Margret Sloan

With everyone tightening up their budgets and looking for ways to cut costs and save money to offset the huge increase in the cost of gas - its right at $4 a gallon most places around here now - I have had to cut my grocery shopping budget. My fresh vegetables from the garden help a little, but to be honest I need to save about $40 a week from my grocery bill.

So today I decided to shop at Aldis and see if they had any bargains worth picking up to stock the pantry. I was pleasantly surprised to see what a nice variety they have. However, most foods are not a recognizable name brand - they are probably house brands that Aldi has arranged to buy in quantity. the best cost savings seemed to be in canned vegetables and boxed bake goods. So we’ll give a few of them a try and if they are good enough to pass my family’s taste test, I will shop there again soon.

We tried a small vegetable garden this year and I must say that it is a great success. We have so many tomatoes off of just 2 tomato plants that we are already giving tomatoes away to friends at work. The jalepeno pepper plant is putting out all the hot peppers I’ll need for the rest of the year. My green pepper plants are very slow to bear but they are strong and healthy and there will be an abundance of actual peppers in just a couple weeks.

We are thrilled at how well these basic vegetables have done and I think next year we’ll go ahead and have a full garden. I have plans to put in a raised bed over in the side yard and I want to grow a bigger variety of vegetables. I found a great site for organic seeds and sprouting supplies, so I can plan the whole thing and set up a schedule and make a serious effort at growing my own healthy foods. Years ago I had great success with a huge garden in Virginia. Everything I planted was from seed or sprout - no cheating with mature plants bought at the hardware store!

Maybe you already know about the Handy Pantry web site for organic seeds and supplies. If you’ve got any gardening tips - especially for raised beds - please share them with me in a comment. I would love to hear them.

Last year the California fires making the news were the southern California wildfires. All around Los Angeles and San Diego there were dozens of major fires that took months to put out. Even the upscale and exclusive Malibu Beach area lost multi million dollar homes to the fires. People were being forced to leave their homes and camp out at the San Diego football stadium for over a week while firefighters battled to save entire neighborhoods.

This year it is northern California, with over 1,000 fires burning today and the news shows airing clips of officials crying for helping - they don’t have enough manpower or resources to even show up at all the fires burning, most of them caused by lightning strikes over the past several days.

It’s hard to imagine that areas so close to the Pacific ocean are suffering from severe drought this early in the summer season and that dry trees and brush all over the far western states is a waiting tinderbox.

There’s no way I could ever agree to make California my state of primary residence. There are just too many natural disasters waiting to take your property and your life. It’s a nice place to visit, but I’ll never live there.

Still looking good for our planned camping trip this weekend. The weather forecast so far says no rain. Still too early to tell, though, so we are keeping the dates in pencil and if it turns bad at the last minute we can change the date without much trouble.

One of the fun parts of this weekend is that my girlfriend and her hubby are going camping, too, and they have a small bass boat. They’ve offered to camp close to us, depending upon what campsites are available at the lake, and take us out on the boat a few times. That would be great!

If they are going to be nice enough to take us fishing, I want to buy something nice to give them as a thank you gift. I can order something online tonight and have it delivered in time for our trip on Friday. I found a nice web site, American Marine Supply, with lots of nautical supplies and novelties. They have all kinds of boating supplies and even nautical jewelry. Since I don’t know what gear they already have, I’m trying to find something either useful, funny, or pretty.

I’ll surf through the web site and see what kind of boat accessories they have and order the gift tonight. If we don’t go camping this weekend, I can save it for the weekend that we do all go, but I hope the weather holds and we can go - I’m looking forward to it.

We want to introduce our grandson to camping and have been waiting for the right time to take off a couple days from work. Now that we have everything covered at work, we are waiting for the right weather. Looks like we have a good chance of good weather this coming weekend. I don’t want to be sleeping in a tent during a thunderstorm, especially if that’s his first night camping.

We have a great tent, sleeping bags, cooler and plenty of fishing gear. Yesterday we stopped by Wal-Mart to see if we needed anything else to pick up and found a few things. I bought a couple flashlights and a can of bug spray. We’ll wait to buy the groceries until we get closer to the weekend and know for sure that we’re going.

So cross your fingers for us that we have a good weekend!