The ultimate eco cleaner, green cleaner or just plain old cheap cleaner is soft soap. Commercial liquid soap is just as good but much more expensive and often much less green and eco too as detergents tend to be added to commercial cleaning products. To achieve a more frugal and self sufficient cleaning regime you need to make your own soft soap so here’s how: Basic Soft Soap Recipe Grate a large bar of cheap vegetable based soap. You can often find cheap vegetable soaps in the laundry section of grocery stores. Mix with four litres of water and simmer […]
Materials For Composting For Free
Not everyone who wants to Compost has sufficient land to generate a good quantity of materials to Compost. Even many of those with enough land don’t have a sufficient mixture of material to make a decent and rich Compost. Hopefully you Compost Kitchen Scraps and anything else you can get your hands on. Here is a quick tip for those who wish they could make more Compost than they do now. Ask! When you drive past a Coffee Shop, Restaurant, Grocers etc, pop in and ask what they do with the waste. Many businesses have to pay to get their […]
Turning The Compost Heap? – Don’t Bother!
It is amazing how much controversy there is over Compost! There are so many different systems it is unbelievable. Anyone who reads about our Self Sufficient Life knows we like to keep things simple around here. There is enough work involved when trying to become more self sufficient without making life more difficult for yourself. I would like to take this opportunity to set a few Composting myths straight. Compost Heap Turning If you have looked around the Web you will find many people advocating the turning of the Compost Heap on a fairly regular basis. They claim that it […]
Simple Lemon Cordial Recipe
I started the batch of homemade limoncello yesterday. It left me with 17 de-zested lemons and 20 de-zested oranges to use quickly. They won’t store very well without their tough zest to protect them and as you may know I’m not a fan of food-waste. Any move towards a self sufficient life means using every part of everything you can. There should really be no waste in a self sufficient household. So what do you do with 17 lemons? The oranges were easy – I juiced and refrigerated them for this week’s breakfast orange juice. The lemons caused more thought […]
Limoncello Recipe
We’re still trying to preserve, juice and munch our way through the windfall of free citrus fruit. After much deliberation, day dreaming, book-reading and internet browsing, I decided to designate 17 lemons and 20 oranges to the ‘limoncello‘ treatment. We have started the process of making limoncello liqueur and arancello liqueur. We still have 89 days to wait till we find out whether both were successful. At that time I’ll let you know. But for now, if you have lots of citrus fruit to use here is the recipe for homemade limoncello liqueur: Homemade Limoncello Recipe Notes: This recipe is […]
Reduce Food Waste – Week Three
Well it’s definitely getting easier to waste less food. It’s becoming more habitual to think about any leftovers quickly. This week there have only been a few potato peelings and half a cup of cooked cous-cous wasted. They got fed to the animals so really a very good attempt at wasting no food. Well I think anyway. I’m getting into the swing of creative thinking too. For example last night MrDB made far too much garlic bread so today I used it in a romesco sauce recipe. It worked a treat, tasted great, saved us cash and reduced our food […]
Chicken Nesting Boxes Made Simple
Anyone who follows this Self Sufficient site knows that we like to keep things as simple as possible. If we can do something cheaply or for free then that is what we will do. A big part of a Self Sufficient Life is getting the best quality food at the cheapest prices. This is where keeping Chickens is so invaluable. Chicken nesting boxes or Chicken Laying boxes can be a simple affair if we wish. Hopefully you have read How To Build Chicken Houses For Free and are now on your way to the freshest Eggs imaginable. Here is a […]