Necessary Household Basics: Recipes

Clean, Green Living in 3 Cheap, Easy Steps

Part 2: Keeping Things Clean

In Part 1 of this 3-part series I listed some basic ingredients to purchase that can do double or triple duty in your home cleaning, disinfecting and treating small first aid issues while saving you big money and at the same time NOT polluting your home or our collective environment.

In this part of the series I’ll list some easy recipes for mixing your basic ingredients into useful household products. This doesn’t take a lot of time or heavy effort, and can be done on a weekend afternoon easily once every month or two (as they get used up), or mixed on the spot for particular jobs.

In The Laundry Room: Everybody must do laundry. Whether or not you’ve got an infant in diapers (cloth is best!) or small children who love to make mud pies, or older kids who sweat a lot, or just working adults who must wear good clothes or uniforms daily in their jobs, you’re going to have to wash clothes. And while the price of food and gasoline keeps rising out of sight, most people already know that good laundry products are a significant chunk of change out of the budget.

I mentioned in Part 1 how to make liquid soap out of the dregs of bars that melt all over your tub and sink by just putting them in a container with water and letting them dissolve. That’s good hand soap that can be put into a dispenser, but can also provide the basis of laundry soap if you’ve enough of it. I have a friend who must travel for her job, and who collects those little motel soaps through the year, gifting them to me at Christmas so I’ve got sizeable baskets of rock-hard teeny-soaps still in their wrappers. I use these to make liquid soap, and liquid soap to make laundry soap. Alternatively, you can use Fels Naptha laundry soap bars, which are inexpensive and go quite far. The three bar package can make about 6 gallons of laundry soap, which should get most households through at least that many months even if there’s a lot of laundry to do! Ivory soap bars or flakes work very well for baby laundry, and is still among the least expensive of basic soaps you can buy.
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Save Big Money On Necessary Basics!

Clean, Green Living in 3 Cheap, Easy Steps

Part 1: The List of Ingredients

Now that it’s late May, it’s time to stock up for the summer – and our many summer visitors – on things like bug repellant (we really do live in the Deep Woods), anti-itch solution, insect sting remedies, poison ivy treatments, cut and scrape treatments, etc. The basic summertime First Aid Kit, all ingredients of which will be used as regularly as the usual household cleaners, deodorizers, detergents, polishes and disinfectants get used all year round.

Might as well get items that do double or triple duty as household cleansers and disinfectants as well as personal skin and hair care products too. I’ll use this post to make the basic list of things to buy, and later posts will give specific recipes and hints on how to use them to best advantage. And the best thing about these products? They’re Green and Eco-Friendly to boot!

Baking Soda: It all starts with good old baking soda. You can purchase generic or the primary name brand we recognize (Arm and Hammer). It’s cheap either way, and the same product though generic will tend to clump and solidify quicker and easier. Compared against the multitude of specialty chemicalized products you could be buying to do many of the same tasks, you could save hundreds of dollars a year with a cleaner, fresher house and a healthier family to show for it!

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Green Fuel Hope on the Horizon!

Perhaps many readers have become aware of the looming worldwide food shortage, there was a story on NPR’s The World just Monday night (March 31) about rising tensions in the bread lines of Egypt. London’s Guardian reported this past November that the crisis can be attributed to climate change (crop failures and ag diversion of rice and wheat crops) and fuel shortages – both the increasing price of petroleum fuels for transportation and agriculture as well as the diversion of staple food crops like soybeans and corn toward biofuels production.

Soaring grain prices are now exploding into full-fledged food riots in many corners of the planet, while Americans are stunned by rising prices every time they go to the grocery store. As of December, 2007 the UN Food and Agricultural Organization reported that 37 countries face immediate food crises, and 20 nations had imposed some form of food-price controls. Reuters lays additional blame on panicked speculators trading on global futures markets in the wake of recession fears fueled by the increasing defaults among Wall Street’s investment banks and stock market gamblers.

But there is hope on the horizon, particularly for those of us who were smart enough to purchase diesel powered vehicles, despite the ruinous and increasing costs of gasoline. That hope is a new source for producing biodiesel (which can run the entirety of our transportation system, including passenger cars if GM can be persuaded to come off their new diesel they’ve been sitting on in joint patent with the EPA).

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Recycled Fashionables

The Beauty and Style site List Maven has posted a linky article entitled…

35 Accessories Made From Recycled Materials

It’s truly imaginative. I particularly like the crocheted plastic grocery bag necklace, though I use my plastic grocery bags as trash basket liners if I forget to take my many forever re-usable canvas bags to the store with me. And I’ll definitely have to make my grandson those computer key cuff links for the prom, since he’s determined to win the Duck brand Scholarship for best Duct Tape tuxedo…

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Frugal Youth: Stuff Does Not Equal Happiness

Age Counseling Youth

Once Upon a Christmas… my Mother-in-Law gifted my children with some thickly quilted fuzzy slippers to put on in the morning when the wood stove in our little cabin had gone out and the water in the dog dish was more often than not frozen solid. Unfortunately both of the pairs of slippers she’d bought consisted of two right feet. So off she went right after Christmas to the store where she’d bought them, and let the kids pick out new pairs that they could wear on both their feet.

The saleslady remembered when Mom had bought them, and the story she told about the kids living in the cold mountains without automatic heat. She asked the kids how they could stand living in a house with no heat. The kids looked at her quizzically, my daughter answered that of course we had heat, we just didn’t have electricity. That really threw the young woman for a loop, so she just had to ask…

If you’ve no electricity, how can you have heat? Daughter smiled. “Fire,” she answered calmly. “Fire is hot.”

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It’s Better Than Cheap… It’s Free!

The Wonderful World of Freecycling

Way, way back in 2004 Grist Magazine published an article entitled Give It Away, Give It Away, Give It Away Now about a cool new environmentally friendly idea called “Freecycling.” Begun in 2003 by Deron Beal, a recycling program worker in Tucson, Arizona, freecycling is a network of people with ‘stuff’ they don’t want to throw away to take up landfill space, but don’t want to keep either. It’s a way of getting rid of stuff by giving it to someone who wants it, and you’d be surprised at some of the great stuff there is to be had for free!

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15 Real Ways to Conserve (and save money!)

Since we’ve been looking at ways to avoid spending money on things we don’t really need, let’s look at some ways to save money on things we really DO need. Like, say energy to heat and cool our homes, cook our food, keep us (and our clothes) clean, etc., etc., etc. Energy – in the form of electricity, gas, heating oil and such for use in our homes is not getting any cheaper, and the generation technologies are contributing greatly to global warming. Water is another diminishing resource we cannot live without. Learning to consume less water is vital for our collective future. One of the best things we can do for our world and our pocketbooks is to learn how to live on less. USE less, NEED less, and be proud of our small footprints on the earth!

Here are some of the best ways to conserve energy and water that are being touted at present. Some of you can put to good use right now, and some of you will want to seriously consider through the coming year as your income allows you to replace things or renovate for a more efficient lifestyle. If you can save a couple thousand dollars a year on your electric and water bills, you’ll have that much more money to spend or save! Check ‘em out…

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Tips for Avoiding Pressure to Shop

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been much of a good consumer as that designation has come to signify in and out of recessions in this capitalist-based economy. I don’t “shop ’til I drop,” I don’t buy much of anything new, and whenever friends or sisters try to talk me into tagging along for a bout of binge buying at the mall I come up with every excuse in the book to beg out of it.

And now that I live on a mountain rather far from town (and any sort of mall), I’ve managed to keep from making friends who believe that frivolous spending of vast amounts of money is a competitive sport. I like that about the people here in the southern Appalachians – they’re not nearly so concerned conspicuous consumption as they are concerned about the quality of their natural habitats. Perhaps that’s true of rural areas all over the country, where people are simply not accustomed to spending money as an ingrained habit or mere way to pass the time of one’s life. When we lived in a city of a million-plus people in Florida, there seemed to be at least one strip mall for every household, and they were all making a living!

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Taking Control: Energy Independence

Analyzing Your Usage and Expense

In the 21st century almost all of us are acutely aware of the challenges of global warming, unsustainable consumption habits, the real human costs of petroleum dependency and the ever-rising cost of all forms of energy. When it’s difficult for regular middle class city and suburban dwellers to maintain their few hours of home down-time due to rising costs, the burden on rural dwellers can easily be impossible to bear.

Anyone committed to sustainable and self-sufficient living should have already begun planning their energy strategies. There are many things to consider before investing in energy sources. One of the first things a homeowner needs to become aware of are the various federal and state incentive programs available to them if they choose to meet some or all of their own energy needs with ‘green’ sources. These incentives have been fluctuating at the same time the per-watt price of the technology has been steadily falling. In some places the cost trade-off – where the cost to install is paid for by the incentives and further energy is basically free-for-upkeep – is down to 3-5 years. Which is a point when someone planning to live the whole rest of their lives on their homestead has no really good excuse not to invest! The Database of State Incentives offers a clickable map with details for all 50 states and is updated as incentives are tweaked or changed.

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The Thrifty Have Long Been Green!

October 15 has been designated “Blog Action Day”, when bloggers are encouraged to write about our environment and things regular people can do to reduce their environmental footprint on the planet and help steward the environment we all depend upon to sustain our lives.

This is pretty easy to do if you’re living on a shoestring budget, as our previous excursions into bargain-hunting, recycling, thrifting and doing for yourself have demonstrated amply. Yet at a time when the Nobel Peace Prize can go to Al Gore for his crusade to educate the nations of the world about the threat of global warming and how our poor choices of lifestyle are contributing to it, this is a great time to do some thinking about how we live. Maybe earn a new appreciation not just for our cleverness in being able to get by on less, but for our wisdom in doing so. Even if we didn’t have to.

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