On this page, we invite our readers to share their thrifty ideas with us and other readers. It behooves the truly born-again Christian, to make proper use of whatever God gives. I always like to think, that the more frugal I am, the more I will have to support missions, ministries, and to give to worthy causes – like the crisis pregnancy center. Wastefulness has no place in the family of God, especially when we consider that every breath we draw is a gift from Him.
John 6:12
When they were filled, He said unto His disciples, Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.
Proverbs 18:9
He also that is slothful in his work is brother to him that is a great waster.
I’ll get it started with some of my major thrifty stuff. Please feel free to share your frugal fun with us in the comment section – and if I deem any of them to be superior – they will be edited into the post.
Cut down old flannel sheets, shirts, and anything else that is 100% cotton, into handkerchiefs. Serge or overcast the edges, or pink if no sewing machine is available. Wash with bleach or borax and hot water for sanitation, since it doesn’t matter what color they are as long as they are clean. A good size is 10 x 10.
Use plastic lids that have a deep lip as plant saucers to catch water run off. For example – the lid to large Nesquick canisters are ample saucers for a 5″ pot.
Use large clear “pretzel barrels” as mini cloches/greenhouses for your early tomato and pepper plants. They are the perfect size, and will protect tender plants from late frosts and torrential downpours. A lot of snack foods come in these barrels now. And you can use the lids as plant saucers!
Empty yogurt containers make ideal seed starting pots, with holes poked in the bottom for drainage. Filled with cheap soilless planting media you can save oodles of money by starting your own plants from seeds. Especially if you save seeds!
- 4-6 parts Sphagnum Peat Moss or Coir
1 part Perlite
1 part Vermiculite
Cat Mahm:
Keep the heat in at Christmas-time by lining the windows with “fake snow”. This could be cotton fluff from the inside of an old pillow, or I even sometimes use white dish clothes.
Keeping heat in can reduce the heating bill, so I line everything with towels or insulating materials. It especially helps around the bases of the windows!
Cat Mahm:
Yes it does.
Need to kill the weeds in the driveway? Don’t buy all of that expensive weed killer.
During the spring/summer/fall months, I get a tea kettle to boil. Shortly after it has boiled, I pour it on the dandelions or persistent grass growing up through concrete. I go out the next morning and the weeds have completely withered and are easy to pull up. My driveway is weed free all year long.
Cat Mahm:
I never go out to eat. I never do take out. It’s never healthier, it’s addictive, and it’s way more expensive.
I buy my ground beef in bulk and chop it up into individual pounds, and store them in the freezer. You can do this with so many things. I would love to get a chest freezer someday. Buy everything on sale, freeze it. So many things can go in a chest freezer.
Please share your thrifty secrets with us!
The black heron knows exactly where and when the fish are biting. He goes fishing for his food by wading into shallow lakes and ponds. But there’s a problem. Fish avoid the water’s surface to avoid the bright rays of the sun. Even if a fish does come close to the surface, the black heron is unable to see it because he is blinded by the sun’s reflection.
You see, vanilla comes from the vanilla planifolia plant which develops into the Mexican vanilla orchid. Unlike most orchids, this one blooms only one morning each year. The orchid also has a hood-like membrane that covers the part that produces pollen. These two facts make pollination almost impossible.
But a few species of spiders are social. They live together in large communities, caring for each other’s young and working together to get food. Their social structure is not like that of bees or ants; but, as one researcher put it, spider society is more like a herd of wildebeests. A South American social spider lives in multi generational colonies that can have hundreds of thousands of members. Australia’s crab spider is also social, building a nest of eucalyptus leaves. The colonial orb weaving spider of Mexico and the U.S. Southwest builds huge colonies out of individual orb webs. The largest colony web ever found was 12 feet deep, six feet high and 600 feet long. It contained hundreds of thousands of members!
Now it has been learned that the honeyguide has a similar relationship with the Boran people of Kenya. When the bird has found a bees’ nest, it will alert the Boran, bidding them to follow it to the honey site. On the other hand, if the Boran want to know where honey is, they know how to whistle and call for a honeyguide.
Creationists, who believe the time line of events laid out in Scripture and reject inflated evolutionary years, were not surprised when a bee was found preserved in amber which evolutionists said was many millions of years older than the oldest known bee. The almost perfectly preserved bee is like modern bees and can even be identified as a worker. Not only does this show that bees, with all their superb specializations, were around much earlier than ever thought by evolutionists, it also shows that they were around for some time before this specimen lived. In fact, the evolutionist who reported the findings admitted that there is a real problem explaining how bees could have developed nearly at the same time as pollen-bearing plants.
The Vine Vigil 