The Face of Frugality

I'd love to look like this when I go outside to work.

Mary Jane of Mary Jane's Farm

But instead, I usually look like this.

The poster child for parsimony.

Thriftiness has many faces, many forms. How you decide to spend your time and resources is different than what we do. Our brand of frugal has enabled us to live the life we enjoy; we've traveled a bit, paid off a mortgage, retired early. 

At Lick Skillet, our version of living on the cheap looks like this:

Waiting for wood stove season to cook down tomato sauce.

Drying clothes outside twelve months a year.

Taking advantage of Jansport's lifetime warranty on packs. I think I bought the original in the 1970's; this is the second or third time it will be replaced.

Tom's National Association of Pastoral Musicians shirt acquired in 1989. He wore it often, then used it as a pj top, now it's a work shirt, soon to go to the rag bag.  

And me dressing like this:

Do you live a life of intentional austerity? Share your thoughts and photos--top that photo of me, if you dare!

Blow, blow thou winter wind

Does anyone remember the book and movie (the 1950 version) "Cheaper by the Dozen"? The father, a time and motion expert, tries to run his family on modern efficiency principles. I'd like to see him try it on this small holding powered by whim and woman.

On the other hand, age and below freezing temperatures are a powerful motivation to make a person more efficient.

Every day, when the sun comes up, I head out to take care of our animals. This month that simple sentence has taken on gargantuan proportions and I am trying hard to reduce the many trips in and out I usually make.

The cats need food and their water dish filled. The rabbits need pellets and fodder and hay and filled water bottles. The chickens get pellets, which they ignore, and fresh water. The sheep also need water and food.

In detail, the low temperatures mean every water source is frozen overnight, paths to cages are slick with ice, I'm carrying buckets and bottles down stairs I can barely navigate empty handed (gimpy knee still healing, see It takes a village), doors need to be unstuck, and everyone is hungry RIGHT NOW!


I start inside. I rinse and drain the wheat fodder I'm growing for the bunnies and set aside the squares of it they will get today. The extra set of water bottles gets filled with apple cider vinegar water. I put everything in a bucket, grab a plastic bag and a full gallon of acv water, bundle up, and head outside. If I'm lucky, the front door isn't frozen shut. I pass everything outside the door while simultaneously keeping the cats from coming inside and shut the door behind me.

I now head over to the steps. One by one, I place the bucket, etc. on each step, limp down one, and repeat until I've reached the bottom and head towards the garage, dodging kittens along the way.

In the garage I fill the catfood bowl and grab their water bowl, dump the ice outside and refill with acv water. Then I load up on rabbit pellets and head out to the rabbit cages, unwrap the tarps protecting them from wind and fill their food bowls with pellets and fodder. 

I swap off frozen bottles for thawed and limp off to let the chickens out. I pour them some chicken pellets but they have recently decided they don't like them and they jump under the bunny cages instead to root in the poop. I take their frozen waterer out of the coop and set it aside to take back to the house.

Next are the sheep and Monster Bunny (she lives in the barn because we didn't plan on four cages in our rabbitry but we got a great deal on 3 does instead of 2). I put her water bottle and some food in the plastic bag and grab the remaining acv water. At this point I realize I have forgotten the firewood canvas carrier which is perfect for carrying hay to the sheep--I may have gotten more effective but I'm not perfect. 

And by the way, the sheep have been trained that grain comes in a bucket so I put the rabbit stuff in a bag to fool them. It doesn't work.

Carefully, I navigate the slick walk to the barn and get my load through the gate. The sheep at this point are locked in the barn which makes this part easier. I open the dutch door and discover that ice is blocking the bottom door which will only open wide enough for the sheep to push out. HA!--This allows me to get inside and keep them out while I feed Monster Bunny. Monster Bunny, aka the rabbit who likes to bite, has seven kits which has mellowed her only slightly. I do manage to get my arm in the cage to give her food without losing any fingers and change her water bottle.

The sheep's water is also frozen, of course, and I manage to drag the bucket outside and dump the ice and give them a fresh drink. They look at me and baa reproachfully when they see I haven't brought them any hay.

So, one more trip down the icy path and into the house for the carrier, thump, thump, thump down the steps, and into the garage for hay. I get it to the sheep without mishap which I consider a big win.

Now I only have to get a bucket of water bottles, a frozen chicken waterer, and the sheep's frozen bucket into the house to thaw and I'm done...

...until later in the morning when all of the water will need to be replaced again, but by that time Tom is up and he is happy to help.

Now I can sit in front of the fire and appreciate the winter beauty while warm inside and congratulate myself on how efficient I've become.

Oh drat, I forgot to take out the thawed chicken waterer. sigh.

It takes a village to raise a rabbit

All we wanted to do was visit out grandkids before Christmas.

We  worked around their parents' busy schedule and picked the weekend, made hotel reservations, found someone to come check on the sheep and chickens and cats and rabbits. And watched the weather forecast.

Winter storm Cleon was headed our way.

The forecast was for a bit of freezing rain and then 4-6 inches of snow*. Our teen-aged animal sitter was terrified. He arranged for a back-up in case he and his dad (who had the 4 wheel drive vehicle) were stuck.

The back-up was a real Country Gal. She and her husband live in a house they built themselves, aren't connected to the grid, are real self-reliant. They also live on the ridge above us.

The ridge ABOVE us.

The morning we were to leave, she called early explaining that they might be snowed in themselves.

Total of about 4" of snow, not exactly record breaking.

Bear in mind that we were only going to be away for 2 full days. We could easily leave enough food for everyone but the cold temperatures meant...

...frozen rabbit water bottles.

With two nursing does and 17 babies, access to water is important. The hutches are outside and unheated.

Snug behind their tarp barrier.
 

The rabbits don't mind the cold and the babies are tucked into nestboxes with straw and fur and we could leave lots of food. But we still needed someone to change the water bottles at least once a day.

We arranged to leave later than we had planned, changed the water once again and put up the tarp wind barrier. We figured the bunnies would be ok that night. We were hoping someone could get here by the next day after the snow stopped.

To add to the stress level, shortly before we were to leave, I tripped and twisted my knee. It hurt bad enough that I couldn't walk without hobbling on Tom's arm and ended up on crutches. This weekend was not panning out as we had envisioned it.

But we finally drove off and, after being slowed down by unplowed roads (did I mention this is southern Indiana?) and bad drivers, we hit clear sailing for the second half of the trip. We were sure that by the next day, the roads would be clear and driveways dug out so we set about enjoying our visit. 

Our carefree mood didn't last long thanks to the miracle of electronic communication.

A spate of emails and missed phone calls informed us that Teen-age boy and dad were stuck at their house. Country Gal's long driveway was snowed in and her door frozen. We seriously considered cutting our visit short and returning a day early.

Here is where we discover the value of good neighbors. When Country Gal found she was stranded, she called our nearest neighbors who live about 1/4 mile away from us on a FLAT road. They obliged and the day was saved. By the next day, Teen-age boy could make the trip. And later that day we were home.


No one even missed us.
 

We learned a few things from our Cleon weekend: Tom hasn't lost his winter weather driving skills, our grandkids are worth the hassles we went through, and most of all, good neighbors are priceless.

* This is where our NY friends will laugh themselves silly. Yes, 4-6 inches is nothing in the Northeast, a mere bagatelle, not worth thinking about. On Skillet Road, however, it is cause for fear and trembling. There are two reasons for this: 1. Our house can only be reached via hilly, twisty roads, many not paved. 2. Southern Indiana is southern Indiana. Folks here talk with a drawl, they eat cornbread and beans, they are not real familiar with snowplows and windchills.

Feelin' Blue

We are, more or less, ready for winter.

The garden is turned and mulched, wood is stacked, coop tightened up, tarps ready for the rabbit cages, and we're gradually moving the sheeps' grazing towards their barn. Now it's time to start on that long list of inside projects. Like the bathroom.

This is the bathroom from the realtor's listing.

My challenge, and I did decide to accept it, was to redo it on a very tight budget.

We had started back in April. We tore out the tub doors and, since the tub space is quite tiny,  replaced them with a curved shower rod and curtain. Now you can take a shower without banging your elbow. The rod was our biggest splurge.

 

Next up was painting, painting, painting. 

The textured ceiling had bubbles and bare spots. I fixed what I could and repainted it white. I'm not sure if the fixes will hold but, as per my mantra, it's ok for now.

After my neck recovered, it was time for more visible changes.

The "woodwork" is funky, plastic-type stuff in a trailer brown. 

I painted it all white. I also painted the wooden, 70's era toilet paper holder and the toilet seat*. Suffice it to say that painting the toilet seat is problematical when there is only one toilet in the house.

I had decided on blue for the upper walls. I don't particularly like blue but the vinyl floor is white and blue and the plastic tile on the lower part of the walls has blue flowers. At some point I'd like to replace both but for now they stay. And so the upper walls went from light brown to bright blue.

 

 Then it was on to the built-in sink cabinet. We both feel this is too big for the room but, again, for now it stays. It too was wood with a glossy finish. I mixed plaster of paris with some flat white paint as a chalk paint primer (learned this from Gail Wilson's blog My Repurposed Life).

Too cold to paint in the garage!

 It covered great. Then I mixed the blue paint with white for a lighter shade. The semi-gloss covered fine over the chalk paint. I replaced the metal knobs with wooden ones painted white.

In the middle of all this, I decided to fix the shower. For some reason, it only had hot water. Fine in winter but it made showers in the middle of summer a bit steamy. I researched the problem and ordered a replacement cartridge for the faucet. We had tried accessing the shower plumbing from behind the wall and discovered all of the working parts were in the front. We spent an entire afternoon taking apart the faucet and never did get the cartridge out. When I put it back together it added a drip to it's woes. With a heavy heart for my lack of skills (Tom and I had totally replumbed the bathroom in our New York house, with me doing most of the work, so I feel justified in beating myself up a bit over a dripping faucet), I called the plumber. He came, he conquered. Problem fixed. I returned the cartridge and was hardly out more money than if I'd done it myself.

So now I could return to painting.

The ugliest part of the bathroom by far were the three hollowcore doors. Three doors (!) in a 7' x 9' room: the room door, a closet behind that door, and a closet by the tub. We early on took off the closet door behind the main door as the only purpose it seemed to serve was to smash it's doorknob into the other door.

We decided to pull a slight of hand to disguise the hollowcoreness of these blah things. We got some half-round molding and glued it on, then primed and painted. 

It's a good thing we're readers!

Despite taking forever--you can only do one side at a time, let everything dry, paint, let dry, etc.--it was worth the effort.

Tub closet door

Door with panel covering hole.

 The doorknobs of these doors were battered and a fake, bright gold. Since the faucets are silver, I thought it would be good if the rest of the metal fittings in the room were less jarring. I ordered a small jar of Rustoleum Metallic Accents paint in pewter and painted the doorknobs, hinges, some wall hooks, and even the toilet seat hinge. It does look better but I'm not sure how well this will hold up under everyday use.

As always, this budget make-over cost more than I had hoped:

shower rod and curtain, $75
3 gallons of paint,  $70 (with lots left over for other projects)
molding, $27
metallic paint, $7
plumber, $77

We still need to replace two wall sconces and add a few other touches. But for now, it's ok!

*Painting a toilet seat does not appear to be a great idea, I have already had to touch up too many dings. Tom is, at this very moment, at True Value perusing new seats so we probably should add about $12 to the total outlay.

Grand Tour

Ivy, Dodge, and Maisie have spent the summer exploring our three acres.

Using electronet fencing, we have moved them to fresh pasture every week or so. They quickly eat down any fresh green stuff and then nibble on the coarser browse. 

And leave behind piles of brown nuggets.

We are now back to where they started and it's time for the return trip towards the barn. 

This puts them on the lawn RIGHT NEXT TO THE HOUSE. 

If they were any closer, they could join us for movie night.

It Can Only Get Better!

I did not grow a garden this year.

I grew a Demonstration Plot for Insect Pests, Diseases, and Nutrient Deficiencies.

Or, as mothers everywhere have said, if it can't be good for anything, at least its a bad example.

I planted green beans and beans for drying, corn and popcorn and field corn, lettuce and spinach and kale and other greens, tomatoes, potatoes, peanuts, onions and garlic, carrots and beets, summer squash and winter and pumpkins and melons.

I have grown all of these successfully before.

The beans, different varieties planted in succession over the summer, were repeatedly chomped down by Mexican bean beetles. I had never even seen these pests before; this summer I handpicked thousands and didn't make a dent.

The corn looked ok, if a little pale, but for some reason pollination was sketchy and many cobs had only a handful of kernels.

Any greens that did germinate in the intense summer heat (yes, I know these should be planted in spring but my plot wasn't tilled until late) were eaten by insects that I never even saw.

The tomatoes did fairly well, except for blossom end rot (another problem I had never seen). I gave them some water with calcium pills dissolved in it and this seemed to help.

The potatoes did fine! Hallelujah. As did the peanuts.

My onions struggled and the few that made it were soft and rotted easily. The garlic came through for me--the grounds are covered with wild garlic so it seems the soil is hospitable for something.

Carrots never came up, beets were sketchy,

 And the pumpkins and friends were attacked by squash borers. Dare I say I've never seen these before either? Add to that, the blossoms were moldy--in a summer where we didn't have a drop of rain for almost a month.

This tale of woe indicates to me that I have a lot to learn about gardening in the Midwest. 


I'll spend the winter researching and working on my plan of attack. Trying to garden organically surrounded by GMO, chemically raised crops will not be easy and I know I have my work cut out for me. But a gardener always knows next year will be better, and as they say in Galaxy Quest, "Never give up, never surrender!"

  

Going nuts

Twenty-first century Americans have no concept of the work involved in the food that is on their table.

Peanut butter is a perfect example.

A staple of childhood sandwiches, peanut butter remains a big part of our diet. We all know that peanut butter is ground up peanuts, but have you ever really thought about the process?

Peanuts are easy to grow if you live somewhere with a long growing season, at least 110 frost free days. This year, I started some indoors and planted the rest after the ground had warmed up. I really didn't see much difference between the plants as the season progressed. 

Most people realize that peanuts are not really nuts. They are legumes and peanuts themselves form on the roots underground, kind of like potatoes. They were one of the very few vegetables I grew this year that were not riddled with pests or other problems, needing only some weeding. And to harvest you just pull up the entire plant and let dry.

I have to admit I didn't keep good records here- I planted about a handful of seeds in a bed about 30 square feet. I harvested maybe 8 times that. Or to look at it another way, each peanut produced one plant which had three or four shells on it, each containing two or three nuts.

So, I've planted and grown and harvested the peanuts. Now they'll have to be thoroughly washed and shelled and roasted. Finally, the cooked peanut can be smashed up and, voila, peanut butter.

And will I be awash in the gooey stuff from my vast peanut field? The National Peanut Board estimates that it takes about 540 peanuts to make a twelve ounce jar, or about 45 nuts per ounce. My pitiful pile might yield enough for a sandwich or two. 

We're spoiled by the small effort it takes to pick up a jar of peanut butter in the market. Grow some peanuts of your own and you'll wonder at the work that goes into making this country's thousands of daily pbj's.

Garbage Monster

In our county, residents can take their own trash to the landfill.

If everyone did this, I believe the amount of garbage in this country would be cut by half. It is a sobering experience.

Like so much else in life, the first glance is deceiving. Arriving at the entrance, you see neat bins for your recyclables and scrap metal. Beyond that are green and grassy hills.  It is only if you have household garbage that you drive back and see the full extent of the problem.

Modern landfills are not the dumps of yesteryear (when I was a kid, it was a fun trip to visit the dumps in the Adirondack Mountains to look for bears). Modern garbage disposal is more akin to putting your scraps in a sealed time capsule and kicking the entire can down the road  a thousand years or so.

 Trash is put on top of an underlayer that is mostly impervious to water; there is a system to collect rainwater and a leachate system to collect whatever does manage to trickle through. The entire bed of garbage is eventually capped off with soil and planted, giving it the misleading look of a natural meadow. But underneath,  the garbage is sealed off from air, i.e. there is no aerobic decompostion like in a compost pile. That trash is going to sit there for a long, long, long time.

At our landfill, you drive right up to a ditch and heave your garbage over the edge, up close and personal. 

Standing there contemplating the mess (but not too long because even modern landfills stink), I always vow to create less waste and fewer trips here. Because, as Pete Seeger sings, we're filling up our lives with Garbage.

Saturday Revels

Most people look forward to the weekend. When they return to work on Monday, they regale each other with tales of their adventures. 

I bet few of them will say they spent their Saturday washing kittens.

I discovered, much to my dismay, that our three little white kittens were infested with fleas. These are outdoor cats so they are not held to the hygienic standards of house pets. But when we can see the little black specks fur swimming and occasionally jumping off to bite a human, then something has to be done.

We're 11 miles from the nearest store and on a tight gasoline budget, so a trip to find flea powder would have to wait for a regular errand run. I turned to the internet; a Dawn bath was suggested.

I was not going to try to bathe cats by myself so I enlisted Tom's aid. He brought the victims in one by one.

I put a ring of Dawn around the kitten's neck. Fleas will run towards the head when they suspect you're out to get them so the soap necklace served as a barrier. Then we soaked the poor cat in the extra bubbly water.
 

Once the fur was wet, you could see how many fleas there were. Ugh! We tried to comb them out but we don't have a flea comb so that didn't work. We picked out as many as we could be most wouldn't budge. We can only hope the soap killed most of the critters.

When we felt we had tortured each feline enough, we rinsed them off and Tom towel dried them.

They were amazingly cooperative; we didn't get scratched once. Their mom, Dale, also has fleas but I draw the line at trying to wash a full-grown cat. 

They're out in the sun now, complaining to each other about how horrid humans are to helpless kittens.

What did you do this weekend?

Steady on the tiller

This post was going to be a rave review of the cordless Black and Decker Front Tine tiller, and it is a good machine...but you know us and mechanical tools (see  My Generator Rant)

I sold all of my bee equipment and decided to use the money to buy a tiller. We have always dug our garden by hand but I felt like that was getting to be too much for such senior citizens. I knew we could never cope with a gas powered machine and the finicky maintenance so, after tons of research, I decided on the Black and Decker.

I placed the order with Amazon and within a few days the tiller arrived. It required a lot of assembly but it went together fairly quickly. Then I tried to charge the battery. This should take 20 hours the first time but the charger was saying "done!" in 10 minutes and the unit didn't start. I called Black and Decker and they said "bad charger" and sent a new one. Same thing--no charge. So we packaged it back up and ordered a replacement.

At this point, our long suffering UPS driver knew the drill. He claims we are trying to give him a hernia but Tom helps him load the heavy packages so we're forgiven.

It didn't take long for the replacement to arrive. This time the battery charged as advertised. Then we took it for a test run in the garden.

It started right up and immediately bogged down. There was no way I could get it to move and Tom was exhausted after shallowly tilling two rows. We both agreed that it would be less tiring to use a shovel.

I know lots and lots of people happily puttputt down the garden tilling merrily away. I have to believe they have stronger arms than we do or are prithy to some esoteric tiller secrets that we'll never know.

Make no mistake. This is a good tiller, reasonably priced, free from dependence on cords or gasoline. But it doesn't work for us. I have come to the overdue conclusion that most machines are not for us and will not be ordering any more heavy, engine-driven products; maybe I'll spring for an extra shovel.

Our UPS driver will thank us.

Clear Saling

On the way into town the other day, we saw a sign proclaiming "Community Lawn Sales, 10 miles, Saturday". 

I always intend to go to lawn sales but rarely follow through. I don't like getting in and out of the car, driving all over town, and most of these sales consist of children's toys and clothes. But this sounded promising so we headed out early Saturday down West Walnut Road towards a lot of nothing.

It was a lovely ride, lots of hills and trees, and finally a sale. Our arrival coincided with that of two women and two children in an Amish buggy--luckily there was a shaded area to park the horse and the side of the road for us. 

We perused the goods--hmmm, children's toys and clothes. We popped back in the car and drove on. The next two were several miles down the road--some broken down chairs and tools and, yes, children's toys and clothes.

Back in the car. The next sign was at a Firehouse. This at least offered a rest room along with the toys and clothes. At this point we both remarked "If this were New York, there would be a bake sale along with the toys, or at least coffee and donuts."

We had to laugh when we saw the sign for the next sale "Yard Sale and Bake Sale." Finally, something that appealed to us. So we bought our only purchase of the day--cookies and a can of  Big Red.

Big Red is a midwest phenomenon. I had never tried it and decided this was a good time to sample a bit of hometown soda. The flavor is very "red", it's supposed to be cream soda with lemon and other flavors but it tasted like cherry bubblegum to me. I think this is a case, like poi, that you have to have grown up with to enjoy. 

On to the next sale. And there were the Amish ladies again. We all agreed that the pickings were slim at these sales; they were at the limit of their horse and about to turn around but we pressed on, deciding to take a different route home. We did stop at one more sale but the snacks were indeed our only expenditure.

Hills and trees, buggies, cookies, and soda--one of our more enjoyable shopping excursions.

Hay there!

One of my favorite bloggers, Suzanne McMinn, just posted about transporting 55 bales of hay in her car and she and her daughter loading it into their barn Hay the Hard Way 

Our hay story is a bit different but just as hard!

Dennis, the nice gent who owns the picturesque barn across the road, just mowed the field around it.

  
It's been hot, hot, hot, so the hay dried thoroughly in a day.

Tom went over and started raking. He brought over several loads in the lawn cart and I went over later and did several more.

Then he had a brainstorm.

 Why not use one of our gigundo tarps?

He raked several piles into it.

Dragged it across the road, past the garage, and to the shed.

We pushed and shoved and got it inside to unload.

The shed is now partly full of lovely, FREE hay. There's plenty more left and if our backs recover and the heat lets up, we'll be over there raking it up.

Chickens in the Road gets it done with woman power, we do what we can with old people power!