Living Life in Rural Iowa

This spring's weather conditions have been anything but ideal. The weather is too hot already in some areas, too cool in other areas, and the rain has been unrelenting. Many, many conventional crops are not being planted due to flooding and unworkable fields. Many experts are already predicting food shortages due to flooding, livestock lost, and crops not being planted.

While all of that is pretty bad, gardens are taking a hit this year too. The naysayers will say that gardens aren't as important as crops because you can just buy your food at the grocery store. However, many of us rely on our gardens for reducing our food bills, putting nutritious food on our tables, and providing food with no chemicals and bacteria. For most of us, gardening is not a hobby but part of our overall food plan to provide for ourselves and to know where our food comes from.

Therefore, what happens when you have a bad gardening year and how can you plan around that?

Bad gardening years can happen to a…

Cookbooks are invaluable. They teach us so much about cooking, baking, canning, butchering, and more. They give specific instructions on how to do anything with cooking and the kitchen. They can really help the experiences and the novice alike.

While nothing really replaces the experience you get by doing and learning, having resources like cookbooks and cooking manuals is very important. You should have a good variety of cookbooks and manuals. Whether you are a canner, a preserver, a carnivore, a vegetarian, a hunter, or a gardener, you need to be well-rounded about you keep on your shelf.

In a crisis or a disaster, you may like to eat meat but meat may be scarce. Having some vegetarian recipes may mean you can have a filling meal with what you have on hand. You may not be a hunter, but you may need to know how to butcher your own meat. You may have a lot of produce from the garden or from gleaning and need to preserve it in a variety of ways.

You will notice that not all of these are c…

I like saving money. I like it a lot. I also have some quirks and one of those quirks is challenging myself to find new ways to do something cheaper. I also think reusing items is cool and recycling items are the best.

Those closest to me will just tell you I am weird and they look for opportunities to tell me when I go too far. Apparently, it isn't cool to take the Sunday coupon flyers out of the county recycling bins to see if there are any coupons you can use. I have also found out that it is better to say you got something from a free pile at a garage sale rather than say you trash picked an item.

I don't have a lot of shame in my money-saving game. However, the ways I save money and live frugally are not glamorous. They will probably not wow you or anything like that. These hacks are probably more along the line of "Why didn't I think of that?!?!".

My Top 10 Frugal Living Hacks

1. I reuse plastic bags of every size and shape. Yes, I have a drawer dedicated to pl…