Oscoey Shop Update #3
On Friday 05/05/23 Oscoey Shop will have our Tulip Collection 2023 drop at 10:00 am PT. I was very inspired by my trip to the tulip fields a couple of weeks ago and took so many photos! I knew right away I would try to […]
A blog about family, food and fun!
On Friday 05/05/23 Oscoey Shop will have our Tulip Collection 2023 drop at 10:00 am PT. I was very inspired by my trip to the tulip fields a couple of weeks ago and took so many photos! I knew right away I would try to […]
Recently we went to the Washington Arboretum near the University of Washington in Seattle. We have gone there many times in the past but have not been there for quite some time. We love to walk the trails and learn about the plants from all […]
It is tulip season in the Pacific Northwest. I love tulips and the years we make it out to the tulip fields are my favorites! We don’t go every year but we try to go at least every other. We have been to RoozenGaarde and Tulip Town and both are great. We try to switch it up since they have very different styles. For 2023 we went to RoozenGaarde and it was beautiful! We went super early on a Sunday morning and the crowds were not bad at all. It was raining most of the long drive up but once we got there the rain stopped.
We didn’t go quite early enough to get the gardens to ourselves but it was pretty empty when we got there just after opening on a cloudy Sunday morning. Cloudy days are the best for taking photographs because of the way the light bounces off of the tulips. I always get the best pictures on cloudy days.
I loved the combinations of purple hyacinths and red tulips. They were very beautiful together!
The pink and white tulips were some of my favorites!
These purple and yellow ones were not quite open yet but I took a picture of them so that I could remember which ones I like in case I am ever brave enough to plant tulips again. I am going to have to take some serious pest control measures because the moles ate all of my bulbs from underground. It was very disappointing!
I thought these raggedy looking pink ones were beautiful as well. They also were not quite open but I loved how the water drops looked on the petals so I took a picture anyway.
I am not always a huge fan of daffodils but these apricot an cream ones were so stunning! I may try to grow more daffodils next fall since the squirrels and the moles tend to leave these alone more.
My kids called these daffodils “egg flowers” because they looked very much like an egg. These were also some of my favorite flowers I saw that day.
I tried to get a good picture of these flowers but it was slightly windy and there wasn’t a lot of room to get a good angle. I am not sure what these were called but they looked like upside-down tulips. We all loved these ones!
It isn’t a trip to the tulip fields without the obligatory picture taken across seemingly endless fields of blooms. I wasn’t able to recreate my purple tulip photo but I did get some great pictures of the reds and yellows that made up most of the fields.
There were only a few rows of the purple tulips this year but they were still stunning.
Surprise alpacas! We took a break from walking to watch these alpacas eat. They were super cute!
My favorite tulips this year were these red ones that almost glowed in the light. This photo hasn’t been edited at all and it really shows how bright the tulips were under the overcast sky.
We had a great time at RoozenGaarde this year. I saw a lot of tulips I have not seen before, or don’t remember, and it wasn’t too cold for us. We just made sure to wear our rain boots since the fields can be muddy. I did buy one bouquet of some deep red tulips for my mom but otherwise we didn’t spend much more than the admission tickets. Parking was free with our ticket.
I should also probably note that this year there is a new farm called Tulip Valley Farms which we have not been to. If you are local you might have heard about some of the controversy around Tulip Valley Farms versus Tulip Town. I won’t go into detail here because I am no expert but basically the person who started Tulip Valley Farms used to be one of the owners of Tulip Town and there is now a lawsuit going on around it. I did link their website below if you want to check it out.
Thanks for reading about our trip to the tulip fields this year! Each field has different pricing and policies for dogs, parking and drones so be sure to click the links below if you want more information on that. RoozenGaarde was open the earliest in the morning which is why we chose it. We are all early risers and we had afternoon plans so we had to be home by a certain time. Also look out for another shop update at Oscoey Shop in time for Mother’s Day with tulip stickers, postcards and a new mini tulip field cross stitch pattern!
Links:
This week we had our second shop update for Oscoey Shop located here or by clicking the link in the top menu of this page. Opening up the shop has awoken the creative side in me I forgot I had. My journey over the past […]
In honor of my 6 year Blogiversary coming up at the end of March I thought I would share a little bit about what is going on in the Oscoey world. First, the most exciting thing, is we are opening up a retail store called […]
My goals for 2023 revolve quite a bit around self-care and doing things that make me happy such as cross-stitching, gardening, puzzles, hanging out with my family and reading. I am also trying to make them pretty open ended so I don’t feel to rigid about them.
Thank you for reading my 2023 goals! I am keeping this post short and sweet so the important parts stand out. I hope your 2023 goes well and you get enough time to relax and enjoy the things you love!
Links:
The World of Cross Stitching Magazine Subscription
2022 was a year with mixed results for me. As I reflect on my 2022 goals post from March of this year I am struck by how different my year turned out from where it started. I started the year gung ho about my career […]
It’s that time of year again for goal setting and reflection. I am hopeful for 2023 and one of my focuses will be self-care. I love puzzles so I am setting a goal of working on my puzzles for 2023. I was very inspired by […]
September was an expensive month for us as far as groceries go. All of our stock up trips seemed to happen this September and that caused our grocery total to be higher than usual. We also have been trying to eat healthier which of course costs more in general. Our goal was to keep spending at $600 but we ended up nearly doubling that at $1,185.21. Needless to say, we are going to try and keep our spending as low as possible for October. I am hoping to keep it at $600 for October and so far I think we can be close.
Our above numbers for September reflect the stock up trips we took to Franz, Bob’s Red Mill, the large Amazon order of Benefit Bars and the Clif bar order which was actually Luna bars. I am working on getting our kids weaned off of bars as a source of protein but we will always have Luna bars in the house since they are gluten-free and sometimes it is the only thing I eat for breakfast on a busy morning! Having something quick to grab and eat in the car is always a bonus.
This haul was our first one for September at Costco and it was a pretty big one. We were out of a lot of basics and I wanted to buy some prepackaged items for meal prep that we don’t usually buy. Overall we have eaten most of what we bought at the start of the month. We are still working on the snack type items but we definitely had to replenish our fresh items this month. All of my grocery hauls are on my YouTube channel which can be found here. I don’t get everything filmed but I at least try to get the big Costco hauls.
I tried to take more pictures of what we made with the food we bought to show how we were using everything up but I have fallen out of the habit and had a hard time remembering. We found a good deal on chuck roast so my husband made some homemade roast beef this month. I replicated a sandwich I had at Pickles Deli out on Whidbey Island where a gigantic pickle is used instead of bread and it was pretty good. I bought these pickles at Winco a while back and they are just ok.
Another strategy I tried this month was to do more batch cooking towards the start of the week and then eat through that and it worked really well. When I was working I never had time to cook on the weekends but now that I am home and child free during the week I can dedicate a couple of hours to cooking on Monday or Tuesday so that I don’t have to worry about breakfasts or lunches for a few days. I loved making these egg bites and now that we have more eggs I will definitely be making more.
We definitely did some bulk buying this month, including a trip to the Bob’s Red Mill store in Oregon while we were down there on a business trip. We bought two 25lb bags of gluten-free oats which will last us about a year. Bob’s Red Mill stopped selling large items on their website right when we were thinking of buying another 25lb bag so since we were down there we bought two. These are the oats we bought and we love them. As someone with Celiac, I have never had a problem with these oats but I do have issues if I eat regular ones.
Another item we did go into Costco for but I am not counting as part of our groceries is 300 pumpkins for our fall school event. We called around and local farms were not able to have pumpkins to us in time so we went to Costco and were able to buy them there. We went to two separate stores to get these. I did bake one of the ones we had previously bought for ourselves and it is quite tasty. I have a soup recipe I want to try with another one and I will probably just bake the others after Halloween. I love buying a bunch of pumpkins in the fall to decorate and then eat later. It is such a sustainable way to decorate and I am pretty sad we could not get any of our pumpkins to grow this year because I love including home grown ones as well!
One of the smaller trips I took at the end of the month was purely for sale items. I bought another pack of chuck roast to be made into roast beef and one gigantic yellow squash. I was not able to grow squash again this year due to the wet spring so I was happy to find it on sale at Fred Meyer. We just bought some zucchini this week at Safeway which I am very excited to eat.
That’s it for our September grocery spending recap. Bottom line is that we spent a bunch but we did buy items we won’t need to buy for a while so I am hoping October will be much closer to our goal. What are you spending tips for this fall?
Bob’s Red Mill Gluten-Free Oats
We continued to work on our grocery budget for August 2022 with a goal of $600. I wasn’t sure if we could make it this month but we came closer than last month at $709.79. We definitely ate better this month and a large chunk […]
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I am a working mom with three kids interested in family, good food and fun!
We live in the Pacific Northwest with our dogs and love to garden. Our household is mostly gluten-free and we have some nut allergies that luckily do not include peanuts. Check us out on Twitter Zamph @ Oscoey and Instagram oscoeyzamph
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