Frugal Families Blog

It’s quiet around our small suburban homestead. The chickens are not laying right now, Gladys is still moulting and Maybell is broody yet again. These hot days are hard on them as well as the rest of us. Meanwhile Gladys is starting to show signs of becoming normal again, whatever normal is for a chicken. She is asking to be let out so she can roam around, take a leisurely dust bath and chase moths. I need the stress relief that comes from watching them flit from one end of the yard to other searching for bugs and the perfect bath wallow.

There is a new hawk in town, he’s let everyone know he’s here and in a big way. I hear him call in the evenings, while watching the smaller birds scatter into the cedars and the bushes. I’d let Gladys out for a walkabout one evening this week while I was out watering. I checked the trees and the sky, even though I coaxed her out with the fishnet, she seemed very happy to be out. I went back to watering while she dustbathed by the swing, which is what saved her life! I heard a whoosh and then something hit the canopy of the swing! When I could finally look, I had closed my eyes, I saw Gladys furled out like a feather duster, growling and hissing in the general direction of the dead cottonwood tree outside our fence. There he sat. She jumped up and ran over to me, squawking and complaining the whole way until she was up against my feet. I walked over to the window so I could peck on the glass to get Gene to come out and help guard against further attacks, as soon as he got out the hawk flew off. Meanwhile, Gladys and I walked very quickly over to the henhouse, all the while keeping our eyes peeled for another attack!  Have to say though, Gladys outweighs him by about a pound and a half, but he could have done some real damage.

There’s a coolness in the air, even though the temperature is over 95 most days. I hope it’s an indication that cooler weather is on it’s way, but I’m not going to wish the days away. There is a purpose to each season I believe so wishing for something else is wasting time, at least for me. I am looking forward to a good fall, the bright colors, cooler temps, fall crops and EGGS! Do you hear me chickens! I want EGGS!

We love picking our own fruits.  It generally cheaper because the farm owner isn’t passing on the cost of labor to you, the buyer.  I’ve heard of PYO (Pick-Your-Own) farms that also offer PYO tomatoes, eggplants, beans, etc. but had yet to find them in CT.

Well, I want to put you onto a GREAT site that focuses on the pick-your-own movement.

http://www.pickyourown.org/index.htm

This site has a search feature that allows you to find PYO farms in specific states and then provides great tutorials on canning, freezing and preserving your harvest.  There is information on canning supplies, too.

I’ve used this site before but never realized there was a great search feature.  Just today, I’ve discovered several farms within 30 minutes that have PYO vegetable picking.  I won’t be able to grow enough tomatoes this year for our needs and PYO is a great resource.  I just never realized we had PYO vegetable farms in this area!

The scores says it all.  I have once again had my efforts thwarted by a creature smaller than my seed potatoes!  Last year, I planted in tradition troughs and covered the seed potatoes.  It was pretty successful early in the season when I periodically went out and filched out a few potatoes for dinner.  Later, when I went to harvest my final haul, I was shocked to discover almost every remaining potato had been dined on by voles.

This year, I decided to make my life a bit easier in terms of soil management by doing the lazy bed method.  I basically placed my cut seed potato on the ground and covered with straw.    My smaller raised beds made the trough method more difficult and this made filching a few for a meal, easier.

Apparently, this method makes it easier for voles, too!  Today, when I moved aside the straw, I found a vast network of vole trails.  There wasn’t a single potato to be found!  The only potatoes I obtained this year was from my garbage-pail-potato experiment.  The barrel method works great for so  many people but I was still determined to plant in the ‘normal’ method.  I guess I have to keep the potatoes entirely out of the ground here, or I’ll never enjoy a homegrown potato.

So, this has led me to ponder next year’s potato season already.  I had placed my seed potato filled garbage pail between my two vertical beds.  There is adequate spacing there and neither climber-filled fence shaded the barrel.  I’ve decided that I could easily fit three to four garbage cans in that walkway.  On the other hand, I’ve also thought on having my husband create four square, wooden planters  or two rectangular planters for that area.  Seeing as he doesn’t want to give up more lawn for my gardening, this would maximize my current space nicely.

I do hope this idea works because honestly, 3 strikes and I might be out of the potato game!

I can’t believe it’s nearly the end of July already!  My apologies for no updating before this.  We moved Frugal-families to a new server and I’ve been busy with the spring planting season, the baseball season and now the camping and canning season!   I’m actually sitting on my frugally redecorated deck, enjoying the cool evening air and eating fresh blueberry pie and thinking that I really HAVE TO update everyone.  Maybe I should share the fresh blueberry pie recipe, too?

The garden is growing nicely.  The unseasonably warm spring meant a quick end to the cool weather loving sugar snap peas.  I was a bit disappointed in the spring harvest but I’ll put my hopes in a cool but long fall to make up for my lack of early harvest. My lettuces suffered the same fate.

I lost raspberry blossoms to the late frost we got.  The plants blossomed early because of the warm temps and they suffered serious damage with the freezing temps despite my efforts to cover and protect them.   On the flip side, the fall harvest of berries is already coming in almost two months ahead of last year!

I worked really hard at rotating my crops this year based on crop rotation charts I have in seen in two hardening books I have and in an issue of Mother Earth News.   I’m sure this is good for the soil and the plants but I’m not really seeing the benefits yet in term of plant growth and development.  In some cases, I’m realizing that some plants really hate being where they are.  My peppers aren’t flourishing in the front part of the vertical beds and the summer variety squashes aren’t happy in the bed they’re in.  Rotating so many beds wasn’t easy, either.  I can see rotating specific crops in just half the beds and the other crops in the other half for the sake of my sanity.

The tomato crop is doing considerably better than last year’s plants.  We were slammed with the blight last year due to the cool, wet conditions.  I also sprayed with a fungicide this year as a bit more insurance.  I was careful to pull up any wintered over potatoes from the garden, too.  Living tissue (as in wintered over potatoes) will host the blight and recontaminate your garden if you’re not careful.  I recently noticed small holes in the lower leaves of many of my tomatoes resembling a shotgun hit.  A bit of research lead me to discover that I have flea beetles.  They punch a small 1 to 2 mm hole in the leaf and then move onto another fresh bit of leaf.  They are literally the size of a pin-head and jump like fleas.  The articles I read said that they don’t cause too much stress/damage to mature, healthy plants so I’ll hand-pick them as I see them and make sure I keep the plants healthy.  There is no way I’ll use the sprays that were recommended to kill them as they’ll wipe out good, beneficial bugs in the process.

Oh, I experimented with two new methods of potato planting this year.  One area got the lazy-bed method and I planted some seed potatoes in a barrel.  Voles have done a decent job of decimating the lazy bed method plants along the same lines as the trough planted potatoes last year.  The barrel harvest was good but the only issue was keeping the soil wet enough.  The soil dried out too quickly in hot weather and the plants died before the harvest was mature.  My husband mentioned that the barrel method also allowed us the luxury of utilizing the walkway space between the vertical bed and gave me extra space in the raised beds for other crops.  This was a good experiment for us this year.

I’m honestly getting a bit tired now.  You’ll have to come back and read up on another day for my fresh blueberry pie recipe.  I promise I’ll post it and my no-fail pie crust.

I’ve had some good fortune this planting season! Last year I saved off seeds from both my dill and celery. I needed both for pickles and to provide seed for this year’s planting. Well, my saved dill seed fell victim to an accident this winter when someone accidentally dumped the little paper bag and then vacuumed up the seeds to clean up his mess. My celery seed didn’t fall victim like that but instead fell victim to me when I missed an early spring weather forecast and the seedlings froze overnight in the mini-greenhouse! Yes, it had been that cold that night that frost formed on the seedlings!

I had saved off one mature heirloom celery plant from last year in a bucket in the house over the winter.  Celery is a biannual so it will produce seed every TWO years.  Parsley and carrot do the same.  I had obtained last year’s seeds from a wintered over plant, as well.  I’m working so hard at NOT having to buy plants and save off my seeds for my next year’s plantings that I decided I would forgo the purchasing and just live without.  I would also get a bit of celery off my saved plant until it had to put off energy to seed.

Well, Divine Providence has smiled on me!  I have found self-seeded dill growing in the garden!  I guess this isn’t as much of a surprise as I thought because with a little research I found out that dill LOVES to self-seed.  I have found it in a few, less than ideal areas, so I might attempt a transplant but it’s still an excellent find!

I had honestly given up on the celery until I was weeding out the Egyptian walking onion patch this morning! As I began to pull weeds, I noticed familiar, small leaves.  Looking carefully, I found celery seedlings poking up, miniature replicas of their parents!  I couldn’t believe my Good Fortune!  I weeded carefully, trying to give my seedlings the room and sun they needed to develop.  I also found at least three seedlings that I felt could handle transplanting to the other bed where they wouldn’t have competition from the onions.  I honestly don’t think I could have grown better seedlings myself.

Here is a picture of my baby celery!

The seedling next to the mature 2nd year plant:

I have learned a good lesson here, too.  I’ve been aggressively weeding out these areas all along.  I wonder what poor, little, innocent self-seeded additions were weeded out by me in the early spring.   I’ll have to look more carefully next spring and maybe be a little less energetic with my efforts until I see what has planted itself in my garden.

Fathers Day is coming up and I know everyone wants to impress that man in their life with a new gas grill or a night out on the town but not everyone can afford it and not everyone wants to afford it if they have other financial goals. So what to do for that special man in your life? Here are some of my ideas….

1. Steak night at your house or even group up with some neighbors and family and have a special night for all the Dads.
2. My husband is a gardener so a gardening hat, gloves, shovels, etc…. are always appreciated by him.
3. Remember some fishing supplies for the fisherman in your life can be deeply appreciated and by shopping at discount stores you don’t have to break the bank.
4. Make your honey a homemade hot pack with some fabric and rice and just put instructions to microwave it for 2 minutes or so.
5. If your husband, Dad, or Grandad or just the man in your life is a reader find out what his reading list is and look for some of his favorite titles on PaperBack Swap, Half.com, Amazon.com or even Ebay.
6. Go for a hike if he’s an outdoorsman and make him a pack filled with a stainless steel water bottle, granola bars, dried fruit and maybe even a walking stick or bug spray.
7. A bug zapper is always cool even though its not so frugal.
8. Wood chips to smoke fish, pork, chicken, and steak on the grill.
9. Homemade pickles or jellies
10. Make your man in your life his favorite dessert!

Enjoy your Fathers Day!

Known also as Egyptian walking onions, walking onions are a great everyday kitchen onion.

I got my first walking onion from a friend of my dad. I didn’t know a thing about them! I had never grown an onion in my life but I had chives and figured I had nothing to lose in giving these a try.

What makes them walk? If you look carefully at the top of these mature onions, you’ll see a paper husk and inside is the start of the next plant.

The paper will split open and reveal a growing green stem that you can eat live a green onion or you can let it grow and a bulb type growth will begin at the end of it. As the ‘bulb’ matures, the weight of it will pull the stem down to the ground. Small roots will begin to come out from each part of the bulb (it looks similar to a garlic bulb with multiple cloves-the roots protrude from each clove) and the bulb will root itself in the soil. The bulb generally ‘walks’ about a foot from the original plant. You can very gently pry the bulb apart and plant each clove where you want a future onion to develop. I do this so I can space out the onions.

You can eat the bottom of the mature onions. They don’t bulb out but remind me more of a large scallion or leek type bulb. It’s not too strong an onion flavor, either. I’ve harvested them right up until Christmas here in CT (I put a mulch layer over the top of them to keep the soil from freezing up too much). They were the first plants to put out new growth this past March. You can also eat the new green growth much like a chive or green onion but once the green stems get too thick, they become too tough.

Like I mentioned before, these are not overly strong onions. I absolutely love using them in a recipe I have for zucchini pickles. They were also good in a quick salsa I made one afternoon. The best thing really is the fact that once you get them going, you’ll have a continuous supply for the everyday kitchen needs simply by allowing a few of the bulbs to mature so you can plant them for next year’s needs. My onion braid from last year is long gone and I’m easily three months away from harvesting new red or yellow onions from my garden. The walking onions easily fill the gap and our needs.

My husband and I had some nice plans for our deck this summer. Having fully funded the emergency fund, we had decided to save a bit of money and buy new chairs, fire pit and other things for our deck. We had a great deck built almost 9 years ago, but with a growing family and the financial demands of that family, we never really did all we wanted with it. Well, our old van finally reached the point of no return and we ended up finding a gently used van and paying cash for it. We are debt free except for the house and want to keep it that way.

So, with the emergency fund a bit low, we put the deck do-over on the back burner.

I was NOT enjoying our deck. The plastic chairs were covered in mildew and nothing beckoned me out there to enjoy it. I desperately wanted a place for us to go and sit and relax. I wanted a place to sit with my computer or a book and enjoy the cool evening air and listen to the birds, crickets and other sounds of nature that we have here. It also wasn’t a great place to entertain although there was space for entertaining. It didn’t beckon anyone out there.

So, this morning I was whining to my forum friends about how empty the deck looked after we took off the old picnic table and how I wanted to BUY stuff for it so badly. Then I had an epiphany! I started thinking about all those TV makeover shows and designing on the cheap shows. The Sunday morning landscaping shows all came back to me in a rush! I was going to clean, scrub and re-purpose a bunch of stuff and make my deck the escape I craved!!!!!

My first step: I took a diluted solution of bleach and water and a short, stiff bristled brush on a long handle and scrubbed down the decking. I let it sit for about 15 minutes and then rinsed it off thoroughly.

Next: How to clean the black mildew spots off of the plastic chairs? A Magic Eraser worked wonders but it also took off serious color! I opted for a gentle paste of baking soda and water and a bit of elbow grease. It took me about 30 minutes to scrub off the black mildew. Here is a before picture of the chairs.

Once the chairs were cleaned and in the sun drying, I began to walk around through the house and yard with an eye towards using anything and everything to create focal points for the deck. We had a tree come down in a windstorm a few weeks ago. My husband had cut it up for firewood and the boys have had fun removing the bark from the logs and taking the logs for “chairs” into their fort. Well, once the bark is off the logs, the wood is kind of pretty! I grabbed a few of the denuded logs and put them on the deck.

Then I spotted the steel base to our old chiminea (it had crumbled after a few winters). I don’t know why I kept it but it made me wonder how I could reuse it. I put it up on the deck with the other items I was acquiring. I figured I’d put all of the stuff I thought I could use up with the chairs and once I had acquired all I could, I’d get to work.

I wanted a fire. Okay, well, I wanted fire light. I started thinking the chiminea base with a patio stone placed on top might make a safe, solid base on which I could place various candles. I started rounding up a collection of old jelly jars and empty Yankee candles jars I had. Then I braved two garter snakes and a bunch of BIG, REALLY BIG spiders to retrieve a patio tile from the pile given to us when our old neighbors moved. REALLY BIG SPIDER!!!!! EEKS!!!!

We had a pretty pair of sunflower tables we had been given as wedding presents many years ago. They were also covered in black mildew and they were growing lichens on them! I took a baking soda paste to those as well! They still have a distressed look to them but being that the “distressed” look is in, I’m all set!

I have some nice rail planters. They needed to be emptied and new, good soil put in. That was just time consuming but no biggy. What I was going to lack was flowers for them. I also had a deck planter that was one of those plastic, terra cotta colored types that had gone way too many winters. It was cracking on the edge and looking beyond sad. I wasn’t sure I’d use it at all.

I also found a nice, gold colored galvanized bucket in the garage. My husband was using it to wash the cars. I had another purpose for it! He has plenty of plastic buckets. The metal one was mine! WOOHOO!!!

So, then I started pulling it together. First, I put the chairs into a pleasing circle on the upper deck. I then positioned the au natural logs between them along with the distressed sunflower tables. I took a stiff scrub brush to the patio tile and place the square tile on top of the round chiminea base. I arranged my candle and jar collection on top of the patio tile. You can see one of the logs in the background. You can put your feet up on them or set a drink on them.

During the process of scrubbing, hunting down items and battling woman eating spiders, I decided to buy flowers. I set my budget at $100 for anything (including flowers) that I might buy for this project. As I drove to the greenhouse, I decided to revise my budget and go for $50. Honestly, I haven’t bought flowers in ages, choosing to spend our money on food type plantings vs ornamental plantings so I had no clue as to how much they would be, but I figured I’d make do.

Once at the greenhouse, I figured out that I’d get more bang for my buck going for younger, smaller plants vs larger, more established plants. That said, I decided to split the difference opting to buy one, larger more established plant for each planter to give myself some instant size and then I’d intermingle smaller plants in as well. I also spotted some totally fantastic romaine and loose leaf lettuces in reds and freckles of red and green! My desire to spend money on edibles vs ornamentals made me think that I could intermingle the tall red romaines in with the flowers for color! I ended up spending my $50 budget on a mix of beautifully colored lettuces and young (cheaper) flowers and a few older (more expensive) flowers.

Here is one of the planters. Note the tall red and green romaines in the back. There is also a smaller, loose leaf type lettuce in the front in a green with red freckles.

Once the boys got home, they were eager to help! We decided to ‘dress up’ the ugly, cracked pot with a wrap of bark the boys had taken off the logs. I would have loved to use jute twine but the boys had recently used up my supply making their fort. LOL! I settled on the white cord, but my husband said he had some copper wire in the garage that would look better so we’ll end up using that and taking off the cord soon. But, here is how it looks. Kind of funky and natural looking! Note the edibles landscaping in the pot again!

Okay, well, this next planter was Ben’s idea! He’s my middle son. He managed to get the bark off of one log in one complete piece! He asked if we could use it as a planter. Well, I had a small terra cotta pot that sat in the top of the bark beautifully! We filled it with a lettuce mix and it looks great!

Here is the car wash bucket turned planter! The gerber daisy was one of the more expensive plants but it will get bigger and taller and bloom all summer and I planted some of the freckled lettuce along with some thyme. The thyme is out of my seedlings and will eventually flow over the edge of the bucket (and I can harvest it for cooking).

Here is the cleaned and distressed sunflower tables:

Here is the finished product!

So, here I sit, typing this blog entry on my $50 do-over deck and loving every minute of it!!! I’m watching my hummingbirds chase each other and enjoy the feeder. There is a nesting pair of fly catchers flitting around and chasing bugs in the col evening air. A woodpecker is beating the bugs out of a dead branch in the big white oak in the back. How that nuthatch can hang upside down and move up and down the tree is beyond me. The crickets are chirping merrily along.

THIS is the way I always envisioned myself enjoying my deck. That I found this much pleasure for $50 and some elbow grease and creativity makes me enjoy it all the more.

Okay, I love asparagus!  It wasn’t always that way but now I’m hooked on those tender spring jewels from the ground!

I’ve been wanting to create an asparagus bed for two years  now, but the physical size of the bed kept forcing me to put it off.  Asparagus send out a tap root that can go as deep as 6 feet down!  If you plant heirloom varieties of asparagus, you have to plant them at least 12″ to 14″ deep and it’s recommended that the bed be at least 4 feet to 5 feet deep.  You can plant hybrid varieties less deep, but you still need the deep bed.

In case you’ve missed some of my past pictures, you might have forgotten that we live on some pretty rocky and clay type soil.  The only thing I grow easily seems to be boulders.

So, this was our rock pile with the bed only 2 feet down.  This, by far, has been the most physically demanding bed that I’ve built.  I continued to be motivated by the fact that if I did this bed properly, it would last for the next 25 years, which is how long you can expect a properly maintained bed to produce.

So, I kept digging.  And digging.  And.  Digging…

At about 4 feet, I had to stop.  I had hit a horrible layer that was beyond hope.  I settled for getting my extra foot of bed depth by building a foot high retaining wall around the majority of the hole.  The hill is sloped upward, so I didn’t have to build up the rear of the bed.

Then began the process of building a high quality soil for the asparagus.  You know you’re a country girl when your dad brings you a truck load of well-rotted horse manure for your birthday and you thank him profusely and grin ear to ear!  LOL!  I began layering manure, bagged garden soil (we had a large supply  from a landscaping company that went out of business and cleared their palettes of soil for very, very cheap), and then shoveling in the excavated clay-type dirt.  I would then climb into the hole, turn over the three layers and begin the process again.

Eight layers and five hours of back-breaking labor later…

I smelled nicely of manure, sweat and lemon-eucalyptus mosquito repellent.

AND I had a very nice, 5 foot deep asparagus bed!  WOO HOO!!!!!

Let me tell you about the variety of asparagus I chose.  I had done some research and read this great book:

If you’re a cold weather area gardener, especially a New England gardener, this book is for you! The author lives in VT and it’s great to read techniques and recommendations that are so easily applicable to my area.

Anyways, he talked about an all-male hybrid developed out of Rutgers called Jersey Knights. You only harvest the male stalks of asparagus, letting the smaller female stalks develop. Well, knowing that I had a limited planting space and couldn’t necessarily afford to lose too many stalks to females, I opted for the hybrid variety. I bought one-year old roots. I won’t be able to harvest for two more years but they were the only roots available to me in my area with special ordering.

I got my roots in before the afternoon thunderstorm moved in. I’m now awaiting for the first signs of green to come up. I planted them about in a trench about 6″ deep (remember, you don’t have to plant the hybrid varieties as deep). As the green comes up, you gently fill in the trench allowing the greens to continue to grow until you covered it the entire 6″

I can definitely say that the harder you work on something, the more satisfying it is when the job is completed. Knowing that this bed will be productive for years and years to come is also satisfying. It IS hard to be patient. I have to wait two more years before I can enjoy a harvest of tender, succulent asparagus but the wait will be worth it!

We’ve had the same auto and home insurance companies for quite a few years.  No claims, no accidents, no problems.  We’re getting more mature and so aren’t the vehicles so you’d think the cost would be going down, right?  WRONG!  Understandably, the cost to replace our home has gone up so the rising cost of homeowners insurance is understandable but we couldn’t comprehend the increasing auto insurance cost.

We decided to go shopping.

Talk about eye-opening and shocking!!!  We got four estimates from reputable companies.  Of the four, two of them came in considerably less.  The other two didn’t write the camper insurance the same way and it wouldn’t have been a savings for us.  But, of the other two, we ended up going with the insurance company my husband works for.  Previously, they wrote auto insurance in a different way so that we just couldn’t afford it but that has changed.

Just to demonstrate the savings:  Our previous auto insurance was costing us $720 every six months or $1,440/year.  The new insurance rate will only be $433 every six months or $866/ year.  That’s a savings  of $574 every year!!!  That’s no small chunk of change!

I brought this up with the forum members here and was surprised to learn that this happens a lot.  Insurance companies get you on board and then continue to raise rates regardless of your age, cars, and driving record.  You’re almost forced to shop around every few years to insure you’re getting the most bang for your buck.

When was the last time you reviewed what you’re paying for insurance, cell-phone contracts, cable, internet and telephone suppliers?  It certainly pays to review this stuff!