Living cheaply has been a 20 year preoccupation which we call self-sufficiency and it all began with planning. We moved to a piece of land where we can grow all our food – veges, fruit, meat, eggs – as well as make hay for the animals and have firewood trees for the woodstove. We thought […]
I’m 74 now but I well remember being a poor university student and begging bacon ends from the butcher and ends of the cheese rounds from the grocer. We ate Pavlova most nights – sugar was cheap and we got egg whites free from the laboratories because they only used the egg yolks for their […]
To keep making improvements in my “Oily Rag” lifestyle I set goals. It might be trying to cut out the grocery shopping once a month. Or saving power so I can afford to attach the wetback. Or filling my woodshed with free wood so I can save $500 by not having to buy it. Or […]
I am 76 years of age so was brought up in the days of “waste not want not”. It amazes me sometimes when I see waste especially electricity e.g. lights being left on, food being thrown out when it could be used the next day, vegetable scraps going down the thing in the waste disposal […]
I was given a catering size can of pulped tomatoes, so decided to make ketchup, using a tried and tested recipe. All went well and I found plenty of containers to store it in. The problem came a couple of months later when I opened one of the large bottles to fill up the table […]
This is an incident I remember from my childhood. My Mother, always good at living on the smell of an oily rag in the post war years, had ‘prepared’ the egg shampoo for the family bath night by pouring some into a glass and adding water to make it go further. Father goes up to […]
My Mum used to whiten her unbleached sheets by hanging them out at full moon, when there was a frost. Don’t ask me how, but the combination of frost and lunar beam made them snow white. Old time flour bags were good calico, but all had Champion Roller Flour Mills stamped firmly on them, not […]
Having grown up on a back country farm from birth, then later, on a very remote (no road access) high country station I come from a background of “self sufficiency with tenacity”. Owe a lot to my parents, and grandparents for their example, teaching us skills that are sadly being lost by many kiwis. Literally […]
Dad had one of his bright ideas. The idea wasn’t original, but it was for Dad – he didn’t have bright ideas very often! Off to the local library he went. Back he came with an Aunt Daisy soap-making recipe. As proud as a peacock at a garden party, he said he was going to […]
Tracey from Auckland is looking for help with low cost meals. Do you have any wholesome low cost recipes you can share?