Gardens, worms, and fishing

Well, I beleive I mentioned that we started a garden this summer in our back yard. We don't expect much out of it this year, because it is our first in a long long time. It is sort of a beginner's experiment.

It is also the first raised garden we have ever done. Before it was the old time rows of corn with irrigation in between. This is supposed to be more efficient and better for the plants. We created a U shaped garden, the concept being that it would take best advantage of the space provided, plus allow for us to reach every plant from our hands and knees without stepping in the garden, plus allow us to Y our hose and cover the entire garden. We snaked two soaker hoses from the Y through each side of the garden and planted seedlings farther apart than we probably needed, because we are used to the old way. It is doing very well, but there are a few places where there are problems. We planted a combination of seeds and seedlings (store bought, unfortunately) and weren't very careful about keeping track of where we planted our seeds, and since there were two of us, we covered up each other's work. Only two corn plants have come up from seeds, for example. Next year we will do all seedlings and grow them ourselved (cheaper). Soon we plan to have our own seeds from previous years.

WE had to buy manure for fertilizer this year, because we started late. The soil is not that great. Maybe we should have used more, but we are trying to do this as cheaply as possible so that it is easier for the garden to pay for itself. After the season, we will borrow our neighbor's tiller again (they will receive vegies in return) and till some more manure into the plot. I'm going to be on the lookout for cheap or free manure, though. This is farm country and we should be able to find a beef or dairy farm around here somewhere where we can get some. And there's also buffalo dung from the park. Wonder how that would do in a garden.

We also plan to compost for next year, building a compost bin and putting our leaves and grass clippings into it, and have our own free fertilizer. What is more, we plan to start a worm farm and create vermicompost. We will put the needed ingrediants into a worm bin. One article I read mentioned using an old dresser drawer with holes drilled into it as a small one. There is a local thrift store for for Habitat for Humanity that sells drawers dirt cheap. That will be the least expensive alternative. The library where I work is always recycling newpaper, so it will be easy to shred that for filler. That, water, and a little garbage (no bones or meat) every week and we have a home for our worms.

This is where the fishing comes in. Today I will buy one small pole, at a yard sale if I can find it, to go along with my giant surf caster bought many years ago on the east coast that I plan to use for catfishing the bigguns. Then, we will buy some bait worms. After research, the best worm for both vermicomposting and fishing combined is red wigglers (nightcrawlers like to travel and would leave our little box too quickly). Fish love them, and they are great for composting. What is left after our fishin trip we put into our worm farm. We do this a few times, and our population will begin to grow pretty quickly.

Soon, we will have a self-sustaining cycle: we grow worms for composting, which feeds our garden, whose vegegetable leftovers feed the worms, who supply us with free bait for fishing and worms and fertilizer for gardening. Any time the farm gets too full, we take a bunch out for fishing, drop a bunch in our garden for aeration and fertilization, along with the waste from the compsot and worm farms, and we are all set. Healthy garden with healthy vegetables, and healthy meat from fishing.

Gardens, worms, and fishing. All self-sustaining, and all, eventually, free.

Fishing For Food : Mother Earth News

Fishing For Food : Mother Earth News

This article fits nicely with my current project. I'm doing a lot of research on fishing at the moment, to see if we can actually do this thing.

Fishing

Today was a better day. We were able to drive most of the way home last night, but got too tired and pulled over in a secluded, closed truck stop and stayed for free. No camping fee.

After waking, we had one of those simple, entertaining, productive days of doing nothing but what we wanted. We went to a free wildlife range and pulled over to watch the buffalo walk by outside our window as we ate cold cereal for breakfast. We then continued on to a campground where they let me shower for free. We went around to the other side of the lake and fished for a while. No luck there, so we drove to a small creek with a tiny dam just outside the park. I set my fishing pole into the water, went back inside to rejoin my wife, who laid on the overcab bed and read.

I sat at the picture window with a beautiful view of this wonderful Oklahoma creek and watched my line, the ducks across the way, and continued to read Walden. It is encouraging that fish was the only meat Thoreau allowed himself to eat over the two years at Walden Pond. Instinct told me that fishing would be a frugal thing if done correctly. I can catch our food, the food that is probably best for someone with a heart condition like mine.

After a time, Wife fell asleep, and the day slowly wore on. Soon, a couple drove down the dirt road past our RV and parked near the shore farther down. About this time I decided to clean up the mess other people left around where we were parked, and load up my equipment. Before I left I walked down the road to where this elderly couple was fishing to check their luck. Unlike me, they were catching one little bream after another. Their hook was not in the water more than a minute before they caught one. Seemed like great luck to a beginner like me, but it turns out this is not what they were really fishing for. This was going to be their bait! They were actually going to a large lake nearby that is known for giant catfish. This retired couple does this almost every day. Just yesterday, they caught a 23 pount catfish!

Afte taking just a couple of helpful hints from these two old pros, I jumped in the RV and headed for Catfish Heaven. When we arrived, we fired up a grill, cooked a few hotdogs and heated up some beans, ate lunch, and went fishing for Giants.

After a couple of hours with only a nibble at my stinkbait, we decided that I needed to do more research. So, we headed for home, where I worked on weeding our small vegetable garden before going to the library to pick up the book on catishing that I had ILLed. After reading it, I decided that I had been doing MOST things right. The right bait, the right size pole, the right line, the right place (near the dam, in the rocks). I just hadn't been patient enough.

Anyway, I'm encouraged. Wife is going yard sailing this weekend, and will be on the lookout for inexpensive rods and reels. Here in Oklahoma, I am allowed up to 7 lines in the water at once! If I can't catch something with 7 lines, I'm in trouble.

Walden

I am currently reading Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. It is very revealing that a lot of things that people think are wrong now were wrong then, in the 1840s and 50s. I am learning a lot from it. Seems to me that this is the original Your Money or Your Life, and that Joe Dominguez was not so original, after all. Yes, his plan is his own, but the concept of equating hours spent earning money to buy something or go somewhere is the real tradeoff we are making for stuff is all Thoreau. That new car is hours and hours and hours of work out of our lives, not dollars. We spend our lives, not dollars, for things.

Anyway, I'm not far into it. Just finished Economy. I'll report more as I learn more.

This has been a rough day, moneywise. We took our used, paid for RV on a 400 mile round trip, but only mde it 100 miles before we had to pull over. Fortunately, we did make to my niece's house, and there is a nice park just south of here. So, we spent a nice day yesterday and last night at the park with our great niece and nephew. My brother and sister also altered their travel plans and came here, instead of our original destination, so we were all able to make the best of a bad situation.

This is small town Oklahoma, so there were no transmisison places open today or yesterday, but fortunately our niece's fiance had a friend who is a shadetree mechanic. The bad thing is that we are spending money to fix this thing that we didn't think we would need to. The good thing is it is getting worked on on a Sunday, and he charges a lot less than a shop. The tranny looks in bad shape, but with the work this guy is doing we should be able to limp around for a few weeks. No more long trips until we get the thing worked on right, though. We probably need it rebuilt.

The thing I am kicking myself about, though, is that we knew it had problems. We didn't know they were this bad, but we still should have fixed it before a trip of this magnitude. This is what Dave Ramsey would call Stupid Tax: doing something dumb that costs you money. It certainly wasn't a frugal thing to do.

The RV isn't all that bad as such things go, though. It is a small four cylendar, paid for with cash, uses little gas, so I don't feel so bad about the concept for RVing. Just this particular situation on this particular day.

Yard sale success

We held a yard sale last weekend.

Actually, it was a block sale. I was dubious about this at first... thought the other folks would draw away customers and money and actually cost us. But, I like our neighbors, and thought is might be worth a try.

Boy, am I glad! Sold almost everything we wanted to, most of it junk. Many more people came by for the sale than would have come for a single yard sale, and the stuff each home was selling was diverse enough that we didn't confuse each other. Because we all chipped in, we could also afford much more expensive ads, which in turn probably drew more people. I recommend it to everyone who wants to do a sale.

I also spent a lot of time the night before putting out yard signs. I kept some old yard signs from the recent election, turned them inside out, and printed out full pages, one word per page, Block Sale, then a big arrow pointing one way or the other, and stapled them to both sides. Eight in all. I set them on all the major intersections for each street.

The two most interesting things to me:

1. How few people haggled. I set the prices higher than I really expected, and was willing to come down on almost everything, but people bought most of it at full asking price. I think only 5 people asked for less, and then not as much as I expected. I was so relieved that I said yes almost instantly to everything.

2. The junk people bought! Some people even paid full asking price for items I told them didn't work. I asked one guy if he knew how to work on TVs when he tried to buy one I had marked all the way down beause it didn't work. He told me no, but he bought it anyway!

Joined two email sites

Yesterday, I joined an e-mail group at Yahoo! groups called the Frugal Folks
Group. The purpose is to discuss, question, and learn about this frugal
lifestyle. Its web address http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Frugal-Folks-Life/

Today, I received an email from someone on that site recommending another
site called Financial Boot Camp, based mostly on the Dave Ramsey plan. It is
at http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/FinancialBootCamp/

It looks like a very heavily moderated group, and I'm still waiting for
approval. I had to send them an e-mail asking for permission, telling them
why I should be let on. We'll see. If I don't get on based on the info I
sent them, it probably isn't a site I would be interested in being a part
of, anyway.

The first site looks good. Thousands of messages all the way back to 1999.

Escape from Affluenza

Just watched the video "Escape from Affluenza," a
sequal to the documentary "Affluenza" and book by the
same title. I haven't seen the first film, but I am
reading the book based on it.

I was affraid I wouldn't enjoy or get much out of the
sequal without watching the original, but it turns out
that it can actually seem independent of the first.

The key theme is voluntary simplicity: living a simple
life by choice in order to enjoy life more fully, save
money, and protect the environment. All three of these
things appeal to me. We are in the process of cutting
way back, and reading lots of books on the subject in
order to scale back our spending habbits.

One idea we got while watching this film that we
didn't have before was chickens. We are going to pick
up a few next year to raise over the summer for eggs.
Maybe ducks too. We live in town, but it is a small
town. We will just need to be careful that we don't
get roosters, who can make much more noise than
hens. May three hens and one duck will add just the right atmosphere, while allowing us to get the food we need.

Lot of ideas in this movie, but mostly inspiration.
They also mentioned another book that I am studying:
Your Money or Your Life, by Joe Dominguez and Vicki
Robbin. I'm also working my way through The Complete
Tightwad Gazette, an excellent book with lots of
practical ideas on frugality.

I will be posting my thoughts and things I learn on my
journey from time to time.

By the way, I bought the Tightwad and Dominguez books
because I wanted to study them and outline them and
mark the heck out of them. I first checked copies out
of the library. Video, too. If you don't have them in
your library, go to the reference desk and request
them via intelribrary loan.

Following are some links to some of my favorite resources mentioned here:

Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence

Affluenza

The Complete Tightwad Gazette

The beginning

This is the beginning of my blog experience. The purpose of this journal will be to collect my thoughts, partly to inspire myself, partly to go back and remind myself of interesting things.

I currently belong to two financial sites with subscriptions. My plans are to drop both of them when the subscription runs out.

One of them is Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover at http://www.mytotalmoneymakeover.com and the other is Mary Hunt's Cheapskate Monthly newsletter site at http://www.Cheapskatemonthly.com both of which are devoted to debt free living. The Ramsey site is based on his nationally syndicated talk show. You can download the show in MP3 format from the pay site, or you can listen to it for free at http://www.daveramsey.com

The Hunt site has her newsletter all the way back to the late 1990s.

Ramsey's site is $9 a month, and Hunt's is $12 a year. In this process of becoming debt free, I have discovered frugal living, thanks to The Complete Tightwad Gazette, by Amy Dacyczyn. So, I'm dropping anything that costs money and can be done for free or on the cheap.