Trio of tips

See the frugality in the above picture? No? Well, look closer:

1. Unplug appliances when not in use! You can see the "unplugged" plug of my kitchen radio/CD player. Do I really need it to be plugged in all the time? Of course not. Why not pull the plug, so that I'm not paying for the digital clock to be on? (After all, I have multiple clocks in my kitchen already. Who needs one more?)

2. As a mom, I love portable snacks. But buying individual sized everything gets expensive. One of my solutions is to buy ONE package of individual servings, and refill the containers. In this case, raisins. I reuse my little boxes, refilling them from the big container. This reduces my per-ounce cost, but I still get the advantage of portability.

3. Canning - okay, sure, not rocket science there. But I preserve my own garden produce (in this picture, yummy salsa), and I got my canning jars for free by asking around. Put the word out when you're on the hunt for something. You never know when someone will be glad to pass their junk (your treasure) on to you!

Check out more thrifty tips at Life as Mom.

Say hello...

To my little friend! This praying mantis has been hanging out on my clothesline for about 3 days. Hubby got a picture of him, perched on a clothespin. (The mantis was perched. Not Hubby.)

I have put him down in the garden several times - mantises (mantii?) are supposed to be helpful insects, eating the "bad" garden bugs. But my little friend won't stay put. He likes the clothesline. Who am I to argue? Maybe some nasty little bugs are trying to make off with my capri pants...

Before & After

Stockpile, before:

And after:

Tomatos, before:

And after:

The garden, before:

And after:

Bread, before:

And after: (see? They are dark!)

So even though I am on an endless gerbil wheel of laundry, dishes, housekeeping, and child-herding, I am making progress.

A post about compost

A while back (last fall? Christmas? this past spring?) we started composting. It wasn't too hard to convince hubby to go along, since he's already been on many crazy/frugal/tree-hugging adventures with me. (Now, there's a post worth writing!)

I started composting because I hate making trash. I genuinely hate to throw things away. We started recycling our plastics, glass, and paper. We started to consider a garden. Composting seemed like a natural step to make. 

When I first explored the idea with hubby, I was a bit intimidated by the whole process. Carbons? Nitrogens? Won't it stink? Will the dog try to eat it? But honestly, it's so easy! I have a small crock on my kitchen counter, with a lid that contains a filter: 

Odd bits of vegetable and fruit scraps go in there. Apple cores, banana peels, watermelon rind, coffee grounds - if it came from a plant (and hasn't been cooked in an oil or fat), then we throw it in the compost container. When the container is full, it gets dumped on the outside compost pile. 

Our outside piles are a mixture of what was in the kitchen bin, grass clippings, and leaves from last fall. (Whenever the boys find a worm, they throw it in the pile, too. Worms like to eat compost.) So all that stuff, veggies and grass and fruit and coffee grounds and leaves (and the occasional well-rinsed egg shell) just get put in a pile to rot. 

Now you'd think that such a pile would stink, right? It doesn't! Amazingly enough, it just smells like dirt. We have two piles right now, side by side. One is a pile that is just decomposing, and doing nothing else. The other pile is the pile we add to on a regular basis. When our decomposing pile is nothin' but dirt, we'll throw it on the garden, and the "adding pile" will become the decomposing pile.  We'll start a new adding pile in place of the decomposing pile that just became part of the garden. 

There are a couple of good sources to find out about composting. I really liked this site that talks about what you can put in your pile. I also like the book Let It Rot. The author gets into the nitty gritty of chemistry of composting - carbon and nitrogen, browns and greens, starters and all that good (sometime unnecessary and complicated) stuff. 

What do we do to our compost pile? Well, we add the ingredients listed above. We avoid any oils or fats in the pile (veggies cooked in butter are out, as is meat). We try to keep it moist, when we remember that it hasn't rained in a while (though I'm too cheap to water our compost often. I mean, really, what's the worst thing that's going to happen if I forget to water? Um, nothing is going to happen - really. It'll just stop decomposing for a while.) And we turn the compost every few days, which means that someone goes out there with a garden hoe and stirs the pile up. 

And no, the dog never bothers the compost. Like I said, it smells like dirt, not food. 

I'll keep adding to it this winter, though I probably won't stir it, since it's darn cold here in winter. But I'm sure that the freezing/thawing processes that happen in early spring will help decay. Whoo-hoo! 

So what does this save me? Well, I get great dirt for free. I buy fewer trash bags. And I'm not adding to the landfills. Yay for me! 

Canning Salsa

As the abundance from the garden begins to roll in, I have become obsessed with preserving our harvest. Watching it grow, picking it, washing it, finding a place to put it, and then wondering... 

"What the heck am I going to do with all this food?" 

I can't just throw it away. Garden produce tastes too good, far superior to the washed-out, bland, old, tired food at the grocery store. Fresh vegetables nearly explode with flavor. As a card-carrying tightwad, I can't let good food be wasted. As a good Catholic, it's sinful that I should have such abundance and not make good use of it. And with a jobless husband, it just smacks of tempting fate. So I've thrown myself headlong into canning. 

Today, I tried out a recipe for salsa, given to me by a good friend. I boiled, I peeled, I sliced, diced, and cut. I mixed, and then, at last, I tasted. 

WOW!! 

Let me be the one to tell you: fresh salsa tastes nothing, nothing!, like grocery store salsa. (Well, of course not. Being made from fresh ingredients makes a difference. Duh!) So thanks, Tonja, for the salsa recipe. I now will be able to have a slice of summer when the snow's flying this winter. And my husband is very impressed by my kitchen abilities, even though I told him I just followed instructions. 

I also have to add an addendum, here. Tonja is so smart - she gave me the idea to save the juice from the tomatoes and can it, also. So we'll be using that to cook veggies this winter. Whoo-hoo!! 

The multi-tasking sprinkler

We've been a bit short on rain the past two weeks, so we've been watering the garden. We have a specific sprinkler just for the garden, that keeps most of the spray in the garden, though a bit does go to both sides. 

Now, I'm not one to waste money by watering the sidewalk that adjoins the garden. To make the most use of our water, we put our potted plants on the sidewalk, and our watering cans, and a few buckets. Instead of letting the sprinkled water sit on the sidewalk & eventually evaporate, we use it! The hanging plants and porch plants get watered at the same time as the garden, and the watering cans and buckets get filled, so we can go dump them on the compost. (Which is much too dry at present, but is much too far from the hose to water conveniently.) 

But this evening, my wonderful husband had a brilliant idea! To entertain the kidlets, he staked down the slip-n-slide on the other side of the garden. (I'll admit I had a moment's pause thinking about all the potential injuries of a two-year-old and a five-year-old on a slip-n-slide, and the fact that we have no health insurance right now, but sometimes you just have to live a little, right?) Our garden sprinkler watered the garden, the compost, the porch plants, and entertained the kids! 

The Garden's Coming Along!

Here's my garden! (Ignore the clothesline. I'll talk about that later.)

It doesn't look like much, but for a black thumb like me, it's quite an accomplishment. I've got tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, chives, green peppers, cukes, and watermelon. There's something satisfying about planting little seeds in May, and pulling honest-to-goodness food from vines in July. 

See my cucumbers? 

And my (still green) tomatoes? 

Yes, there is weed tarp over the whole garden. It's an experiment. I don't like the way it looks, but I do like the time it saves me - there's very little weeding required in our garden. 

We've also tried our hand at composting this summer. The kids are surprisingly into composting, especially Adam. And Joey loves to water and turn the compost. Luke just likes to throw worms in the compost pile. Cory likes that we have less trash to take out (read: less work for him.) And me? I'm glad that I'm not creating more waste for the landfill, and that I'm saving money (by using fewer trash bags), and I'm being ecologically conscious by nourishing the soil with something natural, not Miracle Grow. (What's in that stuff, anyway? Creepy!)