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We have just about run out of the stuff we put up from last year's garden. I had to go to the grocery store. Little Sis was so funny, gasping in shock when I actually bought vegetables.
This year's goal is to put up enough garden produce to last from harvest this year to harvest next year. We were oh-so-close-but-not-quite with what we put up last fall.
Somewhere I have a list of what and how much I planted last year. I plan to at least double everything, and maybe triple the green beans.
Oh, and guess who is now gainfully employed? Yep! I gots da job! It's a great job at a great place - working outside, getting dirty, and having fun. (That's all I'm gonna say out of respect for my employer, who, by the way, is awesome!)
Now the challenges: to get the garden in, to keep decent meals on the table, keep up with homeschooling, and get enough rest. Oh yeah, and laundry...lots of laundry.
I'm open for some new crockpot recipes. Anyone??
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
Lehman's...
...is amazing!
And who knew...we are less than an hour from the store!! I had no idea we were so close!! Ack! I can feel the envy!!
We were there yesterday for at least four hours, including lunch. The place is so much bigger, and modern, than I had expected. I guess I was thinking small country store. Wow, was I ever wrong! I thought we'd looked at everything, but once we got home we realized we forgot to go back to this or that section for a second look, so of course we'll have to head back for another trip.
There are a lot of neat shops in the area, as well. We visited a nice antique shop right across the street and a bulk foods store just down the road. Just behind Lehman's is another row of shops we plan to hit next time.
Little Sis was transfixed by the rows and rows of Amish buggies. Sure, we see one now and then drive right past our house, but we'd never seen so many in one place. They were all next door to Lehman's at the auction building (livestock, judging by the smell).
Did you know Lehman's also has their own brand of soda? Little Sis was thrilled to get a bottle of that plus some 'penny' candy, and then a bit more candy from the bulk food store. Add all that to perusing Lehman's awesome toy section and she had the time of her life. She can't wait to go back!
We were there yesterday for at least four hours, including lunch. The place is so much bigger, and modern, than I had expected. I guess I was thinking small country store. Wow, was I ever wrong! I thought we'd looked at everything, but once we got home we realized we forgot to go back to this or that section for a second look, so of course we'll have to head back for another trip.
There are a lot of neat shops in the area, as well. We visited a nice antique shop right across the street and a bulk foods store just down the road. Just behind Lehman's is another row of shops we plan to hit next time.
Little Sis was transfixed by the rows and rows of Amish buggies. Sure, we see one now and then drive right past our house, but we'd never seen so many in one place. They were all next door to Lehman's at the auction building (livestock, judging by the smell).
Did you know Lehman's also has their own brand of soda? Little Sis was thrilled to get a bottle of that plus some 'penny' candy, and then a bit more candy from the bulk food store. Add all that to perusing Lehman's awesome toy section and she had the time of her life. She can't wait to go back!
DH says if you have any interest in wood carving or quality hand tools, take a napkin, and thank the people walking by not to step on your tongue.
Here's what I bought:
It's a Roma Food Mill. I got the accessory package, plus extra gaskets. I can't wait to use it. I have a friend that has something similar, and she put up 80 quarts of tomato juice in one day, all by herself.
Now if the weather would just warm up so I can get the garden in!
Monday, March 16, 2009
Hubby's taking me shopping!
My wonderful, dear, sweet husband is planning to take me on an all day shopping extravaganza! Can you guess where?
Not to the mall...
I'd rather be hauling firewood
...to buy new clothes
up hill
...which I would have to try on
in the snow
...or to shop for swimwear
make that a full fledged blizzard
...which I would have to try on
while being chased by rabid coyotes
Nope!! We are going to Lehman's!!! We are planning to spend most of the day (or more) browsing and picking up a few things that we need. We'll even have lunch at Lehman's own cafe. I'm so excited!!
Not to the mall...
I'd rather be hauling firewood
...to buy new clothes
up hill
...which I would have to try on
in the snow
...or to shop for swimwear
make that a full fledged blizzard
...which I would have to try on
while being chased by rabid coyotes
Nope!! We are going to Lehman's!!! We are planning to spend most of the day (or more) browsing and picking up a few things that we need. We'll even have lunch at Lehman's own cafe. I'm so excited!!
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Another step toward the goal of self-sufficiency
We just got an incubator!! **does happy chick hatching dance** Complete with automatic egg turner. Can I get a 'woot woot'? ;)
The plan is to hatch our own chicks to raise for meat, as well as restock our layers as needed. We'll be loading the incubator this weekend, and, with any luck, in 21 days we'll have some peeps.
The incubator purchase is one thing now checked off our homesteading list. Next is about a zillion more canning jars.
Enough blogging. Back to work! ;)
The plan is to hatch our own chicks to raise for meat, as well as restock our layers as needed. We'll be loading the incubator this weekend, and, with any luck, in 21 days we'll have some peeps.
The incubator purchase is one thing now checked off our homesteading list. Next is about a zillion more canning jars.
Enough blogging. Back to work! ;)
Sunday, March 8, 2009
The Peepers are Peeping!
I heard a few peeping Friday night. Then a few more last night.
Soon, they will be deafening.
I can't wait!
We all have spring fever so badly! We have had highs in the 60's, the daffodils are coming up, as well as the invasive wild garlic mustard. But even that is a welcome sight after such a tough winter.
Today we are doing some outside cleaning up, wading through several inches of muck and mud. I'll take mud over snow right now, thanks. ;)
We're plotting the garden today, as well. Wooohooo!!
Easy as bean soup
This soup is a favorite in my house. It's a bit like the Campbell's bean with bacon soup. I use a one gallon crock pot, start the soup before bed, and it's ready by lunchtime the following day. I don't soak or boil the beans, just rinse and add them to the pot.
NOTE: Do NOT try this with kidney beans!! Please read here about kidney beans.
Ingredients:
I always make a fresh batch of homemade bread to go with the soup. Recipe is here. To make the herb bread pictured here, just mix 1/4 cup olive oil with the herbs of your choice. I used about a tsp of rosemary and a tsp of basil, plus a dash of onion powder. When you have the bread dough ready for the second rising, just brush this on and sprinkle with a dash of kosher salt. Let rise and bake.
This is a very frugal meal. I can't remember exactly how much I paid for the dried beans. It was $1.29 or $1.79, so I'll round it to $2.00 for all of the soup ingredients. It would cost a bit more if I had to buy canned tomatoes, but the point of growing our own is to save money and have better quality. I know I could do this even cheaper if I grew and dried the beans, but we are all HUGE green bean fans, so none of the beans we grow last long enough to be dried.
With a one gallon pot, you get 16 8oz servings of soup. That's about 13 cents per serving. The bread costs about 89 cents for two loaves (one batch of dough). Two loaves easily divide into 16 servings, which brings the total cost of soup and bread to about 19 cents per serving.
A meal for less than 20 cents per serving? Frugal!! Woot!
Before you even ask, I don't add in the cost of electricity to cook the meal. No matter what we eat, I'd most likely have to cook it, so it's the ingredients that really add up. I do plan to try making this on the wood stove in a cast iron pot, but not as an overnight thing.
NOTE: Do NOT try this with kidney beans!! Please read here about kidney beans.
Ingredients:
- Canned tomatoes (I use one quart of home canned tomatoes)
- 2-4 cups of dried NORTHERN and/or PINTO beans (use the lesser amount if you prefer your soup extra soupy, the greater amount if you prefer it beany; we prefer beany)
- 1 tablespoon vinegar
- Salt, onion powder, garlic powder, chili powder, red pepper flakes (these are all to taste, but I recommend at least one Tbs of chili powder to start with.)
- Rinse beans
- Add all ingredients to crock pot
- Add water till crock pot is full
- Cover, cook on HIGH at least 12 hours or until beans are very tender (this is what it takes in my crock pot, but if you have a newer one it may work faster)
- I usually add more water to this after several hours as the beans soak it up.
I always make a fresh batch of homemade bread to go with the soup. Recipe is here. To make the herb bread pictured here, just mix 1/4 cup olive oil with the herbs of your choice. I used about a tsp of rosemary and a tsp of basil, plus a dash of onion powder. When you have the bread dough ready for the second rising, just brush this on and sprinkle with a dash of kosher salt. Let rise and bake.
This is a very frugal meal. I can't remember exactly how much I paid for the dried beans. It was $1.29 or $1.79, so I'll round it to $2.00 for all of the soup ingredients. It would cost a bit more if I had to buy canned tomatoes, but the point of growing our own is to save money and have better quality. I know I could do this even cheaper if I grew and dried the beans, but we are all HUGE green bean fans, so none of the beans we grow last long enough to be dried.
With a one gallon pot, you get 16 8oz servings of soup. That's about 13 cents per serving. The bread costs about 89 cents for two loaves (one batch of dough). Two loaves easily divide into 16 servings, which brings the total cost of soup and bread to about 19 cents per serving.
A meal for less than 20 cents per serving? Frugal!! Woot!
Before you even ask, I don't add in the cost of electricity to cook the meal. No matter what we eat, I'd most likely have to cook it, so it's the ingredients that really add up. I do plan to try making this on the wood stove in a cast iron pot, but not as an overnight thing.
Welcome to Puppet Theater!
Our granddaughter adores puppet shows. Eol got her hooked, and now every time she sees him, she expects a puppet show. Usually, he hides behind a sheet hung between two chairs and brings her stuffed animals to life. He has a talent for that. Even the grown ups love to watch his puppet shows.
Granddaughter just had a birthday, and we thought the best gift for her would be a puppet theater. We looked at the ones available online...yikes they were expensive! So we decided to build one, but it had to be stable enough to keep from tipping over if the little sibling pulled on it, and lightweight enough so that no one would get hurt if it did tip over, and not too expensive.
We considered building one out of pvc. In fact, we were at the hardware store to get pvc when we came across this:
It cost around $14, saved a lot of time compared to the pvc plans, and is even on wheels. Big Sis put it together in about five minutes. Then Eol added this:
Sorry that pic is blurry. It's basically two pvc connectors (one on each side; only one is pictured) and one piece of pvc pipe cut to fit the width of the garment rack. The connectors slide over the side posts of the garment rack to hold the pvc pipe; they rest just about halfway up the rack on the adjustment screws that were part of the rack. In the pic of the rack, that's right about the top of the black side poles. This cross bar forms the top of the curtain that hides the puppeteer.
I had a bit of this lovely purple velvety fabric that someone had given me, which turned out to be exactly the amount I needed to make the curtains. The lace was also something I had on hand. The whole puppet theater ended up costing less than $16, a little time (mostly sewing), and a lot of love.
We bought her some puppets to go with it since I never got around to making any. She LOVED it, and immediately demanded a puppet show. ;)
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Harbinger of spring
Guess what I saw today!!
Three of them!! Turkey vultures!!
Oh yes, spring is here!!
**does happy springtime dance**
Someone tell the peepers it's time to start peepin'!
(pics from enature.com)
Monday, March 2, 2009
Making laundry soap
Homemade laundry soap is now all the rage, so I thought I'd give it a shot. I haven't had much luck with store bought laundry detergents. We have hard water, and we get our clothes very dirty; it seems only the expensive stuff works, or the inexpensive stuff with a ton of add-ins, which still makes it expensive.
I found this recipe online, but I tweaked it a bit to compensate for our hard water by increasing the borax. Here's what I used:
A clean five gallon bucket
One cup borax
One cup washing soda
One bar Fels Naptha soap
I chopped up the soap with my ulu instead of grating it as recommended in the recipe. The plus with the ulu is that you can use it as a scoop and it's much easier to clean.
I dissolved the chopped soap in a saucepan of hot water. I just put it on the wood stove and stirred it occasionally until it was melted.
In the meantime, I dissolved the borax and washing soda in some hot water in the five gallon bucket. Once the soap was melted, I added that and then topped it off with more hot water to reach the five gallon mark.
And this is what it looks like the following day. Sort of a goopy mess.
The instructions at the Duggar site suggest mixing this in a gallon container, half concentrate mixture and half water. I skipped this step and just use it right out of this container. I use 1/4 cup concentrate (as opposed to 1/2 cup diluted) for each load of laundry.
A few notes on the detergent:
Fels Naptha soap: $1.29
Box of borax: $3.99 - 76 oz; one cup weighs 9 oz, so one cup costs about 47 cents
Box of washing soda: $2.99 - 55 oz; one cup weighs 11 oz, so one cup costs about 60 cents
Total: $2.36
Price per load (using 1/4 cup of the concentrate per load): $ .007 per load. Or, ten loads for 7 cents.
Less than a penny a load. Not bad at all. The least expensive detergent I've bought was six cents per load, and it didn't clean very well. Doing what we do, we get our clothes extremely dirty, so even if I have to use double the detergent, it's still a great deal.
I am curious to see if the concentrate will get moldy. We don't have chlorinated water, so if it does mold, the next batch will get 8 drops of Clorox bleach per gallon of water.
Fels Naptha does contain, according to wikipedia, mineral spirits. Probably why it works so well on stains. I don't think it's any more of an irritant than regular laundry detergent ingredients, but you won't see me washing my hands with either. However, you can make this same recipe with other soaps.
Another note on Fels: Although the soap is recommended for poison ivy contact, don't use it for that. It's a very strong soap, and it's not necessary to use something so irritating to remove urushiol. Any soap will do; it's water that's important. Here's a handy link for poison ivy info.
ETA: I'm having a blogaversary giveaway: three bars of Fels-Naptha soap. Drawing to be held Oct 31, 2009.
I found this recipe online, but I tweaked it a bit to compensate for our hard water by increasing the borax. Here's what I used:
A clean five gallon bucket
One cup borax
One cup washing soda
One bar Fels Naptha soap
I chopped up the soap with my ulu instead of grating it as recommended in the recipe. The plus with the ulu is that you can use it as a scoop and it's much easier to clean.
I dissolved the chopped soap in a saucepan of hot water. I just put it on the wood stove and stirred it occasionally until it was melted.
In the meantime, I dissolved the borax and washing soda in some hot water in the five gallon bucket. Once the soap was melted, I added that and then topped it off with more hot water to reach the five gallon mark.
And this is what it looks like the following day. Sort of a goopy mess.
The instructions at the Duggar site suggest mixing this in a gallon container, half concentrate mixture and half water. I skipped this step and just use it right out of this container. I use 1/4 cup concentrate (as opposed to 1/2 cup diluted) for each load of laundry.
A few notes on the detergent:
- It doesn't suds up at all, but it works great.
- A five gallon bucket of water weighs 40 pounds, so if you can't lift that, be sure to put the bucket where you want it to be and carry the water to the bucket in smaller portions.
- A five gallon bucket of mixture, using 1/4 cup per load, will yield about 320 loads.
- Fels Naptha smells really strong as it melts; be sure to have adequate ventilation.
Fels Naptha soap: $1.29
Box of borax: $3.99 - 76 oz; one cup weighs 9 oz, so one cup costs about 47 cents
Box of washing soda: $2.99 - 55 oz; one cup weighs 11 oz, so one cup costs about 60 cents
Total: $2.36
Price per load (using 1/4 cup of the concentrate per load): $ .007 per load. Or, ten loads for 7 cents.
Less than a penny a load. Not bad at all. The least expensive detergent I've bought was six cents per load, and it didn't clean very well. Doing what we do, we get our clothes extremely dirty, so even if I have to use double the detergent, it's still a great deal.
I am curious to see if the concentrate will get moldy. We don't have chlorinated water, so if it does mold, the next batch will get 8 drops of Clorox bleach per gallon of water.
Fels Naptha does contain, according to wikipedia, mineral spirits. Probably why it works so well on stains. I don't think it's any more of an irritant than regular laundry detergent ingredients, but you won't see me washing my hands with either. However, you can make this same recipe with other soaps.
Another note on Fels: Although the soap is recommended for poison ivy contact, don't use it for that. It's a very strong soap, and it's not necessary to use something so irritating to remove urushiol. Any soap will do; it's water that's important. Here's a handy link for poison ivy info.
ETA: I'm having a blogaversary giveaway: three bars of Fels-Naptha soap. Drawing to be held Oct 31, 2009.
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