The Rag Bag

Do you still have a rag bag? I remember my mother having one, and it was the place to go for cleaning rags, shoe polishing needs, wax buffers, car polishers and all kinds of other tasks. Our wet mop was a wood-handle with a metal spring loaded top that could be opened to put in a new rag mop head--or rags, which is what we used.

I still have a rag bag, and it's as indispensable today in my home as it was in my mother's household. The rag bag is where we get rags for putting polish on the furniture, for removing stripper when we're refinishing and for putting on wood stain. We use rags to clean up spills and to wash the car. And I still have one of those wood-handled mop with the spring-loaded catch, and I still use rags in the mop when I'm mopping the floors. No Swiffer or whatever the latest craze is here. My mophead is recyclable. I wash my rags and reuse them many times before they are discarded. Old tee shirts, towels and other cotton fabrics fill my ragbag.

Many people saved rags for quilts, patches, dolls, rugs and anything else requiring fabric. Log cabin owners used rags to stuff in the chinking and around doors as insulation.

An old crazy quilt I bought 10 years ago, and still use. It is
made from scraps of upholstery material and velvet, with a
blanket serving as the filler.

This quilt was made in the 1950's of old silk neckties.

Ragpicker in France, from wikimedia commons

Rags were even worth money, as ragpickers came and bought used clothing and worn out blankets and such to be sold to pulp mills for use in paper-making. 

Feed sacks were often made of pretty cotton fabrics and were carefully saved to make clothing, underwear, kitchen towels and other useful household items.

Today rags don't get much respect. Most clothing is not made of natural fibers anymore so paper mills probably couldn't use them if the rags were available. Paper towels, wet wipes, microfiber mops and other more modern and convenient tools have replaced the rag as a cleaning device in many homes. Quilts are made with newly bought and carefully matched fabrics, and made more for their artistic value than for the basic need to keep warm.

With today's focus on living "green" I wonder if people are reconsidering the rag bag. Is it making a comeback in the homes of this century?

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

A Frugal Life and Toothpaste

I never really think about the fact that we live a frugal life. It has been a lifelong habit, looking for savings, comparing prices, buying at thrift stores and cooking from scratch. I suppose it's not surprising since I grew up in a large family where nothing was wasted because money was always tight. But for me, it's nor need necessarily that makes me look for bargains. It's the hunt, the score, and the satisfaction sometimes of putting something once useful back into service.

Which leads me to toothpaste. Not that I make my own; I don't. But I have found that toothpaste is one useful cleaning tool for things besides teeth. For example, you can use toothpaste to smooth out the scratches on a DVD or CD. Simply rub the toothpaste in small circles over the disc, rinse it clean, dry with a soft cotton rag (t-shirts or old hankies work great), and that's it. If you have a DVD that sticks (it happens a lot with movies we check out from the library) this may well cure the problem.

Toothpaste is also great for cleaning white leather tennis shoes. Scrub it in with a brush, rinse and dry. Then use whatever product you like to condition the leather again. It's awesome around the soles; I keep an old toothbrush to scrub the creases and seams.

I use toothpaste to remove stains on cloth too; it's my desperation measure and it sometimes works. I wet the item rub in the toothpaste and scrub gently. Then wash as normal. It also works on stains on glass and china items.

I bet there are uses for toothpaste that I have yet to discover. Do you know any?

Copyright 2012 Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Creasey Greens

It's the season for creasy greens in our area, and that means delicious fresh greens, the first of the season, have been gracing our table.

As we were driving home Sunday afternoon, I spotted a large patch on the side of the road in Calhoun County. you know what I said--"Turn around!" Larry was willing because he likes greens as well or better than I do.

We parked on the side of the road by a little creek, and Larry was soon picking greens. I was too, although what I was picking wasn't creasy greens, it was daylily shoots. I am sure that people passing by laughed at me and thought I was picking the lilies thinking that they were ramps. But I knew what I wanted--the juicy, tasty young shoots taste marvelous in a salad. The tubers are also supposed to be edible but I have never tried them. I like the young shoots and leaves chopped up in salads, and the flowers batter-dipped and fried; I have also heard that the flower buds can be eaten and I plan to try them this summer.

Larry picked for quite a while, and he said there were plenty of greens left when he was finished. It's always a good thing to leave enough of a wild plant to re-seed and re-populate an area for the coming years.

Creasy greens generally prefer damp, rich places to grow so this hillside seems odd in a way. But they are prolific and will grow pretty much anywhere, even in poor soil. In 15 minutes Larry had filled his bag.

Dark green, rich in nutrients and with a flavor like spinach, creasy greens are a real springtime bargain.

We knew we needed to clean the greens as soon as we got home to preserve the best of their flavor and nutrients. Larry washed them and I cut off the bottom of the clusters (too much dirt hides in there) and checked to be sure all grass, leaves and debris were removed. Then I put them into a pot of boiling water for about a minute (long enough to wilt them thoroughly), drained, rinsed with cold water and bagged them up for the freezer.

We ended up with 4 packages that are just the right size for the two of us for a meal.

 

And of course we kept out enough to have for our supper that evening. Creasy greens and scrambled eggs--a perfect springtime meal. A lot of people like to drizzle bacon grease on their greens, and that's good but bacon grease just isn't on our diet these days.

 

I hope we can get out and pick some more of this delicious free food before they get too big and get bitter. Although when the flower buds form, those can be cooked and eaten like broccoli, so there's a "second season" coming for anyone who wants to give them a try.

Cheapskate!

Regular readers know I try to be frugal. I've never thought of myself as a cheapskate exactly, but just as someone who prefers not to spend her money wastefully and to be mindful of how I spend. Along with that, I also am aware of my impact on the environment. The two together, apparently, put into a new category of frugality: I'm a green cheapskate.

I had never heard the term until Wednesday, when the original green cheapskate came to give a talk at the library. It was a lunchtime program so I took my lunch and headed up to listen. The title of the program didn't tell me that I would be so entertained! Jeff Yeager, who is so cheap, apparently, that his wallet is filled with dust, was funny, intriguing and engaging. And made me realize that there are a lot of other people who live the same way we do, buying used, watching prices, being careful at the grocery store and trying limit our impact on the environment by making good choices.

He made us laugh when he said that while millions of people have read his book, they all check it out at the library or read it in the back of the book store. And I would bet that many of you who are also mindful of how you spend are already thinking, "Gee, I ought to go down to the lbirary and check his book out!" I might actually part with some cash and buy a copy, if the information in it is presented in as lively and interesting a way as Mr. Yeager's presentation.

One good example of how he and his wife save on groceries: he doesn't buy any food that costs more than $1.00 a pound. That means he eats a lot of chicken and turkey, and maybe pork when it's on sale. He doesn't eat out of season either, so while tomatoes are over $2 a pound right now, he's probably eating salads without them. Apples are probably on his shopping list now, but berries and nectarines? Probably not. He admitted that he does occasionally splurge on a steak or other meats but it's a rarity.

If you're into saving money and living responsibility on the planet, you might want to check out Yeager's  books and his blog, The Daily Green.

I Used to Buy Bananas

...along with a few other things that are no longer on my shopping list.

While the economy has had many ups and downs in the last 2 years or so, the price of food has climbed and climbed. Have you noticed the impact on your budget? I doubt many of us have missed it. I hear rumblings that food (even chocolate) will continue to increase in cost, and I look at my shopping cart and wonder what else will not go in it in the coming year.

Bananas used to be a staple on my table. We ate them fresh, and when they started turning brown I used them to make banana bread or banana cake. Sometimes I would find a large bag, maybe ten pounds or more, marked $1.00. I would have a baking frenzy then, making loaf after loaf of banana bread for the freezer. Now, with the price at 55 cents a pound, bananas have joined the luxury list at my house. When you consider that you throw away almost a third of the weight with the peel, the price per pound becomes even more out of reach.

I suppose I should not fret over bananas; after all, they are one fruit that actually contains fat and I can do without that. And I suppose I can get the potassium bananas are so rich in from some other source. There is nothing that will replace those golden circles on top of my cereal, however, or the creamy smoothness of the first bite into a banana at perfect ripeness.

Being on a diet means not only are we losing weight, we're gaining money. The grocery list is shorter--no cheese, no bread, no pasta, a lot less butter and sugar and other things. Still I am appalled at the cost of even the small amount of food I buy, and I wonder how a family with small children manages the hit to their wallet each time they enter the store. Are they cutting back, not buying the little treats children love, going for the generic instead of the brand names? Or are people just sucking it up and closing their eyes as they swipe their debit card?

It will soon be garden time and some of the pressure of food prices will relax as we start eating our own produce. Last year more Americans than ever planted gardens, and some even ventured into backyard poultry. I wonder if this trend will continue, or if, tired of trying to do it themselves, Americans will lapse back into the convenience of ready-made and pre-packaged.

What's going on at your house? Are you still buying bananas or have they ended up on your do-not-buy list too? Have you cut back in other areas, and are you planning to grow a bigger garden this year, or maybe even your first garden? How is the increase at the grocery store affecting your life?

Canning Beans

It sounds like I've lost my mind, right? Canning beans in this weather?

But that is just what I did yesterday, after going to our granddaughter's birthday party and before figuring out how to do mail merge and labeling 500 promotional postcards. I'd rather can beans any day than have to do that again, let me tell you. It must be my left-handed-right-brain thing, but doing a step-by-step procedure like the mail merge and working through eleven pages of instructions just about makes me a blithering idiot. But it's done.

We like dried beans like pintos, black beans, black-eye peas (are these really a bean or a pea? Inquiring minds want to know), navy beans ,limas--pretty much all of them. Cooking them is another story. I have to remember to put them in to soak, or do the quick-soak method, and then have several hours to spare to let them cook. Usually I end up with a huge pot of beans that we either eat until we're sick of them, or put in the freezer and forget until we find a frozen lump down in the bottom of the freezer, all freezer-burnt and unrecognizable. Canned beans are an option, but the prices keep going up--have you noticed? It used to be I could get two cans for a dollar, now they're almost a dollar a can at our local supermarket.

The next option is to can them myself. It's not difficult, it's a good thing to do in winter because the stove and canner add a little more warmth to the house, and with free gas, now it's a good savings over the store-bought cans.

Most canning books have instructions for processing dried beans. Basically, the beans are cleaned, re-hydrated, heated, put into jars and processed. The University of Georgia has some clear instructions and even some recipes for tomato or molasses sauce to add to your beans. I prefer to can mine plain so that I can use them in whatever way I want when I open them. The recipes all call for adding salt--I don't.

Canning beans needs a pressure canner, so if you don't have one, don't try it. And don't over-fill the jars, because the beans will expand with processing. An inch of headspace is needed in the top of the jars.

Yields: I had a 4-pound bag of navy beans, and I ended up with 15 pints. So how does that figure out monetarily? Well, a can of store-bought beans is 15 ounces; my 15 jars equal 16 store-bought cans then. At eighty-five cents a can, my beans are worth $13.60. The 4-pound bag of beans cost $4.29, or 27 cents per jar.

I had the jars, so I will estimate that I've used each one at least 3 times and will re-use them at least 5 more times. At $9.00 a dozen, each jar cost 75 cents. That means each use cost about 9 cents. Lids are about 10 cents each. The water is free from the well, and the gas to cook them is free.

Total cost per jar: 27 cents for the beans; 9 cents for the jar; 10 cents for the lids = 46 cents per jar.

You can see that this would not be nearly as cost effective if I paid for my water and the gas. And probably I could find beans a little cheaper at another store, but then there is also the cost of gasoline to factor in. I could save more if I bought my beans in larger quantities too, but 15 jars will last us for a good while--and that's just the navy beans. I still have pintos, red beans, black beans, limas and black-eyed peas to do, sometime this month or next.

All the economics aside, there is one thing that can't be quantified: the satisfaction of seeing the finished product on the shelves of the cellar and knowing that meals can be ready to eat without a trip to town. There's no dollar value for that.

Moneysavers

New year, new resolutions, and for many of us the number one resolution is to find more ways to save, and to live a little greener in the process.

My list of things I already do includes the following:

Laundry: hanging it out saves on the electric bill--but we've talked about that before. My daughter-in-law claims that clothes last longer if they are air-dried: colors don't fade, and you know that lint in your dryer? That's part of the fabric in your clothing; the process of drying breaks the fibers that are woven together to form cloth, so a little bit of your favorite towel is lost each time it goes through the dryer.

Hair care: I decided to let my hair grow long again, quit blow-drying, moussing and messing with it. I cut it myself when it gets too long. It's not stylin' but it works for me (well, most of the time). Savings: hair products, hair cuts, blow dryer, curling iron, electricity, gas going to the hair dresser, and best of all--time.

Cloth napkins: They can be found for next to nothing at yard sales and resale places. They can be washed and re-used. They can be mixed and matched for variety. They're pretty!

Cloth kitchen towels instead of paper towels: I still buy paper towels occasionally (especially when grandkids come!), but this is a next-step for me as soon as I have enough linen kitchen towels and good rags for cleaning up spills.

Crocheted dishcloths: My sister Judy gave me one she made and I love it. I want more! This is so much better than anything else I've used to wash dishes.

Kitchen mops: Did you know you can buy wood-handled mops with spring-loaded clip heads that you can refill with rags or replaceable mopheads? We had them when I was a girl and I recently found them again. These are the best--no wringing out a big heavy mop or even worse buying expensive refills. Just use what you have on hand. These mops aren't pretty but they are sturdy and work well. Those Swiffers et al are expensive to upkeep, and don't do the job any better than the old standard cleaning tools. (am I sounding like an old fogey here?)

Wood floors instead of carpet: for all kinds of reasons. Wood will not wear out for years and years (it can wear out, though, as we proved when we were children in our big old house in Virginia. Those oak boards were worn thin!). Wood can be cleaned, refinished to look like new over and over. Carpet needs special tools for cleaning; it has to be replaced; and that's not even talking about the dirt and dust and whatever else seeps down through carpet into the pad and sneaks around firing up allergies in people like me.

Those are a few things that came immediately to mind as I started writing this post. I am sure you can add many other things to this list. The bottom line is re-use, recycle and recreate. I am often amused by ads that cry out to us to "Hurry in and save!" Guess what? If we don't hurry in, we'll save even more because we won't spend anything! It's not shopping and sales, it's thinking about what we buy, what we really need, and what we can re-use, and what we can do ourselves.

There is a new book called Save BIG: How to Cut Out Big Costs, by Elizabeth Leamy that I would like to read. I'm pretty good at saving in little ways: carry my own coffee to work, pack my lunch, grow a garden, can and preserve, hang out laundry, eat out rarely, and so on. But the big things? Like most people, I don't pay attention to them--and I should. I read her blog and found a few things I want to investigate further.

And I'll save even more--I'll get her book from the library!

Care to share? What new things are you trying this year to save money and/or go green? And what old-tried-and-true things are you still doing?