Home Life

http://tipnut.com/35-reusable-grocery-bags-totes-free-patterns/

Grocery bags, all purpose carry bags, produce bags…  My favorite are #1 and #2 so far.

I thought I’d share some of our recent and upcoming projects!  I know I’ve been pretty pathetic at blogging lately, so here are some projects to keep you busy until my next post

Homemade Peanut Butter

Make ‘Puffed Rice’ and What you can do with puffed rice

How to make essential oils & Another technique that most of us can use at home

Make Yogurt in a crockpot, Buttermilk, Cottage Cheese, Cream Cheese

Yummy oatmeal recipes

Cake mixes, seasoning packets, muffin mix, this mix and that mix.

The money you spend on these mix packages and packets are simply this: convienience.  Mixes are simply pre-measured ingredients.  Can you measure what are typically every day ingredients, herbs and spices?  Cut your costs and make your own mixes.  They store well in the fridge or pantry, or use a FoodSaver to help them keep even longer! Once you know you have a mix you like the taste of, make up a huge batch so you don’t run out any time soon.  I love saving glass jars from storebought items we buy or others have bought and saved the jars for us, and these jars get washed and ready for use storing food just like mixes, or homemade yogurt, flour and more! 

What are your favorite mix recipes?  Do you have a healthy buttermilk baking mix?  How about stew seasoning?  Cake mix?  Muffin mix? 

I’ll post some of mine tonight or tomorrow.

Instead of chilling a warm meal in your fridge, or using your freezer to actually FREEZE something, use your porch when the temps are right.  You can give your fridge and freezer a break by adding already chilled or frozen items to it.  When we had the nice cold weather I cooked up a bunch of meals for my freezer.  I made 1.5 gallons of chicken stock today which is currently chilling on my back porch (I’ll end up canning/freezing it tomorrow depending on how I divide it up).  Tomorrow I’ll be making about the same in turkey and rabbit stock.

It’s live!  Finally!  I’ve gotten around to creating a resource website on the things my family and I do to ‘work with the land’ and save money.  It’s no where near done - I have a ton of articles I am still working on but felt I had enough content to put the site up.

http://www.motherhoodnaturally.com/homestead/home.htm is the link.  Bookmark it and check back often.  As I go through my day I keep getting reminded of things that might be helpful to add to there, so I add it to my list and when I have a few minutes to write it up, I will!

Let me know what you think!

Thanks to Candy and her blog I found a super easy yogurt recipe using a crockpot.  I tried it last night and had creamy yogurt this morning. 

I’ve tried to make yogurt three times already and failed each time.  I wanted an organic, healthy milk in my yogurt but the brand I kept picking was ultra-pasturized.  A big no no for yogurt making (I didn’t even realise this until last night when I took a good look at the milk container… My husband was already out so I asked him to pick me up a non-ultra-pasturized whole milk)

You’ll need 8 cups of milk and 1/4c whole milk, plain quality yogurt (I visited Maureen at Health Matters for my yogurt).  Once you have your first batch of homemade yogurt, you can use 1/2c of your own starter for your next batch.

Pour 8 cups of milk into your slow cooker.  Cook on low 2.5 hrs.  Turn the crockpot off and let it sit, covered, for 3 hours.

Mix in your yogurt starter, cover the crockpot, insulate with some heavy towels on top and let sit overnight.  By morning you’ll have yogurt!

You can make your own mixins with fruit, granola and anything else you like in your yogurt.  Yum!

With the rising cost of milk it pays to buy in bulk when it’s on sale. You can stick your milk in a freezer.

We have been doing this and don’t notice a difference in taste or consistency.  Some people say the milk seperates a little and never goes back the way it originally was.  I don’t notice that, but than again as our milk is thawing in the fridge and turns into a milky slush, my family drinks it up right away.  So I don’t think we’ve ever had milk thaw completely…

I take out about 1.5 cups of milk before freezing, for expansion, and milk can be good for around 3 months.  We stock our deep freezer every once in a while to keep it full!

Holidays are approaching!  Something home made, from the heart, can make for a very special gift for loved ones.  You can create thoughtful, useful, and memorable gifts usually for much less than what you’d pay for something in the store, too.  This can help keep your holiday spending budget under control.  Also, keep in mind that the holidays are not the only time you can make homemade gifts!  Birthdays and anniversaries count, too!

If you do a search online, you’ll come up with a TON of home made gift ideas.  Here are a few to get you started:

• Kitchen accessories for the ladies in your life.  Tube-shaped grocery bag holders, placemats, silverwear holders, cute dish towel racks, etc.
• Home-canned jams, jellies, preserves, salsa
• Create a “homecare” basket with home-made cleaning solutions, soaps, detergent and write up a booklet full of other cleaning recipes and nontoxic cleaning ideas.
• Sew clothing or accessories (bags, purses, decorate belts, etc.)
• Home-made household notebooks, pregnancy journals, “baby’s first year” or “school year” scrapbooks for the young and school aged children (made for their parents to write in, of course).  Many free forms and templates are available online, or you can create your own.
• For the kids: bake up some home-made dough threading items, big beads for threading, puzzles and geometric shapes.  Create a felt board or a flannel board (view my personal blog to see how I did it) complete with a set of felt or flannel board peices.  Sew up cloth diapers for a new baby in your life.  Dollhouses, dollhouse accessories, wooden trucks and a toolset (created out of tools you no longer need) can make nice age-appropriete gifts, also. 
• Mason jar mixes: dry cookie and soup mixes make for nice, easy gifts.

Make a list of the people you need to shop for.  Then list their interests, wants or needs.  Then search for gifts you think they’d enjoy!

What have you done, or plan to do?

When you learn the art of meal planning, you may very well notice your money is better spent, you spend less, you throw away less food, have less stress over what to cook, and don’t have to make multiple trips to the store during the week to get ingredients for a meal you want to make.

So how is it done?  In a variety of ways!

You can try “once a month cooking” where you spend a day or a weekend cooking a months worth of meals, then freezing them.  This works well if you have a lot of freezer space and the time to actually cook so many meals.  This cuts out the need to cook, and takes care of using all of your fresh produce within days of purchasing.  You can also do smaller batches - cooking for a week or two weeks, or just spending a day cooking whatever you can fit in, throw food in the freezer and have it available for a night that you can’t cook (just heat the food up and eat).

Another option is actually planning every meal (some people plan every breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for a week, two weeks or an entire month. Then go shopping, store food as needed to make it last as long as it’s needed, and not have to worry about the question most of us wake up with “whats for dinner?”

My personal plan works like this (and feel free to share your own!).  I keep a master list of the meals my family likes.  On thsi master list is the name of the dish, the book/pg number I found it from, and the ingredients needed.  I typically plan two weeks of meals in advance, in synch with my husbands paychecks.  I am slowly working on re-writing all of these recipes into my personal cookbook so I don’t need to dig out cookbooks for recipes, I’d just turn to my own cookbook filled with the recipes my family knows and enjoys.

Generally, I pick 14 dinner ideas and about 7 lunch ideas.  I do not plan meals for each day, but pick what sounds best for that day, or go by what ingredients need to be used first before they go bad.  Usually, leftovers are eaten for lunch the next day so I don’t usually plan a lot of lunches.  Breakfasts are pretty simple - oven pancakes made with whatever fruit I buy, oatmeal, a mix of fruit and toast, or whatever we have on hand to make a healthy breakfast.  I don’t plan these, but I do typically buy the same fruits, when in season, so I know what will last and what is used best in breakfasts.  I will also usually get some lunchmeat of some sort so we can eat a sandwich if needed, and I always pick up salad fixings.  There are certain things I don’t plan into meal planning, but I know we’ll eat and they wont’ be a waste of money.  Now, if I try a new recipe, obviously that DOES get planned so I make sure I have the ingredients on hand and I make note of what meal if might compliment best, if it’s a side dish or something. Certain staples, such as bread that I make at home, I find myself checking ingredients before I shop, and if I dont’ have two weeks worth of ingredients on hand I will buy more. 

When I make my shopping list, I have all of the ingredients i”ll need for a particular meal on the master list.  I combine all of these ingredients into a shopping list.  On my list are usual items I have to buy over and over again - milk, butter, eggs.  I keep a checklist of ingredients to check on - do I have enough sugar, flours and other pantry items to last through my meal planning and snacks?

Then, it’s time to go shopping.  I gather the kids and myself (and if I’m lucky, my husband too) and we hit 3-5 stores depending upon store deals, if I use coupons (rarely, considering most of my purchases are for produce or meats), and what I normally find at the best price.  I also like hitting the farmers markets most for locally grown produce, for whatever isn’t growing in my garden.

Then when I get home, I store everything as needed.  If I’ve bought grapes or strawberries, I wash them and store them in a container.  I like to cut up a certain amount of veggies to have as snacks.  I’ll usually go raid my garden now too, figuring I might as well while i’m packaging food. 

This year and next I expect to do a lot of experimenting with new foods, as my husband will be hunting rabbit, duck, goose and deer.  I’m also hoping to buy a side of organic beef to have on hand.  I’d love to stock my deep freezer with meat to last an entire year and just cut that expense right off our grocery bill.  We still have some venison steaks and ground venison and a few ducks in my freezer that I am going to get some recipes for.  But I’m hoping my husband will get lucky enough this year to fill our deep freezer with a decent amount of meat.

While horses make for great friends and ‘team mates’ they can also serve a useful function on the homestead.  Most commonly they make enjoyable work of checking fence lines, chasing cattle, and helping with harvesting, even in some types of construction (pulling heavy items around).  For others, some homesteads make horses a prime source of income through boarding, breeding, instruction, training and/or other services (however, horses can cost a lot to keep, and combined with loans, insurance, and other expenses you will have when owning your own facility, it may not be realistic to rely on horses as a source of actual income) For most types work, horses (and especially their handlers) have to actually be trained to perform and help out around the farm - trying to get a horse to pull a wagon when he’s never done it is asking for a disaster.

Horses are my favorite animal.  I spent 13 years of my life with them, and during all 13 years I had one main horse who was my buddy through thick and thin.  When I became pregnant with my second child about two years ago I had to leave the horse scene, as I was leasing a barn and doing all of the care of the animals and barn myself.  When complications came on during the pregnancy, I could not afford to have someone take care of everything for me, so I had to make the hard decision to duck out for a while.  I found it odd, considering when I was pregnant with my first, I worked through the entire pregnancy mananging a barn of 25 horses (yep, mucking stalls, stacking/throwing hay, turnout of 25 horses and bringing them back in again, riding, lots of hard work!), training, and instructing riders.  During the last month or two of pregnancy, I started leasing another facility, and went back to work full time in my business with baby in tow two weeks postpartum (riding instruction, training, and barn work).  Considering I kept up the pace after birth of my first I never thought I’d have problems while pregnant with my second, but I did. 

Anyway - enough about me.  During those years I learned a lot about the work animals horses truley can be.  For many, horses are a pleasure animal.  Something to ride, show, love and care for.  For others, they are a work animal.  Either on the farm, on the homestead, or out in other area’s of life that horses can be in.

They are expensive to keep, but being the frugal person I am, I learned a lot of ways to cut down on their cost.  Though every barn I was at didn’t have tons of pasture, if you do, you can dramatically reduce the amount of grain/hay your horse gets (and this can turn into huge savings).  With enough quality pasture, your horse can live trough the warm months on that alone.  Just be sure to keep up on your deworming schedule!  You’ll also want to rotate pasture to avoid one from being eaten down too much or being destroyed in wet weather Cows and horses can go together (and horses and goats, or just about any animal).  Horses don’t tend to eat the grass close to their manure, but cows will, so by combining the two you can avoid missed pasture :-) 

Horses generally love to be outdoors as much as possible, even overnight.  If you have the facility to do so, and the horse is comfortable with it, leave your horse outdoors year round!  He will grow a thick coat, store fat, and adapt for the cold weather if allowed to do so naturally.  For a horse that isn’t going to be worked much over the winter, a blanket is not necessary.

If you have to give your horse grain, look to your local grain mill to mix the feed for you.  I found that by buying grain in bulk, you save a lot of money.  Hay can be very expensive also… Many homesteaders will grow their own hay and sell off any extra.  If ths is not an option, again consider buying in bulk, or find a local supplier that you might be able to barter with.  Learn to vaccinate your horses on your own if you feel comfortable, and deworm your horses yourself.  Try to coordinate your farrier visits with other local farms that might use the same farrier and ask if the farrier would be willing to cut a discount on the barn call (or see about trailering/riding your horse over to another farm to meet the farrier there).  For a horse that is not ridden regularly or who is ridden on good soil, generally a trim is all he’ll need.

The best tip I can tell you about frugal horse care, no matter if your horse is a pleasure animal or work animal: take good care of them, feed quality hay/grain, and keep up on their regular care and maintenance.  If you try to cut corners in these areas (like feeding a poor quality hay or grain to save a few bucks) you will certainly have more expensive problems crop up later.  Most problems in horses can be avoided by quality care and good nutrition.  Trying to increase the amount of time betweetn farrier visits, deworming, vaccines, floatings, etc. can lead to more problems down the road.  Try to establish a good relationship with your vet and farrier, and make a list of questions for them each time they’re out so you can increase your knowledge, learn new things, and be able to take better care of your horses!

That isn’t all the frugal ideas I have, but it’s all I have for today.  I scratched my eye yesterday while out at the air show, and I am legally blind without my contacts which I can’t wear right now…  I’m getting a really bad neck cramp scrunching over to see the computer monitor, so I’ll leave off here.

If you use your horse on the homestead, what is his or her use?  What frugal ideas can you share on horse keeping?