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Frugality
Productive Home Weekly Report: 6/17/17
An attempt to log weekly productive home achievements. Please join in!
Productive Home Weekly Report: 6/10/17
An attempt to log weekly productive home achievements. Please join in!
Productive Home Weekly Report: 5/20/17
An attempt to log weekly productive home achievements. Please join in!
Serendipity Days
Living life is a bit like climbing a giant mature oak tree. We start at the base of the tree, and the entire canopy is spread out above us. Every path is open. As we climb higher, some options shut behind us. Take the left branch and you cannot take the right branch. Oh sure, sometimes you…
Eat From The Larder Challenge 2015
Maybe I didn’t plan very well when I enthusiastically committed to doing another Eat From The Larder Challenge this April. We already had a scheduled a family vacation. Non-negotiable. We already had a scheduled dinner-date with friends. Non-negotiable. We were completely out of butter. Clearly, running out of butter is a dire failure of larder maintenance….
Updated! Seeds For Beginners: Saving, Storing and Organizing Your Vegetable Seeds
This post was originally published January 23, 2012. I’ve slightly updated my own seed storage method (below), and we’ve welcomed a ton of new gardeners to the fold in the last three years, so I thought it was time to revisit seed storage basics. I am getting a lot of questions about seeds right now….
Eat From The Larder Challenge
In February I wrote a post called Food Storage For People Who Don’t Hate Food. Most of the feedback I got on that post was very positive, but a few readers seemed skeptical of my claims that eating from the pantry for six months was reasonable, even if one had the food stored. This floored me…
Three Steps To Reduce Your Consumption
I’m not here to shit on anyone’s Target habit, but I imagine most of my readers agree with me that lowing our overall consumption is a good idea. Consuming less lowers our environmental impact. Less consumption usually means less spending, and most folks like having more money or less debt. At a personal level, many…
Is Growing Your Own Food Worth It?
“Is growing your own food worth it?” When I get asked that question, people are talking about cash-in-hand not harvest-in-hand. They aren’t saying, “Is it worth it to have the very freshest sugar snap peas?” or, “Is it worth it to see your child poke a bean seed in the ground?” because there is, clearly,…
Dear Black Friday Shoppers: Knock It Off Already
It is, somewhat shockingly, just a few days before Thanksgiving. I’m not sure how this happened. Perhaps because I’ve been even more of a homebody than usual this past 8 weeks, I’ve missed the traditional warning signs: Williams-Sonoma window-displays featuring festive, faux-gourd soup tureens and French porcelain turkey-shaped gravy boats. Pre-lit plastic Christmas Trees and…
No Spend Month: Final Numbers and Reader Feedback
It’s time to come clean. It’s the big finale, the big reveal – did we make our No Spend budget or blow it? Did you make your budget? I’m happy to say that we did stay within $250, and we saved up a ton of money this month. In addition to the casual dollars we…