Years ago I did away with artificial scents in our home. Oh how I used to love those reed diffusers, plug-in room fresheners and scented candles! But I decided those artificial scents just weren’t right for me or my family.
These days I’m more apt to use essential oils for room fresheners than a plastic-packaged plug-in delivering a sometimes overpowering artificial scent. Recently I made a super-cute room freshener using a repurposed canning jar and leftover lace. So easy, so inexpensive!
We’ve all probably done it – rinsing out remaining fat and letting it go down the drain. A quick flip of the garbage-disposal switch and the greasy problem is gone. Right?
I’ve written before about how I’ve discovered how the problem Is NOT Gonewhen we flush things through our kitchen sink pipes. I’m not casting stones here. I spent plenty of my younger years flushing things down the sink, from plate scrapings to burnt-on food. And yes, the fat too. I figured if I used hot water it would simply flush that fat away safely. But I’ve learned a lot since then. I now know you should never flush grease or fat down the sink. But how do you dispose of it? Don’t worry, it’s easy – check out this Homestead Hack.
Don’t you hate to have a narrow-neck jar that you just can’t reach with a bottle brush to clean? I’ve often wondered how you could effectively clean those wonderful but odd-shaped bottles & jars. You see, my sun tea is always brewed in a repurposed salsa jar. It’s the perfect glass jar to use, partially because it’s hourglass shaped. That shape makes it much easier to grip and safely carry to the picnic table outside to brew our sun tea.
But although I love the shape of the jar, it does make it very difficult to clean. Of course I rinse it well after brewing my tea. But over time I start to see tea stains on the inside glass. So I sat out to find a good way to get the tea stains out for a crystal clear glass jar, ready to make sun tea again & again. Check out this Homestead Hack, y’all!
RancherMan & I love the wild birds. We have a bird feeder out back that we keep filled so we can enjoy them all. (be sure to check out my Bird-Feeding Homestead Hack where I share how we keep ’em fed on the CHEAP!) There are always a wide variety of birds near our feeder and they nest nearby too, raising their young. Oh how I love it all!
But as you know, recently RancherMan & I had a porch extension built. We spend lots of time out there enjoying the birds and the scenery. But ugh, the birds use the railings as their perch and there was always mounds of poop building up along the railings and on the built-in benches. Until…
We’re (once again) in the grips of a drought. It seems most years in the past 7-8 our little homestead has struggled with terrible drought conditions. The weathermen are finally predicting precious rainfall to bless us for the next several days. Oh it won’t break our drought, but at this point we’ll take that tiny 1/8th inch that falls – ANYTHING!
I’ve got an easy way to track our rainfall which I find quite clever. Oh sure I could measure the rain gauge contents and jot them down. Then I could make note in a calendar to track. But I just never find time to enter it all or even remember to enter it. But this Homestead Hack assures I’ll be able to easily document and track our rainfall throughout the year.
I don’t know if y’all deal with ants like we do, but dang this time of year when it gets super dry, the ants will go marching out looking for food. Every now & then we find that they have invaded Bailey’s food dish!
When we adopted her she had bladder stones. So now her diet is very rigid. Never human food, only special formula low-oxalate crunchy dog food and lots of fresh water to keep her system healthy.
Knowing how common it is to overfeed pets and to keep her fit, RancherMan researched to find out how much food a dog her size and activity level should eat daily. We give her half that amount in the morning and the other half in the evening.
So there’s typically not food left in her bowl for any length of time. But sometimes she leaves her food in the bowl a little longer.
It’s then that we’ll notice it’s attracted the attention of ants. Oh how we hate to have ants in the house. And Bailey REALLY hates them to be in her dish!
But we found an easy fix. Check out this Homestead Hack.
It seems vegetable-gardening planting is finally going on all over the US now. Aaaaaahhhhh the veggie garden – how I love it. Here in NE Texas (zone 8) I typically plant heirloom seeds in my ‘Indoor Greenhouse’ in February and transplant those heirloom seedlings into my garden after the danger of frost is done.
But this year I had a naughty bull jump our garden fence& decimate all of the tender seedlings. I had to start over. I did replant many of my heirloom seeds but I ended up buying a jalapeno plant. It was so small that the winds were pretty rough on it. So I needed to find a way to protect it from the wind. (and free-range chickens) Use Whatcha Got, y’all!
Y’all know I have a compost tumbler and I’m a big advocate for making your own compost. It’s healthy for your plants, cheap to make & a great way to make good use of kitchen scraps and paper trash that would otherwise just be wasted. And it’s super easy too, you just make sure to have a proper mix of browns & greens. Add a little water, do a little compost turning and BOOM! Black gold for your garden. You can see my Post About Composting Here.
For ‘greens’ you can use grass clippings, vegetable peels, etc. And for ‘browns’ you can use dried leaves, paper, twigs, etc. I often use corrugated cardboard boxes to fill my ‘browns’ requirement. But ugh, tearing all that cardboard requires some elbow grease #amiright? Come check out this Homestead Hack to see how I make it easy.
Recently while I was hanging up clothes off the line, I pulled out our empty hangers from the closet. Now I don’t use metal hangers anymore & I haven’t even had them in the house for some 20 years or more.
Back in the day I replaced all those flimsy wire hangers with plastic hangers, typically cheap from thrift stores. I liked how they don’t tangle up nearly as badly in my closet.
I even bought the kid-sized hangers for my children’s childhood-sized clothes too. When I no longer needed those hangers for kid-sized clothes I looked at the hangers & thought Hummmmm…
My baby sis and her hubby came to spend the weekend with us recently. RancherMan & I planned to grill out since the weather was nice. I’d also planned to roast some fresh veggies that I had in the fridge.
As my sis & I were in the kitchen I opened the refrigerator door to fetch the broccoli leftover from our dinner party several days ago. My sister saw how it was contained and exclaimed “That’s BRILLIANT!” I guess I just never thought about it before. So come see this Homestead Hack for keeping your broccoli fresh.
