New Year's Food & Penny Pinching

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Garden Tips

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How To Make Your Own Fish Fertilizer -- The Prepper Project - Remember that old story of the natives teaching the Pilgrims to bury fish beneath their corn plants? It works. That’s why “fish emulsion” or “fish fertilizer” is still sold as a common organic fertilizer. Plants love it – and you can make it yourself. This is a good thing, because fish emulsion is really expensive.
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Pet Control - Keep cats and dogs out of your plants by sprinkling them with large amounts of black pepper. Your pet will dislike the smell and if they get too close they will be racked with sneezing fits, teaching them to stay away. (This also works well with dogs who like to chew on your shoes, by the way!).

If your cat likes to paw into your newly planted containers, place some chicken wire over the pots. Kitty can't get to the soil below and will dislike walking on the wire. This won't interfere with the sprouting seedlings and the wire can be removed when they have established themselves.
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Celery Blight - Prevent celery blight by soaking the seed in warm water for about 30 minutes before planting (about 120 degrees Fahrenheit), or make sure the seeds are stored in a dry and cool place for a year before using them. The seeds will stay usable for up to five years but the spores that cause blight die after two years.    

Road-Trip Tips

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Drive, don't fly - and save -- Tightwad - You have fabulous locations in mind for your family trip. The problem? Airfare is the thing. The thing you can’t stomach, especially when you factor in tickets for the kiddos. Do you really need to break the bank or could there be another way? Consider driving. After all, it’s the journey, not the destination. You can miss a lot of beautiful, funky spots from an airplane.

Have a Snack for a Travel Break - If you start getting sleepy during a long driving trip, try having a snack. Research has shown that taking a food break is more effective than taking a short rest for improving driving performance and keeping you awake. Also, between a rest of fifteen minutes or one hour, there is no discernible difference to driving performance.

Building An Emergency Car Kit: Going Beyond the Basics -- The Prepper Project - A car kit is different from a Bug Out Bag in that it is meant to stay in your vehicle at all times. The contents generally assume you will be sitting tight until help arrives. If you are preparing for an EMP scenario, or are otherwise concerned about being able to make it back home in an event of an emergency, you should include supplies for trekking it on foot. A ‘Get Home Bag’ requires different gear, so right now I’m just going to mainly focus on what you need to pack to survive a few days in your car.
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Use a Salad Spinner For Quickly Drying Small Clothing Items -- Apartment Therapy - Here's a quick tip I learned from friends who regularly go car camping: they always bring a large size salad spinner with them, just in case they find themselves needing to wash, then dry a t-shirt, socks, or intimates...

Also, to the right, is a short (5min) video reminding you of some of the basics of doing laundry while on road-trips.  (The Naked Gardener adds, "That is, if you are the type of people who wear clothes when traveling by car. It must be hard, living with shame about your nakedness!")
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Pack Your Own Food - Even if you eat at "cheap" places like McDonald's, you'll still be forking over around $10 per meal per person. Most likely you won't want Rotten Ronnie's three times a day for a week, so count on at least $15 per meal to dine elsewhere. That's around $45 per day per person. It's much cheaper to pack a cooler with your own food - plus, I don't travel to see what the Denny's restaurants look like in other towns. Packing your own food tends to get you eating in much more spectacular venues, like roadside pull-outs with a view, or nicely manicured inner-city parks. On trips where you are traveling for multiple days, simply stop in at the grocery store each day and spend 20 minutes or so buying food for the day. This easily saves $30 per day per person, and over a week long trip that's $210/person. Nothing to sneeze at!
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Cottages are Sometimes a Better Deal than Motels - I like traveling to Vancouver Island. In fact, I often fantasize about moving there. (I lived there as a child and it was a great place to live). I have gone there several times now and I've found it cheaper to rent a cottage than stay in motels because the cottage has cooking facilities and I can cook my own food instead of eating out. (See above point). While I could get a motel for around $80/night (plus tax = $90/night), I found this spectacular ocean-front cottage in the village of Maple Bay for $800/wk. Now yes, it is more than a hotel at about $115/day, but since I determined not eat at restaurants if I stayed at the cottage, I still came in cheaper. The motel would have cost around $135/day if I included eating out three times a day, while the cottage cost around $125/day including the food I bought at the grocery store and cooked/packed myself. It's not that whopping of a savings, but instead of a dreary motel to hang out in, I had a 600sf oceanfront cottage with loads of privacy, a hot-tub, a dock, and gobs of scenery and wildlife to drink in. That makes it a very good deal indeed!
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Buy a Tent - Quite often when you're traveling, you don't rent a motel until late in the day and then leave early in the morning - while paying full price for a room you've hardly done anything in but sleep. Two years ago, I brought my elderly mother to my hometown, which is located about a 12 hour drive north of here, and this trip would definitely incur "over-night expenses." Since I knew I was going to be staying for a few nights (after I dropped off my mom at relatives), I decided to buy a tent and some camping gear rather than stay in a motel. Hotels would have cost $90-$100/night, and I was going to be gone for a few days. So, I bought a tent at Walmart for a little over a $100, and a variety of other camping gear. In total, I came to around $200, and if I recall correctly, I spent three nights in the tent, costing about $75 in campground fees. This eliminated +/-$300 (-$75 camping fees) in motel expenses while leaving me with about +/-$200 worth of camping gear I still have and can use any time I want, all for approximately the same price as if I hadn't tented for three days. Both of the campgrounds I stayed in had hot-shower facilities, although, I did find buying firewood from Ranger Rick to be a scam at $5/bundle, which only kept the fire going for around 2 or 3 hours. If you can, pack your own firewood in the trunk rather than paying for it.
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Related:
How to do Road Trip Picnics: Where to Stop and Other Tips to Make Them Easy -- Eat at Home Cooks
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Winterize Your Apartment

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Photo Credit: Ryan Dyck (Click pic for link)

Window Screens - Screens block the Winter's Sun. Even fine mesh screens can stop up to 20% of the sunlight that could enter through the windows and help to warm your apartment. Remove your screens in the winter. (Of course, it also goes without saying that you should open your drapes during the day to let the sunlight warm your suite while you are away at work).
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Reverse Your Ceiling Fans - Most every ceiling fan has a little switch on the side that reverses the direction of the blades to clockwise, which pulls air up instead of pushing it down. If you flick the switch and run your fan on low during the winter months, it will gently pull the cooler air up from the "living level" where we are and push it up to the ceiling where the warmer air is, forcing that warm air back down along the walls to the "living level". This has the effect of using your warm air far more efficiently. Your thermostat will now keep the room at the same heat level while drawing on your heater less often.
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Make a Door Snake For Your Entry Door - In an apartment building, one of the worst insulated areas is the entry door to your apartment from the building's internal hallways. Often times there is a significant air-gap on the bottom allowing the cold air from the hallway to continually seep into your suite day and night. The quickest way to solve this is to take a beach blanket and roll it up like a log to place along the bottom of the door. The problem with this is that when you open and close the door, it gets pushed out of the way. The solution to this problem is also very simple: Take some old socks and cut the toes out of them so they make a "tube," then pull your beach blanket through a few of them until a "log" is formed that can be placed along the bottom of the door. To attach the log to the door so that it stays put when you enter and leave, pick up some velcro strips from the dollar store and attach one half to the log and the other to the bottom of the door. When summer comes, simply pull the velcro'd log off the bottom of the door and store it in the closet until next winter.
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Kitchen Tips

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Freeze Ground Meat in Small Portions with a Chopstick -- LifeHacker - First put the food into a large freezer bag and press it out as flat as possible, eliminating air pockets. (Making it thin speeds up defrost time due to the increased surface area, and pressing out excess air guards against freezer burn.) Use a long chopstick or ruler to create divisions within the food, forming individual portions. This way when you freeze the entire bag, you'll be able to quickly break off just as much as you want to use, no more.
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Baked Potato Quick Tip - To speed up time for cooking baked potatoes, press a clean aluminum nail through them to facilitate heat transfer during the cooking process.
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Raspberry Tea - You can get more from your raspberry bush than just the fruit. Pick the leaves when they are fresh and green, then put them on a baking sheet and freeze. Once frozen, store them in a Ziploc bag until needed. Steep a handful in hot water for a light and caffeine free tea.  
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How To Make Your Berries Last Longer - "Berries aren’t like apples and oranges - they go bad a lot faster, so getting them to last a little longer can be a huge money saver. Here’s what I do to get my berries to last longer:  I give them a little soak in a vinegar bath.  It’s one cup vinegar to 3 cups water.  It will kill any spores that might be on the berries and buy you some time.  Once they’ve soaked, I line my salad spinner with paper towels {to protect the berries} and give them a light spin to dry them a bit.  Finally, I put them in a container in the fridge {also lined with paper towel to absorb any remaining moisture} and leave the lid cracked a bit to get circulation to the berries." -- 100 Dollars a Month
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