It's deer season here in Michigan. Hubs is an on-again, off-again hunter, and I've shot exactly one deer in the last six years. "I like hunting when I get something," says Hubs. Otherwise we are not crazy about sitting in the stand waiting for the right doe or buck to come into our sights.

Today I'm going to do a little exposé of how frugal (or not) hunting really is. I'm going to use actual numbers from our actual hunting experience this year. Then at the end, I'll go over some things you can do to save even more money on hunting.


Tallying the Cost

First, we'll add up all of our financial investment into this little project.

Gun: $0.00 (Hubs borrowed my dad's shotgun)
License: $23.00 ($11.00 base license + $12 antlerless tag)
Slugs: $1.82 (2 shots at $0.91 per shot)

Total cost: $24.82


How Much We Actually Saved

Hubs and I would normally pay about $2.00/lb. for red meat (ground beef in a 20 lb. roll). This is the price I will use to calculate our savings.

Savings: $82.00 (41 pounds x $2.00)
Savings minus $24.82 = $57.18


Hourly Wage & ROI

This is where things get fun. Our return on financial investment was 130%.

To calculate the hourly wage, we must divide the savings ($57.18) by the number of hours spent hunting (3) and processing (6.5). 

$57.18 divided by 9.5 = $6.02 per hour


How to Make Hunting More Frugal

There are a few things you can do to improve your return on investment and hourly wage here.

1. Shoot two deer instead of one. While a tag must be purchased for every deer you shoot, the base license only needs to be purchased once. For every deer you shoot, the cost will go down. 

First deer: $24.82 ($0.61/lb.)
Second deer: $19.32 ($0.47/lb.)
Third deer: $13.48 ($0.33/lb.)

2. Be a better shot. Someone who shoots and kills the deer with one shot is getting a better deal than the guy who shoots all over the place and only gets one deer, or worse- doesn't bring home anything at all. Plus, shooting a deer in multiple or incorrect locations (like the butt, for example) will just make it harder to butcher and ruin good meat, to say nothing of making the deer miserable.


3. Be faster at processing. Hubs and I are not the fastest butchers ever. For every hour of processing time that is eliminated, your hourly wage goes up.

10 hours processing: $5.72 per hour
8 hours processing: $7.15 per hour
6 hours processing: $9.53 per hour

Note: Hubs pointed out to me that some people actually enjoy hours spent in the deer stand. Not every hour is equal in value. If you hunt on the weekends, for example, it might be worth $5.72 per hour when you would otherwise just be sleeping or watching TV. If you have to give up a morning of work, though, it is probably not worth the time to hunt.

Note #2: If you pay someone to do the butchering, you might as well buy your meat from the store. In our area, butchering facilities charge between $70.00 and $80.00 for a single deer. This would easily drive our cost over $2.00 per pound.


Is Hunting Worth It?

For us, it is still worth it. In November Hubs' business has started to slow down, so his time is worth less than it would be in April or September. I value my time at $4.00 per hour, so the processing was an improvement on my average hourly wage.

Lastly, venison is probably a healthier choice than run-of-the-mill ground beef from the store. That is because deer are free range and/or grass fed, although they like munching on GMO corn and other non-organic foodstuffs. The health factor alone may be enough to convince some families to hunt, regardless of savings, ROI or hourly wage involved. 


Thoughts About Killing Animals

Some of the worst feedback from Frugal Food has been about butchering. I guess not many people are willing to do it. "You would kill an animal with your own bare hands, just to save money?" Susie Homemaker looks at me with wide eyes as if I were involved in prostitution or drug dealing. She would keel over at the thought of killing an animal. But let's admit it- it's almost impossible to include red meat in a very tight budget. I have never seen red meat on sale for $0.40 per pound, ever. The skill of animal processing- whether that be something as small as a chicken or large as a cow- can provide families with good quality, affordable meat. I don't think it is anything to be scared of or freaked out at. I don't think it is anything to be ashamed of.

People who butcher animals are not weird or evil. It's not like we take delight in the process- it's just a part of producing your own food. I believe every meat eater should butcher at least once in her life, just to realize where her food actually comes from... and HOW it comes. Then if she wants to be a vegetarian, she can call it cruel.

Are you part of a hunting family? Would you consider doing it to save money?

My Kindle Story

I have been a Kindle Paperwhite owner for three years. When I bought the Kindle, it was with the intention of saving money on 1) newly released books, and 2) reference books or text books. As you probably know, most ebooks on Amazon have a top price of $9.99. Oftentimes, this is cheaper than buying a paperback or hardcover version.

One of the first ebooks I bought was Cure Tooth Decay by Ramiel Nagel. At the time, I was burnt out by using the library and wanted to just buy the book. I looked all over for a cheap used copy (even on sites like Paperback Swap which I had been using to get rid of books not worth enough to sell on Amazon), but even the used copies  were only a few dollars cheaper than the list price of $26.97 (+$3.99 for shipping).

After searching the used market for a little while, I noticed that the ebook price was only $9.99. Too bad I didn't have a Kindle! I could be saving 50% on this book. What if I wanted to buy more books, and saved $10.00 or more every time I bought one? The savings alone might cover the cost of purchasing a Kindle.

A few days later, I discovered and downloaded Amazon's free desktop Kindle app. I bought the book I had been looking at, and decided that I liked reading ebooks. When I had been reading ebooks on my desktop for almost a year, I started to want a Kindle. After some research and asking around, I chose to buy the Kindle Paperwhite. It cost about $119.00 at the time.

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Was My Kindle Worth the Investment?

If I saved $10.00 for every book I bought on the Kindle, it would pay itself off after 11 books. Though I certainly purchased 11 books within a year, it's doubtful if I truly saved money by purchasing ebooks, let alone the Kindle. In 2012 I spent $99.63 on ebooks. In June of 2013 I bought the Kindle device, and spent $119.21 that year on ebooks. Woah! I realized then how easy it was to spend money on ebooks, and decided to change my book buying strategy. During the last three years I've only spent $41.62... an average of $13.87 per year on Kindle books.

Altogether, in the past four years I've spent $260.46 on ebooks (most of which I probably could have checked out at the library), in addition to the $119.00 Kindle itself. One has to wonder if spending $380.00 on non-essentials is really an investment.

The reason that I don't think Kindles are a good investment is because, after you buy them, ebooks have no value. You cannot resell an ebook. You cannot even lend it to a friend. So of the $260.46 that I spent on ebooks, I will not have a single dollar of that come back to me. You can resell the Kindle, but only at half the price you paid for it. 


A Better "Investment"

Four years later, I still enjoy using my Kindle but it is much slower than it used to be. I see now that anyone in the market for a Kindle Paperwhite can get one on Ebay for $50.00. And there is one more new development that might influence your decision to buy a Kindle.

Along with the free desktop app, Amazon offers an app for your smart phone. This apph essentially turns your phone into a Kindle; backlight, adjustable letter sizing, highlighting and all. The Kindle app also offers social media sharing, which my old Kindle Paperwhite does not (I'm not sure if the new ones have been updated). 

In addition to being completely free, the Kindle phone app allows you to take your books with you anywhere without carrying another device in your purse. And yes, I can turn the pages a lot faster on my phone than on my actual Kindle device.


How to Get the Most Out of Your Kindle

Whether you have an actual e-reader or just the phone app, there are ways to get the benefits of reading ebooks without spending $260.00 on things that have no value after you've bought them. Here are some of my favorite frugal Kindle hacks.

1. Only buy free books. Sometimes Amazon authors will run a promotion on their book and offer it for free for one day only. I have done this before as an author. Every day there are new free ebooks available. You may be able to download several high-quality books this way.

There are also hundreds of free books out there that are not high-quality, but still worth reading. Some books like this that I have bought include cook books, exercise books, or short stories.

Any book written before 1923 is in the public domain. Most public domain works are available for free on Amazon. This includes everything from great classics and technical writings to any obscure old book you might find at an antique shop. When I was a kid, we had an old book about the "Galveston Horror", a hurricane that flattened the city of Galveston, TX in 1900. Sure enough, just the other day I found the exact same book on Amazon Kindle for free. There is no reason to buy these old books and keep them around (especially if it is a one-time read) when you can get a free, legible, non-fragile and no-pages-missing copy on your phone.

Lastly, any .epub file can be loaded onto your Kindle/app and read as an ebook. These files can come from anywhere, not just the Kindle store. Recently I found some historical files from the Michigan Pioneer Society to use for some research I've been doing. Instead of spending hours in front of the computer, I simply downloaded the .epub file onto my Kindle. Now I can do my research in bed, in the car, or outside on a warm summer day.

2. Use the Kindle for its translation capabilities. You will have to purchase a Spanish (or whatever language you are learning) dictionary, but after that you can download free Spanish books to practice with. This is a whole lot easier than reading a physical Spanish book and having to look up every word you don't know in a physical Spanish dictionary.


Alternatives to Buying Ebooks

Nowadays, if there is a book I want to read that I can't find for free, I will usually get it from my local library. Most of the books I like are not stocked at our local library, but I can order them through the interloan system. For every one book I get via interloan, I try to check out two books off the shelves at our library. The most efficient way to get your reading done would be to ONLY order interloan books and not mess around with checking out books you didn't plan on reading in the first place. However, I tried that with my hometown  library several years ago and it really ticked off one of the librarians. After receiving several rude comments from her (one that I actually confronted her about), I got discouraged and just started buying books I wanted instead. 

This time around, I am really trying to have a good relationship with our local librarian. I am not sure if the interloan books are actually more work, or if the rude librarian just needed someone to blame for her disappointing life. Whatever the case, not using the library cost me literally hundreds of dollars. So I just thought I'd throw that caution out there to anyone who has just discovered the interloan system and is going crazy ordering all sorts of books. Keep the librarians happy.

If there is a newer release that the interloan library does not have, I purchase a physical copy from Amazon. Though it will probably lose some value by the time I am done with it, the book will not lose ALL of its value. I will still be able to resell it, or at least give it away to a friend.

Conclusion

Though I positioned this as an ROI article, the reality is that buying a Kindle is not an investment like one might think. Technology has developed to the point where this "investment" has become a toy for reading pleasure. A better investment is to download the Kindle app on your cell phone for free books, and to purchase physical books that actually have resale value. To be fair, I still do pay money for a select number of Kindle books every year, but those are usually very niche topic books by independent authors. Last year, for example, I purchased Early Retirement Extreme by a blogger named Jacob Lund Fisker. It was not available through the interloan system, and the Kindle book was $9.00 cheaper than the paperback, after the cost of shipping. This year I purchased an ebook when we were on vacation. I had lots of time to read, but there was not a library where we were staying, and I wanted to read the book before we left (it was about the history of banana plantations... not something that would be as interesting when I got home).

Buying books can get complicated when there are so many resources available. However, when we buy the right books from the right place (or get them for FREE from the right place), spending can be cut to almost nothing. And books sure provide a great return on an investment of almost nothing!

Til next time, 
-Bethany

Today I'm going to calculate the ROI and hourly wage of using a clothesline to dry clothes. 

Potential Savings

Each clothes dryer is different, so your energy savings will probably differ from mine. In addition, the price of electricity and propane also goes up and down and differs according to region, so do your own calculations for "official" savings of line-drying as opposed to using a clothes dryer.

Here is a good online calculator to help you figure out how much money you spend per load of machine-dried clothing.

For simplicity's sake, I'm going to say that we save $0.50 per load of laundry that gets line-dried. Your yearly savings will depend on how many loads you do per week. On average, Hubs and I do about two loads of laundry every week.

1 load/wk: $0.50 ($26.00/yr)
2 loads: $1.00 ($52.00)
3 loads: $1.50 ($78.00)
4 loads: $2.00 ($104.00)
5 loads: $2.50 ($130.00)
6 loads: $3.00 ($156.00)
7 loads: $3.50 ($182.00)
8 loads: $4.00 ($208.00)
9 loads: $4.50 ($234.00)
10 loads: $5.00 ($260.00)

Hourly Wage

Obviously, the time it takes to hang out a load of pants will be much less than a load of socks. So, let's do some different calculations. I'm going to guess at how long each type of load takes to hang out.

Load of pants: $0.50 x 12 (5 minute sessions) = $6.00/hr.
Load of shirts: $0.50 x 6 (10 minute sessions) = $3.00/hr.
Load of socks & underwear: $0.50 x 3 (20 minute sessions) = $1.50/hr.

Hmm... for the most part, this activity falls below my coverline $4.00/hr. "housewife wage". That means that I'm only going to do it when I have the time, or when it's convenient (for example, when it is not raining). I know some people who hang laundry outside during the winter, but keep in mind that because of the cold, it will take even longer. Which means even less than $3.00 per hour. There's no way I'm willing to freeze for that hourly wage. So my personal yearly savings (at two loads per week) is probably less than $25.00 per year. This could be doubled if I line dried indoors, but I'm not that ambitious for a savings of only $4.00 per month.

Return On Investment

If you want to start line drying, all you will need to buy is a clothesline and clothespins. Many people already have a clothesline in their backyard, but those who don't can hang a clothesline on their porch or even indoors. I know a girl who ran a clothesline indoors almost the entire length of her double-wide trailer. The line and clothespins will last for years if you're careful, but do eventually wear out. My ROI, therefore, will be for six loads per week, over the course of five years (estimated life of the clothespins & rope).

Investment: 100 pk. of clothespins ($2.00) + clothesline rope ($10.00) = $12.00
Return: $156 per year x 5 years = $780.00

ROI: 6500%

Conclusion

​I think line drying is great for a sunny, summer day. The good news is that line drying requires no special skill. Any eight-year-old child can hang laundry. Line drying is also better for your clothes and will help them last longer.

Line drying is also a very cheap way to save a lot of money. With a $12.00 investment, you have the potential to save hundreds of dollars.

That being said, there are probably better ways to save money if you are short on time. 

Til next time,
-Bethany

Making your own yogurt is a great way to stretch those food dollars. It doesn't take special tools or skills, plus it is something healthy that you can make every week. Making yogurt is as easy as stirring and boiling water. You can read my tutorial here. 

Finding The Savings
How much money is there to be saved by making yogurt? As always, it depends on how much yogurt you go through, as well as how much you pay for milk. We tend to use about two quarts of yogurt per week, and the milk is free because I get it from my goat. At Walmart, I would pay about $2.67 per quart.

($2.67 x 2 qts = $5.34) - $0.58 (cost for a small container of yogurt to use as "starter culture) = $4.76 weekly savings for Bethany

Let's say I make theoretically make yogurt 50 weeks out of the year (exclude two weeks for vacation).

$4.76 x 50 = $238.00 yearly savings for Bethany

For the People Without Goats
I know that most people don't have access to free milk, so in that case is making yogurt still economical? Let's do the math.

$0.58 starter + ($2.00/gal. divided by 2 = $1.00) = $1.58 (divided by 2 qts. = $0.79/qt.)

$2.67 (store bought qt.) - $0.79 (homemade quart) =  $1.88 potential savings for every quart.

So, depending on how much yogurt your family goes through, you could be saving:

1 quart = $1.88/wk ($94.00/yr)
2 quarts = $3.76/wk ($188.00/yr)
3 quarts = $5.64/wk ($282.00/yr)
4 quarts = $7.52/wk ($376.00/yr)
5 quarts = $9.40/wk ($470.00/yr)
6 quarts = $11.28/wk ($564.00/yr)

Hourly Wage
It takes about 15 minutes of actual hands-on work to make yogurt. As I said before, that work involves heating milk, stirring in yogurt starter, and dumping the mixture into a yogurt container to incubate. If you don't have a yogurt maker, you will have to use the "mason jars-in-a-cooler-with-hot-water" method, which may take 30 minutes.

Hourly wage with yogurt maker (2 quarts): $3.76 x 4 (15 minute increments) = $15.04
Hourly wage without yogurt maker (2 quarts): $3.76 x 2 (30 minute increments) = $7. 52

However, keep in mind that it takes just as long to heat and cool a whole gallon of milk as it does to do a half-gallon, if you are using mason jars. With this in mind:

Hourly wage without yogurt maker (4 quarts):  $7.52 x 3 (30 minute increments) = $15.04

ROI of Making Yogurt
In my case, I got my yogurt maker and milk for free, so the only "investment" is the $0.58 yogurt starter.

$5.31 worth of yogurt = 915% ROI for Bethany

For everyone else making four quarts per week without a yogurt maker:

$0.79/qt. x 4 qts = $3.16 investment
$10.68 worth of yogurt = 338% ROI

Some Side Notes: One serving of flavored yogurt from the store contains more sugar than a chocolate chip cookie. I'm not kidding! However, this is to our advantage if we use store bought yogurt as a starter culture. I find that those 18 grams of sugar spread out over two quarts of yogurt gives just enough sweetness so that I can eat my homemade yogurt without adding sugar or honey or maple syrup. This too, saves money.

Some of you may be wondering how to use up a whole gallon of yogurt every week. Some people use yogurt to soak fresh-ground flours and grains with. We eat it for breakfast with granola or in smoothies. Yogurt can also be used as a condiment or in dips and dressings. Last night I used it as a spread on Greek-style lamb sandwiches. Speaking of Greek, you can make your own Greek yogurt by using a cheesecloth to strain out the whey. Greek yogurt can be strained even longer to make a kind of "yogurt cheese", which can be used to replace cream cheese in recipes.

Lastly, the price of milk fluctuates all the time. This is important to keep track of. If milk is $3.00 per gallon, your cost to make yogurt is going to be $1.00 per quart. If you can buy yogurt for $2.00/qt., or on sale for even cheaper, it may not be worth your time to make it. At the time of this writing, I believe it is still very much worth your time. But circumstances change, so keep an eye out. I've always wondered why Amy Dacyczyn (author of The Tightwad Gazette) recommended powdered milk when it is actually cheaper to buy real milk. Recently, while reading her books, I discovered that her cost per gallon of milk in the early 1990s was $2.19-$2.59. Earlier this year- 25 years later- you could get a gallon of milk for $1.89. Crazy!!!
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Til next time,
-Bethany

Just this week, we brought home a road-kill deer. Between the tenderloins and one ham, we were able to harvest 14 lbs. of meat. For free! Even with limited freezer space, I was still able to keep it. Thanks to... our handy-dandy pressure canner. :)

I LOVE LOVE LOVE the pressure canner. It allows me to make cheap bulk dried beans into ready-to-eat canned beans. It also allows us to keep far more meat in food storage than we would be able to, otherwise. I'm not a huge fan of pressure canning vegetables*, but that option is open as well.

Note: I didn't include the cost of canning jars, rings and lids in this analysis. I assume that if you're ready to attempt pressure canning, you've been water bath canning and already have a stockpile of jars/supplies.

Potential Savings:

Canned meat: The main cost savings with canned meat has to do with energy; you don't have to run a second freezer to store all of your stockpiled bargain/free meat. A vague (and probably too conservative) guess at energy costs for our old freezer is $6.00 per month.

Therefore, our yearly savings for canning meat = $72.00 per freezer of meat. 

A bonus of canning meat is that it comes out of the jar already cooked. This energy savings cancels out the energy cost of pressure canning.

Another bonus? If you pressure can bone-in meat (I use free chicken), your jar will have gelatin-rich broth in it, as well as the meat. This is perfect for making soup with. A lot of people mess around with either 1) making broth every week in a crockpot, or 2) making a ginormous pot once a month and freezing it in quart-size freezer bags. If you are one of these people, not only do you have a more crowded freezer, but you've also got to pay for all of those plastic bags and deal with any that bust open. If you freeze broth in glass jars, no doubt you've lost some due to breakage (caused by the expanding liquid). All this can be avoided if you making bone broth by pressure canning.

Canned beans: let's say an average can of navy beans costs $1.00 and holds two cups of cooked beans.

I buy my beans in bulk for $0.79/lb. One pound of dry beans= 2 1/3 cup. There is only 2/3 cup of dried beans in a can of store-bought beans, which means that my home-canned beans only cost about $0.23 per can. Add $0.05 per jar for a canning lid (I use mine at least twice before throwing them away), and the home canned beans cost $0.28 per can, for a cost savings of $0.72 per can.

If we used one pint jar ("can") of beans per week, the yearly savings for canned beans = $37.44. The more beans you eat, the more savings. But I'm just doing calculations for the two of us.

A beany bonus: some people cook a ton of beans in the crock pot, and then freeze them in plastic bags. In addition to using up freezer space and wasting plastic baggies, frozen beans have to be thawed before you can use them. Canned beans only have to be soaked and canned, and then they are ready to eat... forever. No freezer burn. No cooking, no freezing, no thawing, no re-washing plastic freezer bags.

Total yearly canned meat & beans savings: $109.44

Investing in a Pressure Canner & ROI
I bought our pressure canner from Walmart with some leftover wedding money. It is a Presto 16-quart aluminum pressure canner, and still costs only $69.97. As you can see, it will pay itself off in less than a year.

ROI after 1 year of use: $109.44 savings - $69.97 investment = $39.47 NET savings = 56% ROI
After 2 years: $148.91 net savings = 213% ROI
After 3 years: $258.35 = 369% ROI
After 4 years: $367.79 = 525% ROI
After 5 years: $477.23 = 682% ROI

It's hard to determine the exact ROI on this one, because it really depends how much and how long you use the pressure canner. A large family who cans for many years will save THOUSANDS of dollars by purchasing a pressure canner. But even a small family like ours will save enough in just one year to justify the cost. In my opinion, everyone should buy and learn how to use a pressure canner.

Last Words
What are you missing out on by not having or using a pressure canner? It may cause you to turn down fantastic deals because you don't have enough freezer space or can't eat a large amount of ___ before it goes bad. Pressure canning makes it possible to buy in bulk, even for a small family like ours. Instead of paying $2.00/lb. for chicken, I can pay $0.50/lb at Gordons. Health nuts can grow their own chickens. My point though, is that learning how to use a pressure canner will open up SO many more areas of saving. You will save more money on food by buying in bulk, you'll save $$ by not using disposable 2- or 3- use freezer bags, you'll save energy by not using the freezer, and you'll spend less time cooking and cleaning up after cooking. It's a win, win, win. 

We have one refrigerator/freezer combo, and one upright chest freezer to store all of the fruits & veggies that I grow, plus meats and farmers market ingredients. I use pressure canning as my "overflow" method for dealing with meats that don't fit in the freezer. Our freezer space is precious, and I really don't have the time or space to be freezing beans, broth, leftovers, crock-pot meals etc., so pressure canning is the perfect solution for those things. Unlike plastic baggies, canning jars are easy to wash and can be used for years- possibly a lifetime, if you're careful.

One of my goals in life is to save time, space, money and energy. Pressure canning does all of these things, and in some cases, produces a superior product to that which is frozen (tough meats come out of the jar tender, with no gristle). Sometimes I wonder if people would even bother freezing meat and beans if they knew how easy and cheap it was to can them.

-Bethany

*I'm not a fan of pressure canning veggies, because the high temperatures produced during pressure canning can destroy vitamins. Minerals, on the other hand, will stay intact regardless of heat (to the best of my knowledge). Therefore, I freeze any produce with high vitamin content, and can things like meat & beans. 

Welcome to the Friday ROI! If you click on the "Finance" tab in the top left hand corner, you'll see that I've added a page called "Investing". No, I'm giving advice on the stock market! What I will be talking about is different ways that we can invest small amounts of time and money, and the size of return on those small investments.

Last summer at the farmers market, I set up every week next to a vegetable gardener I called "Rhubarb Man". He was full of stories from the good old days, garden shenanigans and tips. During the fall he sold a lot of garlic, and happened to be giving out free tips on how to grow your own. Of course he gave this information to every customer that bought garlic, so the idea of growing some started to grow on ME!

Growing Some Garlic
I ended up buying four bulbs from him to plant in my own garden. There were still a few 4x4' spots that did not have raised lasagna beds yet, so I decided that I would put my garlic there over the winter. It took about 10 minutes to work the soil a little bit, and 20 minutes to plant all four bulbs (about 30-40 cloves). I put a small cattle panel over the spot so that I'd remember where my garlic patch was.

This March, the weather finally warmed up and my little garlic cloves began to sprout. I counted 35 sprouts. If each of these sprouts grow into a bulb of garlic, what will be the return on my $2.00 investment?

Calculating the Return on Investment
4 bulbs @ $0.50 per bulb = $2.00, + 0.5 hrs of my time @ $4.00/hr. = $2.00
Total investment = $4.00

35 bulbs @ $0.50 per bulb = $17.50 - $4.00 investment = $13.50

Therefore the return on my $4.00 was almost 338%.

Hourly Wage
You can also look at growing garlic from the standpoint of an hourly wage. 

35 bulbs @ $0.50 per bulb = $17.50
$17.50 - monetary investment of $2.00 = $15.50
$15.50 x 2 (30 minute sessions) = $31.00 per hour

Conclusion
I've come to the conclusion that growing garlic is well worth the time and money involved. Either way you look at it- $31.00 per hour or a 338% return- there's no denying that this is something many more housewives should be doing.

In addition to being incredibly easy and a small time commitment, garlic is super healthy for you. Use it to flavor food OR in herbal concoctions to help fight infection. One of the reasons I planted so much is that I'll be using it for my animals as well as for Hubs and I.

Here's to growing great garlic!
​-Bethany