First Volunteers of the Year and Other News

Spring is not quite here and already volunteers through the WWOOF program are beating down our doors.  So far we have three young people scheduled to join us in March.  I was a bit hesitant to take them on so early in the year, thinking that it's really not the best time to teach much about what we do here.  But I decided I would just give them fair warning about weather, and the lack of many growing things, and take whatever volunteer help still wanted to show up.

What I've learned about the WWOOF program is that I have to be on my game when volunteers turn up.  I do more work when they're here than otherwise, and not just because it's much like having house guests.  I want to keep them busy for the agreed upon half-day of work, sure.  There's no sense accepting volunteers and not making good use of the help.  But I also feel a sense of responsibility to teach these volunteers.  Maybe they don't expect as much as that, but I can't help myself.  And in order to teach, I have to be out there, showing, talking, demonstrating.  Projects have to be ready to tackle.  And in order to do that, well, I've got to do my homework.

Such as ordering some new hens.  You see, in the last month an egg eating habit has developed in the hen house.  This is a bad habit, one of the worst that hens can have, from my perspective.  I'm not sentimental about my hens.  I value them and treat them well, but they're not pets.  They're here to provide us with eggs to eat and to barter, and to produce manure and help control insect pests.  When they eat their own eggs, they're not adding value.  I don't know how the habit developed, but I've seen evidence of at least five eggs eaten this month.  I don't know if it's one hen doing all the damage or if they've all learned that eggs are good to eat.  To me, it's immaterial.  Repercussions will be positively Old Testament; punishment will be meted out collectively.  So this batch of hens is going as soon as I can replace them with new layers.

Which brings me back to the volunteers showing up early next week.  One of the young men we'll be hosting specifically wanted to learn about chickens, and another about slaughtering.  I didn't think we'd be able to accommodate the second interest, since our layers are still relatively young.  But a bad case of egg eating changes things.  So I think we'll not only be slaughtering, and processing chickens, but also pressure canning some tough birds and making chicken stock too.  Good things for strapping young lads to know, I'd say.

If we get another run of bad weather, there will be minor DIY projects for the garden to pursue in the garage, and bread baking in the kitchen.  Otherwise, we'll start the early spring tasks in the garden.  I've also ordered a couple slabs of pork belly from one of my farmers, to turn into bacon.  So I'll be able to teach a bit about curing while the lads are here. Somehow I suspect that if the guys think canning and bread baking is sissy work, they'll take a different view of makin' bacon.  (And yes, I checked; they're carnivores.)  It's exciting to me too; I've never made bacon at home before.  I know that as WWOOF host sites go, our homestead is not the norm, and so neither are the activities that our volunteers pitch in with.  Most WWOOF hosts are proper farms.  Sometimes I feel a bit apologetic about this, but in the end I think what we have to teach are good, practical skills.

In other news, seed starting has begun.   So far it's just the early stuff indoors, and some experimental frost sowing outdoors.  I've been working on breaking down all the branches pruned from our apple tree early this year.  It finally struck me as absurd that we haul our branches down to the yard waste facility, and then haul back finished compost and mulch.  We'll still go for the free soil building materials, but I've decided not to part with the soil building materials we've got onsite.  So I've been cutting up the very small branches with hand pruners, and spreading the bits all around our fruit trees.  It's a slow job, but it's just nice to be outside for an hour or two this time of year.  And the spring overload hasn't yet begun, so I've got the time.

Okay, final bit of news is a heads up for you readers.  I've ordered a few copies of Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen's book, The Urban Homestead.  I'll be giving away two copies here when the books arrive, but it looks as though I ordered the expanded and revised version, which won't ship out until mid-March.  As soon as the order ships, I'll post a giveaway here.  So check back later for a chance to win a new and improved copy of the book.  In the meantime, you can check out their great urban homesteading blog.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Nothing Much to Say for Myself Lately

It is so obviously springtime here. Even though I've been fairly busy outside, I feel like I have nothing to report. Evidently I'm not alone. Half my blog reading list has gone stealth in the last couple of weeks.

We're still working on hauling away the debris from cutting down three evergreen trees a few weeks ago. Surprising how fast the bed of the beater pickup truck gets full. Plus my husband ripped out a fair sized stand of forsythia to make more room for things that will feed us. All that had to be hauled away as well. Now we're sort of debating which berry to put in that spot. The soil looks none too great.

The comfrey is up and starting to grow rather quickly, and the one I moved under the apple tree last fall seems just fine. The oregano and thyme evidently made it through the winter, because they are putting out tentative green leaves. What's more surprising, and therefore more exciting, is that the ramps we transplanted last year are coming up. We were sure they hadn't made it. The leaves keeled over and apparently died shortly after transplant. Even the even spacing and location of the leaves didn't convince me. I had to break one off and sniff it. No question that stuff is in the garlic-onion family! So now we have a few ramps poking up. I've never eaten them before, and there are only 8 or 9 of them out there. So fill me in, please. Should I let them just do their thing this year so that there will be more to harvest next year?

Our seed potatoes arrived, and I've started them chitting (pre-sprouting) in a dark, moderately warm spot inside. Also our two cherry and two pear trees, along with our asparagus roots. We don't have the raised beds built yet, don't even have the materials for the beds. So typical of us. This was something I had hoped to get to before the plants showed up. The weekend after this one I have to go pick up my four blueberry bushes from the Extension Office sale.


On top of everything else, the weather has been crazy. It snowed on Wednesday this week when it was 42 F outside. I know; I didn't think that was possible either. But it is. I had to look it up, but it can happen, and it did. About 10 days ago we had hail large enough to destroy the glass on my coldframe. The plan was to do some chipping last Saturday, but it was so windy that the chips simply blew away when they came out of the chipper. And then there's been the odd 63 F day sprinkled in there among all the cold and gray ones. The temperature has fallen below freezing overnight a few times, but never on the nights that it was predicted to. I like spring, but the mercurial weather (no pun intended), I could do without. Since we have clay soil, all the rain we've had is making it very difficult to get an opening to plant. Planting trees (or anything really) in clay soil that's wet is a Bad Idea. The soil gets all compacted and loses what little microbial life was in there.

We've been modifying the design of our chicken coop, a project that has been moving at an agonizingly slow pace. Part of this - but only part of this - delay can be chalked up to the weather again. It was either too cold or too rainy for quite a stretch of time to do any priming or painting. The painting is nearly done now, but we have a much more serious design issue to overcome. I plan to blather on about my mobile coop and pen in a lengthy post, TK. In related but sad news, we heard one of our hens died while at winter camp. I was sort of prepared for this, so I'm not too upset. At least we didn't have to kill her, and she wasn't killed by a predator. Just dead one morning. We'll see how the others are doing just as soon as we get our act together with the chicken digs.

We discovered a huge cement slab in the process of extending our garden. What fun! Too big to move, and right where the potatoes were supposed to occupy long, uncrowded rows so different from last year. Nothing to do about it, couldn't find the bottom of the slab even two feet down. It was going nowhere. I attempted to do a little biochar trial by filling the space all around it with twigs and stuff. You know, for carbon sequestration and soil improvement. Bloody weather once again - the wood was all pretty damp. I'm going to file that one under "nice idea if you happen to have a lot of seasoned twigs lying around."

What else? Oh, yes. I bought some durable row cover and have set out some lettuces. As soon as the cover went up about a thousand volunteer seedlings popped up. I would have ripped them out, or some of them anyway, but they were more or less in areas where the ground cherry volunteered last year. In case you're curious, I'm pretty sure we had "clammy" ground cherries, Physalis heterophylla, and no, that doesn't refer to the texture of the fruit. It refers to the slightly sticky stems. I'm about 80% convinced that that's what these are, so I'm leaving them for now. I have a spot in mind for them where they'll be able to grow year after year, under our new fruit trees. Turns out, the plant will form a rhizome and regrow from that. So, a little more time and we'll know for sure whether that's what we've got.

My garden is probably at its ugliest in early spring.

I pushed my luck again today and planted out a few leeks and shallots. I will probably need to cover them. I just couldn't stand looking at a mostly empty garden anymore, plus I'm running out of room inside for seedlings. By this time last year, I had harvested a small pile of baby Tuscan kale leaves. This year, with a cooler spring, the surviving kale plants are just barely starting to green up.

Other than yardwork, I've been spending my time madly researching forest gardening after watching this amazing video. I don't know why permaculture or forest gardening didn't interest me when I first heard about it. But it's got my full attention now. Which means tons of reading and pondering, and inter-library loan requests of course.

I keep hoping that one of these years we're going to have a spring that isn't insanely busy, one where I don't feel like I'm behind schedule all the time. Just once, I'd like that. Next year, if my husband still has a job, I'm going to lobby for two weeks' vacation in April.

That's all I got.

Tree Slaughter

"And among these, I hold trees dear. Long in the growing, swift shall they be in the felling, and unless they pay toll with fruit upon the bough little mourned in their passing." - J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

We cut down three perfectly sound trees on our little property in the last few days. It made me sad, although it is necessary to make room for the fruit trees we have ordered, and which will no doubt be arriving soon by mail. This is in addition to the large black cherry tree felled late last year, along with an old white lilac and a large snowball bush. Who would have suspected that 2/3 of an acre could hold so many trees and still have room for other full grown trees, a house, detached garage, and a very sizable garden?

Cutting the white pine, a blue spruce and a fir of some sort made me feel a little guilty. It reminded me of the quote above, from Tolkien. Yavanna, a queen of the Valar, has created the plants and trees of Arda, Tolkien's mythical world. She foresees, when her husband creates the dwarves, that her creations will be killed to fuel the industry of metalsmiths. To balance the scales she asks that the Ents be created, tree shepherds, half men and half trees, who will speak on behalf of the trees, and protect the forests from wanton destruction.

Yes, I was conscious of killing a living thing yesterday and today. Something gentle and silent that had done me no harm. Still, we can't eat evergreen trees, and our priority this year is to get fruit trees and berries (elder, black raspberry, and blueberry) in place. Oh, yes, and asparagus beds too, just as soon as we can get to them. We're working on getting closer and closer to feeding ourselves from our little residential lot. With only 2/3 of an acre, sadly, there isn't much room for non-edibles.

My penance will be to tend with care the cherry and pear trees we plant in their places.

I'll be back with cheerier news pretty soon. It is, after all, springtime.

The Candlewax of Frugality

I recall a practitioner of the Wiccan religion once telling me that every religion burdens its believers with something unpleasant that isn't really the point of the religion, just a necessary by product of sorts. She said that for Wiccans, it's dealing with all the candlewax that has to be scraped off of various surfaces after their ceremonies. She said that celibacy would be one equivalent unpleasant thing for unmarried Christians, especially Catholic priests and nuns. That idea always struck me as amusing, but interesting too. Frugality isn't a religion, but it sure has its share of candlewax.


Today I tackled some of the candlewax of frugality; I defrosted the chest freezer we keep in our unheated garage. This was one of those necessary chores that I knew I should be getting to in order to trim our electricity bill. But the task was about as appealing as scraping candlewax off a floor. All summer long I procrastinated, using the warm weather as an excuse. Today the high temperature forecast was for 35 degrees. No excuses there: the contents of the freezer would thaw only very slowly while I cleaned, and make it less urgent for me to work at top speed. I'm still getting over a nasty and very tenacious chest cold, so I'm not really working at 100% lately.

Our chest freezer is about as full as it possibly can be, thanks to our homegrown, hand-pressed apple cider, several quarts of homemade lamb stock, and my inclination to bake a lot during cold weather. While having a freezer full of food is reassuring, and more energy efficient than an empty freezer, it does make it hard to find things in there. It also makes for a lot of work when it's time for the defrost. But the build up of frost on the walls of the chest freezer is quite inefficient, because the freezer has to work harder to keep things cold.

As you can see in the picture above, I had allowed a full inch of ice to build up on certain parts of the freezer walls. The ice was quite unevenly distributed. But from what I've read, you're meant to defrost a freezer when the frost/ice is 1/4" thick. There were parts of the freezer with no ice at all, but clearly the defrosting was overdue.

You know what? Getting through this chore that I had put off for so long was pretty quick once I got started. It took less than an hour from start to finish, and that was with me having to make trips inside for warm water. Isn't that the way of things? It also gave me the chance to re-organize the chest freezer so that things are easier to get to, and I have a better sense of where everything is. While I had the chest freezer empty, I also pulled it away from the wall and dusted off the coil that is part of the cooling system. There wasn't much dust, but keeping that coil free of crud is another way to maximize the efficiency of the appliance.

So, all you chest-freezer-owning frugalites out there, I know I'm no shining example of frugal maintenance. But I'll just point out that winter is really the best time of year to defrost a freezer if you've got one that needs it. Time to get to some of that frugal candlewax. I hope your necessary but unappealing frugal chores turn out to be as unexpectedly easy as mine were today.

Days of Yard Work

We had that ornamental black cherry tree and the sickly mulberry felled about a week ago. Some of you remarked that the total bill of $400 seemed low. That might have been because we didn't ask them to remove any of the wood or even chip it for us. We've been dealing with the scrub ever since. For the record, it takes an awful long time to trim a 40'+ black cherry tree into pieces small enough to dump somewhere in a small enough pile that it will compost, eventually.

We found out that the cherry wood is somewhat valuable for furniture or cabinet making. I have no idea how many board feet we've got, but it would certainly be enough to at least make facing for some kitchen cabinets. Or some furniture. So we're going to hold on to it for now. We figure if we put it somewhere where it will dry down nicely, it'll simply be more valuable in a year or two. Maybe we'll sell it then, or maybe we'll have furniture made for ourselves. In any case, we just need to think about where to stash it for a while.

In other yard news, I finally started ripping out the 23 tomato plants I insanely put in this spring. (Next year, no more than 12!) I've long since stopped eating them myself. But the hens still enjoy the cherry tomatoes especially. I expect hundreds of volunteer tomato plants from the seeds they've pooped out. I gave them so many yesterday that they were getting a little blase about them. They're novelty junkies, those girls. With winter coming, it's been hard lately, finding dandelions or other weeds for them that they especially love. Foraging for their food makes me more aware of the change of seasons. I've been giving them some damaged chard still going strong in the garden. I'll miss the girls, and especially their eggs, after we slaughter them in a few more weeks' time.

Our apples look beautiful. But the tree doesn't want to let them go yet. We've harvested only about two bushels and change so far. I've been eating some of them with my morning oatmeal and with crepes or blini. We get the ladder out every few days and have another go at harvesting them. I had thought that we would be pressing this week. It must be a very late season apple. We had a much warmer October last year, so maybe that hurried them along somewhat. I'm hopeful that with the black cherry tree no longer shading the apple, we'll see more apples, less sooty mold, and maybe even an earlier harvest next year.

Oh, yes. And then there's leaf raking. Plenty of that already, and most of the leaves still on the trees. I remember that last year, when we hosted Thanksgiving, a few family members helped me rake on Wednesday. When everyone showed up on Turkey Day, it was impossible to tell that any raking had been done at all. The lawn was covered in leaves. Glad I'm not hosting this year.

Indoors, I've been removing our homegrown popcorn from the cobs. More on that soon.

Simple Frugality: Do Fewer Dishes

I feel like I've been talking about food, gardening, and harvesting a lot lately. Well, it is August, folks. It's to be expected. Still, I felt it was time to get off that one-note tune for at least a few days.

So here's a tiny frugal tip, with credit to the redoubtable Amy Dacyczyn: Stop doing so many dishes. When my husband isn't traveling, we run the dishwasher a lot. More than twice as often as when he's away on business. I think this is because with more than one person in the house, we're each more likely to clean up after ourselves so as not to leave a messy table for the other. And so, with the dishes promptly put in the dishwasher, it's not so easy to re-use a plate or a glass that is essentially clean after a single use.

So I suggested that we try a rubberband trick. He'd put a red one on his glass, and I'd use blue. That way we could easily distinguish our glasses and have a visual reminder to use our own more than once if it's not dirty. Presto! The dishwasher filled up a little more slowly, so we ran it less often.

Now, I'm sure there are some folks out there who would be scandalized by this re-use of glassware or plates. In a restaurant, I want a clean plate. In my own home, where I know who's touched it, what's been on it, and who ate off of it, I'm pretty laid back. My dishes don't need to be autoclaved between meals. Granted, if it looks dirty, it gets cleaned after the first use. A few crumbs on my plate from my morning toast are no bar to putting my lunch on it, in my book. It's a meal, not invasive surgery.

Anyway, this works for us. It probably saves us $1 or more per week in detergent and hot water. And it costs us nothing but a little more of our attention. If it seems like you're constantly doing dishes, you might give this a try. If you wanted to take it to the next step, you could mark a bowl, plate, cup and mug with different colors of electrical tape for each member of your family. Then each person would be responsible for their own dishes, and could decide how often and when to wash them. Just watch out for someone lazy sneaking uses from the clean freak's personal set!

Putting the Livestock to Work

We love having fresh eggs from our own laying hens. The girls are very easy to care for and the eggs help us keep our grocery bills trimmed. But it occurred to me that I haven't really pointed out the other virtues of the domestic chicken. We use them as workers too.

Chickens love to scratch the earth, looking for tender green shoots, grubs, worms, and insects. They are natural scavengers, and their clawed toes are adapted to help them find these treats they so love. Though we knew this as an abstract fact before we got the hens, we were soon given a more concrete lesson when we started rotating their pen around our lawn. Even when moved every single day, they scratched right through the grass and into the turf, leaving sizable bare patches. So we started letting our grass grow longer before putting them on it. That helped it stand up the abuse from our energetic poultry.

But we soon realized that our girls could be put to work doing what they love to do, for our benefit. So after harvesting my garlic, we positioned their pen over the empty garlic beds. Within two days there was little greenery left in what had been the weedy rows between the different varieties of garlic. In a matter of days, they tore out every weed, scratched up the dirt to make holes for dust bathing, and generally had a great time.

After all the weeds were gone, I made sure they got plenty of extra greens from elsewhere. Like beaten up leaves of chard from the garden, or dandelions. Having hens gives me a good reason to pull dandelions, and makes me see them as assets to be managed, rather than enemies to be exterminated. I'm generally not fond of weeding, but knowing that the girl relish these weeds provides plenty of incentive. I also started pitching a few five-gallon buckets of compost into their pen each morning. The girls tore into this stuff delightedly. I was delighted too. I've composted for many years, but I am a very lazy composter. I don't enjoy turning the pile and rarely get around to that chore. Our girls were more than happy to turn it for me, breaking it down much faster than it would when left to its own devices, and working it into the soil. And at the same time they were adding manure to my garden beds.

In about ten days, our four hens had meticulously prepared a patch of the garden roughly 6'x12', twice the size of their mobile pen. I moved them off the garden and back on to the lawn. Then I followed the "lasagna method" of mulching. I laid down about 3" of free compost from the township yard waste center, covered that with heavy layers of newspaper, and then covered the newspaper with free mulch from the township too. The bed looks wonderful, and it took almost no effort on my part. The chickens enjoyed the change of scenery and the dustbathing.

Now that my squash crop is nearly ready, I am eyeing that larger patch of soil in our large garden bed. If all goes as planned, I will use the girls as before to clear the weeds and scratch up the earth. Then I'll sow a fast-growing fall or winter cover crop and let it grow while the girls work on other patches of the garden, each the exact size and shape of their mobile pen. The cover crop will grow somewhat this year, and continue in the spring. It will use its head start of this year's growth to outcompete any opportunistic spring weeds. As bonuses, the cover crop will: loosen the soil with its roots, add organic material, and feed our chickens in the spring. By putting the girls back on the same plot in the spring, they'll do the harvesting of the crop themselves, save me a few days' of feed, and loosen up the soil one more time before I plant. Having the chickens in the garden means they're working their own manure directly into the soil as well.

I offer this experience and these plans to those of you who might have been curious about keeping chickens. Maybe delicious eggs alone aren't quite enough to convince you to give it a try. Perhaps thinking of the hens as pieces of autonomous garden machinery might tip the balance. In any case, I've been well pleased with the contributions of our hens. They've saved me time and effort in the garden, which I appreciate a great deal. Eggs, manure, weeding, and soil preparation. They pull their weight, that's for sure.

Related Posts:
Going Mobile with a Backyard Flock
In Further Praise of Domestic Poultry
Meat Rabbits On Pasture

A Day in the Life of a Frugal Housewife

Yesterday was a fairly typical day in my frugal life. I get up and tend to our four laying hens first thing every day. While I was out there, I poked around a bit in our large vegetable garden, just to keep an eye on things. I ripped out several handfuls of purslane, an edible groundcover that has volunteered enthusiastically in our garden. I fed that to the chickens as part of their daily dose of green things. (Purslane, as it turns out, contains a higher concentration of omega-3 fatty acids than any other land-based source. All that good stuff passes through our chickens and right in to their eggs, which makes them extra good for us.) Then I came inside for breakfast, which yesterday was a Spanish tortilla of leftover baked potatoes, some spicy garlic-chili sauce, and eggs from our hens. I washed it down with some sun tea, made up in a big batch about once a week. Instead of using a paper napkin, I used one of our cloth napkins that we've had for years. My total cost for this breakfast was probably less than 50 cents.

Then I baked a sheet of focaccia from dough I mixed the day before. It was topped with fresh herbs from our garden. There was a possibility of selling half of it later in the day, but that fell through. If I had sold half the sheet, I would have more than recouped the total cost for all the ingredients, including the herb plants I bought at the farmers' market.

I cleaned up the kitchen and included washing a few ziploc bags as part of the cleanup. I throw out any bag that has held raw meat, but I'll keep the ones that held things like fully cooked hot dogs or cured lunch meats that were in another opened bag inside the ziploc. The to-be-washed bag pile is unending in our home. I only have so many places in the kitchen where they can drip dry, so it's a chore I need to stay on top of.

The sliding glass doors that lead to our porch had been looking kinda grimy. So I cleaned them using a 50-50 mixture of tap water and distilled white vinegar. (I buy the store-brand stuff by the gallon - very cheap.) I used the squeegee that we keep in our shower, and pages torn out of last year's phone book. The pages are just the right size for this chore, and they leave no streaks. Nor do they leave any little paper fibers behind, the way some paper towels will. When I was done with the doors, I cleaned my windshield wipers with the same solution. Then I poured the vinegar and water mixture on our brick walkway where some weeds push up through the gaps. The acidity will kill some of them (non-toxically) and make it harder for others to grow.

After my cleaning chores, I went next door, where my husband had seen someone dumping aluminum cans in a dumpster a few days ago. I spent about 5-10 minutes fishing out about three dozen cans from the mostly empty dumpster. The neighbor won't mind. No one lives there and the owner simply uses the dumpster for scraps from his small construction jobs. He has to pay to have everything hauled away anyway. The aluminum will probably bring me a dollar when I next take aluminum cans to the scrap metal dealer.

I put in a load of laundry to wash with my homemade laundry detergent. Later in the afternoon, I hung the wet clothes to dry slowly on my indoor laundry lines and a wooden drying rack. Total savings over store-bought detergent and using a dryer probably comes to more than $1.

Lunch was a simple sandwich of garden lettuce and aged goat cheese on the focaccia. After lunch I took a break and did some reading on a frugal topic: solar cooking. I thought about some simple things I might try cooking in the parabolic solar cooker I made, the next time we have some reasonably clear weather.

In the afternoon I did some weeding and garden work, mounding up more dirt around the leeks to make them produce a longer white section, and around the potato plants to encourage production of more potatoes. Then I harvested a large batch of lacinato kale for blanching and storing. This was a fairly labor intensive process, but it means clean and healthy green vegetables for us this winter.

After that hot work, I took a shower. I used soap, shampoo, and conditioner picked up by my husband in hotels during his business travel. Since I didn't have to appear especially presentable for the rest of the day, I let my hair air dry instead of styling it. My wet hair helped keep me cool on a warm day too.

For dinner I went to the garden once again. I picked some zucchini blossoms, lettuce, and herbs for our appetizers, and cabbage leaves for our main course. The zucchini flowers were cleaned, stuffed with a mixture of cheese, egg, bread crumbs, garlic and herbs, then dredged in beaten egg and flour and pan-fried. Served on a few lettuce leaves, they looked pretty and tasted great. The shredded cabbage leaves went into a simple risotto, which we enjoyed with glasses of cheap three-buck Chuck Shiraz. Dessert was a small serving of day-old bread pudding made with my homemade bread, powdered milk, and eggs from our hens.

After dinner, it was time to tuck in the girls to keep them safe overnight from predators. They were back in their coop, which I secured tightly.

My last frugal duty of the day is dental hygiene; flossing and brushing thoroughly keep my mouth healthy and help me avoid those avoidable, expensive and painful dental treatments. Health is the first wealth, and looking after one's health is always a frugal pursuit. My ablutions done, I indulged in some escapist reading with a library book.


-So there's a snapshot of my frugal life. There's a good mixture of active, passive, and preventative frugality packed in there. My active frugality included making my own meals, gardening, fishing out those aluminum cans, putting up some frozen vegetables for the winter, and hanging my laundry up to dry. Passive frugality was represented too: I didn't drive anywhere, partly by choosing to prepare meals from what was available rather than dreaming up a dish that would have required going to the store. I didn't doll myself up after my shower as there was no need to. And I avoided using store-bought paper towels or napkins with simple alternatives. Reading library books is also a passive sort of frugality when the alternative would be to pay for books or some other paid form of entertainment. Cleaning my windshield wipers, protecting our hens, and taking care of my health falls under the category of preventative frugality. Killing a few weeds with vinegar could also be considered "frugal" in the sense that it may save me a little weeding time and effort down the line, without much invested effort at all right now.

How do you practice frugality throughout your day?

How to Save a Bundle in the Laundry Room

Frugality is often unglamorous and repetitive. It's thrilling to save hundreds of dollars in one fell swoop with big purchases, such as a car or a chest freezer. The more difficult struggle is to maintain frugal practices in our everyday lives, saving small amounts of money here and there. Though these little efforts and little savings aren't often immediately apparent in our pocketbooks, the cumulative effect overtime can make a huge difference to an annual household budget.

So today I want to focus on the laundry room. I've been doing a lot of laundry lately, and it occurred to me that it might be useful to discuss the several ways I save money when doing this chore. We're fortunate to have a laundry room in the first place, though it's not large by any means. I've heard of many areas where hanging laundry up to dry outside is either expressly forbidden by evil Home Owners' Associations (HOA), or subtly discouraged by neighbors who think a laundry line lowers property values, or else just looked down upon as "trashy." While I think all of these attitudes are ridiculous, I also know there's a very easy alternative: hang your laundry up to dry inside.

First I should mention that a frugal approach to laundry (as with so many other things) requires a little bit more attention, effort, and planning. Since I air dry all my laundry inside the house, I can really only manage one load of laundry per day. We simply don't have the room to air dry more than one load at a time, and it takes at least 12 hours for a load to dry. So it's best if I stay on top of this chore. If a whole lot of laundry somehow piles up, it takes several days to work through it.

Here's what my laundry room looks like:
You can see that there are rubber-coated wire racks on one side, above the washer and dryer. And on the other side I've strung up two short laundry lines, one above the other. At the far end of the room, there's a small gap between the edge of the dryer and the wall, with the shelving overhanging the gap. These wire racks, and laundry lines, along with one folding wooden laundry rack, are where I dry all my laundry. There's a window in the room which I keep open during the summer, but the laundry dries just fine in the winter time too. You may notice that there's a button down shirt hanging in the gap between the wall and the dryer. That fortuitous gap makes it easy to just dry the shirt and then either hang it up or take it to be ironed.

I do use the dryer with each load of laundry, but only when the laundry has fully air dried. I put a load or two at a time in the dryer and run it on the unheated "air fluff" cycle for about 10 minutes. This uses very, very little electricity, and all my laundry gets nicely softened. No scratchy, stiff towels for us! You can see the blue dryer ball on top of the machine. I use this to help soften the laundry during the summer. In winter I will use a fabric softener sheet to control static electricity. These can be used several times each before they are depleted. I calculate that air drying my laundry saves me about 75 cents per load.

Another way I save money in the laundry room is with homemade laundry detergent. Trent at The Simple Dollar has a great tutorial on making your own detergent. It's easy and fun in a science experiment sort of way, and it saves me about $45 per year. Kids would really get a kick out of mixing up a big bucket of this gelatinous slime. Making laundry detergent is especially cheap for us because we get the main ingredient - bar soap - for free. My husband travels very frequently for work and often stays in hotels. He's always bringing home bars of bath soap and little bottles of shampoo. I take a few of these bars and mix up a batch of laundry detergent a couple times per year. I choose unscented bars and then add some essential oils I have on hand for making solid perfumes. So I can decide what our laundry detergent smells like. Usually I choose lavender, but I've also enjoyed a blend of lemongrass and grapefruit.

One blunder I should confess to in the laundry room is that I paid good money for those laundry lines you see on the left side of the room. This was a newbie frugalite error. While the motivation to air dry my laundry was a good one, I wasn't yet in the creative, do-it-yourself-for-less frame of mind that I now inhabit as my natural medium. I paid at least $15 for those two lines, and possibly as much as $20; I really can't say for sure. I reasoned at the time that the savings in electricity would quickly pay for the purchase, and that is correct. I'm sure by now I have recouped the cost of the purchase. But I would never do the same thing today. Instead, I'd just go to the hardware store and buy four sturdy hooks that can screw into wood. Along with a few feet of zip cord the hooks would have done the same job and cost only a few dollars at most. It's true that the fancy store-bought laundry lines can retract into the base units, but I never retract them anyway. Lesson learned: always consider if there's a better and cheaper way to pursue a frugal practice.

You probably can't distinguish the clothespins I use on the wire racks, but they're the old-fashioned wooden kind. These are worthwhile purchases. Under no circumstances should you buy the cheap plastic kind of clothespins. They break easily, turning into junk in a matter of months. The wooden pins will last a lifetime.

Hanging up a load of laundry may sound like a chore, and I'll admit that it takes a little bit more time than moving laundry from the washer to the dryer. But not by much. Because I hang my laundry up right in the laundry room itself, it only takes me about five minutes. It would take longer if I were hanging it up outside. Putting wet laundry into the dryer probably takes the better part of a minute, so the difference in time is only about 4 or 5 minutes, using my method. If I save 75 cents in 5 minutes, that translates into an hourly wage of $9 per hour, tax free. It's not the best hourly wage, but it's not bad. Another way to look at it is that I save about $2.25 per week (doing an average of three loads per week). That's a $117 savings per year, and I only do laundry for one and a half adults. (My husband does some laundry on the road when he travels.) If electricity prices go up - and that's likely - the air drying method remains essentially free.

Another bonus of hanging laundry up to dry is that as I handle each separate item, I notice if there's a stain on a piece of clothing that hasn't come out in the wash. If I were to throw it all in the dryer, not only would I likely miss the stain, but the heat of the dryer would also set some kinds of stains, making them much more difficult to get out later.

I'll close with a frugal laundry room option that I haven't yet tried. I read about it over at Homegrown Evolution. The urban couple writing that blog points out that dryer lint can be used, along with cardboard egg cartons and candle stubs, to make fire-starters. Good for campers and survivalists!