The Frugal Farm Living life deliberately

You might already know that I cloth diaper my babies. When it comes time to potty train, I stick with cloth as well and don't use Pull-ups or the other disposable pull-ons. For night-time, though, sometimes they are necessary. I have two kinds of kids--the kind that wets at night and the kind that doesn't. Children numbers 1 and 3 are the night-wetting type and children number 2 and 4 have stayed dry at night even when they weren't even toilet-trained yet. The oldest outgrew the night-wetting shortly after he turned 5 but I am still waiting for Frugalgirl2 to outgrow it at 5 1/2.  read more »

I recently bought 20 pounds of ground beef and part of it was made into a meatloaf for the freezer. Last night as I cooked biscuits and sausage gravy, the youngest Frugalgirl, who is quite opinionated, especially since she turned 3, insisted that we also have "mashed 'tatoes." Since mashed potatoes don't really go with biscuits and gravy, I told her I'd make them tonight, so I pulled the meatloaf out of the freezer as well.

This tutorial was originally published on my old blog but I thought I'd move it over.

While I still buy those outrageously expensive individual cups of yogurt on occasion, I almost always have a quart or two of homemade yogurt in the fridge. I use it mostly in fruit smoothies. Some frozen fruit and some yogurt, blended up, makes a delicious and nutritious breakfast drink. It is super easy to make your own yogurt, for a fraction of the cost of store-bought.

Things you will need:
Milk
Saucepan
2 tbsp plain yogurt (with active cultures) per quart of milk
candy or instant-read thermometer
quart jars and lids
small cooler
dish towels  read more »

I am still pregnant and while I wait for this baby to come I am trying to finish up this year's canning. As I stirred the plum jam this morning I was a little bit glad that the apple trees aren't really mature enough to have born any fruit this year, and that we only got a couple gallons of pears, because between the peaches, nectarines, apricots, plums, berries, crabapples, squash, cucumbers, and corn, I had my hands full. It feels good to have almost all of my jars full of food. There are still lots of blackberries and some apricot puree in the freezer that need to be made into jam, but right now the freezer is so jam-packed (not with jam!) with sale-purchased meat that I don't have space for jam.  read more »

The two older girls recently donated their hair to Locks of Love. I was getting really tired of brushing waist-length hair on the 5 year-old every morning before school, but it had to be her idea for it to be cut. Look how cute they turned out!  read more »