Weekly Grocery Update - April 4 - 10

Just a quick post on spending this week; thanks to a bit of overspending in our lawn and garden category, we we have a lot more garden planting to do today.

Groceries:

Need now:  12 oz. bag frozen corn, 1 gal. milk, 5 lb. bag sugar, 1 lb. strawberries, 1 lb. carrots, 1 dozen eggs, 2 ltr. Sprite (for Kat's upset stomach one day)

Stock up for later:  5 lbs. ham for slicing, 2 lbs. cubed ham, 1.5 lbs. sausage links, 2 lbs. bacon, 4 lbs. hot dogs

Not really needed:  2 bags tortilla chips, 1 bag pretzels

Total spent, after coupons - $29.41


Other categories: (not included in grocery budget)

Health/Beauty/CoPays - Melatonin and 6 Rx for April (after instant rebates) -  $33.01
Paper products, cleaning/laundry supplies - $0.00
Cat food/litter - $0.00
Lawn/garden - $67.10
Dining out - $0.00 

I'm glad we don't spend anything on lawn and garden for half the year, because it's so hard to resist temptation during the warm months.  We put in another raised bed for veggies and we had to buy some topsoil to fill it. We were able to get three 4-packs of annual flowers for free (with coupons at a couple different nurseries), but we spent money on that many more, all to fill some hanging planters we already had.  We saw a young boy selling Rose of Sharon seedlings in his front yard.  We bought him out, getting eight healthy saplings for $20.  We'll use some of them to make a hedge of sorts between our yard and that of our no-lawn-mowing neighbors to the east; we'll give what we don't use to my parents for their yard.  We bought a few "sturdy stakes" to make tepees and some scarlet runner bean seeds to grow on them, both per Shane's request.  And Shane bought some kind of weed-and-feed stuff for our front lawn.  We had about $15 left on a gift card from Shane's employer (safety incentive) and used that, but we still spent $67.  I guess that's not bad for all we got, but still...it seems like a lot to me.  At least the cost of putting in new raised beds (and the Rose-of-Sharon bushes) will be spread over many years instead of being an annual thing.

Oh yeah, we also bought a couple of silly and fun straw gardening hats -- harder to find than you might think -- but those will come out of our clothing budget.