Frugal Friday

[ecosophia]

Welcome back to Frugal Friday! This is a weekly forum post to encourage people to share tips on saving money, especially but not only by doing stuff yourself. A new post will be going up every Friday, and will remain active until the next one goes up. Contributions will be moderated, of course, and I have some simple rules to offer, which may change further as we proceed.

Rule #1:  this is a place for polite, friendly conversations about how to save money in difficult times. It's not a place to post news, views, rants, or emotional outbursts about the reasons why the times are difficult and saving money is necessary. Nor is it a place to use a money saving tip to smuggle in news, views, etc.  I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #2:  this is not a place for you to sell goods or services, period. Here again, I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #3:  please give your tip a heading that explains briefly what it's about.  Homemade Chicken Soup, Garden Containers, Cheap Attic Insulation, and Vinegar Cleans Windows are good examples of headings. That way people can find the things that are relevant for them. If you don't put a heading on your tip it will be deleted.

Rule #4: don't post anything that would amount to advocating criminal activity. Any such suggestions will not be put through.

With that said, have at it! 

Comments

Re: Might anyone here ever have grown

[isaac_hill]

Hablitzia is not too hard to germinate, they did alright when I started them from seed some years ago with a month and a half of cold stratification. Personally though, I get better yields from their annual self-seeding relatives like amaranth and lambsquarters. Also, I've found better luck with native perennial vegetables in my corner of the North East, like Sochan (Rudbeckia lacianata), pokeweed (just boil and throw away water before eating) and milkweed (you can eat at three stages, and you just have to cook them.) Nettles are another wonderful perennial vegetable, and giant chickweed is not so bad either, and edible raw.

I haven't tried much with sconzera, skirret, or normal salsify. The thing is, yes they're perennial, but if you dig up the roots, it's not really different than an annual like carrot or parsnip, so why not just grow carrots or parsnip? Yellow salsify grows as a weed around here and I usually just much the stems/buds as the roots are pretty small. Best perennial root crops I've found for my area are Jerusalem artichoke, groundnut (apios americana) and Chinese mountain yam (though these tubers are very hard to dig up, the aerial tubers are easy, but small), these are all tubers. If carrots are small, the other root crops will be small, best to amend with lots of compost. Jerusalem artichokes don't do too badly in clay soil, though their high inulin roots can be hard on some folks digestion if they're not fermented first.

Re: Might anyone here ever have grown

[(Anonymous)]

If I may, ONLY young shoots of pokeweed should be eaten, while the stem is still small and soft. Later, the leaves will be too toxic for boil-and-dump to make them safe.

Re: Might anyone here ever have grown

[(Anonymous)]

Jerusalem are-to-chokes, IMHO, are not edible. Yuck. I manage fairly well with carrots, turnips and rutabagas, so should probably stick with what has worked. I may attempt sugar beets, for the syrup. Mary Bennett