Stretching Dollars

Raise Your Own Beef

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

I live in Oklahoma and I live in the country, but unlike Pioneer Woman I don’t raise cattle. Or horses.

But I wish I did!

My neighbor has a few cows and he has two little baby cows over there (ok so they are called calves - but I can call them baby cows if I want to) and they are just so CUTE! They’re camera shy though, plus, I get kinda funny looks when they see me trying to take pictures of their cows. Like, what’s that crazy lady taking pictures of our cows for?

cows

cows

You see, they raise cows for beef. It’s a great way to save money on your meat bill, plus you have a handle on what the cow eats. You can have organic grass fed beef cheaper that way.

I would ‘try’ to raise cows for beef but, knowing me, I’d end up raising cows for big pets!!!

I couldn’t eat a pet!

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Beekeeping and Bee Removal

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

I tried once to raise bees. It seemed like a simple and easy thing to do to help become more self-sufficient. What they don’t tell you is that it isn’t as easy as it looks!

First they arrive in a box and inside that box is a cage full of buzzing bees. Inside that cage is a smaller cage with the queen bee inside. Once you get your box home YOU have to open the cage and get the queen bee OUT of that little cage without harming her and hopefully without all the other bees getting you!

It’s a creepy thing to do and it’s very scary too. I donned a whole body tyvek painters type suit and covered my face with some tulle (don’t laugh it’s all I had) and used duct tape to seal all the edges so that anything couldn’t get ‘in’ the suit.

I then headed outside with my handy dandy smoker.

My dogs must have thought I was the Michelin Man, OR the the giant marshmallow man or a GHOST because they had a tizzy! Barking and growling - humorous that they didn’t know who I was!!! LOL

I calmed them down and somehow managed to handle the bees like I was supposed to.

Another thing they don’t tell you is that sometimes the bees will just leave. It’s called swarming. (Basically they outgrow the hive and look for another home LIKE YOUR HOME).

When that happens, please don’t call an exterminator to get them out of your house. We need bees! Please call a bee expert like Bee Removal San Diego to remove the bees safely. Safely both for you (and your home) as well as the bees.

It’s the right thing to do. Mother Nature will thank you.

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Cat food

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

I ran out of cat food.

I had been buying Purina indoor formula at Sams. Sometimes Sams just quits carrying items without notice and such was the case with this catfood I’d been buying on a regular basis.

I tried to hold out another week, but I guess ice and snowy weather makes cats hungrier than normal too. I ran out.

I gave them tuna to get them by until I could get back to Sams.

No, they still didn’t have my preferred brand. I was left with two choices, just two. Meow Mix and the Sams brand. My cats will eat Meow Mix and I hadn’t ever tried the store brand, so I decided to go for it.

Into the buggy went that big old bag of Members Mark cat food.

The cats must’ve heard me coming down the driveway – they couldn’t wait for me to get it in the house and into their respective bowls.

They gobbled it down.

But now, I don’t know if they love it – or they were just really hungry after only getting tuna for a couple of days… The good news? Members Mark is a couple dollars cheaper than MM.

2cats

2cats

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Walking the Dog

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

One of my dogs is overweight. So I thought I’d take her for a walk. Country dogs really don’t get many ‘walks’ as they can run and walk all day long for acres and acres….

cleo

cleo

One of my Oklahoma homestead friends mentioned recently that her and her husband decided to start walking for their own weight issues and headed out one night. There were about a half mile from their house when they heard a sound behind them. Turning, they saw their dogs following them. And their cats. And several of their goats and a couple sheep. Needless to say, that was the last ‘walk’ they went on!

Walking your dog in the country is just tough. All your critters want to come. If you put everyone else up and you and the one overweight one take off walking you still have to deal with gravel roads, water filled potholes, neighbor dogs, poison ivy, and snakes…

So we decided to walk around the front yard. I put her on a leash and we took off. We didn’t make it too far before she stopped cold and looked at me with big pleading eyes. That’s when I realized we’d been walking through a grass-burr patch. Poor baby.

After picking all the sticker off of both of us, we’d decided we’d had enough.

Anyone know Cesar Millan’s trick to getting your dog to walk on a treadmill?

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An Apple A Day

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

Lots of folks right now are making apple butter with all the apples about.

morris-and-apples

morris-and-apples

Morris and apples on an old picnic table….

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DIY Auto Repair

Friday, September 4th, 2009

What do you do when you just don’t know HOW to fix the problem on the farm truck?

Call in an expert.

Geronimo - Golden Retriever Car Repair

Geronimo - Golden Retriever Car Repair

Geronimo LOVES to help! Don’t all golden retrievers?

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Art Work

Monday, July 13th, 2009

Art work is expensive!

I had been looking for some folk art farm animal prints for my downhome kitchen. I found a couple but I wanted something BIG, something that stood out and called attention to itself.

I found a painting I liked of a sheep. It was WAY outta my price range.

The ever talented MOM offered to try her hand at painting me one similar.

Here’s the outcome:

sheep

sheep

It’s perfect! It’s folk art! It’s a sheep! And my MOTHER painted it. How cool is that?

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Buh buh buffalo

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

Try to find things to do and see in your own backyard. No tellin’ what’s nearby that you haven’t seen.

Like a buffalo…

buffalo

buffalo

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Hummingbird Food

Friday, April 24th, 2009

Around these parts, that would be central Oklahoma, the initial ’scout’ hummingbird comes through in mid March scouting out potential feeding spots on his trek north. I always put a feeder out on the Ides of March (March 15).

I haven’t seen any hummingbirds yet, in fact, it now seems a little late in the year to not have seen any, but, I still change the feeder out weekly, just in case.

Don’t buy that expensive hummingbird food at the store. Make your own!

Dissolve a quarter cup of sugar in a cup of warm water. In other words its a 4-1 ratio of water to sugar. Make sure it cools down before you put the feeder out. That’s it!

Just be sure to change it every few days depending upon the outside temps. We don’t want it to spoil!

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Cats Can Go Outside

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

Seems like we’ve always had cats around, in fact at one point in time we had around a dozen! They were all outside kitties, and we started with just one.

* Dibney (we were at a loss for names and named her after her mom, Dibble, and her dad Barney)
* Dibney had kittens and we kept: Fuzzbucket (the name of a Disney character) Fuzzbucket was fuzzy wasn’t she?
* Fuzzbucket had kittens and we kept: Sahara, she was the color of the Oklahoma sand…
* Sahara had kittens and we kept: Princess Snowpea, later renamed Princess Snowpea from hell. She was one mean kitty. Solid white. We later just called her Little Kitty, it was much easier than Princess Snowpea from hell. lol
* Sahara had kittens again: They got harder to give away. We kept: Granny Kitty (granny was GONNA TAKE THIS CAT), Tweedledee and Tweedledum (looked too much alike), Stinky, Snot, Booger, and the rest of the names escape me….

Stinky managed to drown in the pool. After we buried him, our youngest told her Grandmother that one of the cats drowned in the pool. She told her “It was Stinky.” Her grandmother said “I’m sure it was sweetie.” She said, “No grandma, it WAS Stinky.” “I’m sure it was sweetie.” “No grandma, IT was Stinky”……….

Anyhow, even when we had ALL these cats we never bought cat litter. They lived outside. Somewhere along the line a cat ended up being a house cat, and that cat learned to go to the door to be let out, just like a dog. But, these last two cats we have, well, they think they have to come inside to use the restroom….

I started out buying the CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP cat litter. But then ‘what’ do you do with it when you clean the pan out? For a while I was using it to fill up holes in the yard that the dogs dug (I’ll tell you about the doggies later.) but then I noticed that the dogs were digging in the holes to get at the ‘treats’. YUCK. So, I switched to a higher priced litter, one that clumps, and the clumps go in the garbage bag. Then, as time progressed I, as a cat owner evolved and now I’m buying these huge containers of ‘fancy’ cat litter at Sams.

cat litter

Not as bad as it looks. I only bought one bucket, they accidently rescanned it then backed it out

Of course, I do get the handy dandy square stacking bucket with removeable lid to keep things in, but goodness. I need to go back to making the cats go outside. Cats have been doing it ‘outside’ for centuries. Why are mine so citified? Goodness, they are country cats. They need to go back to their roots.

Morris

Morris

Eddie

Eddie

Spoiled? I think so!

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