The World's Best Gardener

I have always wanted an English Cottage Garden:

Ok, maybe Christ Church College in Oxford isn't exactly the cosy type of garden I mean, but you get the idea.

Now, I am a fairly good gardener...as long as I am growing stuff to eat. From asparagus to zucchini, I've had success with roots, leaves, and shoots. But somehow the type of garden that requires you to plan out colors and heights and foliage contrasts is beyond me.

So, we hired the best gardener in the world to landscape our hillside. 

Mother Nature--take a bow!

Times of Extreme Frugality: Shoelaces and Earthquakes

My ever helpful sister called the other day to cheer me up from my so-far-this-summer-sucks depression.

"We didn't have an earthquake," she offered.

Yup, that did the trick.

                                     လလလလလလ

When Tom and I were first married, like many couples we didn't have much money. He was a full time student and I worked part-time for minimum wage-- a whopping $2/hour. We managed to pay the rent, buy gas and groceries, but not much else. Then the shoelace on Tom's shoe broke. Rather than buy a pair, I CROCHETED SHOELACES FROM YARN. 

After he graduated and we were only poor instead of very, very poor, I vowed that, as God is my witness, I'll never crochet shoelaces again!

I never have. 
And I never will. 

Times of Extreme Frugality: Running Dry?

Scrimping is my default. 

Penny pinching is second nature.

It seems sometimes that I've tried just about every hint I've heard (clip the coupons, shop the sales!) and that new and realistic ways to stretch the ol' dinero are scarcer than hen's teeth. These two minor efforts from this week do fall outside of the normal tightwad suggestions; maybe they'll spark some different ideas for you.


1. The garden needed watering, I needed to do laundry and I remembered that we are now paying for water (last 3 houses had wells).

So:

Our washing machine is a portable that you hook up to the faucet and drain into the sink. These buckets are just a portion of the rinse water from one load. It was a lot of schlepping back and forth out to the garden, but I feel better for not just letting the PAID FOR water go down the drain.


2. And this:

Anyone who has talked to us recently, knows our big summer project involves digging drainage. HAND digging. We've got a long mound of dirt snaking along the back yard but some of it we have sifted (our "sifter" is a plastic grate we found in the garbage pile on our property), giving us screened topsoil. Soil for raised beds and pots that we don't have to buy.


Both of these are what I consider extreme frugality measures--they're time consuming and back breaking, not something we will do consistently. I'm all for saving money, however, sometimes the spirit is willing but the aged flesh is weak.


How about you? Any outside the coupon-box type of ideas for reigning in the spending? We all could use some inspiration from the hive-mind!

Times of Extreme Frugality: We Hit the Road

Sometimes even those of us buying only the necessities like a bit of pizzaz in our diet. So I decided it was time to try a recipe I've had for years and also to revisit one I made years ago.

First up, elderflower presse. 

English lit and tv are big in our house and it seems someone is always offering homemade elderberry wine to visitors. I don't drink wine but I thought a drink made from elderberry flowers sounded interesting. And they are in bloom right now.

So, first step, gather about 25 elderberry blossoms. 

We have two elderberry bushes that we planted last year, but I wasn't willing to give up potential berries. Luckily, they grow wild along our road and it didn't take us long to spy some in a bit of wilderness.

Cut off most of the stems and pick over--there WILL BE BUGS.

Heat one liter of water in a pot (I guess my recipe really is British) and add 500 grams of sugar and four tablespoons of honey. Remove from the heat, add zest and juice of one lemon, the flowers and cover. 

Let sit overnight. Strain and store.

Essentially, what you have made is simple syrup with essence of elderflowers. Dilute one part presse with nine parts ice water or seltzer and pretend you're having tea with Miss Marple.


Years ago, I got interest in wild foods (anyone remember Euell Gibbons?). One of the few that we liked was day lily buds.

Day lilies grow wild along roadsides all over New York and are easy to spot. Word of caution: remember the old cartoons of corpses with white lilies on their chests? Those lilies are poisonous. Be sure you are picking day lilies, Hemerocallis, which have edible buds, flowers, shoots, and tubers.

I opted to saute the buds in some bacon grease. They are also good dipped in fritter batter and fried.

Cheap dinner of day lily buds, homegrown snap peas, turkey burger on a homemade bun. Summer on a plate!

Anyone else gleaned a meal from the wild? I would love to hear your experiences!

Times of Extreme Frugality: We Go Grocery Shopping

Extreme frugality can be succinctly expressed as:

       Don't buy stuff mindlessly.

Now, before you cry "DUH", bear with me for a bit.

We Americans are conditioned from an early age to buy, buy, buy. Buy our way out of depression, buy our way to a higher standard of living, buy because it's Christmas or Halloween or Martin Luther King Day. It becomes automatic and mindless.

Being frugal demands that you think before you plunk down that cash. Do I really need this? Can it wait? Will my world collapse if I don't purchase this or that?

The grocery store is as good a place as any to practice the zen of thriftiness. Follow me as I do my weekly shopping.

Caveat: Planning ahead means that my freezer and pantry are stocked. We probably could go without groceries for a month or two--meals would be interesting but we wouldn't starve. I hope you can say the same 'cause when the Zombie Apocolypse comes, I ain't sharing.

Anyway, on to the store!


On a typical trip, we ignore:

The Deli

The Bakery

and prepackaged cold cuts

Then we move on to not even bothering going down these aisles:

Sometimes, we do shop dairy (butter, cheese, but not milk), meat, produce, some canned and some paper goods. Coffee for Tom, and Diet Coke for us both (hey, we're human and we ALWAYS buy it on sale). 

Our ragtag little garden is starting to give us a bit of lettuce and tons of peas, so we skipped the produce section (except for some blueberries, on sale of course!). But at least 80% of the store is filled with items that we don't want or need. Lots of money saved right there!

Of course, even us misers are tempted:

But I am proud to say, I resisted these. If the desire is too strong, I can make my own.

Milk is one item we splurge on; NY dairy farmers need our support. 

When we can't make it out to Comley's Country Creamery we stop at Byrne Dairy--New York milk in glass bottles.

On today's trip, we also hit Aldis for cereal, orange juice, and sugar. Except for probably needing more milk later in the week, this should carry us through. Now, how many ways can I prepare peas?

How do you save on groceries? Any hints, tricks, or miracles you perform to keep the family fed?

Times of Extreme Frugality

So...it's been awhile. 5 years in fact. In that time we have moved twice and are now back in good ol' upstate NY. It is good to be back.

Midwest or east, some things don't change. Once again, we find ourselves needing to tighten our belts (if only my increased girth would allow me to wear a belt), and I have declared us in a time of extreme frugality.

Many of us find ourselves there occasionally. Luckily, we've had lots of practice in pinching those pennies til they squeal and I've decided to share some of our tightwad ways in the hope that: 1. we might be of help to others, and 2. others will share their skinflint hacks.

For my first post, I was going to share my latest baking adventure, extolling my cleverness in cheap, from scratch cooking. I'm still going to, but it turned out to be an example of a frugal fail. Such is life.


I volunteered to bring dessert to a family gathering. Looking around for what I had on hand, my eyes locked on the jam shelf. 

With over 40 jars of jam, I figured I could spare some for a dessert. So I did a quick internet search and got a recipe for jam cake. I had the other ingredients, so set to making a glorious mess in the kitchen.

Mixed it all together and popped it in the oven. The recipe said 350 degrees for 20 minutes. When the timer dinged, the batter was still soupy. Set it for 10 more minutes...then 10 again...and again. I lost track of how long it took to set and it never really cooked throughout. And a taste of the finished cake was Yech! So, the compost pile is now one jam cake richer.

And I brought an apple cake from a tried and true recipe to the gathering.


What are some of your less than successful attempts to save a buck or two? We won't judge, promise!

Life and Death and Pizza

We are well into the growing season here at Lick Skillet.

 

The garden is green and lush, yielding tomatoes and beans, corn and potatoes, bean beetles and slugs and flea beetles. 

At least this year the balance is tilting towards more vegetables than pests.
 
Our livestock is blossoming also.

Dale had more kittens (she finally has her date with the veterinarian next month). Current cat count is now at 5.

Mr. Gottlieb

Mrs. Claypool

Our two breeding does continue to be productive. Fluffy Black Phantom (I gotta stop giving the grandkids naming rights) had 9 fat kits who are now old enough to drive her nuts. Monster Bunny followed a few weeks later with 6 babies of her own.

And we recently harvested* eight rabbits. 
That brings the population at Rabbit Town up to 18.

The big surprise of the summer is keets!

One of our 4 guinea hens took herself off into the weeds for a month and came strutting back with 16 babies following her around. The noise level from 4 guineas is sometimes overwhelming, There just may be roast guinea on the menu at some future date if we want to keep our hearing. 
Guineas number stands at 20!

Our chicken raising hasn't been so successful. Our last two laying hens were attacked and killed WHILE IN THEIR FENCED RUN by what turned out to be a neighbor's dog. I came home a few weeks later from a poultry swap with three adult hens, two of whom died within days. The remaining Barred Rock is getting used to her surroundings but keeps looking for a flock to hang with.

So, on a whim, I ordered chicks from the Meyer Hatchery. 

This is a mixed bunch of peeps of indeterminate variety plus a free one. Meyers offers a free chick if you agree to donate its eggs to charity. Got my fingers crossed that it lives that long!
Chickens at this moment=17.

We were blessed to increase the human presence to 4 at Lick Skillet for a few days in July. Grandchildren Lizzy and Elias came to help out and keep us entertained.

 

They ran and climbed and painted and planted. We watched and listened and scolded and loved. In a few years we hope to add brother Oliver to the mix. A group of sheep is a flock, a bunch of sparrows is a host. Would a trio of grandchildren be called a frenzy?

A farm is a microcosm of the world; life and death and growth. Animals are born, some die. Crops grow and wither. Seasons come and go. But at Lick Skillet, one thing never changes...

Homemade pizza for dinner at least once a week.

*In other words, we killed and ate them. I was trying to be sensitive.