Ongoing Challenge #5 Moey -- Get Back On the Horse

Oh, I did have a week last week! It was just a sucky week, won't go into too many of the details, but the long and short of it is that I flunked on ALL the goals last week. So my new ongoing challenge to add today is, Get Back On the Horse.

Something is better than nothing, right? Keep on keeping on, and don't give up.

A brief update is that the garden is producing nicely for us at the moment in spite of borers and raccoons. My potato plants have made an appearance, so I need to learn to care for them so they will produce potatoes, and hope that it doesn't get too hot for them. It is definitely a much warmer summer than it was last summer, which is good in a way, because the heat is reducing the fungal problems we had last year (which killed the tomatoes and would affect my little potato plants too.)

I have borrowed more interesting books from the library, some of which I would like to share in a future post. Seems like the library is getting in JUST the books I am wanting to read lately, so I am sure to check the "New Books" section every time I go. I can not keep up with all the reading I am wanting to do.

As far as the Dollar-a-Day challenge, due to a few extenuating circumstances (needing some extra TLC in the form of ginger ale and sprite and easy-to-digest foods,) plus a general meltdown of the system, I have spent about twice what I had budgeted for on groceries over this past week. It is still a good total, but I can do better if I refocus.

I plan to go through the stock and pull together as many recipes as I can, using what we have on hand and utilizing what is currently ready for harvest. I really don't want to waste anything, because it does make a huge difference in a small budget. When I wasn't watching the budget so closely, it didn't really matter that much.

Ongoing Challenge #4 Moey -- 30 Minutes in the Garden

One thing I am trying to accomplish with these Ongoing Challenges, is to make a habit out of doing *something.* Sometimes I let my expectations and dreams get too big for what I can reasonably expect from my time and energy in this stage of my life. So then, I feel defeated and don't even try. The garden is one area where I tend to do this. I have lots of wants and wishes for the garden, but nowhere near enough time to accomplish what I want to out there. But I thought it would be a good idea to see what can be accomplished in the time that I do have, maybe half-an-hour a day, and why not see what happens?

So this goes on my Ongoing Challenge list too -- 30 Minutes in the Garden, Daily.

In our vegetable garden, we currently are growing lettuce, carrots, beets, onions, yellow squash, cucumber, big tomatoes, roma tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, capsicum and hot peppers. Everything is doing fairly well at the moment although the tomatoes are suffering a little from the humidity and fungal growth -- which reminds me, today I saw toadstools growing in the squash plants, and now I am wondering if the squash will be safe to eat...hmmmm...the humidity is killer here!

Anyway, so I have been getting into the garden for my 30 minutes -- I try to do it early before it gets so darn hot! and I have been able to make some good observations (like the fact that we have squash vine borers again, and the lettuce has bolted) and do a couple of necessary things like pull up the bolted lettuce (saved a couple good ones for seed, though) and harvest the ripe vegies, and whatever.

Last week, when I had decided that I would do my utmost not to waste another bite of food, I went shopping in the pantry for potatoes -- had a little 5lb bag that had not been opened yet, but when I went to get out the potatoes, they were all wrinkly and starting to mold and sprout. There was only one good one in the batch. So, (uncharacteristically, and only because I had made it a challenge,) I cut up a couple of the ones least moldy and yet sprouty, and dug up a little patch to plant them in. My oldest son helped me plant the potato pieces, and so far there has been no sign of life.

So today I dug one up a little bit, and could see that it is sprouting some little leaves down there in the soil. Life!

I went and looked up what I should have done to plant potatoes (soak in salt water, plant in spring because they don't like hot weather, etc.) and it wasn't very encouraging...still, it didn't cost me anything but 20 minutes of cutting, digging and planting, and if I get a new batch of potatoes out of something I was going to throw away, I will be very happy. :-)

Ongoing Challenge #2 Moey -- Don't Waste

This walks hand-in-hand with what Deb posted earlier. What she was talking about is a little more pro-active than what I am talking about. At this point in my household, I need to get control over the wastage of stuff -- food, materials, time, talents.

I have read many good books during the course of my married life, about this, but probably the stand-out resource, to me, is that well-known collection by Amy Dacyczyn, The Tightwad Gazette.

This is the book that taught me how to turn leftover bits of foody everything into muffins, casseroles, soups, quiches; how to make almost everything from almost anything; how not to be stuff-proud but money-poor; and most importantly, WHY I would want to!

The fact that the author had both a small income and a large family (six children,like Deb and me), makes her ideas both credible and attainable.

I'll let all the single ladies keep Oprah and Cheryl Mendelson, give me $15 worth of Amy any day.

Now, here is the small difficulty: the book (as a series of newsletters) was compiled in the 90's, in the USA, and so is both somewhat outdated and somewhat USA-biased in its ideas, materials available and advice. (That is one of the reasons I think Deb's input is so valuable as an Aussie.) So in our lives, I hope that we can continue to think of creative ways to use what we have, and not to waste.

I just love that challenge.

Humongous Challenge #1 -- Deb

Use what you have to create what you need/want

I am an habitual collector of potential. The theme of this challenge is something that has increasing gripped my interest lately, especially since I am very aware that we have way too much potential lying around here in the form of fabric, old pieces of furniture, tools, old clothing, yarn, craft stuff, dirt, seeds, containers, paint, frames, timber, food, old blankets, paper, toilet paper tubes, old towels, beads, feathers, energetic youngsters...you get the picture I guess. These are the kinds of things I can turn into a vibrant and fruitful garden, new and exciting toys and learning experiences for my children, gifts and thoughtful gestures for my friends and family, decorations and beautifications for my home, suitable and lovely clothing for those who need it, good and wholesome food to fill many hungry bellies, and perhaps even that most universal form of stored potential (and the one of which I'm not yet such a skillful collector)...

The ideal realisation of this challenge would be the conversion of all available resources stored in and around my home into useful and useable things, while not bringing new things into my home whenever it is possible to meet needs from within it. I suppose in order to reach this grand goal, I first need to know what I have, and what I need, so I will spend a little time figuring all of that out. It will likely be necessary for me to be very organised with this, or else I will lose my mind and any interest in this project. Thus I will need to categorise the dickens out of our resources and our needs and wants and make many, many, many lists. Therefore, step one = copious listmaking.

To be continued........

Ongoing Challenge #1 Moey -- Eat Cheaper (but not poorer)

In the great stash of library books, is a little paperback called On a dollar a day : one couple's unlikely adventures in eating in America by Christopher Greenslate.

The premise of the first part of the book (the part I was interested in, and have read, LOL,) was that a billion people on the earth are overweight (hello, me) and 800,000,000 don't have enough to eat. The rest of the people on earth fall somewhere in between that, with many having "food insecurity," meaning, they have only enough to get by, day by day, hand-to-mouth.

And a vast majority of the world lives on around $1 a day.

I liked this book, a lot. It was interesting reading. Dramatic, a bit over-the-top, I thought at the time. I mean, really, how hard is it to eat on a dollar a day, in the USA? Everyone knows that if you cook from scratch and buy the best deals and use coupons, you can practically eat for free.

For the authors (Christopher and his girlfriend Kerry Leonard,) it wasn't that simple -- they are vegan, which adds interest, but also complication. They wouldn't use anything that wasn't available to anyone, and they wouldn't accept gifts. So, teachers' lunches and relatives "helping" wasn't going to work.

They agreed to try it for a month -- the book has the details -- but the long and short of it is that they pretty near starved, and about went crazy with the feeling of deprivation. A lot of the feelings Kerri describes resonated with me, as a chronic dieter: how, knowing you can't have something, makes it all the more desirable and a constant in your thoughts, and how mentally grueling it is to deal with (voluntary) deprivation.

Here are her words:

Since the meager dollar-a-day portions didn't satiate my hunger, food became the focus of my existence. When we weren't preparing food, we were eating. When we weren't eating, we were thinking about eating. It became increasingly impossible to ignore the abundance of food around me, and the fact that I couldn't have it. (p.31)

This book really fueled my imagination. I have thought about this many times: how cheaply can we eat (and eat well, mind you, I have little mouths to feed and not about to sacrifice health for ideology!) But I didn't have a goal number in my mind, nor a concrete reason to do it: so I would try to get frugal, use every little bit of everything, (read everything on the subject, goes without saying,) do it for a while, burn out, and order pizza.

Well, now I have a number, and a reason. The reason isn't a very good one; it basically boils down to: if a couple of vegan yuppies who don't know how to cook beyond beans and rice can do it, so can I, with my prior years of knowledge and experience. Plus, there are seven of us who eat, and only 4 of us eat full portions -- the others are still young children -- and $49/week is a lot easier to deal with than $14. Bulk buys and all that. Plus, I also have a very well-stocked pantry filled with food bought on discount (and I generally don't buy junk, or if I do, it gets eaten up right away so doesn't languish in the pantry anyhow.)

To my financial detriment, I also have a quarter share of grass-fed, organic beef in the freezer, which cost me $450 and gets doled out extremely frugally, as the cost-per-pound was astronomical. If I have $50/week to spend on food, and $450 went to beef, well, I better make it last!

So I went through the pantry, fridges and freezers, and came up with an estimated total of $1455 worth of groceries on hand. I have many pounds of beans and rice and pasta, etc., bought on discount (for example, my most recent stock-up purchase was 20lbs of botan rice -- sushi rice --for $6.99.) So I can probably at least try to stretch my pantry supplies out for the year, and that is what I based the "grocery shop" figure on. I'm giving myself $50/week instead of $49, because it's easier for figuring. So, that's $2600/year, minus $1455 in stock-on-hand, which leaves $1145, or $22/week, for grocery shopping.

I usually spend 7 - 10 times that much, especially if I am feeling tired and/or lazy.

Oh, and there is the problem of the chickens, which cost $12.50/month in feed. That used to seem cheap, for the wonderful eggs they give us; but all of a sudden, $3 a week is big money.

The immediate problem that I can see is having enough money to cover fruit and vegetables, and milk. For the recommended dairy allowance, at 3 servings a day, times 7 people, times 7 days a week, we are looking at 147 servings -- or, over 9 gallons of milk (the cheapest way to get dairy) per week. That is $20 right there, and then--how? do I get enough fruit and veg to feed 7 of us with only $2/week?

There are solutions: start using the great stash of powdered milk in the pantry (which has already been accounted for in the budget,) plant a garden (more on that later,) find cheaper alternatives to dairy (pick a vegan's brain, Hi Deb! *waves*)....

If I really only had a dollar a day to spend on food, I'd have to get my gardening money out of that, too. Which leads to interesting thoughts on: where can I get free seeds? Free supplies? How can I get something for next-to-nothing?

The bottom line is, I don't have to do this, but now I sure want to. Good exercise for the brain, the butt, and the wallet. At the end of it, I sure hope to have learned something, to be able to teach someone who needs the info and may not have the resources to experiment, and to be able to have saved enough to give a big chunk away to a worthy cause.

The thought strikes me that I've been awfully selfish and ignorant not to have given this much prolonged effort before. People have suffered because I have been lazy and selfish. That is the truth. And one of the people suffering, is myself -- suffering under the weight of, well, weight.

My husband said to me the other day, as I was doing all this figuring, "got another challenge going on?" And I said, "Of course! You know I would die, bored to death, without a challenge...and this is a good one."

Well, we'll see. And don't worry: for my purposes, the children come first, and I'll accept any freebies I can get, just like anyone who is really having to live on $1/day. LOL.

ADDED: here is the blog from Christopher and Kerri's experiment.