Hey y’all,
I’ve been talking a lot about property and house ideas lately, because that’s what’s been on my mind. However, even through all the craziness, I’ve still been implementing a lot of my frugal ways, and I may as well share them. Half of this blog’s title is “frugal” you know.
Something I did a while back was to buy 25 pounds of flax seeds (because I can’t resist a bulk deal).
I like to put some flax in everything we eat because it raises the omega 3 fats (it’s like putting fish oil in all your food, but you don’t taste it). However, flax seeds don’t do any good if they’re put into food whole – they pass right through you.
So, every week or so, I grind up a handful of flax seed into meal and store it in the fridge. You shouldn’t buy flax seed meal in bulk (because it’d go bad fairly quickly), but whole flax seed can absolutely be bought and stored in bulk.
Something else I did today was have a weed smoothie. No, not marijuana, but weeds, like pennywort, wild carrots, wild blackberry leaves, even crabgrass. I was wandering outside today and gathered some yard weeds while I was at it. I made a smoothie out of them with some banana and frozen strawberry. Greens are great for you, but buying greens at the store is crazy expensive, especially if you’re putting a bunch in smoothies or juicing them, so I just gather free “weeds” from my yard. I wouldn’t want to eat most of these weeds in a salad – they can be pungent or stringy, and some have thorns – but in a smoothie, I can barely tell they’re there.
I also rigged up a special way to cool my bunny rabbits.
They’re in a shed in my backyard, and it was great during the winter, but it’s getting pretty warm in there now. There’s no air conditioning, so every few hours once the sun’s up, I put a tube of ice (in an old drink mix tube) in front of a fan pointed at the bunnies. It doesn’t keep the shed quite as cool as air conditioning would, but it knocks the temperature down about 10-15 degrees, so it helps a lot.
I like that it keeps the bunnies cool, because I want them to be content, but I also like that this is a really inexpensive way to do that.
I also saved some strawberries today. I had a bag of frozen strawberries in the freezer when the power went out. They didn’t thaw completely, but enough for about half the bag to form a solid chunk. Instead of throwing these out, I thawed the whole bag and am refreezing them separately on a cookie sheet. Then, I’ll stick them all back in the bag. It’ll be like none of this ever happened.
I bet I’ve saved at least $10 today, and I plan to make a bunch of pizzas later, and that’ll save about $10 more.
Frugal Treehugger 