Frugal Living Archives - Our Heritage of Health

How to Store Vegetables for Winter

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Whether you want to store your own garden-grown produce or whether you want to take advantage of a bulk discount for fresh vegetables from a local farm stand or farmer’s market, one of the most important things to know is how to properly store those vegetables for the winter.

Storing produce for the winter is something we don’t always think about today since we have the option of running out to the grocery store anytime we want, but our ancestors had to plan carefully for winter storage to make sure they would have a well-preserved food supply to last through the winter without spoiling. Continue Reading

How to Save Seeds From Your Garden for Next Year

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Saving the seeds from your own garden plants is a simple and easy way to make your frugal, old-fashioned garden even more frugal. Whether you’ve been gardening for years or whether this is your very first year gardening, with a little bit of planning you can easily save seeds from your garden harvest to use again for next year’s planting.

For most types of vegetables, saving seeds is a very easy process that requires little hands-on time and just a bit of organization and planning. Here are a few simple guidelines to make sure that your seeds are stored in a way that will keep them viable for planting next spring. Continue Reading

How to Use Soap Nuts as a Natural Laundry Detergent Alternative

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When I first heard about using soap nuts as a laundry detergent alternative, I liked the idea of using something that was natural and simple . . . but I was also pretty skeptical that they would actually work.

When I tried them, though, I was pleasantly surprised by how well they cleaned my clothes. They worked just as well as any homemade or store bought natural laundry detergents I had tried, only they’re even easier to use and much cheaper too. Continue Reading

6 Simple Ways to Improve Your Health for Free Right Now

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Sometimes it seems like there’s the misconception that you have to spend a lot of money in order to improve your health. Especially in the world of natural health, it can sometimes seem as though you can’t be truly healthy unless you’re willing to spend a fortune on vitamin and mineral supplements covering every letter of the alphabet or special tools like dehydrators and water purifiers and Vitamix blenders.

These things can all be very helpful, of course, and there are times when trying to live a healthier lifestyle may mean shifting your priorities around a bit to allow you to spend the extra money to buy organic food or natural products, or it might mean waiting a while until you can save up enough money. But if you have a tight budget and you don’t have the money to buy all of the fancy natural products and ingredients you hear about on the web, that doesn’t mean you can’t still do things to improve your health! Continue Reading

Is It Really Healthier to Grind Your Own Grain?

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It took a long while before I finally decided to get my own grain grinder. For several months, I had debated whether it would be worth the cost and the effort, but I finally decided to just go ahead and give it a try.

Grinding your own grain is getting more popular, at least among the natural real food crowd anyways, but the question is, is it really healthier to grind your own grain? I wondered that at first but after doing some reading and some thinking there were two main reasons that finally convinced me to get a grain grinder: the freshness of the flour and the cost savings.

How to Clean Glass with Newspaper

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How to clean glass with just newspaper | ourheritageofhealth.com

One of my least favorite cleaning chores has always been washing windows and mirrors.

Conventional glass-cleaning products are usually filled with chemicals, and they usually smell pretty nasty too.

And even natural cleaners often don’t work as well, leaving streaks on the glass – which seems to happen a lot even with those products that claim to be “streak-free.” And then there’s the problem of the little bits of lint left by the paper towels that make the glass look just as dusty as if it had never been cleaned in the first place. Continue Reading

How to Make Homemade Yeast

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How to make homemade yeast | ourheritageofhealth.com

For a long time, I had been confused about the subject of yeast. The only yeast I knew about was the little packet of active dry yeast or rapid rise yeast that I would sprinkle into my dough. But then I started collecting 19th century cookbooks and found recipes that called for “one gill of fresh yeast” among the other ingredients.

Once I finally figured out what a gill was, though, (about a half a cup,) I was even more confused. I would have to use how many little instant yeast packets to equal a whole half a cup?!

After doing some more research on period cooking, though, I found several recipes for how to make homemade yeast that helped to solve the mystery a bit. Most involve the use of hops or potatoes added to boiling water and flour. The problem with all of those recipes, though, is that they all call for adding “a bit of good fresh yeast” to the mixture – which was exactly what I didn’t have! Continue Reading

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