6 Little, Easy Ways to Be More Frugal

I like living simply, and I love doing things for my family with my own two hands.  I'm learning more and more every day, and I love the way that creating things that my family needs with my own know-how and with items that I already have in the house allows me to be more frugal.  This is especially important to me right now as I am going back to university in the fall, which is a pretty expensive prospect when you have little ones at home, and jobs aren't exactly growing on trees at the moment, particularly in the conservation field.

Some of these homemaking activities require (or will require, as I haven't started them all yet!) time and commitment and work, but for me, they are so rewarding that it doesn't matter.  It's actually kind of addictive, and Pinterest and blog-reading are fuelling the fire.  Oh--you make your own deodorant?  I should try that!  You have a recipe for homemade ginge rale? Sign me up!  You sewed your own apron which beautifully gathers so you can put your freshly plucked organic vegetables in it when out in the garden?  Where is the pattern?!

Obviously, I'm just starting down this path.  There are oodles of people WAY ahead of me.  And maybe, some people who drop by this blog are with me in the early phases or are just figuring out that they'd like to explore these ideas a little more, which is why I am including a few easy ways to live more frugally and do things for yourself, by yourself.  You can be kinder to the planet, have fun with items already in your home, and save a few pennies (or soon-to-be nickels, in Canada I guess!).  Some of these you've seen before in blog posts, but I thought it would be fun to do a quick review in a list format!

 1.  Make your own bread.  Really.  It isn't hard to do, and this recipe is super easy, forgiving, adaptable, uses less yeast so even less expensive, and it's no-knead.  You mix it up, leave it alone, come back, flip it around a few times, put it in a pan, give it a break, then put it in the oven.  Before you know it, your house smells like a bakery and you feel a sense of accomplishment.  It tastes way better than what you would buy in the store, for a fraction of the cost and probably even saves time in the long run because you don't have to drive to a store, pick out a loaf, wait in line at the check-out counter, get home and put it away. :)

2-3. Grow your own vegetables.  This one is sort of a frugality double whammy, are you ready?  Grow your own vegetables from seed (all of them) rather than buying the seedlings at the garden centre.  This is loads of fun, gives you an activity to interest your active three-year-old son and prevents him from endlessly, noisily crashing his cars around you, or colouring on your bedroom door, and costs less than buying the seedlings (which in turn costs less than buying the full-fledged vegetables).  Frugal tip number three: grow them in cut up toilet paper and paper towel rolls.  Save them and then plant in them when you need to.  They hold the soil, can be planted as they are in the ground because they'll decompose and you won't have to disturb the roots shaking them out of the pot, reduce household waste, and save you loads of money on unsustainable peat pots.

4. Save your eggshells for your garden.  Egg shells break down in the soil, add to the compost that you are hopefully already adding to your garden, and provide much-needed calcium to the most beautiful of all garden crops, tomatoes.  Also, slugs don't like to cross them so they can act as an effective barrier to those horrid slimy creatures (and as a biologist I say that with love and no discrimination against a natural creature of any kind).  If you eat lots of omelettes or angel food cakes, you'll collect quite the pail-full of these in no time at all, and your afore-mentioned three-year-old boy will love helping you crunch them up!

5. Use vegetable crisper compost to make new veggies!  Specifically, celery (above) and green onions (not pictured).  I don't know if there are other veggies you can do this with but these are the two I've tried.  When you cut them back to nothing and all you have is the bottom of the celery or the silly little white onion bulb from the green onions, just as you're about to toss them in your compost bin, think again and stick them in a glass of water.  They'll grow and you can harvest them again!  Gets you a lot more bang for your 99 cents (or $1.49, if it's the celery and it's on sale!).  It also provides a fun little experiment for your kids and it doesn't take long--those celery leaves are 5 days old.

6. Use orange peels to make your own environmentally friendly household cleaner.  Have you noticed yet that I save a lot of garbage?  Toilet paper rolls, egg shells, celery bottoms (what is the correct term for those anyway?) and now orange peels.  And it's not only me saving them, I have my parents and my sister saving them for me too.  And I require that my husband take home the orange peels leftover from his lunch.  But I like this cleaner, it's fun to make, smells better than cleaning with straight vinegar and it only takes a few minutes using something that would end up in your compost bin.

I love little tips like these!  Please share yours and I can delightedly add to my little rituals of using weird items to cut down on waste and create great new things.

Cleaning Up

For the last couple of years, my favourite cleaning product has been a cleaner that my mom makes for me and that we imaginatively call "Green Cleaner". It smells lovely as it has peppermint essential oil in it and works great on pretty well all surfaces. Just lately, I've been spending a little more time on Pinterest and finding all sorts of awesome ideas for do-it-yourself-pretty-much-anything. I'm especially interested, though, in homemade cleaning products and homemade toiletry items. So basically, things that will clean your house or clean your body. If I can make these items with ingredients I already have in my house, so much the better!

I saw this recipe for a homemade cleaner that uses citrus-infused white vinegar. Now, I have battled with the idea of using vinegar as my main cleaning agent for a few years. I know that it is a great cleaner, is easy on the environment, is inexpensive, and if my children got into it, it wouldn't hurt them. However, it doesn't smell nice. At all. I used to use it a lot at work when I worked for an environmental non-profit organization and, when I think of our office in that old train station, the scent of vinegar emanating from wash cloths long past needing to be bleached (!) will forever come to mind. Yuck.

Enter the orange peel! How awesome is it, first of all, that you can make this cleaner in about two seconds after you enjoy a healthy, vitamin C-rich snack? Because I didn't want to peel fruit just for the sake of making a cleaning product, but rather, I wanted to use my scraps for something more, I just made it in 250 mL jars, one at a time. I had three oranges, therefore over the course of a couple of days, I started the preparation for 3 jars of cleaning product. I took a few pictures of the final preparation, and had my three-year-old help me in the process (he's a great do-it-yourselfer!).

This is all you need.  (I'm assuming you have a convenient source of water!)

Don't mind his blue-stained fingers, we were playing with markers right before he helped me with this project!

So here are my three 250 mL jars, after letting them infuse for 2 weeks.  There's a small Fisher Price tractor in the background for good measure.  The boy left it on the counter, and I left it in the picture because it made me smile.

So pour the contents of the jar through a sieve into some sort of container, I used a 4-cup Pyrex glass measuring cup. *Note the strangely waterlogged/spongey/pickled texture of the orange peel.  It reminds me of something out of a bucket of formalin during Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy class at UPEI.

I got about 1 1/4 cups of the orange-infused vinegar from the three jars.

So fill your container roughly 3/4 full with water, then top up with the infused vinegar. (I was lucky that I had the perfect amount to fill the bottle up the rest of the way.)

The final product.

And there we have it!  Orange-infused vinegar cleaning solution.  Now I couldn't post about this on the blog before actually trying it out, right?  So I decided to give it a test, and thought of one of the yuckier substances it would need to clean on our kitchen counter:

Peanut butter.

Now I occasionally eat peanut butter (in fact I did tonight which is why I thought to use it to test out this cleaner!) but I also find it an extremely offensive substance.  It's greasy, it's sticky, and it smells very strongly.  Not something I want on a surface anywhere, let alone the counter.  So I smeared some on (then promptly washed my fingers!) and give it a few squirts.

The cleaner did a great job cleaning it up, no residue, the vinegar cut right through it and left the counter lovely and clean with a fresh-ish scent.

Yes, the scent.  There's no denying that vinegar is the base of this stuff, really, you can't hide vinegar all that well.  But it has a nice, fruity, orangey overtone that makes it a lot more pleasant.  My verdict?  I like it.  

This post is linked to the Homestead Barn Hop #52.