How Do You Know If You Are Frugal?

I have found Frugal In Norfolk's blog and as I am so nosey I have started at the beginning and will hopefully catch up one day - at the moment I am on October 2011 posts and the one I read was about being frugal.

FIN said that one of the defintions of frugal is 'practising economy; living without waste; being thrifty' and this got me thinking that I see all of those as just normal but am I actually frugal?

I read other frugal blogs but I never seem to do what they do - one blogger only had a quick wash most days and then a short shower once or twice a week. Now I find that extreme frugalness.

Everyone in my household has a bath every day - we don't have a shower but when we lived in a house with a shower we still all had baths. I think it stems from my childhood, even though we were classed as poor we all had a bath every night, my best friend had a bath once a week and my DH also only bathed once a week.

Our little nod to being frugal is that we all share the same bath water, DD always goes first (she has an early bedtime) and the rest of us follow in order of cleanliness so the last person is the dirtiest.

I cannot bear to scrimp on water - if we need water we will use it. Our water usage is about £30pm as we are metered, I suppose we could cut back but do we really need to?

I cook a chicken and then keep the carcass to boil up to get the meat off the bones and then the stock is either used in gravy or as a base to a sauce to go with the chicken. I thought it was normal not to waste food but then DS' girlfriend came round and said she had never heard of anyone boiling a carcass to get the rest of the meat off it.

One thing I do that I know not everyone does is to make my own washing powder - DD has always been allergic to most washing powders so we always purchased non-bio but then over on MSE someone mentioned making their own so I have been doing that for nearly a year now.

I use Borax substitute and soda crystals from a local hardware store and buy unperfumed soap from either Tesco or Lidl.

Here is my box of goodies ready to start

I buy 6 boxes of Borax substitute (500g each) and 3 packs of soda crystals (1kg each) and 4 bars of soap. Total cost £15.04.

I then layer it up starting with 1 box of Borax, followed by half a bag of soda crystals followed by 1 box of Borax and the rest of the bag of soda crystals and then I grate 1 bar of soap. Then I give it a good stir and continue the process adding the extra bar somewhere along the line

This is what it looks like in the tub - I always think the grated soap looks like the topping on London Cakes!!

I brought the tub from the hardware place ages ago and also purchased a seperate grater just for soap!!

I use 2 scoops of powder in each full wash, obviously half washes get 1 scoop.

Here is my nice large tub of soap

This tub should last about 8 - 10 weeks and as I do about 6 loads a week it works out very cheap per load. I also find it gets whites whiter than normal supermarket soap powder.

So what do you think is frugal and what is normal?

7 New Additions

So we have 7 more additions to the fold!!

On Tuesday night 8 poullts hatched but by Thursday morning one had died - poults just love to die, they just cant seem to stay alive so it is quite hard work looking after them.

I seem to run between the house to the shed to check on the 7 and then up to the top to check on Mummy and her 2 and then back to the house for a little while.

This is the first picture - it's a bit red because the lamp is so low as they need loads of heat

I will see if I can get some better ones today.

Mummy is doing well, she is letting the poults explore but as soon as she sees me she calls them, yesterday one was outside the hut and flew like lightning up the steps and under her wing and the other one crouched down behind a lump of straw to hide!! It's quite good fun trying to get a glimpse of them.

She is bringing them further down the garden each day but I saw a jackdaw yesterday and I am worried he might take a poult.

I still think, despite the time taken to catch them, that we have done the right thing - if we had left them on the meadow they would have certainly died by now - either by a rat/bird or by dying of the cold.


Photos of the Poults

Well I have managed it, I have 2 photos of the poults (well only one can be seen in each picture! but it is a start).

When we got home from work the turkey had come out of her fenced area (we left the gate open just in case the poults jumped through the fence and she panicked) and was in the far corner of the garden with them.

This is what happened when I tried to get my first picture

Yup Mummy got in the way again!!

This is my next attempt

and another one

She still managed to keep one hidden though!!

I managed to herd them back in to the run where there house is but later on when I went to lock them up she was missing her babies and they were not calling for her. In her panic she flew on to the neighbours fence and I thought she might go in their garden so I did what all good smallholders do - I left her to it and walked up to the field to lock everyone else up.

By the time I got back she was not on the fence, I checked the neighbours garden and she was not there! I found her hiding in the stinging nettles with her 2 poults!! Crikey knows where they were!!

So they have not been locked up tonight but I am sure she is quite safe in the back garden hidden away.

Yesterday I was asked if Turkeys are too domesticated which is why they can't rear their young - I asked DH and he said 'No, they are just stupid creatures'!!
My turkeys are quite wild compared to some I have seen - ours free range on a 1 acre meadow and prefer to roost as high as possible and would rather eat insects than pellets.
Looking on the internet one website says Narrangansett (our favoured breed) are very maternal for a Turkey - I would hate to see the other breeds with their young.
I remember reading an article about why Narrangansett's started to die out (some of it was the large producers favoured quicker growing birds) and basically it was the increase in traffic on rural roads in America, they just didn't know what to do around traffic and kept getting run over!!

I know other Smallholders don't let their Turkeys rear their young and instead use chickens or buy in eggs or poults. I wonder if anyone does the same as us??

Forgot to say the poults are now about 4 days old.

New Additions To The Meadow

Gosh, it's been a week since I posted. I am not sure where the time goes - well actually I do; I work full time (I leave the house about 8ish and get home at 6pm) and when I get home I cook tea and then DD has her bath and we lock the animals up and by then it is about 8.30pm and I am usually so shattered I have been having a bath and going to bed.
I am also on the Committee for a large family event which is held yearly in the nearest town so with meetings every fortnight for that and all the associated paperwork it keeps me busy.
I have read back and see that last Sunday I complained of a pain in my stomach the night before which meant I had to go to bed early, well it has happened a few times this week and so I have been in bed very early - I have thought long and hard about this and did some google research and initially I thought I just ate too much at meal times and decided to cut down and then on Saturday evening I was in loads of pain but I hadnt eaten hardly anything all day as I was an organiser at a charity fun day but when I looked at what I ate I realised it was toast for breakfast, quorn fillet in a bun x 2 for lunch and chips and mushroom/spinach in puff pastry for tea - I then realised that most days consist of at least bread with 2 of the 3 meals I have a day!
I have had a read and think I am gluten intolerant - some people don't think this exists but having a read of the symptoms made me realise how much gluten I have every day so I am going to try 2 weeks gluten free and see how I feel. At the end of the 2 weeks I intend to have some toast and see how it affects me although if I feel really good I might not bother and just stick with gluten free.
I am 2 days in and I feel great, usually after every meal I feel so full I feel sick (even if I only have 1 slice of toast and an egg) but I thought I ate too much but now after each meal I don't feel anything (well after a roast dinner I did feel slightly full but not so full I felt sick). I have also noticed how little I am eating now - usually I would have breakfast and then need a snack and then have lunch by 11.30am and then more snacks in the afternoon but for the last 2 days I have not needed a snack and have not felt hungry. I know a lot of products which contain gluten also contain sugar, the more you eat the more you want to eat and the cycle continues.
So I will see how I get on - it will be interesting as breakfast is always toast and egg and I just adore pastry and of course no roast dinner is complete without yorkshire puddings.


Anyway on to the title of the post - we have 2 new additions to the family. We have 2 turkey poults hatched by Mummy Turkey.
Mummy Turkey had taken herself off a month ago to sit on eggs, we knew where she was and kept an eye on her - on Sunday DH noticed her in the main field with 2 poults.
Turkeys make very bad mothers - they are so clumsy and just don't seem to be able to manage their young. If they are not treading on them, they are losing them as they obviously can;t count and wander off with one missing and then they die of the cold. In previous years we have left Mums with their young and let nature take its course but we always end up losing all they hatch (which is why we also hatch in the incubator) so this year we decided Mummy and Poults should come and live in the back garden.
Well what a palaver we had yesterday trying to do this - the back garden was easy, we mowed a path through to the chicken hut at the top of the garden (pictures before) and put straw in the hut but when it came to bringing Mummy and Poults back it turned in to an hours nightmare!!
When we got up the field Mummy and Poults were on the edge of the field near where the hedges start so DH decided to coax her out in to the field for us to catch but instead she took off like a loony leaving her babies behind. I kept the poults warm down my top until Mummy came back for them. We gave them back and let her calm down but then she decided we were a risk and took them over the fence, down the ditch in to the next field!!!
DD and I scrambled the same route in to the other field (not ours) and found her but then she took off dropping her babies in the process (she has them under her wings usually), she kept calling them but they did not respond - by this time they were too cold and didn't have the strength to call so we were hunting through 2ft high grass/stinging nettles to find them. We found one easily and after 15mins when we were about to give up we found the other one (he let out a pitiful cry so we could locate him).
Then we took them back to our field and tried to catch Mummy but then one of the poults jumped from DD's hands and ran to its Mummy, I still had the other one and we tried to entice Mummy out but she stayed put and then my poult jumped and ran into the undergrowth!!
Mummy then ran off to join the other turkeys in our field and kept calling her babies but again they did not answer as they were too cold so then we had our 2nd hunt to find the poults who were in dense grass and nettles!!
Luckily after 15mins we found them both and then managed to capture Mummy in the fencing and we quickly jumped in the truck to bring them home!!!

They are doing well in the hut although Mummy was not keen last night and kept jumping at the door to get out (Turkeys hate being enclosed, they are wild animals and prefer to be in the open which is why in all the years of breeding turkeys only 2 have hatched eggs in a hut, the rest (about 10) like to wander off and hide and then reappear with poults in tow) and we were worried she would squash them but this morning everyone was doing well.
Throughout today they have been out for a walk in the top patch and she is doing well to keep them warm but also fed and watered.

Unfortunately there are no pictures of the poults yet as every time I get close she makes noises at them and they run and hide under a wing!! But here are some of Mummy:

This is her hiding in the weeds

On her way back to the hut (she's camera shy!)

Nicely tucked up back in the hut

Tomorrow I will make sure I get some pictures of the poults for you.