QFC Grocery Basket 2/20

My Grandma Redmond was an amateur Phenologist.  She just thought she
was a good farm wife by keeping track of all the goings on at the farm.  Every afternoon she would sit down with a good cup of coffee, with cream from the morning's milking, and a cigarette, and record the weather, new lambs and calves born, crops, flowers, eggs gathered, how much milk to the creamery, grandbabies born, etc.  She had one of those big farm calendars with a large box to write in for each day, and she saved them all.  There was a big stack of them out in the grain room and my cousin and I used to pour over them, looking for the day we were born.  Linfield College came and got them after she died.  I'd love to see them now.

Phenology is really just nature's calendar and if you are a gardener, you practice it.  Timing is everything in the garden and if you pay attention to Mother Nature's signals, your gardening life will be much more pleasant.

I heard a good example of this someplace ?? that when you see blooms on the Forsythia, it is time to prune the roses.  Now that makes sense.  We are told to prune around President's Day but maybe Mother Nature has other ideas and doesn't care, in fact, she laughs at our calendar on the wall.  So if the Forsythia are blooming then it is going to be safe to prune the roses.  We hope.

You may be wondering where I'm going with this.  Me, too.  I just think that it is interesting and you know that means you are going to hear about it, also.  I'm going to start keeping track of what is going on around here and when it does it and the date and weather.  Then, next year, I'm going to use it to help me make decisions regarding my garden, since I can't seem to remember anything past this afternoon unless I write it down.

Now to the shopping.  The QFC ad is crap this week but I did manage to ferret out a few things.  If the strawberries are as good as they were last week, buy them.  They smelled like strawberries should and were delicious.  Strawberry shortcake sounds good, doesn't it??  My mom used to make shortcake biscuits, which were just biscuit batter with sugar added to it.  None of those creepy spongy yellow things at the store.  She would butter each half of the biscuit, add the sweetened berries to the middle and the top, and then top it off with whipped cream.  If you try this, you will never, ever go back to those yellow things again.  Trust me on this.

Here are my picks this week:

Boneless Pork Loin - $1.59/lb
Broccoli - $ .99/lb
Cauliflower - $ .99/lb
Roma Tomatoes - $ .99/lb
Driscoll Strawberries - $2/lb
Franz Bread - $2.49/loaf
Fresh Pacific Cod - $6.99/lb
Primroses - $1/each


Cruise Fund Update :

Old Balance        =      $718.01

                           +          17.71

New Balance      =      $735.72