Stephanie emailed in recently and I thought you’d be inspired by what she shared:
Have you ever thought about simple, small ways in which you can use the resources in your community to save, and also to teach your children simplicity and the basics of life? The reward of hunting and gathering is immense.
Here are a few of the ways we’ve used the resources available to us in our community to save money and keep life simple:
–My husband hunts. That provides considerable deer, hog, bullfrog and fowl meat for us. We also fish.
–My 6-year-old son and I have collected at least a gallon of mulberries in the last two weeks and we are freezing those for future use.
–We collect black walnuts (we live in Kansas) in the fall, let them sit all winter, then crack them in the spring.
–We pick rhubarb from my husband’s grandmother’s house, it comes up every year.
–A kind farmer let us ride his combine and gave us a bucket of wheat which we will grind into flour.
–I save the crusts off his bread and make my own bread crumbs.
–We save rain water and use it for our garden (though the drought has hindered that some!)
Now apple season is starting! Several people in town have more apples than they can use, so we are picking them off the trees and making applesauce and even crab apple pie! Crab apples make wonderful pies and applesauce. They are very tart, which I like.
Also, though people’s gardens are suffering from the drought and heat, we have been able to get a few squashes here and there and cucumbers.
One of the local towns here has a “reuse” center at the landfill for the same thing, you drop off what you don’t need and see if there is something you can use. It’s awesome!
I planted a 4X4 square foot, raised bed this year. I had a $25 gift card to Lowes that I used to pay for most of the supplies and then I bought cheap seeds at Walmart. Since it was my first serious attempt at gardening, I did 2 tomato plants, squash, cukes, and beans. It has been great and since I am in the south, I still have time to plant again. I plan to expand and put in blueberries this fall. We harvest wild blackberries. I don’t have the heart to hunt or fish, but I think it is a great option for those who can. I have some crab apple trees behind my fence, but the idea of snakes, lizards, and spiders is just too much of a turn off for me to get those apples. My mother once made homemade apple sauce out of crab apples and it was awesome! Of course, that was in the north where there were far less creepy crawlies. lol. When I get better at gardening, I will add some fruit trees. 🙂
I often keep my eyes open for fruit or nut trees that look as if they are not being harvested. The worst that someone can say is “no”.
Also, our city offers free mulch. You just have to be willing to haul it yourself.
I meant to add that I recently wrote a post on this very thing. I just didn’t want to take up a lot of room in the comments saying the same thing over again.
http://seeyouinthegarden.com/2012/07/finding-produce-for-free/
How do you know which berries are ok? I think we have wild raspberries that grow in our woodsy area of the yard, but we have never tried them.
Ahh, mulberries. I’ll go out picking and meet people who tell stories of how they picked mulberries as children.
We also have wild blackberries, wineberries and pawpaws around here in southern Maryland. The pawpaws we can harvest in quantity in the right places, but there are not usually enough berries to be worth a trip unless we were planning on visiting someplace anyway.
My best harvest has been chickweed from our own garden. It came up in place of the spinach I tried planting one year, and it can be used similarly, though the flavor is a little different. Now I look forward to chickweed season every fall or spring, so we have free greens for our omelets and salads. It is so prolific! I just wish it had a classier name so I could feed it to guests without embarrassment.
Our friend let us pick the cooking apples he was not going to use because, at 80+ years old, it’s too hard for him to get up in the tree to pick them. We made him an apple pie to thank him. We also like to pick crabapples to make crabapple sauce. Some varieties will make bitter sauce that’s only good for baking, but a monastery near here has the biggest, sweetest, reddest crabapples I’ve ever seen growing right by the parking lot… we got permission to pick, and cooking the apples made a sauce that looked and tasted like strawberry lemonade!
I can appreciate the resourcefulness here, saving money, and a more old fashioned way of life, but old fashioned does not mean simple to me. Hunting, preparing and cooking hunted meats. Gathering and storing walnuts all winter long. Grinding flour. That’s a LOT of work.
As someone who does this some, I agree! Making a batch of crabapple sauce takes some time and planning. Buying regular apple sauce from the orchard near my parents’ house would be much easier. We enjoyed saucemaking last year, but this year we have a newborn during crabapple season, so we’re not going picking. We are barely able to keep our dishes washed, so we really are trying to keep things simple — as in “let’s just worry about the basics for now.”
Daina: You are showing lots of wisdom in that choice. ;
I drove by a house near my town that had pears all over their trees. I knocked on their door and asked if I could pick some. They weren’t going to use them, so I now have over 60 pounds of pears to can next week. I have a friend who knocks on people’s doors when she sees wild (muscadine) grapes growing along roadways. People usually always let her pick, and she makes grape jelly with them.
My parents have pecan trees, and they share w/ family and some neighbors. Unfortunately, I haven’t made the time to shell them. 🙂 I think taking the time to do so would be quite worth it, as pecans are so expensive in the stores.
My family enjoyed pecan shelling in the evenings, in the living room, with a fire if it was cold enough, or maybe while watching a movie. It keeps your hands busy, and facilitates conversation (or quite movie-watching).
I don’t think I could eat a bullfrog………but it probably tastes like chicken ;),We had black walnut trees in MO, but we just turned them in for the money, never used them ourselves, but we had 5 trees, we would have never used that many walnuts. Our walnuts would get gross if I didn’t take them every other day, how did you keep them decent all winter? We let the kids pick them up and keep the money, so it worked out well……….
To get through the green hull, you actually let them turn black Makes it so much easier if you are doing it yourself. At least, that is what we used to do. Then all you have to do is crack the shell (with a hammer or such) to get the meat out. It is a bit more time intensive than picking, say, apples.
Where did you find a place to turn them into?
You can put them in a large bucket and store them inside somewhere, say a shed or garage until they dry up through the winter. The first year my son tossed 6 in the trunk of my car and they were awesome by the spring!
I use Freecycle to give things away and sometimes I get something in return.
I enrolled my 5yo in a free preschool sports and a preschool art class this past year through the city’s parks and recreation department. I took a free adult ceramics class and made ornaments for my Christmas tree. We also took advantage of low cost swimming and gymnastics lessons for our kids.
We “hunt” for mushrooms at the local park. My husband did plenty of research first, and we only pick ones that are very easy to tell apart from any dangerous varieties. Many of our salads include dandilion greens from the woods behind our house, a safe distance from the sprays our neighbors use on their lawns.
A fishing license here is $60, so we would have to catch a lot of fish to pay for those. My DH doesn’t hunt, and doesn’t want me to, but the fees associated with that are pretty high in our state too. We intersperse perennial foodstuffs in our landscape – asparagus, fruit trees, rhubarb, etc.
It is illegal to collect rainwater in some areas – so if you decide to do that, you may want to check first (it’s illegal here). Instead, we redirect it with gutters and underground pipe, to the roots of our fruit trees. We just aren’t allowed to store it.
One of the biggest community resources for us is a different type – the library. We get almost all our reading materials there, we borrow movies to watch, magazines to browse – it’s a real blessing. It cuts cost and clutter. 🙂
I wonder why it is illegal to collect rainwater?
Because if the people upstream hold up the water, the people further downstream don’t get any. People saving back the water can literally dry up a river in dry areas.
My father lives in Washington state and he was just telling me today about some guy who was being charged by the state for collecting rainwater!
That’s sounds like fun and something that the kids will remember ..memory making and saving money!! My daughter would love the bull frog hunting!! We have four chickens and we go to great-grandma’s to harvest raspberries every July.
BullFrog!?!? Wow! I’m not THAT adventurous but I have been known to pick wild black raspberries that grow in our nearby parks…also there are some plants you can eat that no body every does. Day lilly buds are lovely sauteed in butter! A great addition to your garden and they come up every year!
I was going to comment on the same thing. I’ve had frog legs but never bullfrog!
Here in the south, most of the country boys go frog gigging all summer. My son has an 8ft frog gigger pole. Of course I don’t eat them, but he & his cousins enjoy cooking the legs.
Our city has a great program that we use to save money and keep down waste. Our recycling program will pick up used containers of paint and cleaners and any that are still usable they put in the recycle store, the store is open a few days a week and you can come by and get what you need for free. This is great for those times that you need maybe a little bit of a strong cleaner for something particular but would never use a whole bottle.
I wish every community did this with everything that folks clear from the home. I have some diapers right now that are size 4 that were left from a pack he only used half of. I have a few baby sleepers I do not wish to hold a yard sale and I don’t want to give them to goodwill. I tried freecylce only to have no shows. I have tempted to put them in the car and give them to the first Mom I see at Walmart. I have other items as well. It is a shame that we can not have free stores. They had these on every airforce base I ever lived on and I loved them. Sometimes we paid .25 but that was to pay the light bill and for the person who sat in the store on the day they were open.
Sarah- have you tried pregnancy crisis centers, shelters, food banks etc. I know we have a woman’s center that takes baby items because they rescue woman you were thinking of aborting their baby and then help them with all the needs it will take to keep the baby.
I have found that a table in front of my house with the sign “Items on the table are FREE. (table stays)” on it does wonders for getting rid of things. No need to worry about posting or arranging to meet up with people.
Why don’t you want to give to the Goodwill? Don’t you think they are a good organization? I thought they sold the donated items to run their programs and that their programs were to try and help people get jobs?
Goodwill is very selective in the items they take. If there are items that don’t pass the standards they throw them out, defeating the purpose of recycling your things. Some of these are any baby items that a bum has touched (swings, chairs ets) and any packaged products. I’m not sure on the whole list, but I do know those.
How about donating to local thrift stores run by churches and hospitals in your community?
I agree with this! My 3 favorite thrift stores (that are also much nicer and cheaper than Goodwill or Salvation Army) are run by a church or the Rescue Mission. Plus they are local, so you can see where the money goes!