Growing Willow

PART 1

One of my long-term goals has been to cultivate willow (Salix). There are hundreds of different types with many colour variations, so I refer to them all as just willows. I have successfully grown cuttings and planted small rows of willow in each of my previous three gardens, always to be foiled by the need to move on so, when we finally bought Thrift Cottage, I set about, once again, planting my willow.

Being of the frugal ilk and in developing this as a frugal project, you’ll understand my need to create my willow plantation from scratch and on a very strict budget, so all cuttings are appreciated.  

Read more here

I’m hoping to develop it far enough to make the willow growing self-funding and productive enough to help support the entire Frugaldom project

Day 5 of Making it in March - Hot Dogs and How to Make a #Frugal Bean Sprouter #MIIM

Day 5 of 31 - Spuds, Tin Cans, Sprouters and Hot Dogs!

Lemon & mango drizzle cake

Here goes for day 5 of my 'Making it in March' challenge.

The day began early, as I didn't want to miss the coalman when he was driving along the lane. The coal bunker was almost empty, so best filling it up in the hope that it does us through to spring. 5 x 50kg bags costs £70 and we get through about 10kg each day the fire is lit. Price wise, there isn't much difference between coal and logs, except the coal, in this house, also heats 5 radiators and the water, not just one room.

I made the most of the extra 'morning time' and baked the remaining cookie dough (mango, apricot, fig, pistachio & almond) then baked a lemon drizzle cake, but added in some of the mango pulp to try and use that up, too.

POTATOES

Seed potatoes 'chitting' in egg cartons

The above are my 2014 indulgence of the year, so far - heritage seed potatoes! On the left are the Shetland Blacks that arrived a couple of weeks ago and on the right are my Salad Blues, which arrived a couple of days ago. They are sitting in cardboard egg boxes to allow them to 'chit'. ('Chitting' is the gardeners' term for letting them start to sprout.) The Shetland Black is a dark-skinned potato with white flesh that carries a blue/purple ring around it. The Salad Blue, which isn't really a salad potato, is my favourite of all time, both for growing and eating. These stay deep purple throughout cooking, so you can get some very colourful and interesting mash!

 

The potato peelings I kept

Last month, during my 'Extremely Frugal February' challenge, we had a fabulous time stretching the pennies as far as they would go. It was a month of finding out just how extreme we could be in our quest for moneysaving and zero waste, so even the potato peelings were being saved. (Link to post)

Planting the sprouted potato skin

My potato peelings are normally treated as organic waste and added to the compost, fed to the garden poultry (potato peelings need to be cooked first), added to the wormery or used to bank the fire at night. But I wanted to show you that from one potato can come many, so I picked out the best sprouted piece of peel and it has now been planted into a tub on the patio. With care and luck, this piece of peel that would otherwise have been discarded has the potential to produce over 1kg of potatoes.

TIN CAN PLANTERS

Making tin can planters safe

I do love my tin cans - I'm collecting them all for a specific summer project but keep dipping into them for other things! Before you make anything from them, make sure all the sharp edges have been flattened.

Don't forget to add drainage holes in the bottom of the tins

I managed to fit a dozen tin cans onto an old baking tray. I'm using a piece of non-slip rubber mesh underneath so there's no water-logging.

Ready for planting

Remember the damp pea and bean seeds that I washed and soaked to try and save them? I have now filled each of these tins with compost and vermiculite and added a row each of the runner beans, dwarf beans and peas. We'll soon know if they are still 'alive'.

 

 

Wrapped wallpaper around them to prevent spills

After wrapping some old wallpaper around all the tins, I sat the tray on the windowsill and have topped it with the glass out of the broken picture frame. (You know the one - I used part of it to make the apex roof for the cat's den yesterday.)

SPROUTING BEANS INTO BEAN SPROUTS

Mung Beans

Frugal living means making the most of anything we can make or grow for ourselves. Mung beans are great for sprouting and adding into salads and stir fries and let's face it - frugalers love their home grown salads and their 'leftovers' stir fries. But how do we sprout mung beans without a fancy, extravagant sprouter?

 

Homemade frugal sprouter

Get a clean jar with a screw cap metal lid, a hammer and an awl. You don't even need the hammer, as most jar lids are now thin enough to pierce with minimal force. Now punch a whole load of holes in the lid - do this on top of thick card or a folded towel to avoid scoring or puncturing floors or worktops. Now give everything a final rinse.

Hey presto! A homemade sprouter

Place a couple of handfuls of mung beans in the jar and rinse them several times with water. Take the lid off to add the water, screw it back on again to drain the water back out of the jar.

 

Easy drainer

I'm leaving my mung beans to soak for 24 hours before giving them a final rinse. I'll follow up this post with progress as and when I see anything happening in the jar, which is now on a shelf in my kitchen.

HOT DOGS IN HOT DOGS

99p bread mix and cheap hot dogs

Now before anyone starts commenting about the unhealthy aspects of this snack, hold your typing fingers still and let me explain - this was an inexpensive and fun experiment and if we were having it as a proper meal, I would normally serve this with onions, cheese and tomato and/or plenty of salad stuff. Today, however, lunch was just a hot dog with tomato ketchup. Cost = less than 5p per person! Worth a shilling for the novelty factor alone!



Knead and prove your dough

Bit of cheating going on here as I am using the 99p per 3.5kg bread roll mix I got from Approved Food*, so it's a simple case of 'just add water', mix, knead, rest, knead, rest, split into finger roll size, wrap around a cheap hot dog, leave to prove for 20 minutes then bake for about 20 minutes.

- PHOTOS DELETED -

I did take a full set of progress photos but to be perfectly blunt, I fear some may have found them obscene! So here is the finished article.

Use smaller pieces of dough for legs and ears

Bake the rolls with the hot dogs inside them - I used the cheap tinned hot dogs, I think they were 5 tins for £1 from Approved Food when I bought them!

Hot dog rolls

I made only two 'hot dogs in hot dogs', one for each of us here in Frugaldom. I got some very curious looks when I presented 'the dog' on a plate at lunchtime today, that's for sure! We'll need to eat the other rolls tomorrow lunchtime to use up the rest of the hotdogs, too!

 

Now I am retiring to bed with a cup of tea and planning out my next phase of rag rugging!

NYK, Frugaldom

References and acknowledgements
http://www.goodshomedesign.com/hot-dog-dog/

* Friend referral link - thank you for my £1 commission earned this week. :)

Budgeting to Make a House a Home

Moneysaving + Renovation = Not a Good Combination
(An Introduction)

Many people dream of owning their own home. Thoughts drift towards a comfortable, uncomplicated life of debt free bliss - no mortgage, no rent, no worries. A pretty, country cottage with white picket fence and roses growing around the door... It's all so far removed from reality for most of us that we barely give it a passing thought, lest we sink into the depths of despair at the impossibility of it all. We can't help but think of the dire, economic climate in which we all seem to be living at the moment, probably overlooking the simple fact that it doesn't need to be like that!

Here I am, writing and blogging on a daily basis about money saving, frugal living and a variety of attempts to earn a little extra, when I have overlooked one major storyline: the consequences of all this and where to go from here!

It has taken 10 years of skrimping and saving, many temporary work contracts and enough house moves to make me think I'd have been better towing a mobile home. Then the opportunity arose to sink everything into buying a property to renovate into something that could be called home - a pretty white cottage with about a quarter acre of garden and room at the front for a picket fence and roses round the front door! OK, so it's an end terrace in a rural village, rather than a detached country property and, to be honest, 'village' isn't quite the correct term. Here, we have one street with nothing more than a phone box and a post box, so it's fairly rural.

The roof leaks, none of the doors fit properly, one of the windows was held in place with cobwebs, there are holes in the floors and the garden hadn't been cultivated in years. The fusebox had been burned out, the wiring was old-style and most of the pipes were burst. The toilet cistern had frozen and thawed so often that its internal workings were non-existent, the "kitchen" looks like the ceiling may cave in and the outbuildings were so delapidated that storing anything in them wasn't an option. But we threw in our lot and took a chance on making it home.

We had only two months to make the place habitable before we had to move in and give up the rental. In that time, we had to strip out the worst of the interior, dig up and transfer an entire garden, move the ducks, hens and quail plus bring the cat and the rabbit, get the plumbing and wiring fixed and gut the 'kitchen' to rid it of the rotten flooring. During that time, the car 'died' and we lost 50% of our income. The budget was well and truly screwed! How bad can things get?

But we'd bought a house that could be renovated into a home.

Now, the real work begins. Researching the most frugal ways of surviving this dire economic climate while renovating our house into a home. It is proving to be time consuming and, at times, soul-destroying, but every day is worth it and every day takes us one step closer to achieving our longterm goals.

Is the good life all that it's cracked up to be? Can people still realise their dreams without being swallowed up by a system that dictates we MUST earn X amount of money? I certainly hope so, because it seems like we have stepped out of the system to find that it's all a bit of a myth. Society cannot function without cash because society has forgotten how to function without it and we all eed to pay taxes. Thanks to this, (and the fact that we couldn't afford a smallholding,) my concept of frugaldom has developed as a lifestyle and any cash earned online from home will, for me, forever be known as cyberdosh.

Blah, blah, blah... let's get onto the good part - budgeting to make a house a home.

Follow the tales and exploits of Frugaldom, as we continue our quest for financial freedom. For the cyberdosh side of things, I've introduce a second blog HERE.

It's best to know right from the outset that frugaldom means adaptability and being prepared to make changes whenever or wherever necessary. I may write one thing one day and then retract it the next. There is no brand loyalty in Frugaldom, nor is there much room for error. It's very much about finding opportunities and making the most of everything because, as sure as I sit here typing this, this type of lifestyle falls through almost every safety net I can imagine.

If you find yourself pining for the good life, you need to grasp every opportunity available and sometimes that means leaping before you look, or accepting that gift horse without first inspecting its teeth. It's all about being prepared, but for what, I do not know! Home's home, afterall.

Back soon, and don't forget to +1 any posts you like so I know where to focus my attention. Thanks.

A day of reflection, as we try to absorb and understand the austerity measures.

Got soaked by the rain this morning when going to feed the hens & ducks. If only I had a goose that laid golden eggs to make it all worthwhile! Instead, what do I have? I have a motley crew of moulting specimens of Gallus Domesticus, in a variety of shapes and sizes, all scratching their way around my garden, none, bar one, laying me any eggs. Even the quail seem to have stopped laying. Yesterday's final egg count amounted to a duck egg, a hen egg and a single quail egg - dinner for 3, nonetheless.  -5C followed by wind and rain with ever fewer daylight hours is not a combination condusive to good freerange egg production. I wonder if my feathered friends ever stop to ponder the origins of their meals or if they just eat whenever they please with no regard for their futures? I suspect the latter. One thing for sure is this - there won't be any lemon curd making being done this week, although I'm tempted to make a few metres of pasta to dry and have in store. Despite soaring grain prices, local flour prices are down! Odd, or what?

Onwards and upwards - no point in allowing the current economic climate to grind us down. Another quick review of personal and/or business finances is always a handy exercise. I'm glad to say that for every pound of income, expenditure here doesn't exceed 70p, so there's still a bit of room to manoeuvre if things get really tight. (Unlike the Government that's inherited a nationwide 'business model' that seems to be costing them £1.20 of every £1 'earned'. MEGA-OUCH! )

What do people want? It's that age old question with no definitive answer. We all know that we need water, food, clothing, shelter, but a huge part of society needs more - they need to define their own lives by adorning them with extras, be they physical, factual or fantasy. These wants are a normal part of human nature - an innate need to succeed, so we work to earn to afford. The 'ability versus inability' to earn our own monetary income is a conflict that splits our society, in my opinion. For this reason, I think those who can should help those who can't in whatever way possible. We can adopt pets, farm animals, children from poverty-stricken nations, trees, vineyards... the list is endless, but I have never seen the opportunity to 'adopt a drop-out'. Perhaps this is the way forward... turning more and more of the normal, everyday people like you and me into the equivalent of secret millionaires. It's not millions of pounds that we need to help support our families, friends, neighbours, communities or, even, our countries, our skills and available man-hours are every bit as valuable! I realise that costs have to be met somewhere, but a penny saved is a penny earned.

It's time to decide on the next project...

Join us in the fun, frugal forum at
http://www.frugaldom.co.uk/