Just "normalizing" a frugal practice

I had one jar left of the kind of peanut butter that I think makes the best (crispiest) peanut butter cookies. My plan had been to save this jar for cookies, so I tucked it in the back recesses of the pantry.

One afternoon, last week, I mixed the dough and set it in the fridge until the next day when I had time to bake it all.

I took great care to make my peanut butter cookie balls just perfectly sized. I smashed them with a fork, just right, bake them at the proper temperature. My plans were good, but in practice, it just didn't work out.

I burned the bottoms of 2 trays of peanut butter cookies! Ouch!

So, what does a frugal person do with burnt cookie bottoms? Well, I got out a sharp knife and began scraping the burned portions off. I ended up with a pile of burnt crumbs, maybe 2 cookies worth of crumbs. I was sorely disappointed in the burnt cookies, but I did what I could to salvage them. Fortunately, I'm not related to any really picky eaters! ;-)

This is normal, right? You'd scrape the bottoms of burnt cookies, too, right? Just trying to normalize some of the frugal, but sensible, things that frugal folks do.

Saving seeds for next year's garden

parsley plant, gone to seed

Last week, I spent a fair amount of time cleaning up the vegetable garden. In ding so, I found ti was time to collect the seeds from my parsley plant. In spring, when planting seeds, I discovered I was out of parsley seeds. So, I chose to let one of 2014-seeded parsley plants go to seed. (Parsley is a biennial, the first year it has a full season, the second year it comes back early, then goes to seed mid to late season.)

Letting a plant go to seed does look less than tidy, for a couple of months. But it is the way to obtain free seeds for the next year.

I think I collected enough parsley seeds to seed a football field! And in the process of collecting them, I probably free-seeded my herb garden with next year's parsley. Later this week, I'll do a germination test on a few of those seeds, so I can determine their viability, and whether or not I'll need to buy parsley seeds next year.

You know how to check for viability/germination in seeds? Place 10 seeds in a folded paper towel, napkin or tissue. Wet the napkin/towel with water till damp. Place into a plastic ziploc bag and seal closed. Leave this in a warm spot (on the fridge top, on the tumble dryer, on an old big-back television, any spot that stays around 70-80 degrees). Check every 2 to 3 days, sprinkling the towel with water, as needed, to keep damp. Note the days till germination for your own planting purposes next spring. Most seeds will germinate within 2 to 3 weeks, some in as few as 4 or 5 days (cabbage family seeds germinate quickly). If after 2-3 weeks, only 3 of the 10 seeds have sprouted, then you have roughly a 30% germination rate for the remainder of your seeds. 70 to 80% germination is considered good. But a lesser percentage of germination is still usable. You simply need to seed more thickly to account for the less than ideal germination rate. So, my own germination rate will 1) tell me if I collected the seeds in time, and whether or not the seeds had time to mature, and 2) what my germination rate is likely to be in spring, for determining how thickly to plant my parsley.

I'm still waiting for the beet seeds, from the 2 beets that I allowed to set seeds, to fully mature. I may have to cover those plants with a row cover, to give them as much time to mature without rotting, as possible.

collected parsley seeds, in a junk mail envelope

I store my saved seeds, in junk mail envelopes, in a glass jar, in the fridge. I add those little silica gel packets, that come in vitamin bottles, to the seed jar, as a precaution, to reduce moisture in the jar.

And in case you don't already know this, you don't want to collect seeds from hybrid plants. Many tomato plants that you buy at the nursery are hybrids, for example. Collected seeds from a hybrid won't remain true to that hybrid. (However, when one of my hybrid tomatoes has self-seeded in the mulch, and a random tomato plant has erupted in my garden, I still leave it there and collect any tomatoes from it that it wants to give me.)

I like to go through all of my seeds, now, at the end of the gardening, season. It gives me a chance to pick up any packets of seeds on clearance, barter/exchange seeds with friends, and plan for the next planting season, so I am free to start my seeds, next spring (or winter), whenever I am ready. If the winter is indeed a mild one, as has been forecasted for my area, then I could be able to start seeds indoors (to plant out later), as early as late January.