Like you, I was given a wake-up call many years ago as to what it’s like to have to do without. I have been poor and I have been comfortable but the lessons learned while poor are more valuable than a great paycheck.<<<
Yes, poor is valuable training for the rest of our lives.
Thank you for your prayers, they can be used and will be.
Your grocery store trips make me smile, as when Mary and I went to Yuma once a month for our shopping needs, our last stop was for the boxes of vegetable scraps at Safeway, for the Chickens, goats, etc.
We did share with them, but first, we went through the boxes for usable items. We rarely bought celery, as they toss it at the first sign of age and the animals got the outer stalks the rest went in the freezer.
Within a day or so, we would have a fine meal of the goodies.
Yes, it helped the budget, but it also gave us a goal of using something that was going to be wasted.
It is more fun to find something usable, [to me], than going shopping.
I envy you your compost, it does not do well here, but in the past, I found where a stable dumped the cleanings from the stables and would go and get the old for the garden.
LOL, they have covered about an acre with it, all nicely dumped in piles.
You are right about starting with a good soil, the natural soil here will grow a pea plant about 6 inches tall, which might have one pod on it, with one pea in it.
What a shock, my first garden was.
The compost does not stay in the soil here, as the wind blows it away.
Heh - you are exactly right about how I handle my “compost.” I had to sign a waiver that I understood the stuff was not for human consumption. However, I had made friends with the produce man and knew they weren’t putting any poison on it. Ya know, I just had to know lest that stuff contaminate my garden. But, we have eaten much more fresh food this winter as I have been doing this. I really have to watch to whom I say that as this *is* a small town and if word got back they wouldn’t give me the culls anymore.
They throw away so many good items that I have been sharing with a friend on social security and preserving a little each week. For me, it’s something when I have produce to can in January!!
I expect my soil is about opposite of your soil. It’s such hard packed clay that I often injure myself with trying to loosen it up. We don’t have a motorized tiller yet, so I borrow one about once a year and do the rest by hand. The compost is helping but it takes time. This is my grandmother’s old home and she was the first generation who didn’t garden so it’s never been broken up. However, she never fertilized, just watered and cut the grass. When I manage to get the soil loosened up I find lots of earthworms the next time I move soil. They are really taking to my compost piles.
And I’m getting to be like that manure patch you found, I have piles all over the back yard! LOL