Welcome back, frugal freedom fighters. This post is showing you the basic preparations for a planter box, or set thereof.
The tools for today are some cheap plastic gutter mesh [the stuff you put in gutters to keep the leaves out] a pair of decent scissors [if you bought wire mesh, use side-cutters!] and the paperclip staples I showed you how to make last time.
Step 1: Measure the mesh to fit, but make sure it fits up the sides of the box a little way.
Step 2: Cut along the joins. You will notice that the mesh does not want to stay where it’s put and tends to spring back on you.
Step 3: Press mesh into shape and weigh it down.
Step 4: Say hello to my little friend. The long side allows you to position the other side for maximum mesh manipulation :D
Step 5: Position staple.
Step 6: Press into the foam. This will kill your fingertips after a while. Not literally, though.
Step 7: Repeat steps 5 and 6 everywhere you reckon you need to keep the mesh in check.
Step 8: Now do the other side.
Put a layer of rocks in the bottom, just enough to mostly cover it.
And now, a teaser. What am I planning to do with that old rag?
Stay tuned, freedom fighters!
I’ve learned some things about tumblr, now, so this is a two-parter. Should I make you wait for part 2? We’ll see.
I initially wanted the boxes and setup closer to the washing line [it made sense to me] but hubby put the whole box and dice on some bare-ish earth at the other corner of the house. As you can see from the tool set, it’s going to get weird.
If you don’t want to go to the bother of making staples, you can just use regular staples from your office stapler. I didn’t have any of those that worked, so I went with paperclips.
Creative geniuses will tell you the paperclip has over two thousand uses. This is one of them. And how to make it.
Step one, open a paperclip into a V.
Step two, cut the longest side in half.
Step three, flatten the rest of the paperclip.
Step four, cut the longest side in half. It’s preferable to do the cutting steps inside a walled container so the bits don’t go flying off into inconvenient places.
Step five, Voila! Three planter staples for the price of one paperclip.
Step six, now do all again until your hands are ready to croak.
Then I dragged everything outside, ready to make planter boxes.
Stay tuned for part 2, frugal freedom fighters!
My Continuing Adventures in Frugal Freedom Finding
Keep in mind that I’m rounding out prices and, for everyone’s protection, I am obscuring the shops’ names. Clever readers will be able to figure it out in no time at all, I am certain.
As I write this, I have recently returned from a mat-hunt. Anyone who’s played WoW and does not want to spend a fortune at the Auction House knows what that’s about. You go out grinding for materials, or mats for short.
So here’s the breakdown:
* Coolite foam boxes from Grocery Shop C: Free! [Just spin them a tale depending on the volume you desire, they don’t really care]
* 40kilos of rocks from Garden Shop M: $20
* 2 rolls of cheap-arse gutter mesh (Same shop): $4
* One small flex-tub (Same shop): $5
* Side cutters or wire snips (Same shop): $7
* Impulse-bought set of box cutters: $4
* big packet of 1000 paperclips (10 boxes of 100) from Stationers O: $11
* Compost tumbler I’ve had sitting around for a while: $600 [I think. I got $1000 back from the govt. Yay!]
* Pickets we’ve had lying around for about 10 years: Price forgotten [If you don’t have pickets you can scrounge any old thing to lift your boxes up. You can even use the old “college bookshelf” method of bricks and planks]
* Sweat-equity: (y)our precious, precious time and effort.
It took about three hours to round all this lot up, including finding some stuff I didn’t exactly need for the garden…
I plan on setting up in the afternoon, when hubby will be more amenable to mowing and setting up. That is when I will take some pictures and document everything for my next blog. And that is when all my loyal readers find out what the flying hell I’m doing with all this shite.
Stay tuned, freedom fighters!
Finding the Raw Materials - My Adventures in Frugality for Freedom
This Saturday was the day I was supposed to change everything. Or start changing everything.
The ONLY farmer’s market I could find nearby operated one Saturday out of every month. Odd, I thought, but I thought I made it understood that we’d be going together to get infos.
The day dawned and Hubby volunteered to look after the kids whilst I ventured forth on my ownsome.
Like shit, I said, and bullied the kids and my main squeeze into coming along.
To an event that had shut ages ago from lack of interest. The webmeisters in question had evidently failed to notice. Yeesh.
Far be it for me to admit defeat. I went scavenger hunting for big, foam boxes that the BigBoxmarts tend to throw out.
Turns out they arrive Sunday. Fury.
Still, I managed to talk the nice folks into reserving me three of them and I plan on striking five seconds after the doors open.
Hubby, meanwhile, bought a shitton of perishable and frozen goods as an excuse not to be roped into further adventures.
I took mercy on him and went on a pricing expedition to Big Garden Chainstores B and M. I hit M first, because it was newer. Turns out Big Garden Chainstore M is interested in selling one all SORTS of semi-useful and decorative crap for both indoors and outdoors. The garden section is relatively tiny, but their big bags of rocks and sources of mesh are relatively cheap.
B had the bigger gardening section and was actually willing to sell one some varying items needed for hydroponics… but they had no hydroponics-for-idiots starter kits. Just separate items for a whole ton more. Big Garden Chainstore B loves selling items separately, they get more money that way.
Next, I tried the long shot, the biggest dollar shop in the area. It used to sell all sorts of Demtel crap at much less than the easy-installments-of-X tallied up to.
It had been a long time since I’d seen any dollar shop selling Demtel-associated gadgetry, and this visit was no exception.
Maybe Demtel (and its relatives, you know the sort “but wait! There’s more!”) realised they were loosing their hats by selling their shite directly and stayed on the late-night television-only advert circuit. I dunno.
Still, at the end of the day, I know where to strike, come the morrow.
If you can imagine a plump, frumpy commando ninja who cackles occasionally and talks to herself… that would be me. Whisking from A to B to C with a gleeful little scamper and a lot of lookers-on wondering who that strange, lumpy ‘tard was.
And as soon as hubby lurches into wakefulness, that day, I’ll have my mats ready. All I’ll need from him is some fresh garden biomass (You’d know it as “lawn clippings”) to feed to the compost-tumbler and turn into industry-free high-quality potting soil
Economies of Scale
So I revealed to hubby my determination to grow our own fruit and veg, yesterday (I write these in advance, so I don’t have to fret about having something to write about) and offered him some input into the process. He said, grow tomatoes, carrots and lettuce.
Lettuces like things so swampy, I was thinking about a hydroponics setup, so I don’t drown the tomatoes and carrots.
If you don’t buy a kit and grow them indoors (Hubby had a firm and definite ‘no’ to that. Our house is already crammed with gadgets) then you have to buy/build/make a greenhouse. You need pumps and pipes and hoses, oh my.
Even if you go the cheapest you possibly can, that’s an outlay of $8000AU.
Eight. THOUSAND. Dollars.
If you even want to think of making that back, you need to grow a shitton of lettuce and be able to sell them at a profit.
Stalls at the farmer’s market cost money, too.
So, my best options are: Grow to sell at the farmer’s market (Once a month and it will probably co$t) or hang up a placard on the fence, advertise on the Internets or otherwise grow to sell to the local community.
OR… take the outlay as a lost cause and grow to suit myself.
In which case, why NOT buy a kit and grow the frelling things on my computer desk?
Life Skills 101: Grow Your Own (part 3)
They sell pots. They sell tubs. They sell potting mix and blood&bone. They will sell you dynamic lifter, which is actually chook poo. If you have a good garden emporium, it may actually sell you varying kinds of manure [horse poo, cow poo, zoo poo…]. Just don’t go with people poo ‘cause our guts manufacture some really nasty shit. No joke. Cholera, typhus, ebola, and many, many more.
What most garden places don’t sell are what’s now known as “heirloom seeds”. These are viable seeds from plants that really grow and actually give a yield. People like Monsanto and other frankenfood manufacturers sell plebes the seeds that won’t work, are fragile or otherwise need delicate treatment, and give weak, nasty yields. All to convince you, the money-spending plebeian, that growing food is too hard, and to yolk you back into the corporate treadmill.
But wait, there is hope! People all over the world have noticed that the store seeds are crap and are saving and selling “heirloom seeds”. You can find them locally, you can even mail order them in the right circumstances. Once you have heirloom seeds for the plants you want, you can save them from the plants you grow and spread the wealth.
More good news, the Frankenfooderies have yet to discover how to sterilise a carrot or a potato.
You probably did this once or twice for a science fair. Put toothpicks into a potato and suspend it over a glass of water. A week or three passes and you have leaves and roots forming. Bingo - new potato plant. Now stick it in a tub of soil and cover it with something to keep out the weeds [a friend of mine recommends sugarcane mulch] and you have a potato plant flourishing in or near the comfort of your own home.
Carrots are easier. Lop off the top of a carrot and place green-side up on a different tub of soil. Make sure it’s well watered and gets some sun. I admit, I haven’t done this, before, but when you buy carrots to plant, you get a packet of carrot tops.
I know some executive offices and houses grow wheat grass for their smoothies and health shakes… ask around. I’m sure some health shop somewhere is willing to help you, the plebe, grow your own wheat. Back when I was a kid, a few would even sell you a stone grinder known as a quern so you could make your own flour. Now, you may have to look for these.
There are some herbs you can’t kill with a hammer, and are easy to grow in little pots on your kitchen countertop or outside your windowsill. Mint is a favourite, as is Mother-of-all herb, which can substitute for nearly everything except mint. And, of course, the old favourites, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. You may have a knack for growing oregano. I’m not too certain how easy that one is to grow.
I do advise that you mix your potting mix with some kind of fertilising agent, like blood&bone or manure, because every single potting mix I have encountered is basically bark chips from a sawmill, and can barely grow weeds.
Start small and work your way up. Always look for guidance from people who’ve done this sort of thing before. We can have open-source food.
And we should view cross-pollination from Frankencrops as industrial pollution and sue the companies responsible.
One bonus of growing your own is that you can share your bounty with a neighbour, and thus convert them to the Gridle$$ ideas of frugality for freedom.
Cut the chains to corporate slavery one link at a time :)
Life Skills 101 part 2
Yesterday you saw a discourse on sewing. Can save you upwards of $20 per garment and is only “not worth it” if you let the body corporate tell you that you should follow fashion.
Today, I cover cooking.
Cooking is an essential life skill and will save shittons of money if you’re used to eating out of the drive-through.
Yes, I know some places charge more for fresh produce. I have two words for that: Farmer’s Market. Or three more words: Grow Your Own. The latter is lesson 3.
There are three basics to cooking: Boil, Bake, or Fry.
You boil it in water, you bake it in the oven, or you fry it. Simple. Everything else is just fancy dressing of those three.
Poaching? Lower-heated version of ‘boil’.
Sautee? Frying in butter, usually. Mostly with onions.
Roast? You put it in the oven, you bake it.
Reserve the fancy stuff for when you can handle it. Likewise, the kitchen gadgets. What you need is some form of oven, some form of cooktop or hotplate, a big pot, a medium-sized pot and a little pot, and a frying pan. For stirring, you can use kitchen utensils, but sooner or later, you *WILL* need a spatula and a ladle. Big spoons are optional.
There are recipes absolutely fucking everywhere.
Most of them will contain an ingredient or two you disagree with. Or that disagrees with you. Or that you just plain can’t afford. That’s okay. You can leave them out. Or pick another recipe.
After a while, you get a sort of feel for cooking. Especially when you eat the results of your experiments. You may not produce cordon bleu, but you’ll make something that is all the more satisfying for being homemade.
Cooking can be a bonding experience, between parent and child, between couples, between families. Sharing meals where the secret ingredient is care can be amazing.
Try some. It’s delicious.
Independence from Corporations: Life Skills 101
It occurred to me that I know a lot more about coping without corporate-made items than a lot of the folks who don’t know how to protest the corporations.
I know you. You feel like you’re stuck. You’re scared of losing your job/home/car/significant other/whatever if you stand up with the shouting throng. I know a few people in the media got fired for siding with OWS… they won’t be the last.
There are things you can do, as well as sending shingles back to the banks with their crappy credit card offers (High praise to that man, I love you!).
Learn how to sew.
You do not need a machine. Needles and threads are freely available, and not just in branded hobby shops. You can find adequate sewing kits practically anywhere, even in a dollar shop or 99cent store. The thread they supply may be crap, and the scissors are guaranteed to suck, but you get some needles. You can’t skimp with them.
Yes, it takes some trial and error. Practice on some old clothing you were planning on throwing out. Look up instructions online. Practice sewing on buttons. Stitching up hems and, yes, patching up tears.
Every shirt bought at a big box mart - especially the fancier kind - costs upwards of $20. Twenty cents gets to the kid in the sweatshop in Eastern Craplackistan(Note: This is not an actual country. It is a made-up country name to prevent lawsuit-happy corporations from landing on me with a legal ton of bricks) where it’s actually made. The rest of the money goes to advertising and executive pay.
Every cheap-arse sewing kit I’ve ever seen sells for less than a dollar. A good packet of needles, spool of thread and a pair of scissors can cost up to $15, depending on where you shop. Even then, you’re still $5 ahead. More so with every clothing repair you do.
Smarter folks than I may note that fabric and sewing patterns cost less than some shirts you can make. If you’re very good at it, then I would advise saving up for a sewing machine. Do not buy one and expect it to make you a clothing genius.
Yes, your first few garments will be swimming in fail. Nobody has ever just looked at the instructions and produced haute couture overnight.
Yes, your first efforts will be frustrating and take up some otherwise free time. Sew during the advertising they run during your favourite shows. It’s not like you were planning on buying any of that stuff, anyway.
Yes, most of the patterns available for cheap are from a few years ago. Pretend you’re a hipster or otherwise setting a trend.
If anyone snarks at you, say, “At least I’m keeping my money in this country, instead of sending it overseas.”
At least you will have clothing that fits, that suits you, and is made from material you like. And, as an extra bonus, doesn’t cost hundreds of dollars per wardrobe-refreshening.
And you’re not paying for anyone’s executive bonus for building the most polluting sweatshops in countries that really can’t afford it.
Knitters knitting for the 99% #OWS #crafts #photosynth #occupyeverywhere
Power to the people!