Five Frugal Things

I began my more frugal journey with Rhonda Hetzel's Down-to-Earth blog and book and since then have gathered lots of ideas from many more blogs and books. I really enjoy reading about the simple everyday savings that people make and that I can do in our home too. Here are five frugal savings I've made of late:

Homemade lavender room spray.

I made up a simple and fragrant lavender room spray following the instructions I found on Wendy's blog, My Abundant Life. I mixed up cooled, boiled water and a small amount of water soluble lavender oil (from the supermarket) in a little spray bottle that once held a face toner. This room spray is simple, cheap, took very little time to make and smells beautiful without all the chemicals one would find in a tin of air freshener. I 💜it!

Delicious home baking.

There's always something baking at our place. Lately, some of the delicious mulberries from our dwarf tree, which we picked and froze by the handful, have found their way into homemade apple and mulberry pie. Mmm! The sweet orange juice, squeezed from my friend's homegrown fruit, has been the star ingredient in batches of orange breakfast muffins. A delicious way to make the most of gifted produce. Not one, but two chocolate slices were baked while the oven was already on. One was shared with friends for afternoon tea and one was sliced and frozen for another day. Everyday, inexpensive pantry staples, like flour and cocoa and coconut, became a home baked treat with a simple recipe and some time. 

A little sweet gift.

I made a simple little notelet card, for a loved one in lockdown, by reusing the front of an old greeting card, some homemade paper and a piece of ribbon from my stash. A tiny bar of chocolate was wrapped in some saved tissue paper and, together with my notelet and message, was sent on its way in a salvaged envelope. 

Magazines from the library.

Many years ago, I would faithfully buy this magazine every.single.month. I still enjoy reading it and looking at all of the beautiful country-style homes inside the pages, but I no longer buy it. Instead, I borrow it from the library. This magazine costs $8.50 at the supermarket so over the course of a year not buying it saves $102. I still get to enjoy it but for free!

A second hand bargain!

Two sets of this children's construction material were purchased second hand. Both sets are in excellent condition and cost at total of $50. A single, new set can cost more than that! All these plastic pieces will be used and enjoyed often instead of ending up in landfill. As I use this material regularly, in my work, I consider this a bargain as well as a saving of resources. 

None of these things, on their own, lead to jaw-dropping savings but a more frugal mindset has made me more resourceful, creative and conscious of what I do spend money on. That does lead to healthy savings over time, for us and for the Earth too.

I'd love to hear about the ways you save at your place.

Meg

Finds from the Op-Shops

There are several op-shops to visit very close to where I live. I often pop in if I'm passing to see what is hanging on the racks or stocked on the shelves. Sometimes, I have a specific item I'm hoping to find second-hand and other times I may just be in the right shop at the right time! These are my recent op-shop finds:

A set of four of these blue-ringed pasta bowls. They cost $8 total.  Their blue rings match some plates I bought a while ago. We have used these multiple times already for soup and pasta meals. They hold generous serves!

This floaty cotton top cost only a few dollars. It's a brighter red than showing in the photograph. As it's a very lightweight cotton, it will be perfect to wear in Spring and Summer.  I 💗it!

This book is filled with amazing tales and stunning photographs that chronicle the history of attempts to climb the highest peak on Earth. Published in 2002, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the first successful summit by Edmund Hillary and Tenzin Norgay in 1953,  all three of us were fascinated by the stories and images and have since borrowed more books from our local libraries on the topic. I can't remember the exact cost but it was less than $10.

A t-shirt and a pair of shorts for my growing boy cost $7 altogether. Orange is one of my son's favourite colours and so he has been wearing his new-to-him t-shirt quite a lot. The shorts are a size larger than he currently wears and have been put away until the next growth spurt. 😊

These thrifty finds are all in excellent condition. Bringing them home has benefits beyond the savings of second-hand. They remain in use, the resources embedded in their manufacture have not ended up in landfill and the dollars I spent to purchase them go towards supporting the work of charity organisations, that run these op-shops, in the community. 

In the next little while, I'm on the lookout for collared polo shirts for a growing boy off on school camp and I am always hunting for old embroideries and linen. Who knows what else I'll come across in the treasure-troves that are my local op-shops.

Have you found any op-shop finds lately?

Meg

 

Some More Simple Savings

Saving at our place is often about the little things, done often and over again. These more frugal things keep a little extra money in our family's cookie jar each week and add up over time. Many of the simple savings we make relate to the food we eat:

A nourishing homemade lunch.

We've had some cold days this past week, and I can think of nothing better than a bowlful of hot homemade soup on such shivery days. I made a huge pot of split pea and bacon soup earlier in the week and we've been enjoying it for lunch each day. I used yellow split peas, vegetable stock, onion and bacon, carrots and celery and a lone sweet potato, and added bay leaves and parsley that I grow in the garden. Here is a recipe, from the Erren's Kitchen website, for just such a soup. One big pot of a soup like this goes a long way!

A healthy & delicious afternoon snack.

Each week, I make a batch of homemade yoghurt. I make unsweetened yoghurt and top this with some fruit, like these locally-grown strawberries, in-season now and so far less expensive. I had one ripe passionfruit, left from those that came in my weekly produce box, so it's juicy pulp went on top too along with a sprinkling of chia seeds. Delicious!

While I use an EasiYo to set our yoghurt, I do not buy the matching sachets. Instead, I follow this recipe from Wendy over on her blog, My Abundant Life. (There are lots of money-saving tips in her blog's archives.) Not buying a tub of yoghurt from the supermarket each week saves us money but also reduces the amount of plastic coming into our home. (*I am not sponsored by anyone to promote EasiYo, it's just what I use to make yoghurt.)

Frozen portions of celery and capsicum.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought two huge bunches of crisp organic celery, 2 for $10, at a local health food grocery on a member's saver special. Celery has been incredibly expensive at times over the past year and organically grown celery even more so. (Here is an article from The Guardian about soaring celery prices.) Currently, at two major supermarkets, the price for a bunch of celery is $4. That's down from $7 a bunch. Given celery can be found among the list of fruit and veg with the dubious mantle of 'The Dirty Dozen', relating to those most likely contaminated by pesticide residue, and that the celery in my garden has not taken off (yet), I thought paying the $1 extra per bunch for organic celery was worth it. 

We use a lot of celery, in soups and stews, during Winter time. Storing two bunches of celery in my fridge crisper would lead to wastage (It's a lot of celery!) so I rinsed and chopped it all up and then bagged handfuls of it in the clip lock bags we wash and reuse over and over again, and froze it. I know we'll use it before our Winter time is over. While it's not for stir fries or salads, when you want crunchy celery, it's fine for the soft, cooked celery of soups and stews. There are delicious things, such as pesto, that you can make with celery leaves, you can add them in to the mix when making stock or you can put them into your compost bin or worm farm where they'll break down to become food for your soil. No waste!

Some smoothie bananas.

Overripe bananas inevitably end up in banana breads or smoothies at our place. For smoothie bananas, I simply slice them up into chunks, spread them out on a baking tray and snap freeze them. Once frozen, I transfer them all into a container and use them up by the handful in smoothies. No waste and frozen banana makes for creamy smoothies!

Homemade muffins & silverbeet pie.

With silverbeet, spring onion and parsley, picked from our garden, I made another scrumptious Silverbeet Impossible Pie. We had a slice of this with soup for lunch on the day it was baked and then warmed up for dinner the following night. It's just so good! 

While the pie was baking in the oven, I used fresh juice, from the oranges my friend grows in her garden, to make batches of orange and chocolate chip muffins. I simply added chocolate chips to Nigella Lawson's Orange Breakfast Muffins recipe. They freeze beautifully and are perfect for adding to school lunchboxes.  

Tangy & luscious lime butter.

The juice from the limes I have been foraging from a local tree has been made into batches of tangy and luscious lime butter. While there's jars of jam in our pantry, they remain unopened while lime butter is in the fridge. It's sublime on toast!

Making the most of our homegrown produce, as well as that so generously shared by friends or foraged for free, baking up a storm while the oven's on, making big batches of simple and nourishing food that can be frozen or enjoyed as leftovers, eating seasonally and having ways of eliminating food wastage means that we eat well and save at the same time in multiple ways.

What simple savings have you been making at your place?

Meg

Some Simple Savings

The simple savings we make here don't usually come via a flashy sale with price tags advertising huge discounts. Instead, they tend to reveal themselves in the everyday things we do over and again. These are some of the little savings we've made of late by making, growing, reusing, mending and finding our own:

This plant, grown from a cutting I brought home from my Mum's garden, has filled out its hanging basket. Both the wire hanging basket and its liner were 'rescued' from my stash of old pots that I keep on a table under our house. I am not sure what this plant is called but it has pretty tangerine bell-shaped flowers. A free plant from my Mum's place that's now growing here too.

I stamped a plain piece of brown paper, which came wrapped around a little bunch of flowers I received, with tiny flower heads. I added it to my ''saved" gift wrap along with this silver and black piece that came with flowers too. I think both will look lovely once re-used and tied with black ribbons.

A large dish of lasagne was baked to share as a meal with friends. I used grated zucchini and carrot and pumpkin to add to the very small amount of meat I had to make the filling. I sprinkled the creamy sauce on top with a little parmesan cheese and baked it until golden.  I served it with steamed veg. Warm and chocolatey prune muffins, from a recipe I found in a Grass Roots magazine, with homemade vanilla ice-cream, made a lovely dessert too. As we were feeding two extra hungry teenage boys, this homemade meal saved us quite a bit as I'm sure you can all imagine just how many takeaway pizzas growing boys can eat!

Little harvests from the garden are finding their way into lots of our meals. There are handfuls of crunchy snow peas for stir fries, juicy yellow tomatoes for salads that are also lovely and sweet when roasted. I've made two Silverbeet Impossible Pies now, with silverbeet and spring onion and parsley from the garden, which is just delicious hot or cold, for lunch or for dinner. The little limes, from a tree that I walk past almost every day while out with Sir Steve dog, are destined to become lime curd to dollop onto our homemade scones. At one of the big supermarkets, limes are 72c each. These were foraged and free!

 

One of my favourite op-shops is open again now and I found this black button-up cardigan amongst the racks of clothes. It cost me just a few dollars. I will get a lot of wear out of it because it's lightweight and thus perfect for our mild sub-tropical Winters. I also mended one of my son's favourite t-shirts to extend its life a little longer. 

Making things last that bit longer, reusing what we already have, growing and making our own, buying second hand and keeping an eye out for that which is free or a good bargain saves a little here and there which, over time, adds up to dollars and cents not spent but saved.

Meg