One Hundred Dollars a Month - Page 1461 of 2143 - I am your typical housewife living in high maintenance suburbia. I have a handsome husband, 2 kids and a flock of pet chickens. I try and feed my family with $100 a month. With the help of coupons, gardening and bartering I am able to squeeze the most out of our grocery budget and still manage to have a little fun along the way.

DIY – Homemade Granite Cleaner

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By Mavis Butterfield on September 17, 2013 · 12 Comments

When we built our house, the guy who installed the granite countertops told me not to waste my money on expensive granite cleaners–which are like $7.00 a bottle, so it wasn’t a hard sell to get me not to buy them. He told me I could make my own with rubbing alcohol, dish soap, and water. Check. Check. And check. I had all of those things already, so all I had to do was buy a plastic spray bottle.

I seriously love this stuff–it works awesome!

Ingredients:

1/4 cup rubbing alcohol
3-4 drops dawn dish soap {any dish soap would work}
Water

Directions;

Add rubbing alcohol and dish soap to a spray bottle. Top with water {add the water slowly to avoid the dish soap sudsing over}. Put the lid on and shake it up. {If you don’t like the smell of rubbing alcohol, you could add some essential oil, but I have always liked the sterile smell of the rubbing alcohol and never bothered with adding the oil.} To use, you just spray down your counters and wipe them off. Easy pleasy.

The whole bottle costs pennies and works great. Take that over-priced granite cleaner!

~Mavis

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Building New Garden Boxes

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By Mavis Butterfield on September 17, 2013 · 27 Comments

When I first built our garden boxes back in 2009 I was totally new to raised bed gardening.

I was going for maximum space and didn’t put to much thought into how deep my garden boxes needed top be. So I purchased the most inexpensive untreated wood I could find, 8′ x 8″ x 2 ” inch boards.

I can’t even remember what kind of wood the boards were made of, but the total cost for each bed was somewhere around $20 – $25.

And they worked great. 8 inches of soil was plenty for crops like lettuce, zucchini and beans.

But when it came to room crops like carrots, beets, turnips and even potatoes, 8 inches just wasn’t going to cut it unless I wanted to grow the smaller varieties of the vegetables. Having nice long 12 inch carrots just wasn’t going to happen.

Unless I upgraded to larger beds.

Which brings me to one of my fall/winter garden projects. Replacing all 16 of my raised garden boxes with deeper ones. The plan is to replace all the boxes in the main garden as the crops are harvested. Then, re-purpose the wood elsewhere in garden.

If you were planing on building a garden box, ideally you’d want to use cedar boards. But they can be expensive, especially in my case because I have 16 garden boxes to build. This time around I used {3} 8’x12″x2″ hemlock boards and stained the outsides of the boards before putting them together.

I plan on using a few of the old garden boxes {which are still in great shape} to create new lettuce beds alongside the greenhouse, and maybe move the rest down near the chicken run. I’m not happy with the way the hens Swiss chard and kale garden looks right now, my little OCD heart needs some sort of structure down there. And I’m hoping by adding a few garden boxes, it will spruce things up a bit.

All I know is, gardening is rad. And I want to keep on sowing seeds.

It’s going to take awhile, but I think the new garden boxes will not only look better, but grow more food in the long run for my family. Gardening is cool, there’s no doubt about it.

Do you have garden boxes? How big are they?

Mavis wants to know. 🙂

Carrot seeds I planted for a winter harvest:

Little Finger
Cosmic Purple
Danvers 126

Thinking about growing a garden this fall? Check out the book The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener: How to Grow Your Own Food 365 Days a Year, No Matter Where You Live. It’s loaded with all sorts of cool tips.

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Food Waste In America – Free Lunch Snacks

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By Mavis Butterfield on September 17, 2013 · 8 Comments

This weeks “scrap boxes” were filled with a bunch of produce that was still edible {imagine that!}. Some weeks there is a lot of variety, and other’s it’s like hitting the mushroom lotto or something and I have to scramble to figure out what to with mass quantities of one item. It’s fun, but sometimes it can be a bit of a challenge. But not this week.

Radishes. I think the only thing that was wrong with these radishes was that they were too small. The smallest being the size of a dime. Clearly, if given the chose, a consumer is going to pick a bundle of large radishes over a small cluster, because bigger is always better, right?

Ahh But guess who loves bite size radishes?

Miss Lucy Puggle that’s who! 🙂

Free watermelon, apples, kiwis and grapes for lunch snacks and a boatload of lettuce for taco night and dinner salads. Gitty up. Free food is awesome!

~Mavis

Would you like to see what else we have brought home over the past year?

Head on over HERE to read all the past stories and to see all the pictures.

If you have just stumbled upon this series and are wondering how I got all this food for free, you’ll want to read this story first.

This post may contain affiliate links. These affiliate links help support this site. For more information, please see my disclosure policy. Thank you for supporting One Hundred Dollars a Month.

Slow Cooker Vegetarian Indian-Spiced Lentils with Spinach and Rhubarb

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By Mavis Butterfield on September 16, 2013 · 5 Comments

As soon as I spotted this recipe for Indian-Spiced Lentils with Spinach and Rhubarb in Vegetarian Times magazine, I knew I had to make it. Well last night I gathered up some rhubarb and spinach and let me tell you Bob, this stuff was freakin’ delicious.

It was so good I felt like I was sitting in one of those trendy restaurants that only total hipsters go to. Seriously, freakin’ delicious doesn’t even begin to describe it. Hearty? Earthy? I should be wearing corduroys? Hmm. I can’t quite put my finger on it but it was gooooooood!

Slow Cooker Vegetarian Indian-Spiced Lentils with Spinach and Rhubarb

Author Mavis Butterfield

Ingredients

2 tablespoons yellow mustard seeds
2 ½ tsp . dried cumin
3 tablespoon dried ginger
3 cloves garlic , minced
1 medium onion , chopped
½ cup raisins
1 cup lentils , rinsed and drained
5 cups vegetable broth
2 cups rhubarb
6 cups spinach leaves , chopped
½ cup cilantro , chopped

Instructions

Place all ingredients in a slow cooker and cook on low for 7 hours or high for 4 hours.

Looking for more easy crock pot meals? Check out my Crock Pot Meals recipe index or check out my Crock Pot Board on Pinterest,

My favorite Crock Pot – Crock-Pot Cook’ N Carry 6-Quart Portable Slow Cooker
My Favorite Slow Cooker Cookbook – Fix-It and Forget-It Big Cookbook: 1400 Best Slow Cooker Recipes!

This post may contain affiliate links. These affiliate links help support this site. For more information, please see my disclosure policy. Thank you for supporting One Hundred Dollars a Month.