Make Your Coupons Produce!

I like to make my coupons work double or even triple time. I print them from my Swagbucks site (which mirrors coupons.com) and score 10 Swagbucks for each coupon redemption, for instance. Or once they’re expired, I send them to our military overseas, where they can use them for six months after the expiration date.  I’m always determined that my clipping, printing (ink, gasp!), filing, and filler items pay off somewhere, for someone, somehow.  

My favorite example is what I call my "coupon garden". In late March, the only cheap filler item I could find at Walgreen’s were some generic garden seeds at 5 for $1. This happily coincided with a freshly rototilled garden (grabbed some yard, borrowed a tiller).  I’d made three Walgreen’s trips that week so I had 15 packets of seed, and I’d purposely selected the frost-tolerant fast movers: lettuce, radish, cabbage, carrot, dill, broccoli, and cauliflower. Walgreen’s also had nice little bags of potting soil on sale that week for .99 (limit 2), so I grabbed two of those for seed-starting. What's that you say? I should've dropped $6 on some fancy seedling mix? Hey, I'm not the greatest gardener; my plants have to be tough, so I let them know right away how it's gonna be around here.

Eggs were incredibly cheap a few weeks later around Easter (we even had a .35/1 coupon) so I used the egg cartons for seed-starting. Heck, I used the eggshells for seed-starting (bonus: adds calcium to the soil). I toyed with the idea of picking up some free pallets from a local building center for this:

No tilling! No weeding!

But I didn't, because a) pallets were heavier than I thought; b) I didn't want to end up in one of those "you know you're a redneck if" pictures you see on the Internet as I drove home with pallets hanging out of the open trunk of a sports car and c) I didn't want to buy that much dirt, which to me is akin to buying water, or air. I felt guilty enough about those two little bags of .99 potting soil.

Point is, though coupons for fresh produce are rare, you can grow it on the cheap in a small space with pretty minimal effort. A little garden nearly always makes a yard look prettier anyway, and you might even be able to peddle some of your extra produce for a little grocery money later this summer! Or for those of you who just want to give back (a big theme with many couponers) you could do this :-)

Most seeds have at least a year's shelf life (I've sprouted some that made it through a house fire 10 years ago!), so watch for clearance seeds for filler items this fall and grow your own $3 garden!

April 2012 (broccoli, radishes & lettuce)

May 2012 (same cheap-seed plants!)