I’m sure that Facebook would be useful for getting back in touch with old friends and staying in contact with people.  I know that my brothers and sister (and wife!) are keen on Facebook and all wonder why I don’t sign up.  My brothers certainly never email me, but I’m sure would reply if I sent them a message on Facebook.  That’s the most tempting reason to join I have.

I’m not especially interested in catching up with anyone from school or university.  I’m sure it would be nice to see how some people are doing, but it’s not especially important to me.   I certainly wouldn’t be interested in following their daily lives which seems to be what Facebook is all about.  And, sorry current friends, I’m not really that interested in what you are doing every minute of every day either.

But, I must admit, that not joining Facebook is mostly a matter of pride.  I just couldn’t bear to see Jodi with thousands of friends (hundreds at least) and scores of comments every day and me with twenty or so friends and a couple of comments every month.  So it’s just easier not to get into the competition.  I know – Facebook is one of those things where you get out what you put in.  If I spend the time commenting on other people’s updates, they would comment on mine.  But really, that’s just not me.  I’d like a social network for non-social, non-networked people.  That I could sign up for.

By the way, you can read what Jodi (the socialite, networker extraordinaire) has to say about Facebook on her web 2.0 masterpiece, Jodilightful.