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.

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.

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?

Simple Gifts

I used to hang out my laundry all the time. We didn't have a dryer. Twice I fell while carrying baskets of wet clothes--one fall produced a broken foot (try that when you're pregnant!) and the other a badly sprained ankle. When the dryer came, I quit hanging out clothes thankfully.

Funny how we go full circle sometimes. For the past year I've wanted a clothesline again. We still had the poles but they were in the wrong spot. I kept talking about it. Wouldn't it be nice to have sheets that smell of sunshine? Wouldn't it save on our electric bill? At the same time, I realized that given my limited amount of time at home in the evenings and even on weekends, hanging out laundry might actually be a luxury I could not afford as far as time was concerned.

But one day a few weeks ago, I came home to find that Larry had pulled up and re-set the poles in a new, sunny location. I was thrilled. But the weather didn't cooperate on the weekends I was home--until Sunday.

Sunday I hung out four loads. They dried in less than an hour. The clothes smell wonderful. The dryer didn't run all day (my dryer is not working right, I think, because it takes at least 90 minutes to dry one load--ugh).

Such a simple thing, hanging out laundry. Wooden clothespins, sunshine and a nice breeze, clothes fluttering colorfully in the yard--it was part of my life for a long time, and it is good to have it back. I find that we are slowly simplifying our life by removing some of the "conveniences" we've added over the years. First the TV left, then the dishwasher. Quiet returned in their place. Now the dryer will be silent too, at least some of the time.

We will keep the dryer because I know that there will be many times I will still need it, unlike the TV and dishwasher that are seldom missed. But one more thing is unplugged, one more tiny drop in the electric bill, and one more activity that will take me outside to enjoy the sun and air has been restored.

Simple gifts. They're the best kind.

Packing Lunch a Little Greener

Many of us are finding new ways to save, recycle, and re-use. Here's a few things I've been doing when I pack my lunch. None of them are earth-shattering, but little things that take little time and reduce waste:



1. Instead of buying yogurt in the little containers, we buy it in big tubs like cottage cheese. It's a lot cheaper, and less plastic goes into the environment.


2. To pack the yogurt for my lunch, I'm using 1/2 pint canning jars instead of plastic containers. They wash up, I have plenty of them, and they're not plastic. Other recycled jars would work too. This isn't a good idea for kids lunches, of course, but most of us adults can manage to carry a glass jar without breaking it (note that I said most!)



3. Ditto for cottage cheese or other liquid-type stuff for lunch.



4. I have always liked wax paper sandwich bags but I have not been able to find any for years. I finally searched online and found that at Webstaurant. com you can buy them 1000 at a time! They're cheap too (15.49/1000)--until you add shipping (12.28). But even with shipping I think they are a little cheaper than plastic sandwich bags.



There are two kinds available, "dry" and "wet." That refers to what you plan to pack in them, not the bags themselves! I opted for the "wet" bags because you never know when a sandwich will leak.



1000 bags should last me a long, long time. Once a bag has been used, it can go in recycling. Cool.



5. Paper lunch bags are a given, of course. And sometimes they can be re-used for several days. I sometimes use the paper bags, but mostly I use a canvas tote bag these days--it washes and can be re-used over and over.



6. I make my morning coffee and take it with me. That saves a stop to buy coffee and one more throwaway cup in the environment. If you don't have time to make coffee, bring your own cup and fill it up instead.


What simple things are you doing to reduce the amount of waste your family creates? I'd love to hear some more ideas.