Review of ChipDrop.com – free arborist woodchips!
I love writing about services that we use and love, so when I heard about ChipDrop I started doing what I normally do: I drafted a blog post with how we got started with our new venture. If you've read any of my previous articles about how we grow our own food, you'll...
4 Stages of Training Young Kids to Do Chores
One of the things we intentionally do in our house is we encourage each child to be as independent as is age-appropriately possible. Basically, I have four steps when I'm teaching the kids to do new jobs, which are: Watch me do it Help me do it Do it while...
Can you build a business when you can’t afford a website?
One of the questions I get most often these days in my inbox is, "Do I have to have a website to have a business? I can't afford one." The short answer is: you should probably have a website, but there are things you can do to significantly shorten the time it takes...
Easy-to-Implement Ways We’ve Automated Our Finances
One of the things I’ve learned is that in order to do well financially, sometimes I need to get out of my own way. When I set a priority, I need to automate it so I can’t sabotage myself out of success. Direct deposit When we set up Ian’s direct deposit when he...
7 Prompts to help you clear dysfunctional recurring patterns
I think it's pretty common for people to feel stuck where they are. They have the same old thing that keeps happening over and over, and can't understand why. One of the things I've learned through experience and observation is that the things that keep coming up for...
How we make preserving days more efficient during harvest season
I wanted to share some quick tips that I used to make my baking days simpler and easier during the harvest season. When you have lots of zucchini to use up and not a lot of energy, anything to make the mammoth task of using up your summer produce can quickly end in...
How we’re planning to preserve our garden harvest in 2020
Last year, our garden was...sad. But, as I like to remind myself, my main project was growing and giving birth to Abigail. My goal was to have lots of tomatoes canned, enough for the whole year, and I did pretty well considering the lack of energy I had. This coming...
What We’re Growing in our 2020 Garden
This year, we're expanding dramatically! Last summer my main project was growing and loving baby Abbie, who was born at the beginning of August. Honestly, I was too hot, enormous, and uncomfortable to do much gardening, and we were woefully unprepared for the...
The Easy Journaling Trick to Help You Maintain New Habits
Making new habits can be hard. Really hard. It's something I've been working on actively recently - replacing old habits with new ones. Habitual eating is one of the big ones I work hard against in the evenings. What started off as one page in my planner has evolved...
Thriving When You’re A Minimalist Living with a Non-Minimalist
I like things, but very selectively. I have moved 5 times in the past 5 years and every time I swear that I'll have less stuff than the time before. Somehow, I always manage to reduct the chaos in some areas, even if it increases in others. I understand that living...
Habits to Help You Stop Compulsive Spending
I really love to shop. The fact that I always spent more, no matter how much more we made, was always a problem, until I started to really figure out how much it was hurting me. The funny thing is, I have a lot of frugal habits that allowed me to save a lot of money...
What to Do When Your Freezer Gets Left Open
We discovered this morning that when someone went downstairs to get bread for dinner out of the freezer, the door didn't seal completely. Thankfully we keep our freezer very cold, so somethings in the back were still frozen solid, and only about half the stuff in the...
8 Quick Ways to Preserve Produce More Efficiently and Cost-Effectively
It took me a while to figure out how to come up with a good system that would mean I could preserve a lot in a day, without being too utterly exhausted at the end of it. This was my first summer of working to create our homemade pantry, so I knew I'd have a bit of a...
Lessons from creating our homemade pantry
This month was the first time we started preserving things in earnest for creating our year-long pantry. This is the first year I've ever done any major canning, much less Have a garden that was more than a handful of plants in hanging planters. Gardens, rain, and...
Second Month Update: Creating Our Homemade Pantry
This month, preserving was a lot less fast-paced. The garden hasn't started producing fruit yet, but I did find some good deals on things this month that I ended up putting up in the pantry. I got more pineapple chunks to can and preserve because I found more on sale...
3 Practical Ways to Avoid Lifestyle Inflation When You Get a Raise
We've had some great upswings in our financial circumstances in the past few months. My husband left a job for one that paid much better, and I've been working to automate my income as much as possible so I can focus less on selling and more on just creating content...
First Month Update: Creating Our Homemade Pantry
As this was the first month of us working to create our completely homemade pantry that will hopefully last until next year's growing season, I wanted to do an update to show how the process worked, what we learned, and the final overview of what we accomplished in...
The consistency myth: how perfectionism kills your motivation
Consistency is a touchy subject with me. For a long time, I held the belief that I couldn't succeed because I wasn't "a consistent person." Growing up, my mother called it laziness and tried to train it out of me by making my copy Bible verses on the subject. It...
How to Process 50 lbs of Chicken Breasts in One Day
I love chicken. Back in the day I used to save money by buying a case of chicken at a time, which meant I would come home with 50 pounds of raw chicken breasts, which was insane before I got into a groove for processing it. My goal for bulk cooking days is always to...
Quick & Simple Website Setup Tips for Newbies
Website design used to be how I made my living, while my husband is in college, so I've seen, and worked on, all kinds of websites and I've picked up a few tips for creating your own website. In my experience, a lot of people who want to have their own website get...