Frugal Living Blog - Cooking Whatever is Growing.

If you are here for the animals, wildlife & nature project, Scottish hutting or our off-grid stopover site for campervans/motorhomes, see HERE for details. By way of update for our wildlife watchers and bird spotters, the first swallows have returned to the barn, there are bats out and about, the grasshopper warblers have returned and the badgers and pine martens are active most nights. 

This blog post is more to do with the origins of the name Frugaldom: Frugal living freedom. You are very welcome to read along if you would like to know more about frugality and money saving, plus you can join the Friends of Frugaldom or support the project HERE, or join us free in the Frugal Living Challenge within the forums section of moneysavingexpert.com website.

TODAY HAS BEEN FAIRLY FRUGAL AND PRODUCTIVE

After mucking out, watering and feeding all the animals, I had coffee with the friend who had been helping. She had made a fruit crumble so we ate that at lunchtime. The topic of food growing is a popular one here so we were planning where to plant different things. She pointed out that the nettles were already growing and I had spotted many dandelions flowering.

This afternoon, I picked a tubful of young nettle leaves, some garlic shoots (not cloves), lemon balm and some chives, plus a mugful of dandelions.

I often used chives in place of spring onions and they are perpetual / perenniall so create a colourful purple display in summer. The garlic is now also perennial after leaving bulbs in the ground to grow wild.

Chives and garlic are growing happily together in the herb garden and as you can see, so, too, are the strawberry runners and chives.

The rhubarb is at a stage that we can harvest stalks for crumbles, but the very mild, wet winter interspersed with sub zero temperatures and occasional high teens warm sunshine caused the plants to flower so those had all to be cut out as soon as spotted. You will see here that there are also strawberry plants evident. They get everywhere but I do lift some and pot them on to sell or swap at the main gate where we have the 'Trading Post'.

The rain stayed awake long enough to allow two buckets of weeds to be pulled out and some of the herb beds tidied. This one contains sweet cicely, one of my favourite herbs, great for chewing on, adding to stewed rhubarb or feeding to the ponies, who love it. It's said to be good for soothing throats during persistent coughs.

I picked some lemon balm while weeding and this got added to the other herbs picked.

We have never tried growing butter beans so this is something new for us. Friend brought them along today and we will decide where best to plant them over the next week.

Chopped herbs - nettles, chives, garlic shoots and a few leaves of lemon balm. I fried these for a few minutes in some butter and a splash of oil, seasoned with salt and pepper to have with spaghetti.

The resulting meal was very tasty and I can highly recommend it. I am not vegetarian but meat is so expensive that it does not feature strongly in our diet.

What did I do with the dandelions? I made some cookies. There was no flour at the hut so I used a pack of pancake mix and added the dandelion petals, some sultanas and some finely grated orange peel, then mixed it into cookie dough using butter and some warm water.  I 'baked' the cookies in the Omnia on top of the gas camping stove, as I'm currently at the hut,. completely off-grid. 

That has been my day so far: There is a campervan parked in the yard with the occupants keen to spot the badgers and pine martens tonight. The rain has returned with a vengeance but, thankfully, the wildlife cares not a jot about getting wet when there are peanuts, eggs and other tasty (appropriate) snacks available at the feeding stations.

Winter Garden Preparations

The herbery will be getting an overhaul to bring all the strawberries under control. There are numerous raised beds here, all constructed as one of our lockdown projects. Since then, the herbs and sedum have thrived but I haven't had enough time or energy to keep on top of the weeding, thinning and trimming. It is absolutely fabulous to see someone tackling this job, despite the sub-zero temperatures, so I'm looking forward to getting the strawberry and rhubarb beds mulched over and the others topped up with the composted pony manure.

Here are the beds that have been cut back today. The lungwort in the centre is actually flowering. The strawberry plants have never yet died back and have sent out runners in all directions so these will be left until spring then potted on for moving out to our Trading Post at the main gate. I'm still not sure what to plant in the spare beds here as I really don't use many herbs but this also becomes a butterfly and bee garden, so I may introduce some buddleias. There is a patch of rhubarb, which fairs quite well. I can already see it bubbling below the surface of the soil so that will get some straw over it when I'm putting it around the strawberry plants. Aside from that, I can't think of anything else suitable for growing in these herb beds. All suggestions welcome.

What's Growing at Frugaldom this Year

Signs of Summer - the first of the briars are flowering and the hum if the bees can be heard. Seeds are sown, seedlings transplanted and pea pods are fattening. The grass and wild flowers are profuse and we are now anticipating the arrival of the various wildlife babies. It would be great to see pine marten kits this year.

One thing we won't see is kittens, as the female cat who lives at Frugaldom spears to have been neutered at some point in the past. We can tell this by the cropped portion of her ear.

Work continues in the herbery, where the first of the new sculptures have been put on display - two woodland warriors, the guardians of the garden.

The cleared space to the right of this photo will become home to the next sculpture, known as 'Embrace  Nature'. Meanwhile, the herbs are thriving, the first strawberries are beginning to ripen and the beds are looking healthy. 

By the yard, the salad bar is being reinstated - better late than never. Our food growing efforts have fallen way short of anything imagined, thanks to the amount of time it takes each and every day to see to the ponies and goats. Now, almost halfway through 2025, we are desperately trying to catch up with the growing season. Weeks of dry, hot weather followed by the recent deluges have seriously hampered progress but we have overcome the water supply problem, for the plants, at least. Potatoes, cabbages, onions, beetroot, kale and even some Brussels sprouts all seem to have survived and there are signs that we may get a few tomatoes,  cucumber and peppers. Here's hoping!

Herbs and Herbery Progress

If you are parked overnight at Frugaldom, you are welcome to help yourself to fresh herbs.  There is a small herb box in the corner of the yard or the main herbery is by the centrally located hut.

The main herb garden has 7 large, raised beds crammed full of various mints, ideal for teas or refreshing cold drinks.

The strawberry beds were planted last year so we are hopeful of seeing some fruit on the plants this summer. So far, it is looking promising.

Blah

Dill is flourishing and is a lovely, aromatic herb that lends itself well to seafood dishes, yoghurt sauces and potato salad. 

The red valerian is simply decorative here, attracting pollinators, however, it is said that the root can be used to help alleviate anxiety in horses. I have not tried feeding any to Lemony Snicket, although he could use some anxiety relief whenever he sees the vet. 😆

This is a bed of Sweet Cicely and ginger mint. Both make refreshing brews but the sweet Cicely is nice eaten in it's own as an alternative to sweets. Frankie, one of the ponies, always sought this out when his summer cough developed from the pollen and hay dust.

Frugaldom has many herb, berries and fruits growing, all planted in the past 10 years since taking over the field. We hope to further develop the fruit growing and encourage all our campervan stopover guests and visitors to make the most of whatever is available. The orchards are part of the wildlife gardens and most of what we grow here is horse friendly, meaning healthy treats for the sanctuary ponies. Most will also readily root from cuttings, meaning several of our vanlife frugal friends can have a plentiful supply of tea making herbs in a little pot to take away with them. 

Words and Herbs

Hello friends and followers of the frugal ways. I hope you are well and that life is treating you fairly during these uncertain times. The cost of living is still escalating but I think it's fair to say that it always will, unless we have a complete change of direction, habits and lifestyle.

One big question that is often asked is, 'Where do I start?' This daunting conundrum csn become completely overwhelming. It can lead to confusion, procrastination, frustration, despair, inaction and even complete exhaustion. My best answer is simply to start by writing one word. It can be any word to describe what you want to change, make, do or achieve. What is your word? My word is a combination of two words - FRUGAL and FREEDOM. Therein lie the origins of what has become my life's work -  FRUGALDOM. Words can mean so much to so many and there is no rule book stating that you cannot mix and match to come up with something that fits the bill, no pun intended. 😊

Every day is a new day and a new start. April, in our little corner of southwest Scotland, is looking like rhubarb month. I have fabulous thoughts of growing all my own fruit, vegetables and herbs, rearing chickens and ducks, making, mending, bartering, sharing, living sustainably... I do my best. I fail often. I start again. Hope and despair go hand in hand but achievements are always made - we just need to step back and look for them. Make up your own word for what you are doing.

HERBERY - My efforts to achieve a HERB NURSERY. Yes, rhubarb is a herb. It's a medicinal herb known in Chinese medicine. The roots and tuber are used for some things, the stalks and even the leaves are used for others. Herbal medicine is not my subject  so I won't go into that but as a frugal living officianado, rhubarb means crumbles, jam and even a crunchy snack when, dare I say it, dipped in sugar. It is interesting to note that as the rhubarb grows, so does the nearby Sweet Cicely. 

I wonder if there is a connection to be made there, seeing as nature has presented these two herbs simultaneously? It may just be coincidence but these are the things we need to look out for in life. With coincidence can come opportunity but we need to recognise that when it appears. 

This herbery was created during lockdown with most of the seeds and plants gifted and appreciated. Emily brought agrimony, Lisa sent seeds, I say and Eva brought mugwort. All have had time to develop, thanks to the help of visitors and volunteers. Hilary (Lily) brought a load of strawberry runners and planted them. (Strawberries are herbs.) Janice brought several plants along, including a type of lungwort, which now has  pretty pink flowers. There is also a bed of assorted sedums, planted with the thought in my head that, one day, we could have a sedum roof. The roof has never materialised but do you know what? The sedums are growing every year, ready for thinning out and reporting to grow someone in the future a sedum roof.

Never give up. If things get you down then study life at ground level. Find your passion and start from there.

Make a plan in small increments - today I plan to plant a sprouted potato. If I plant more than one, I have excelled my own expectations. If I plant none, the day is as a week and it ain't over yet. 😆  

Photo Blog from September 2017 at Frugaldom

SCOTTISH WEATHER!

In a bid to bring the frugal blog up to date, I'll do a few more pictorials, as the photos can tell you more than the words in a much shorter time.

From drought conditions earlier in the year we moved straight into wet weather with a few hot, dry days sprinkled among the rainy days! Our new wildlife ponds more than filled - they flooded! Emergency measures were needed, so we dragged and rolled some big logs and began building a 'wall' along the edge of the small feeder pond and then dug links between this pond and the bigger one so flood water would run through the ponds rather than over the edge and down the path.

We managed to get a lorry load of old tyres for recycling, so these are gradually being rolled around the place to act as huge planters for future herb and flower gardens, plus a few stacked up around the tracks for stuffing full of hay that the ponies can munch on whenever they want.

The Siberian crab apple trees were absolutely dripping in tiny fruit but all of this got left for the wildlife, as we just never got around to harvesting any of it. 2018 should be different as we now have the holiday accommodation and can offer fruit foraging and preserving weekends.

Our first ever crop of leeks, onions and courgettes! All of the plants were donated or we traded fresh eggs for them. By December, we had used up or traded out all of the courgettes and I have enough leeks to last until the 2018 crop. 

The new heritage apple orchard brought forth a bucket of fruit from the 2 year old trees, so these were all picked and processed. Galloway Pippins are fabulous apples for eating, cooking or preserving in jams, jellies or chutneys. We used most of them in crumbles but I held back a few for the chutney, which also had some of our onions and courgettes added to it. Tastes lovely, especially with cheese! Along with the other apples from the garden orchard, they filled a full section of the freezer. I now need to make an apple store and have the perfect object for recycling... an old fridge!

Plans began for the 'real' Trading Post, which is currently standing by the pallet fence. All going well, we'll build a designated produce store that will double as a pick-up point and actual trading post for trading our surplus produce in the future. 

Muddy wellies! We get plenty of those at Frugaldom so we introduced our 'Muddy Wellies Weekends' and advertised these via our new Frugal Breaks page on Facebook. At a special price of £95.00 for up to 4 people for 2 nights, all the weekends throughout September, October and right up to mid-November. Two lots of our visitors have already rebooked for 2018 and the children who came along definitely had fun in the mud! 

Drainage work at Frugaldom is still on-going. I think this is going to be the biggest job we'll ever need to do, as the whole place sits at the lowest point of the surrounding landscape, with peat bog and marsh all around us. Clearing out all the field drains is a slow and arduous task, so I think we'll need to allocate a budget to hiring in a mini digger again in 2018 to speed up the tedious, muscle-aching work of digging them all by hand.

Just to keep us all on our toes, don't forget about the snakes. We have adders at Frugaldom and they love nothing more than to come out and bask on the new stretch of access road that was laid at the start of the year. Sunshine + tarmac = warm basking surface for our slithery friends. Personally, I enjoy seeing them and love that we have them living here but I seem to be in a minority! Several visitors have looked at me in disbelief or shocked horror when I mention them. OK, so their bite is poisonous, but adders are still fascinating creatures and can be almost chameleon-like in their colouration, especially when basking on sphagnum moss! 👀 

The adult hens that we were given laid many eggs throughout summer and continued to so so right through to December. The chicks we hatched in June turned out to be 5 cockerels and only 3 hens, but this will still give us a glorious selection of egg colours, as we have a white hen laying blue eggs, a brown hen laying pink eggs, a white hen laying white eggs and a brown hen laying brown eggs. All 3 of the chicks, once they mature, will lay blue eggs. (They are pure bred Araucanas.)

I couldn't make it up if I tried - rain, rain, rain, then blazing sunshine bringing temperatures topping 25 Degrees C. The hot, dry weather did not hang around Scotland for long, so we missed out on all that super summer they reported in the south.

More and more courgettes and leeks - they seem to like the climate at Frugaldom so I'll definitely be designating space for growing many more of these.

I love picking homegrown produce! 2017 was another year of cutting, hacking, path clearing and planting, so we didn't expect to have much by way of fruit and vegetables but the apples and herbs just kept on coming... soup and pudding is most definitely still the meal of the day. When it costs nothing to pick the ingredients, why would we spend on shop bought produce?

Tiny apples abslutely everywhere we look - please get in contact if you'd like to come and pick some in 2018, when we'll be offering our foraging and preserving getaways - the foraging will be free!

Foraging is so frugal that it simply cannot be ignored. Over the past year we have attempted to encourage as many of the brambles and dog roses to grow as possible. We also invested in many more briars - Rosa Canina and Rosa Ragusa in several colours - for planting around the slowly emerging tracks. Somewhere in the future we will have access paths all around Frugaldom and all edged in edible hedging that can be kept under control by the ponies, provide fantastic habitat for wildlife and provide us with a fabulously frugal foraging trail.

After all Anna's hard work digging ditches and dealing with the greenhouse, we reaped the benefits by way of a few cucumbers, more spinach beet than we could ever eat and a whole host of herbs grown from seed. I did try to get her to return but the warmer climes of the Continent stole her from us. The summer students kept up the watering and weeding, so we made the most of everything the little greenhouse produced. We did try 3 of these polytunnels but 2 succumbed to the storms and will need to be rebuilt once we have a more secure base on which to site them.

Yes, we even managed to get some tomatoes - enough to add to the apples and courgettes to make our year's supply of chutney!

Things I love about growing techniques now known by posh names like permaculture and biodynamic farming - allowing things to grow where they want to grow and planting accordingly to make the whole project more sustainable. We had Evening Primrose growing in the herb paddock that nobody had planted... it just grew from seed that probably blew from behind the barn.

The absolute biggest and best thrill of my year at Frugaldom was that I was finally able to go walkabout for a pony's eye view of our project. For those who follow or have followed for some time, we were given 3 young ponies in March 2016. With no proper grazing land, we decided to let the ponies live on the tracks that we're building around the project so, instead of fencing the ponies in, we are fencing them out of the growing areas and feeding them hay instead of grass. 

Willow's 'medicine hat'

These ponies have never had shoes on their feet and probably never will. Since coming to us, they haven't had bits in their mouths and probably never will. In the above photo, the pony had nothing on - no halter, no bridle, no saddle... this little walkabout was based entirely on mutual trust and this particular pony is 'Willow'.  She is our medicine hat, spirit pony and is living up to all the ancient myths and legends that originate from the Native Americans. 

Back again soon with October's summary of events so watch this space... we're working as fast as possible to bring everything up to date both on here and on social media. To keep right up to date, you can follow the Frugaldom page on Facebook and consider joining in our frugal living challenge group.