I know I’m pretty late to the party, but I’ve been doing a lot of meal-prepping lately. Sundays, you can usually find me in the kitchen making something for the week ahead. And I will admit, I’ve been eating much better when the food is ready to grab for each meal. 

In doing so, I noticed a few things in the pantry we had canned that we still have a lot of. Canning is a lot of work, especially if you’re canning produce you grew as well. So having scads of tomato sauce still sitting there in March made me wonder why we were growing so many sauce tomatoes.

The sweetie and I got talking about it and realized we’ve both cut down on carbs quite a bit in the past few years, and we don’t eat pasta nearly as much as we used to. We really didn’t need as much tomato sauce as we had canned. We both agreed that we would much rather have cans of salsa on the shelves instead of tomato sauce. So that’s changed what types of tomatoes we’ll be growing this year, along with the number of plants.

The more we talked about it,  we noticed a few other vegetables we gave away more than we ate.  

I realized there were a few things we grow every year that neither of us was super chuffed about, that were taking up valuable space. So, we won’t be planting those things this year, or in some cases, not as much.

It’s easy to fall into the habit of growing things because they looked great in the seed catalog. Or because we’ve always grown something in particular, not necessarily because we wanted to eat it.  

It was nice to talk about what we actually wanted in the pantry and the freezer, not what we felt obliged to plant.

Now we have more room for the things we do eat a lot of and more room to plant some of the flowers and herbs I didn’t have room for before. We’ll, hopefully, have fewer jars of tomato sauce left in the pantry, too.

I don’t know if you need to hear this, my friend, but you know that one vegetable you grow every year, but you aren't excited about eating it? You don’t have to grow it if you don’t want to.