Townhouse Homestead Tuesday

This past week has been a busy one. I've been listing items on eBay for my daughter. Sales have been better than we thought so all that shipping has to get done. I'm getting ready to start some tomato seeds soon. Still a bit early for our zone. In the meantime I've been making very good use of my second hand vacuum sealer. I live what I call "My Canning Jar Life". We stopped using a lot of disposable plastic bags, however, I do use vacuum seal bags. These can be reused. Another step towards being green. I started vacuum sealing our grocery investment in jars over a year ago and it's paying off in many ways. 

This is our expensive purchase of non fat dry milk, sold in a box, but will keep for quite a while in quart jars. This is why when we see jars at thrift stores we get them. I also use oxygen absorbers in the jars.

I store everything and make use of everything. I make bread crumbs and croutons out of leftover bread, pudding, cornbread mix, pasta and oatmeal to list a few. I even make my cookie mixes ahead of time and vacuum seal them for future use and yes, I vacuum seal candy in jars. Empty spaghetti sauce jars work well also. As a matter of fact any jar with a cover that has a rubber seal inside can be reused with the vacuum sealer. The benefit to us for doing this is that we don't have to spend more money on smaller amounts. We can take advantage of larger sizes and sales. Living in an apartment situation you never know about the critters so it protects our investment and the best part is that we are eating better because we can have a wonderful variety of food ingredients and spices available all the time. So at this point in time my new to me older version of a vacuum sealer purchased on line has more than earned it's keep and still will. 

So on to the socks that I promised myself to learn how to knit this year. Here they are. One for each foot. This challenge to myself was not without a few attempts. I did end up pulling them out in several areas several times, but I got them done, figured out how to make them the correct size for my feet and now I can work on more and move on to the next challenge of making cheese. There's a saying going on here that was actually a comment made by a supervisor at my daughter's place of employment. My daughter was talking about using scraps of fabric to make quilts with another co worker and up cycling items not wasting anything and this supervisor heard the conversation and quickly voiced "like the depression". The saying has stuck because I guess the depression is on a lot of people's minds. My socks are made of second hand yarn, "like the depression". 

Thank you for stopping by and think like you can do anything and you will. Have a wonderful week.