Canning with little money and updates

Made a Rose Petal Jelly from this recipe, substituting cane sugar for 1/2 the amount of honey and 4 packets of gelatin versus pectin. It becomes jello solid in the fridge and is fairly runny otherwise, but it tastes great. Planning on making more as a jam once enough blossoms bloom again.

A tomato plant, most of the calendula, and all of the yarrow have been victims of dog F. We were gone for too long and he killed them. We got a crate to keep him in while we are gone. Mr. Greenie will be mainly in charge of crate training and I will assist where I can.

Visited my local grandmother and Mr. Greenie worked more on his work training on her computer. She gave us a bunch of last year's frozen raspberries and a overgrown stevia plant. I will be returning her zip lock bags next time we visit. We plan on making raspberry jam and canning whole raspberries from this blessing. We should be canning more whole raspberries from our own bushes in about a month or so.

We worked in the yard more this week. I harvested 3 bags of chamomile, a bunch of stevia leaves to dry, and two bunches of red raspberry leaf. Mr. Greenie did awesome amounts of weeding and moving bricks from an area we're incorporating into more growing space to a dirt patch. The patch will better serve as a path to our garage and is large enough to double as a patio once complete.

I just discovered Swagbucks cashback program where you can earn points towards Paypal cash or gift cards. I'm working towards Amazon Gift cards to earn Weck jars. I play videos on their app, search with their browser, answer surveys when I'm resting, and will earn cashback whenever I shop online. They also offer points for playing games, app download points, and more. If someone uses your referral link to signup , you get 10% of whatever points they make for life! Here's mine if you're interested- http://www.swagbucks.com/p/register?rb=19896290

I also subscribed to volunteer opportunities for the Green Urban Lunchbox. Here's my plan to get free, local, mostly unpackaged food to can and dehydrate this year:

• Using Green Urban Lunchbox's FruitShare and Back Farms programs to get free fruit and vegetables
• our garden 
• neighbors who have fruit trees
• free box outside of neighborhood communtity garden
• our Church community
• Swagbucks program to earn free jars
• Local Classified ads for free canning jars
• Family and community for extra free canning jars

With free local food from these sources and just supplementing with Farmer's Market produce, we should be able to preserve enough to get through the Winter/Spring much better than this year.

Imagine all the glass jars full of canned and dehydrated foods, mostly free, mostly local, mostly plastic-free (exception of Ball/Kerr lids from free jars)!

Started some white vinegar, so we'll see how that works out. The link on making vinegar can be found on my resources page under non-plastic options, (plastic-free vinegar). Here's what it looks like so far:

Here's to local food on the frugal and plastic-free/zero-waste side of life!

Little Urban Greenie