Frugal Friday
Jul. 25th, 2025 07:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
Rule #5: don't post LLM ("AI") generated content, and don't bring up the subject unless you're running a homemade LLM program on your own homebuilt, steam-powered server farm.
With that said, have at it!
Sourcing Garden Soil
Date: 2025-07-25 01:28 pm (UTC)What are folks' thoughts on purchasing soil to add to garden beds, for example, in the event that one wants to top up or fill a raised container bed? There is both a frugal and an ecological dimension to this question.
Ecologically, I have never fully understood where purchased soil comes from. Peat moss, one of the main ingredients in bagged soil, is as far as I know basically mined out of a wetland ecosystem somewhere. I don't even know about the rest of the ingredients. Is there an ecologically sound, affordable product to look for here, or is it basically a no-win situation?
Not knowing the answers to these questions, I've mostly stuck to making my own. My go-to source is grabbing free mulch/compost in the fall in the form of neighbour's bagged leaves put out to curbside. I'm also having fun with 3'x4' wire composting cylinders in the yard, filled with leaves and weeds and kitchen scraps, and moistened daily with my own collected urine. (I think that was Maxine's trick, shared here some time ago).
Open to thoughts and suggestions, thank you.
Dylan
Re: Sourcing Garden Soil
Date: 2025-07-26 04:31 am (UTC)If you need to buy a soil amendment, we find it is best to buy sand by the truckload and screen it for rocks. Then, you add the compost you are making. I am so happy you are using urine!
If you buy soil, you can get horrible weeds or contaminants. Sand is pretty neutral and we have several garden beds that are soilless; they contain only sand and compost. We never have to weed them and the plants love them.
Maxine
Re: Sourcing Garden Soil
Date: 2025-07-26 05:20 am (UTC)'garden soil' is normally the above mixed with some bulk compost made from garden clippings by the local tip. 'premium garden soil' has added chemical fertilisers.
The main problem with all of these is the clay and lack of soil structure and organisms which makes it all very moisture resistant, poor drainage once wet and hostile to plant life for at least a few years. Unless you're on solid bedrock I would not bother with any of these since you'll already have your own crappy soil.
I started with scraped bare, hard, scalded clay subsoil. It basically only grew a few patches of lichen. I found the best way to cheaply build topsoil at scale was to: 1) physically aerate ground and water with clay breaker a couple of times 2) spread a 20cm layer of 90% decomposed garden clippings supplied as 'fine forest litter' in a dump truck by the tip 3) plant potatoes under the clippings (this is optional but I figured might as well use the space) 4) water weekly for a year if it hadn't rained. After a year I had 30cm of decent soil which I've continued to improve by sheet mulching our green and paper waste.
Re: Sourcing Garden Soil
Date: 2025-07-26 06:10 am (UTC)Definitely we don't use the loose fill based mixes that are sold as soil by the garden centres around here - it just doesn't drain or wet properly and there isn't enough ground contact to turn that stuff into proper soil if it's in a container.
Re: Sourcing Garden Soil
Date: 2025-07-27 02:18 am (UTC)Re: Sourcing Garden Soil
Date: 2025-07-27 05:58 pm (UTC)As an urbanite, keeping rabbits often gets around urban livestock restrictions and their manure (and leftover feed) can go straight into the garden. Rabbits can be exceptionally wasteful and messy, in my experience. However, I transformed what was effectively 'loose fill' into beautiful black soil within a couple years using rabbit manure.
Now on a rural acreage of primarily clay, we keep poultry. I find the manure from waterfowl (geese & ducks) especially to be almost as effective as rabbit manure. Waterfowl manure can even break down wood shavings rapidly. Chicken manure tends to be drier, meaning that most of the composting is going to happen after it is removed from the chicken house. Unlike rabbit manure, poultry manure should be composted before you use it in the garden.
While I do keep compost bins, I have also begun simply building up a pile of the manure in a remote area and letting the foraging chickens do the "turning" for me. Highly effective.
I just work the matured compost into my garden soil. Haven't really worried about producing any other form of soil mix.
Caldathras
Re: Sourcing Garden Soil
Date: 2025-07-29 11:35 am (UTC)System of Envelopes
Date: 2025-07-25 03:11 pm (UTC)I may have mentioned this in the past but it is so helpful. Some friends in Lancashire explained how they were able to negotiate life in a very poor county without a lot of opportunity. They were working-class people and strong-team players. When the kids were little and they had only the husband's income, they had a system of envelopes. Money for rent and later a mortgage was put into one envelope from the pay packet. Grocery money went into anther envelope. There were envelopes for insurance and bus fare. When the envelopes were empty, they stopped spending in that category. I doubt they ever stopped this practice until they died.
My husband and I have used the system of envelopes for the last 27 years. We have had consistent success with our financial goals. Our tiny farm is paid off. It took us only eight years to pay off the property because we made it our first priority and lived like poor students to do so.
Maxine
The wonders of Insulation
Date: 2025-07-25 05:28 pm (UTC)Insulation is a marvel. Even badly done insulation helps a little.
But well done? Carefully installed with fastidious attention to detail?
Wow. And it works year-round too!
Which is to say that heavily and correctly insulating your exposed attic will not only keep your house warmer in the winter, it will be cooler in the summer because the mass of hot air in your attic isn't pressing down on your living room.
Insulation is one of those things that can often be done better by the homeowner because you are willing to work slowly and carefully whereas a contractor has got to get the job done. It takes time to cut and fit batts snugly into corners.
Your library is full of books on how to properly install insulation. Get one, read it, and follow the directions to the letter.
What should you insulate? Wherever you can reach.
In our house in South Carolina, that meant the exposed attic floor (two layers, laid crosswise) and the underside of the floor in the crawlspace.
Here in Hershey, when Bill insulated our attic, the first thing he did after stripping out the moldy, randomly strewn about batts, was to push the underlayment of rockwool into the bays under our second floor bonus room. He used a hoe. This was better than removing the rockwool (horrible job) and it put insulation where we couldn't otherwise reach. Then the rest of the attic got the layers of pink fiberglass laid crosswise. The second floor bonus room's attic access got three layers.
Insulating the attics was an AWFUL job. Bill put on the boiler suit and got to it. You can insulate attics from fall to spring. Don't do it in the summer because you'll roast in your own sweat.
I insulated our pipes, wrapping ALL of them, hot and cold, in pipe wrap. Hot water stays hot on those long runs to a faucet. What's more, insulating the pipes reduces the chances of them freezing.
We insulated our floors from beneath because we've got full access. Each bay got stuffed with pink batts and the we covered the batts with white polystyrene boards to keep the cats from getting into the insulation. We insulated the exposed walls of our finished basement, accessible from our unfinished basement. We did the same with the bonus room, insulating every wall we could access.
Did this make a difference? You bet. Since Bill did the job (it took years), we have NEVER used as much fuel oil as we did our first winter in Hershey in the poorly insulated house. The house is warmer and less drafty in the winter, and cooler in the summer. It's also quieter.
If you can, insulate. Do it now.
Re: The wonders of Insulation
Date: 2025-07-26 03:23 pm (UTC)Just now, depending on your locality, you may be able to get sheep's wool for less than nothing. Speaking as a sheep farmer in Ireland, there is actually NO value to our sheep's wool just now. No one is buying it. We still have to clip the sheep, because it is a cruelty not to. But no one wants it.**
That said, sheep wool is an excellent material for house insulation - with one, very important caveat!!
The wool needs to be prepped in such a way as to kill any critters living in it, and in such a way as to wash out any loose, attached sheep manure soiling. Seemingly, people have had to re-open walls insulated with UNprepped sheep's wool in order to remove the ongoing life still inhabiting it...
However, when properly neutralised, I'm told that the wool does make a good insulating material that holds its shape and doesn't slump. I advise anyone interested to do their own research, but it may well be a good time to get hold of sheep's wool as a raw material at next to no cost. (I imagine there is still quite a bit of work to properly prepping it, though).
** we ourselves have started to use our annual sheep clippings as slow-acting soil additives in a forest plantation... However, many local farmers are completely stumped as to how to use their wool, which they now see as more of a waste problem than a resource, and some are simply digging holes and packing it in, or finding out of the way dumping places.
Re: The wonders of Insulation
Date: 2025-07-27 02:55 am (UTC)Atmospheric River
Re: The wonders of Insulation
Date: 2025-07-27 06:25 pm (UTC)Employing the excess wool as insulation sounds like a great idea.
Caldathras
Re: The wonders of Insulation
Date: 2025-07-29 10:33 pm (UTC)Re: The wonders of Insulation
Date: 2025-07-28 04:18 am (UTC)BoysMom
Re: The wonders of Insulation
Date: 2025-07-29 12:49 am (UTC)Low cost wool or alpaca fleece may be available for sale from a high school teaching agricultural courses. One with which I had to do had its students raise and shear the sheep but the wool was treated as a byproduct.
Despite the Aus reputation for being a land of sheep, finding sheep's wool insulation is a real chore and all the mineral ones are confusingly (or misleadingly) named "wool" this or that. Even the real stuff is mostly blended with polyester. It does not appear to have a real foothold in the insulation market and the person I know who used it in a house told me it was also not competitive in warmth.
Re: The wonders of Insulation
Date: 2025-07-29 12:24 pm (UTC)(Not necessarily feasible for everyone, I know... but around here keeping sheep IN is the farmer's job, so if our sheep stray into other land, the owners deffo feel entitled to impound and negotiate their release...).
Re: The wonders of Insulation
Date: 2025-07-29 10:30 pm (UTC)Re: The wonders of Insulation
Date: 2025-07-27 12:14 am (UTC)I can see the very top that he is just getting to has dark marks on the insulation, which means airflow has happened, but this is up under the eaves, so kind of like 3rd story height. He will fill voids he sees, and that is it. Some pieces are a few inches short for the wall bay they are in, I can probably get him to cut a small piece to fill that and make it at least fill the wall cavity.
There was no insulation in the wall below one of the second story windows, so he did cut out and place insulation there.
what should also be done is spray foam around all the outlet boxes, but not gonna happen up there.
this second story wall did not have any moisture barrier under the siding, it should have had 30 pound felt (tar paper) like the rest of the house, but it did not. That may have been enough to allow the air movement that dirtied the insulation batts.
The wall had to have siding replaced, so it is now going to be the new modern way of plywood sheathing, Tyvek house wrap, cement board siding. I cant afford to do the whole house, so I have to tackle just the walls that need replacing as they come up, this is non-ideal for the corners. So the tyvek will go around hte corner on the outside of the siding on the adjoining wall and be covered by the 4" wide trim board going down the length of the wall. SO 4 inches will be there, so whenever that wall gets so bad it is replaced, that house wrap 4" can overlap the new installed house wrap on that wall and the seam taped.
Atmospheric River
Tax Holiday
Date: 2025-07-25 06:25 pm (UTC)Re: Tax Holiday
Date: 2025-07-26 01:27 pm (UTC)Remember, TN even taxes charity thrift sales, so it really is the time to go shopping, even if you're as thrifty as I am. :)
If you're considering saving money by moving to a state without an income tax, remember that we have sky high sales taxes to the point that the state legislatures took pity on us peons and gave us sales tax holidays. I hope we have a sales tax holiday on groceries sometime soon. Yes, the state taxes our food. Still unsure I'd really prefer an income tax though.
Re: Tax Holiday
Date: 2025-07-27 02:09 am (UTC)Re: Tax Holiday
Date: 2025-07-27 04:27 am (UTC)Atmospheric RIver
Re: Tax Holiday
Date: 2025-07-27 06:44 pm (UTC)Up here in Canada, our average sales tax (federal & provincial) is 12% to 15%. We are also hit by income tax at both levels. Finally, we are hit by property tax at the local level. Very similar to California from what I can see, only nationwide.
Tax holidays are rare, cause more headaches than benefits, and are usually just done to buy votes.
Caldathras
Re: Tax Holiday
Date: 2025-07-29 07:07 pm (UTC)Re: Tax Holiday
Date: 2025-07-30 06:30 pm (UTC)Re: Tax Holiday
Date: 2025-07-31 08:53 pm (UTC)Re: Tax Holiday
Date: 2025-07-31 09:30 pm (UTC)Soups
Date: 2025-07-25 08:55 pm (UTC)pork carnitas with pintos, pico de Gallo, Mexican rice and broth
pork pot stickers, chicken broth, rice, Chinese cabbage and green onions
It's a win-win for me because leftovers get eaten and changed up. I also have been digging through my pantry for home canned meats, beans and veggies to combine for easy soups. Trust your instincts when it comes to seasoning. I'll stir in a dollop of miso or red pepper paste for a taste change.
Report (bit graphic) - DMSO on a burn
Date: 2025-07-26 05:48 am (UTC)Happened to be out of herbal remedies so after the 10minutes under cool water I thought I would see what happened if I put some pharmaceutical grade 70% DMSO on. It's very cheap so I've been experimenting with it.
It seemed to stop any further blisters forming and the redness on my forearm went away in a couple of days.
I was using the small blister as a control - it healed much like normal - the top came off after a few days, it stayed oozy and sore for a few more, scabbed, scab bled a bit then eventually fell off a few days later to reveal shiny skin underneath.
The large blister stopped hurting after the initial pain unless bumped. It popped at one end and drained after a few days. The skin on top was loose and floppy and blood pooled underneath. Thought I would have to get the skin debrided if it didn't come off naturally but applied DMSO again for infection control. Woke up and the skin had reattached itself. Was acting like normal, flexible skin but a little rough to feel. Blood underneath healed like a bruise over about a week. Eventually skin layers shed much like normal.
So, I liked the DMSO. It seemed to do as advertised - stopping inflammation and unnecessary cell death. The skin reattaching was a big surprise but made healing of the big burn blister quicker and less painful with less exposure to infection. Neither blister scarred but I guess the big one might have if it healed normally.
Downside is it hurts! Not the DMSO itself since that just feels like water to me on notmal skin. But, turned out, keeping all those damaged cells alive meant they kept sending their pain messages for a few hours. Might add a drop of clove oil next time to see if I can numb that.
Fasting
Date: 2025-07-26 09:37 am (UTC)Re: Fasting
Date: 2025-07-26 02:26 pm (UTC)13-15 hours - fat burning begins, inflammation decreases, energy and focus increase
17 hours - cell detox and repair
24 hours - intestinal stem cell repair, brain and autoimmune healing
36 hours - reduces glucose and insulin stores, increased fat burning
48 hours - reduces anxiety and depression, anti-aging, resets dopamine receptors
72 hours - peak autophagy, accelerated healing of chronic conditions
Of course, this isn't medical advice.
Re: Fasting
Date: 2025-07-27 04:59 pm (UTC)Now, 13 (to 15 for some) hours used to be a usual daily fast timing between dinner and breakfast, and I still do this daily(13 hours or so).
Atmospheric River
Re: Fasting
Date: 2025-07-28 06:59 am (UTC)Re: Fasting
Date: 2025-07-28 11:55 pm (UTC)Home insurance
Date: 2025-07-27 04:17 pm (UTC)I doubt anyone has an answer, but my mom just found out her insurance company of forty years is canceling her home owners policy. She has no mortgage, so it's a problem, not a disaster. Now she's got to find a new one. If she can. (We're in the urban-wildland interface zone, as it's called, in the rural Intermountain West, that is, a fire ecosystem. Would you sell insurance here? I wouldn't!)
But home owner's insurance is a relatively new thing, and probably mutual aid societies helped with that sort of problem . . . but our Eastern Star certainly hasn't the budget to rebuild even one house after a wildfire, not at modern prices.
My main thought right now is if she can't get insurance she should go to the county and insist they drop her property tax because it makes the property nearly valueless: no one can buy it without a mortgage and no one will loan without interest.
Our state does not have an insurance of last resort pool as far as we can find. I suspect our best option, if no other company will pick her up, is simply to prepare to fight fire the best we can ourselves and hope for sufficient charity in the event of disaster . . .
BoysMom
PS I need to really push the Boys on building that cistern I've been asking for.
Re: Home insurance
Date: 2025-07-30 01:47 pm (UTC)