We spent the whole weekend digging, and our little homestead is coming along nicely.  On Friday, we went to an end of season sale at the local tree nursery.  We had been waiting all summer for that sale, and were there as soon as they opened.  All plants were 25% off, and when you’re putting in an orchard and berry patch, that 25% amounts to a pretty good savings. 

We ended up with 11 fruit trees (cherry, peach, apricot, and apple) and eight berry bushes (raspberry, grape, blueberry, gooseberry).  We also got some weed blocker, peat moss, and drought-resistant decorative plants for areas of our front yard that we plan to cover with mulch and/or rocks – all for 25% off normal prices.   I normally hate to spend money, but we had been planning that shopping trip all summer (and saving for it), and were thrilled with what we got. 

We spent all day Saturday planting trees and bushes.  By the end of the day, we were sore all over, but our orchard and berry patch are now in place… they just need to grow a bit.

Sunday was devoted to planting some grass seed around our back patio in order to reclaim a bit of the yard back from the industrial weeds, and moving gravel from one side of our front yard to the other.  It’s like going to the gym but with an added bonus of getting stuff done.  We were exhausted by the time we went to bed last night, but it feels great to be making such good progress towards our goals.

I’ll leave you with a picture of diapers drying on our new clothesline.  The clothesline was rescued from a scrap metal bin by my husband, and he did a great job of making it new again.  I love looking out the window and seeing our laundry drying on it, and I adore seeing our son’s little homemade diapers flapping in the breeze on the line.

Back in January, we decided that we needed a new bank.  We have finally checked that task off of our to-do list – better late than never I suppose.  Around the time we became frustrated with Wells Fargo, we also decided to sell our house, which meant several months of sprucing things up and going through the sale process.  Once we moved into our new place, we were just as busy, and it felt like a three ring circus around here for the last couple months.

But while Wells Fargo was relatively convenient at our old house (about a 20 minute bike ride), it is much less convenient here.  The closest branch is about 13 miles from here – not a quick bike trip that I can squeeze in between all my other tasks during the day.  That sealed the deal, and convinced us to go ahead with a change.

We are now the proud owners of business and personal accounts at our local credit union.  So far, we are thrilled.  The personal account pays 5.01% interest on all funds up to $25,000.  That is more than three times what ING is paying us right now, and was a huge selling point for us.  In addition, the credit union rebates ATM fees that other banks charge (automatically, no need to keep receipts), offers free bill pay (which our WF account did not), and delivers exceptional customer service – we’ve been blown away by the level of service we’ve received during our account set up process.

The credit union is about a mile from our house.  It’s in the local grocery store, which we can see in the distance if we look out our back door.  It takes just a few minutes to bike over there, and is also a nice walk with the dog.

Now I’m plowing through the switching process, which is not much fun.  That is the main reason I waited so long to do this – I knew it wouldn’t be fun.  I’ve started making a list of all the places I need to notify about the change, and there are 23 items on the list so far.  Plus bill pay setups, which I haven’t gotten to yet.  We had been with Wells Fargo for a long time, and our entire financial life is linked to them in one way or another.  It will take me a while to untangle all of that, but I know that this is worth the effort.  It will be nice to be earning such a good rate on our money, and it’s nice to feel like a valued customer.

Some of my readers had mentioned credit unions back in January when I detailed our troubles with Wells Fargo, and that was part of what inspired me to look into the idea – thank you!

Since my foray into baking bread has worked out well, I thought I’d try tortillas.  I don’t know why I never thought of this before.  Seriously, they are about as easy as baking powder biscuits, which I’ve been making for years.  I stopped buying big name-brand tortillas years ago, because of the large number of ingredients on the label.  We don’t eat tortillas all that often, but when we do, I always buy organic, preservative-free tortillas at the health food store.  They are not cheap.

Yesterday, I found this recipe online, and decided to give it a try.  You know me – I can’t ever follow a recipe without tweaking it a bit.  So I swapped out some of the white flour for whole wheat flour, and used Smart Balance instead of lard.  It took about five minutes to get everything mixed up and 12 little dough balls made.  I let them sit for a while and then rolled them out with my rolling pin (first time I ever used my rolling pin!  Guess my son can’t have it as a toy afterall).  I cooked them for about 10 – 15 seconds per side in a hot frying pan (no oil needed), and that was all it took.  They were fabulous.  We may or may not have eaten all twelve of them already.

So not only will I not be buying bread anymore, I also won’t be buying tortillas.  I don’t remember the exact price of the tortillas that I used to buy, but I’m thinking it was around $4 for a dozen.  I’m estimating that the ingredients I used yesterday cost less than a dollar (including organic flour).  The tortillas took very little time to make, and required almost no cooking skills.  I can definitely do that again.

Yesterday I baked a loaf of whole wheat bread in our sun oven.  Then I decided to make eggplant sandwiches.  I had a fresh farmers market eggplant, which I sliced up and drizzled with fresh garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper.  Then I put the eggplant slices in the sun oven and left them there for about an hour.  Halfway through their cooking, I added a bell pepper from our garden to the sun oven, and roasted it along with the eggplant.

I assembled the sandwiches with tomatoes (from the farmers market – ours aren’t ready yet), lettuce from our garden, mustard, and vegan mayo, along with the eggplant and roasted pepper.  They were amazingly tasty, and I love that all the cooking was done for free.  As a bonus, it was done without heating up my already warm kitchen, and while I was able to get other stuff done in the house.  Here’s a picture (I’m not a food photographer by any stretch, so please ignore the glare):

We also installed a clothesline yesterday, which I’m very excited about.  Actually we just installed the poles – we still have to add the lines, which we’re going to do tomorrow.  My husband found the poles at a scrap metal place he’s been frequenting lately.  They had been cut off at ground level, so they’re a bit shorter than normal.  Once we got them embedded in concrete they’re only about four and a half feet high.  But they will work perfectly… after all, I’ve been using folding clothes racks that are about four feet high for the last two years.  The best part about the poles was that they were scrap metal, sold for 25 cents a pound.  He bought a bunch of other stuff with them; we don’t know exactly how much they cost, but we’re guessing it was probably around ten bucks.  One of the T-bars was broken, so my husband snagged another piece of pole scrap and welded on a new T-bar.

We commented on the fact that our new clothesline area takes up as much space as we had in our entire backyard at our old house.  Here, it’s only taking up a tiny little area of yard to the side of our house.  Reason number 742 that we’re glad we moved!

At our old house, it was only $4/month to add basic cable TV to our internet service.  So we did.  We had a handful of channels – I have no idea how many, because the only thing I ever watched was “Ice Road Truckers” (my husband picked that one…) and “The Office” (that was my choice, and I consider it an essential part of my life).  My husband liked to watch “The Daily Show” in the mornings while he drank his coffee, and there were a few other times when we would flip on the TV and watch random stuff here and there.  Overall, it was worth $4/month.

At our new house, it’s $30/month to add TV to our internet service.  We both agreed that TV wasn’t worth anywhere near that amount to us.  So we are TV-free.  We actually packed our 400 pound, 1995 era TV into storage back in April and stashed it in an empty house that my parents own.  It’s still sitting there, along with a few other things that we need to go pick up.  So I guess we’ve actually been TV-free since April, but we still got TV programming (and could record it using Windows Media Center on our computers) until we moved.

Now, all we have is internet.  But that means we have Hulu, and we can still watch DVDs on our laptops.  So far, we’ve been so busy since we moved that we haven’t been to Hulu at all, or rented/borrowed a single movie.  I’m thinking that once winter comes, we might have a little more couch time, but I think we’ll be just fine without TV.  We didn’t want our son to be exposed to TV during his first few years, and now it’s easy to make sure that is the case.  In our living room we have a couple of big floor pillows and lots of toddler toys in the spot where one might expect to find a TV.  We’re both very happy with this arrangement, and the $30 a month that we’re saving is a nice bonus.

How expensive would TV have to be for you to decide that it’s not worth it?

My husband finished a window well cover earlier this week, and is nearly finished with the second one.  I’m pretty darn impressed, especially given that this is his first real welding project (he considered the umbrella stand practice, since it just involved attaching a piece of pipe to a piece of I-beam).  Here’s a picture of the finished window well cover:

He spent $58 on the grating (enough to make covers for both windows), and about $10 on the angle iron.  He ran out of angle iron on the second cover, so he’s been using scrap metal that we found in a dumpster behind a welding shop here in town.  He talked with the owners a few weeks ago, and they said that he’s welcome to dig through their scrap metal dumpster any time he wants.  So for the last couple weeks, he’s taken me over there on Friday nights, for a “dumpster date.”  He gets in and pulls out the good metal, and hands it out to me so that I can load it up in our wagon.  And he gets a kick out of telling all the neighbors what a romantic guy he is, taking his wife dumpster diving on Friday nights

Our new patio is the perfect spot for our solar oven.  At our old house, we had to move the oven from the back yard to the front yard as the day went by (sometimes in the middle of cooking something) because the yard was so small and the house next door was so close that we didn’t get constant sun in any one spot for long.  But our new backyard is like a gigantic sun deck.  It gets sun all day long, and the patio extends far enough back from the house that it doesn’t get shaded by the house until evening.  Not only is this good news for our garden, but it’s also great for the sun oven. 

Yesterday, I picked a bell pepper from the potted pepper plants we brought with us from the old house (they were in our hydroponic garden, and now live in pots in the back yard).  Then I stuck it in the sun oven for half an hour or so, and ended up with a perfectly roasted pepper.  I wanted to make veggie sandwiches, and figured a roasted bell pepper would be perfect.  It was.  We had great sandwiches, and I loved the fact that the pepper grew on our patio, and was then moved all of about three feet to the sun oven where it roasted.  About as local and energy-efficient as possible.

Today I decided to try making a loaf of bread in the sun oven.  My husband has done this before, but I hadn’t.  For some reason, I’m always hesitant to tackle any baking project that uses yeast.  I’ll make baking powder biscuits, and all sorts of fantastic raw desserts that I find over at Kristen’s site, but not things like bread.  I think I’ve used dead yeast in the past, and had loaves of bread turn out flat, and that’s what was discouraging me.  But no more.  This morning I decided that a loaf of bread was not going to outsmart me.  I found a recipe online, sort of followed the instructions, and this is what I just pulled out of the sun oven:

I can’t wait for lunchtime so that we can break into it.  It smells amazing, looks great, rose up just like it’s supposed to, and in general boosted my confidence when it comes to baking bread.  All without heating up my kitchen or using any electricity.

My husband is teaching himself to weld (with a little help from YouTube and Google).  It’s something he’s wanted to do for a long time, but now that we’ve moved, he has more space to do it, and lots of things to weld.  He found a welder on Craigs List, and a welding mask on eBay.  He got all of the other supplies at various places around town, and found some metal shops that let him take their scraps for free.  There’s one place just a half mile or so from our house that has a dumpster out back where they toss their scrap metal, and they told him he can dumpster-dive anytime he wants.  It’s all mostly small stuff, but it’s been perfect for practicing.

He made his first project last week.  We had bought an umbrella for our patio, but had skipped the $50 umbrella stand, because my husband decided that would be a good place to try out his welding skills.  He welded together a chunk of old I-beam and a metal pipe, and they make a great umbrella stand:

I love it.  It’s unique, very effective, a great example of recycling, and very frugal.

The next project is window well covers.  Our basement windows don’t have well covers, and with a toddler, those are a must.  We were shocked to discover how expensive they are if you hire someone else to weld them for you.  We were finding prices of $300 – $400 per window (we have two).  My husband went to a metal supply shop last week and got all the supplies he needs to make both well covers for about $70 (angle iron and heavy duty grating).  By the time he’s finished with the window well covers, the welder and all its accessories will have more than paid for themselves.  And there are many more projects to come…

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while now, but keep forgetting.  After we moved, we had a ton of boxes sitting in our garage.  We had wrangled them up from all over the place in the months preceeding our move: my parents saved medical supply boxes for us, a friend who moved just before we did saved some boxes for us, and we scrounged more from a local grocery store that doesn’t crush all their boxes right away.  Some of the boxes my friend saved for us were Home Depot moving boxes, including a wardrobe box with a hanging rail in it.  I didn’t want them sitting in our garage, but I knew we could do better than just recycle them.

I put an ad on Craigs List offering the boxes free to the first person who could come pick them up.  I posted the ad late in the evening, and had 12 responses by the next morning.  The guy who came and got them was thrilled to have them, as his family was moving across the country.  When I posted the ad initially, I thought it might be ridiculous and that nobody would reply.  But I was amazed by how many people wanted our boxes.  So if you’ve got a stash of boxes sitting around, it’s worth offering them as a freebie on Craigs List or Freecycle or some place like that.  Easier than breaking them all down to take to the recycle center, and reusing is better than recycling anyway.

With all the craziness of moving (have I mentioned that we’re never doing that again?) I haven’t posted a Frugal Blog Network Round Up in a very long time.  Here are some great articles from my fellow FNB writers:

Kelly at Almost Frugal writes about going to the doctor in France.  Highly worth reading, as it’s an objective factual perspective, rather than something filtered through various media outlets with various agendas.

Frugal Zeitgeist has a post about voluntary simplicity, with a link to another great site that will inspire you to think about what really matters.

Not Made Of Money has some ideas to get you started on the debt reduction path.

The Frugal Duchess has some tips for saving money when you’re moving.  Definitely some good ideas here, especially if you’re moving a long distance.

Andy at Tight Fisted Miser has kept his housing expense at about $400/month for several years.  Pretty impressive.

Hope you’re all having a good weekend!