Rookie Mama: Fall hauls and soccer balls and budgets for the win

By Michelle Cote
The Rookie Mama

And here we are again, ladies and gentlemen. We’ve been winding down another season –turn, turn, turn – as the next ramps way up. It’s fall hauls and soccer balls; buttoning down garden beds and prepping our harvest residuum for winter storage as we crank up the sports-o-meter to 11.

We’re still in that odd seasonal transition, the autumnal Venn diagram of falling leaves and bubble wands.

I’m reminded of two things as I’m running soccer carpool and running hair-on-fire wild all at once – things that essentially point to being kind to your future selves in small ways now that will pay dividends later.

The first ongoing charge is to take the time to properly preserve any of your remaining garden harvest for the winter months ahead when you can – A big ol’ storing up of nuts, if you will.

For those of you who garden and may have bonus harvest such as tomatoes, peppers, beans, gourds galore, there are several ways to pack it up, pack it in to enjoy farm fresh – and free! – taste all winter long before we do it all over again next spring.

If your harvest is past peak, you can sometimes save non-hybrid seeds for next season.

My kiddos love to shell peas and beans while watching a comedy, like a modern-day Waltons’ front porch, but with Pixar.

Your garden is as full of gifts as it is compost bits, after all.

Just another benefit of money savings in the garden game.

Some of you may also enjoy canning – It’s both literally and figuratively quite the process – and this is a classic method to preserve garden goods.

My crew cans one day out of the year, a massive family assembly line effort involving colossal quantities of applesauce. It takes an entire day and several background Christmas movies, a special October dispensation for that weekend.

But my go-to for easy weekend harvest preservation is freezing and blanching as needed.

If you’ve got yourself an unexpected haul of beans limping along, chop up and boil for three minutes, submerge in ice immediately, freeze flat in labeled freezer bags.

Extra tomatoes can be milled into sauces, also frozen flat once cooled.

Freezing as a preservation method is easy peasy for your peas.

Remove from the deep freeze in the months to come when you’re ready for your own tasty farm fresh goods to complement a meal.

The second ongoing charge is not unlike the first in practice, and involves budgeting for expenses that lay ahead – Storing up of nuts in another manner of speaking.

In recent years, my husband and I began harvesting proverbial greens in another sense of the word altogether by setting aside small funds monthly for various familial budget lines so that when ultimately needed, we’d be prepared and reduce any risk of debt.

We save now, a little at a time, as we do with the food preservation.

We have several checking accounts that serve as account lines for various expenditures including house projects, car repairs, plowing and Christmas, among others.

Costs associated with each of these, whether planned for, such as Christmas – or not, such as repairs – come faster than a speeding soccer ball, burdensome and fast.

Because they’re inevitable, we bank up a bit each month now to ready ourselves for that time.

For example, each January I estimate what I’ll spend the following Christmas, divide that total by twelve, and contribute that dollar amount to my Christmas checking fund monthly in the interim so I’m not faced with holiday expenses all at once.

It’s straightforward, and can be accomplished on a timeline that works for you, and ultimately will ease your mind in the future when your next car repair or otherwise comes around.

A small but meaningful habit change.

So turn a new autumnal leaf and start banking up to be kind to your future self, whether it’s by storing up garden abundance now for use in dreary months, or by contributing small amounts regularly to important expense funds.

We’re winding down to hibernation mode for a brief respite, a perfect time to reflect on habits and how we may plan ahead now for better outcomes later.

To everything there is a season, folks.

And ours will be probably filled with a minivan carpool full of kids.

­­– Michelle Cote lives in southern Maine with her husband and four sons, and enjoys camping, distance running, biking, gardening, road trips to new regions, arts and crafts, soccer, and singing to musical showtunes – often several or more at the same time!