This week was a mixture of happy things, good old-fashioned frugal accomplishments, and "why me" moments.

​This morning I stepped into the chicken coop to see all but two of my hens slaughtered or seriously injured. After examining the surroundings, we came to the conclusion that there was likely a predator in the coop when I shut them in last night. That means that I shut the little chicken door, counted the chickens, shook down their feed, and checked for eggs in the midst of the chicken murderer.  Thankfully my siblings took three of the hens to the 4-H fair this week, so they were completely out of harm's way. I've NEVER had anything like this happen, so it was a real blow.

On top of that, I found poison ivy in my strawberry patch last week. Unfortunately, I found it by pulling it out with my bare hand, while weeding. So now I have itchies on the fingers of my right hand, my left wrist, and the right side of my neck. It could be a lot worse, but still... why me??? 

In the midst of everything I left undone last week, I did actually accomplish some things.

1. Groceries: I spent a lot of time this week cleaning out our freezer, fridge and pantry. I worked on using up eggs, milk, and fresh produce from the fridge. I also made broth from chicken bones in the freezer, and used up (almost) all of the frozen bread ends by making a french toast casserole. We did spend some money at Walmart for bread and lunchmeat for sandwiches. Ice cream was on sale at Kroger for $0.99 per tub, so we spent $4.95 on ice cream. I cooked up a bag of chicken thighs that was in the freezer, so that is not taking up space anymore. Even though I'm not as "hard core" as I used to be about our food budget, I still get a kick out of making economical meals. The casserole probably cost about $0.75, and the meal I made with the chicken thighs was pretty cheap too, at about $0.75 per plate.

Of course, Hubs ate two chicken thighs so his cost a little more. But I don't know where else where you can get two chicken thighs and a plateful of rice and veggies for $1.50. Except maybe Guatemala.

2. Gardening: I harvested beets, Swiss chard, raspberries, kale, cucumbers, basil, thyme and cilantro this week. I dried the beet leaves and powdered them to use as greens powder during the winter months. I cut some flowers from the garden and made a centerpiece for the kitchen table.

For the first time ever, I started seeds for a fall garden! I've always liked the idea of a fall garden, but in the hustle and bustle of summers past, I never managed to start one. The seeds I started indoors were lettuce, kale and endive. The endive and kale seeds have already germinated!!!

​We started the process of transferring my garden from its current spot to the new home. For now, I'm going to have just four raised beds behind our kitchen for herbs, a greenhouse box, and a few vegetables. We built two brand new beds (out of scrap lumber, of course, so.... FREE) and I moved one of the unused beds from my old garden. I filled them up by layering grass clippings and rotted chicken manure. Only one bed will be used for my fall crop, so I topped that bed off with rich dirt from the old garden. I planted spinach and radicchio seeds in half of the box. The other half will be home to the endive, lettuce and kale plants.

That being said, I'll still be using one of the greenhouse tops on my current spinach/kale/swiss chard bed. Between the old garden and the new garden, I hope to have plenty of greens to harvest this fall, along with parsnips, beets, acorn squash, green tomatoes (to ripen indoors) and some sweet potatoes.  

3. I threw out some junk that we no longer needed. I also cleaned the excess canned goods out of my pantry, which set me wayyyyyy behind on dishes. Boo. But at least the pantry is cleaner. I organized our canned goods in the new basement by month, starting with the month of October. You can read more about that below.

4. Thrifting: I bought two kid-sized cabinets at a garage sale for $5.00 each. I think in their former life they may have been a kitchen set; one piece a sink, and the other a pretend fridge. The doors sagged on one piece, but they are nice wooden Montessori-style cabinets that will look wonderful with a little TLC. I also bought three kids' books at the same sale for $0.25 each

5. Mending: I fixed a hole in a pair of Hubs' shorts.

6. Books: I found two books on Scribd (aff. link) instead of buying them (Carrots Love Tomatoes and The Complete Book of Chalk Lettering, if you're wondering). A friend loaned me her copy of Joanna Gaines' book, Homebody. I've learned a lot from all three of the books already, and I've only browsed or just started them.

So, those are my main frugal things for the week. Apart from that, I had some thoughts I wanted to share regarding food preservation. As I dumped out several jars of canned food, I kept asking myself, who let out the canning monster? When we were first married I had from a "food shortage mentality" and canned everything from chicken feet to squash. Alas, we did not starve. After homesteading for a few years now, I'm realizing that too much food is more of a hindrance than a help. 


How Much Preserved Food Do You Actually Need?

As I was organizing jars of pineapple and grape jelly, I got to thinking about how little food we actually use in any given month. It's not like we're light eaters. It's just that two adults and one child can only eat so much fruit. Especially when we have plenty of fresh fruit, here on the property, April through October. That's about seven months during which we don't have to buy fruit OR eat canned fruit. That leaves November, December, January, February and March to can, freeze or dry fruit for. As I was redistributing the pineapple to different shelves (one for each month), I asked myself, how many half-pints of pineapple will we use in November? I thought about what people normally eat in November; Thanksgiving-style meals, warm soups, pumpkin spice everything. Nope, no need for pineapple in November. What do we eat in December? Party meals, cinnamon spice, more warm soups and cornflake casseroles. I guess I might use one little jar to cook a ham. I put one jar on the December shelf and redistributed the rest between January and March.

I went through this process for all of the months. Applesauce and pumpkin are pretty much fall items, but there was so much applesauce that I put some on every shelf. I will probably be looking for different uses for the applesauce (baking or using as sweetener, for example) just to use it up. Again, though—realistically, there are so many other fruits and fruit items I'd rather eat than applesauce; many of them cheap or even free. It's not like I never use applesauce, but I think one pint per month is more than enough. And if you consider the fact that we only "need" two or three months' worth.... well, four to six pints per year is plenty, if I continue to can applesauce.

Regarding freezer foods, I discovered the same thing. In the past, I would ask myself, how many frozen strawberries will we use per month? I thought we could use about one quart per week, so I froze 11 gallon-size bags of strawberries. I figured that I would use the berries in smoothies, and four smoothies per week doesn't sound unreasonable. But think about this: do we drink cold smoothies in the winter? Or, do we want to have only strawberry smoothies during the spring, summer and autumn months? When there is fresh fruit available, you can use that and blend it with ice during the summer. All that considered, I only froze five or six quarts of strawberries this year. Over the past week I put the same amount of raspberries in the freezer. We bought a bunch of fresh blueberries last week for $2.00 per pound, but to our disappointment, they were bitter and not great for fresh eating. So I put the last of them (1 quart) in the freezer as well. 12 quarts of berries should be enough to last from November to March. Of course each family is different, but we never use as much frozen fruit as I think we will.

So, that's fruit. What about veggies? We go through a fair amount of frozen vegetables between November and March. This year, though, I'll likely have some acorn squash and kale, and a few indoor-ripened tomatoes in November. Supplemented with crazy-cheap Thanksgiving vegetables from the store, we won't need much in the freezer for that month. I'm also hoping to have some greens in March, (but we'll see). I will only have to freeze vegetables for the four remaining months; greens and a small assortment of other frozen veggies like beans or bell peppers. I'll buy onions, carrots, cabbage and other frozen vegetables at the grocery store.

And what about canned tomatoes? I think I can make our current stash of canned tomato products last at least six months. During the summer we hopefully won't need as many canned tomatoes, if I base meals around other in-season foods. Next year, I'm hoping to do a little more tomato canning, but enough for several years. 


Egg Preservation Thoughts

Eggs are another example of seasonal efficiency. We have enough eggs from March through October. It's lean in November and February, but there are still some fresh eggs. We don't have any fresh eggs in December or January, but we DO have a surplus in April, May, June and September, it seems. In the past I've tried getting the chickens to produce during the winter, and also freezing the eggs; neither of which worked very well. Last year I tried waterglassing the eggs. Overall the experiment worked, but about half of the eggs were not usable. Neither were the "good" eggs good enough for scrambled eggs; they were only good for cooking and baking. Furthermore, later on I learned that waterglassing works better for unfertilized eggs, and ours were fertilized.

As I was organizing jars in the basement, I had an idea. What if I took just a few of our September eggs and waterglassed only enough for December and January? I could separate the rooster from the hens for that one month, and then put him back in. Further, by storing the eggs in several glass pickle jars, instead of one green five-gallon bucket, there would be less chance of a single bad egg spoiling the whole batch. 

I think I might try it.

Edit: Since the chicken massacre happened, we may not have extra eggs for waterglassing. But I'm going to keep these thoughts here to reference later.

So, those are my thoughts for the week. How has your week been?

I've had a decently frugal month so far. I finally feel like I'm getting into a groove with our summer schedule. Since we finished picking strawberries, I've started weeding and doing garden work in the mornings when it's cool. During the day I work on new house projects with Princess, then in the heat of the day she can take a nap while I do indoor things. I feel like I accomplished a lot recently.

Museum and cemetery: We visited a local (within 30 minutes) history museum Sunday before last. I've had my eye on this one for about a year now, but it's only open two days per month, for two hours at a time. Finally we didn't have anything going on! My great-great-great grandfather's suitcase was on display there, which was pretty cool. He immigrated from Germany in the 1880's.

​Groceries: We haven't been spending a lot on groceries lately. Most of our spending is on things like ice cream, bread or snack foods. I did collect eggs from the chicken coop (as always), and also harvested black and red raspberries, straggler strawberries, Swiss chard and kale from the garden.

Cooking: I made mayonnaise, bread and tarts. 

House project: We are finishing up the siding on our house. We put in several porch posts. The insulation guys came and now we are working on putting up drywall. Upstairs I was able to start spackling nail holes and removing wallpaper to prep two of the bedrooms for painting. We moved two propane tanks off of the property. 

Hobby farm: We trapped one raccoon last week. I mowed over the strawberries to refresh them for next year. I also cleaned up around the raised beds with a weed whacker, and did some weeding inside the beds as well. I talked to Hubs about what I should do this fall for next year's garden. I'd like to do a formal potager garden at some point, but that probably won't happen for the next few years. Instead, I'll move four raised beds from the current garden over behind the kitchen, and those will make do for now. One will be a culinary herb bed, one will be a greenhouse bed, and I haven't decided what the other two will be.

I started picking Japanese beetles off of the raspberries and feeding them to the chickens. I also found a mouse nest, and some of the chickens gobbled up the baby mice. I know that sounds gross, but I've seen chickens eat full-grown mice before. So.... free food for the chickens. I was really hoping to get a garden update up on Youtube before I posted this, but our internet wasn't cooperating. :(


​Trip to ND

This last weekend, we took a short trip to North Dakota to see my SIL and her family. I was really pleased at how well the trip turned out, despite me still trying to potty train our toddler (I think I'll make that into a separate post...) and one of our flights being cancelled (such a hassle!!).
 
Highlights and souvenirs: we've been to ND before, but this time we drove a little farther out to visit Medora and the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. I think that was my favorite spot, as you all know how much I like learning about the Presidents. While we didn't get to see Roosevelt's home, I did get the chance to poke around in a cabin he used for hunting.

​. I picked up a biography on Theodore's wife, Edith, as a souvenir. The book is pretty thick, so I think it will be worth the $20.00 I spent on it. In the past I have just taken pictures of such books, planning on borrowing them from the library, but in actuality that never happens. I also could have ordered the book online for less than $6.00, but then, of course, I couldn't have enjoyed it on vacation. I guess the best thing to do would've been to listen to or buy it beforehand at the best price. Anyhow, I'm really enjoying the book, since some of Edith's contemporaries were the same people who associated with the Vanderbilts (we visited Biltmore earlier this year).

Apart from the T.R. site and museum, I really enjoyed seeing the buffalo and prairie dogs in their natural habitat. I felt like I was in a real-life "Oregon Trail" scene. We got to watch a gigantic herd of buffalo graze from afar, then later we saw several up close as they crossed the road. We even got to see a few cross the river, which was really neat. All I needed was a bonnet and a wagon, and I could've lived out some of my childhood dreams. Sigh.

After we drove through the park, I found a little buffalo toy for Princess at a gift shop. It was pretty expensive at $8.00, but the toy was high quality (Breyer) and a quick internet search told me it was about the lowest price as anywhere else. I know she probably won't remember actually seeing the buffalo, but by the time we left ND, she knew what a buffalo was. We actually live just around the corner from a bison farm, so I can refresh her memory from time to time. 

Some other highlights were watching the Medora musical, enjoying a wonderful steak dinner and catching up with friends and family. The trip was a nice reprieve from house and garden work. In Minot we visited the Scandinavian Heritage museum/park. We'd been there before, but none of the buildings were open. I really enjoyed going through the log cabin and little museum. One of my favorite things was the decorative painting on furniture, musical instruments, household things, etc. called rosemaling. Here's a picture of a cabinet door inside the log cabin:

Some of the newer rosemaling looks a bit "1990's", but I think it's still very pretty.

Well, that's about all I have for now.

​Til next time,
-Bethany

Hello again! I think it's been about two weeks. So, I've got some things to share.

Strawberries

We're just wrapping up a fantastic strawberry season here on my little hobby farm. I was able to earn a net profit of over $1200.00 this year, not counting some trades I made for locally produced meat and milk, plus several flats of strawberries that we were able to share. It's been a stellar season. The berries have produced literally over 100% better than last year. We filled a lot of orders, I had no complaints, and the berries were huge and numerous! To top it all off, I'm not nearly as burnt out as I was last year, despite having less help and far more picking to do. Everything just worked out.

All that being said, the $1200.00 will give me a lot of "play money" to reach my goal of eating better food. You can save a lot of money on high-end food by either growing it yourself or participating in the local economy. Maybe you can't grow strawberries or produce meat to sell, but what about baking? What about kombucha? What about making soap and using the money and/or soap to get you those things? If you find something you're really good at, and there's also a market for it, you can go whole-hog into that one thing, instead of trying to do a multi-faceted hobby farm like I do. In that way you can supplement your regular budget. Strawberries are perfect for me because they're something I can do with my little girl (to a limited extent at this point, but hopefully she'll be able to help more when she's older).

Now that I have some hobby farm funds burning a hole in my pocket, I've been thinking of what new things I can try, or which old things to revive. The fact that we'll be in the house next year is just icing on the cake. A big (as in, I won't have to store cookie sheets in the oven, and I'll have more than three drawers), beautiful kitchen to work with. An extra freezer to put food in. A ginormous basement to store canned goods. A dishwasher to wash all of those jars. Wow. DISHWASHER!!!!!! In particular, though, I'd like to bring back the honey bees and work more on my chicken setup. I would love to have our own chicken meat again, but buying birds to raise is not cost-effective, and I hate butchering. So those hurdles will have to be overcome before we bring back pasture-raised chicken.


Gardening

The garden is still doing well. Since it's not raining every other day, though, I've started watering. (*Edit: it's still raining every other day.) This year, since I'm doing the square foot gardening method (to a T), I'm watering with a cup and bucket instead of a sprinkler. Supposedly this is better for the plants, since the water doesn't get all over the leaves and cause rot. It takes about 30 minutes per week with all of the plants I have, but the upside is that I don't have to hook up or unhook hoses from the hydrant (we've been sharing the hydrant with another family ever since we moved here). Watering regularly also gives me a chance to check up on the plants, weed, trim, and do other maintenance tasks.

In the past two weeks I've harvested Swiss chard, lettuce and some herbs and flowers, in addition to strawberries. I froze about 10 quarts of strawberries. I will take some out of the freezer later on to make jam and/or wine with.


Kid Stuff

I found a wooden car at the VOA 50% off sale, for $2.50. Normally I wouldn't spend so much on a kid's toy, but our girl loves cars and this one fits her peg dolls perfectly. The boys are a little bit wobbly because they're skinnier, but the girls fit in like a glove. The car also came with three unpainted dolls that are a bit wider than the ones we have. My brother suggested that I paint one as William Howard Taft. LOL!

We've been potty training pretty consistently for about a month now, and I can definitely see progress. One of the the things I bought before we started was a little travel potty. It folds up so you can fit it in a beach bag or other bag for on-the-go use. I find this so helpful to have when we are outside. The potty came with special plastic liners to use, that cost $0.47 each. What? Fifty cents per pee, and we do this multiple times per day!!! I made my own liners with used grocery bags (the ones without holes....), some paper towels, and double-stick tape.

Other things:

Party Favors: My sister-in-law is having a baby shower this weekend. I made little soap samples for party favors using goat's milk soap that I already had. I also made bath salts for some of the boxes and put lip balm in some of the other boxes. I think they turned out so cute!

House: We began siding the house since my last update. There is also a lot of work going on inside of the house as well. The heating and cooling guys came, and right now the electricians are working in there. It will get done... someday! We'll be buying paint this week, since Home Depot is having a great sale on paint.

Well, that's about it for now. Til next time,
-Bethany