Comparing prices between 2014 and 2022

On December 24 2014, I went shopping for a few necessities. I saved my receipt and I went shopping for the exact same things on February 4th, 2022.
The shopping happened at the same store. It might not seem like a huge difference but keep in mind that this is a very short shopping list and you'll see an almost scary difference when you look at each product individually.

Receipt from December 24, 2014

Toothpaste Aim brand 85 cents 

120 count aspirin $5.88

1/2 gallon of 2% milk: $1.84

1 pound butter store brand: $3.68

6 pack Cottonelle toilet paper: $4.77

Subtotal:  $17.02

Same list, same store, on February 4th 2022

Toothpaste Aim brand 98 cents

120 count aspirin $6.97

1/2 gallon of 2% milk Byrne Dairy: $2.38

1 pound butter store brand: $4.48

6 pack Cottonelle toilet paper: $6.98

Subtotal: $21.79

Potatoes with Bacon and Cheese Sauce

 All recipes in this blog are my own.

This is one of my favorite recipes :)
Please note that I never measure anything at all, so the amounts are not exact but should be pretty close.

What you need:

- 3 large potatoes
- 1 standard package of bacon
- a big head of broccoli
- butter (about 1/4 of a stick)
- flour (about 2 tbsp)
- salt 1/4 tsp (optional)
- pepper 1/4 tsp
- nutmeg 1/4 tsp (optional)
- 1 cup of milk
- mustard 1 tbsp
- 1 1/2 cups of grated cheese 

It takes me about 40 minutes to put this together, and I'll give you the sequence of actions. This feeds 4 people and it's well worth the time.

- Peel and wash the potatoes, and cut them in thick slices, each slice being a half to 3/4 inch thick.
- Boil the potatoes.
- While the potatoes are boiling, wash the broccoli, cut it up and boil it.
- Cut the bacon into thin pieces and fry it.
- Turn the oven on warm, just warm.

- When the potatoes are ready, drain them and put them in a large baking dish. Keep them warm in the oven.
- Drain the broccoli but keep the water you used to boil it.
- Add the broccoli to the potatoes in the oven.
- Drain the grease off the fried bacon. I keep the grease and freeze it to be used for popcorn making some other time.
- Add the bacon to the mix in the oven, dividing everything evenly across the baking dish.

OK now you just need to make a cheese sauce and that's it.

- Put the butter in a pan and melt it.
- Add the flour to make a roux
- Add salt, pepper, nutmeg and mustard. 
- Add milk and keep stirring. It should be pretty thick. 
- Add some of the water in which you boiled the broccoli, add a little at a time until you have a smooth looking sauce.
- Add the grated cheese, stir one more time and pour the sauce over the contents of the dish in the oven.
- If you want to be fancy, you can also put some grated cheese over the top of it all and put it under the broiler until brown.

Serve and enjoy.

Growing Giant Peruvian Corn

 We grew giant Peruvian corn for 5 years in a row until this past growing season we decided to stop growing it.
Keep reading to find out about the great, the good, the bad, and the ugly about growing giant Peruvian corn.

The giant Peruvian corn stalk easily grow up to 20 to 24 feet which is 6.09 to 7.31 meters. They grow super quickly too. The stalks become so thick they almost look like small trees and the good thing is that the stalks can be used the next season to make trellises for beans and whatnot as long as they are kept in a dry spot in wintertime.

Here are some pictures of the corn:

Impressive for sure. Visitors loved it and we always got a lot of oohs and aahs but you know what we didn't get? Corn! That's right, we never had any corn to speak of except last year, but it wasn't pretty. The ears would grow big and thick. They too were impressive, but something always went wrong. Critters and birds got away with them and they didn't want to share with us, or the season wasn't long enough for the ears to mature, you name it, it happened. 

The corn would sometimes fall over in a storm. Due to the huge stalks, they caught a good amount of wind. A decent storm would knock them over.
This past year I had started the corn inside the greenhouse. As they say, by the 4th of July the corn should be knee high. Mine was well above my head by the 4th of July. So here we thought we would eat some giant Peruvian corn at last, and we did. It was tough, bland, and chewy, we had left it on the stalks for too long but who knew. These ears took longer to mature than regular corn, and we were inexperienced. This is when we decided to stop growing this kind of corn. For stalks to get this tall, it takes a lot of nutrients out of the soil.

I miss seeing those giants but it's for the better.

Meet the Sheep

 Let me explain how we ended up with sheep. We had 8 chickens, they gave us many eggs and even friendship. Once they became too old to produce eggs the coop turned into a chicken nursing home. We let them live out their lives but then came the dreaded moment when we were down to one chicken. Her name was Annie and she was such a lovely creature.

Here is a picture of Annie:

To prevent Annie from getting lonely, we borrowed a lamb from a friend.

Here is said lamb, we named her Laika:

Wouldn't you know it, Annie was terrified of Laika. Indeed, we were rather inexperienced with all this. our friend could not take Laika back right away, so we kept her in our little homestead for a few weeks.

Then came the day that she went back home. I came with her to drop her off. As I turned around and walked back to my car, Laika started to cry so badly, it was heartbreaking. She pressed her head against my leg, looked up at me and just cried and cried. The rest is history.

I quickly built a sheep stall inside our shed, Laika came home and we thought that she would live happily ever after. Little did we know that you can't have just one sheep. Laika got lonely. We spent every free minute with her, took her for walks, played with her, etc.. But the second we were out of her sight, she'd cry. Long story short, we got her some company.

Meet Laika and Betty, both very much grown at this time. They've been together for four years now.

Stuffed Peppers Recipe

 All recipes in this blog are my own.

Stuffed Peppers.

What you need:

2 peppers
1 pound chopped meat.
1 large onion
1 small can of tomato paste
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp pepper
a cup of breadcrumbs
2 tbsp mustard
2 tbsp parsley flakes or dried spinach flakes.

Preparation:

Cut the peppers in half length-wise and remove the seeds and the white stuff.
Mix all the ingredients together (except the peppers of course)
Stuff the peppers with the mixture. There will be some left. The leftover can be shaped like a little meatloaf and can go in the pan with the stuffed peppers.
Put everything in a baking dish. I usually like the dish with parchment paper since I don't use oil when I can avoid it.
Cover with aluminum foil.
Bake in the over at 375 degrees for about a half hour.
Remove the aluminum foil after a half hour and bake for another half hour or until ready, it could be less than an hour total, just keep an eye on it.

Note:

The amounts as well as cooking times are approximate since I never set a timer and I never measure anything, so use your judgement.

Strawberry secrets

 Well, this was my first experience with growing strawberries.

I purchased 10 small strawberry plants last year. Great was my excitement when I found a handful of strawberries on the plants. I saved the runners and planted them in little pots in September. Runners are vine-like extensions that shoot out of the plants and grow some leaves as well as some roots.

Once the runners were well established in the pots, it was time to plant them outdoors.

I made a hill of about a foot tall and planted the runners about 12 to 15 inches apart. Once planted, I covered the entire hill with hay, and this has definitely kept the weeds down.

I also planted some runners inside a stack of two tires plus I made a raised bed out of Styrofoam boxes. At that point, the runners had gotten pretty big.

This is what it looked like:

After my strawberry beds had been set up, fall and winter came and the gardens took a long, cold nap. Would the strawberry plants survive the bitter cold? Would the snow flatten them?
Once spring came and the snow melted away, I was happy to see the strawberry plants come to life.
Fast-forward a few months, and June has been beyond generous. With still numerous strawberries to pick, I have already frozen 10 quarts.

The strawberries are big and oh so sweet.

Four quarts in the sink, just from today's harvest.

I didn't even use half of the runners. I am convinced that you can start a strawberry farm with just 10 plants. If I saved all the runners from this year, I'd literally have hundreds of plants.

Snake Rescue.

 We rescued a snake today. The poor thing was stuck on some ductape and she was stuck with 3 different parts of her body, the front, the middle, and the end. Things looked hopeless there for a bit but it all worked out in the end.

She was stuck on a bag in the old chicken coop which we now use as a hay storage shed. I saw her right away when I opened the door, but it took me a few minutes to realize that she was stuck on the ductape and couldn't move. I took the bag outside because it was super hot in the old coop.

If you look carefully, you will see the snake stretched out across the tape. It quickly became clear that the tape was far too strong to simply pull her off, so we resorted to the next best and maybe only option, Mark cut the tape from around her and simply left pieces of tape on her body.

Rescue operation almost finished..

While I was holding a piece of the tape she was stuck on, she 'musked'. I actually thought she pooped since I had never heard of snake musk. The smell was awful and very strong. Turns out that snakes use this musk to keep predators at bay.

Miss snake was very lucky that she was found because I usually only go in the old coop maybe once every other week. This could have ended very badly for the snake but thankfully, this story had a happy ending.